Alger And Priscilla Hiss, 2009 Model

September 26, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cuba, Intelligence, National Security, News media | Leave a Comment 

In early June of this year readers of Washington’s two dailies woke up to the news of the arrest of a much-liked, sophisticated, rather affluent local couple. W[alter] Kendall Myers, when FBI agents put the cuffs on him, was 72 years old; a great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell and scion of the Grosvenor family that guided National Geographic magazine for a century; and a former high official at the State Department and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University’s ultra-prestigious School of Advanced International Studies. His wife, Gwenolyn Steingraber Myers, was a 71-year-old South Dakotan who had come to Washington as an aide to Senator James Abourezk in the 1970s and, in recent years, had been working at Riggs Bank and at a bookstore in DC’s Cleveland Park neighborhood. The couple lived in an elegant co-op at the Westchester on Cathedral Avenue, and, in 2007, acquired a 37-foot, state-of-the-art yacht which they named Helene. Both had reached retirement age, and, like many well-off couples in their sunset years, were just counting down the days until they could board their boat and head south for good.

Except in their case, they weren’t planning to dock their yacht in Boca Raton or Jupiter, or even Key West, and go looking for a comfortable little house. They meant to go all the way to Havana, to the nation for whose spy agency they had worked for nearly thirty years. It was for espionage that they were arrested by the FBI this summer.

At the time of the Myerses’s arrest, the Washington Post and the Washington Times published lengthy articles. The Post’s writing about the couple noted that in the mid-1970s, not long before meeting his Gwen, Kendall Myers, who had recently divorced his first wife and had trouble making his child-support payments, had drunkenly slammed his car into another vehicle one Thanksgiving Eve and that a teenage girl, Susan Slattery, who was in the other vehicle, died as a result, for which he received three years’s unsupervised probation. The tone of the quotes from Myers’s friends suggested that this unfortunate incident had somehow unsettled an otherwise upstanding citizen and had sent him down the path to espionage.

Ah, if only Alger Hiss had friends like that – or, for that matter, could have used something like that for an excuse. The new issue of Washingtonian magazine features a lengthy article by Toby Harnden, the US correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph, which presents by far the most complete picture of the Myerses and their misdeeds set down on paper or cyberspace to date. (At this point the article is not online, so readers are urged to proceed to their nearest bookstore and newsstand and look for the October Washingtonian among the “city” magazines.)

Like any well-written account of the spy world, the article is thoroughly fascinating, from beginning to end. Among its most remarkable passages is one describing the other residents of the Westchester. As it happens, several of the Myerses’s neighbors, according to one resident, were or are in the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency – and an upstairs neighbor is an FBI agent. Not one of these neighbors remotely guessed that the tall, bespectacled, well-mannered, bright but rather glib Foreign Service officer in their midst had actually spent decades, with his wife, hunched over a Sony radio purchased with Cuban money, carefully deciphering messages from those “numbers stations” that pop up around the shortwave dial. None of them knew that a man who once had angled to be George W. Bush’s special envoy to Northern Ireland had, in 1995, spent four full hours with a grateful Fidel Castro. None of them knew that two agents working to the detriment of American national security were walking, every day, down the hallways where a former Westchester resident, Barry Goldwater, had once walked.

Instead, it was up to diligent FBI agents to listen to the broadcasts, carefully narrow lists of suspects, and look for clues. How about this one: the Cubans’s code name for Kendall Myers was “Agent 202″ – the DC area code. How many Scoobysnacks would the Great Dane need to puzzle that one out? And Gwen Myers’s handle was “Agent 123.” Impressive, no?

Probably the most arresting passage in Harnden’s article is the one describing how the Myerses were recruited to work for Cuba. They were not approached in some distant land which has diplomatic relations with the Castro government. They were not approached by someone who’d managed to go under deep cover in Little Miami and make his or her way up north. Rather, they were approached by a Castro lieutenant of long standing, who’d fought in the mountains with Fidel, Raul and Che, by the name of Carlos Ciano – an operative at the UN’s Cuban mission in New York, who, thanks to the Carter Administration’s conciliatory attitude toward the island nation’s diplomats, was moving completely at will between Manhattan and Washington in the late 1970s, meeting and “greeting” leading policymakers at various informal brunches and parties sponsored by sympathetic Capitol Hill staffers and others. It was at one of these that Ciano met Kendall and Gwen Myers.

Gwen Myers, as explained in the article, had a thoroughly left-wing background – one of her sons, according to a South Dakota neighbor, made no bones about being, literally, a card-carrying Communist – and it apparently was through her that Kendall Myers took the fateful step from being a liberal State functionary, like thousands who never give a thought to betraying their country, to becoming an operative for Cuba.(The resemblance to the influence that Priscilla Hiss’s views had on Alger in the early years of their marriage, as described in such books as Allen Weinstein’s Perjury and Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers, is quite striking.) It’s difficult to overstate the implications of all this as the Obama White House and various Democrats on Capitol Hill assure us that it’s time to let old quarrels with Havana be patched up.

Harnden also looks into the auto accident which is said to have had such a troubling psychological effect on Kendall Myers. It turns out that, for a man of almost forty, he handled the whole matter as if he were a particularly spoiled seventeen-year-old. He sent Susan Slattery’s family a letter that, although missing an apology, concluded: “It is a tragedy for me too.” During a recess in the civil case brought against him by her family, he told her father: “You people can’t touch me.” Harnden then wryly quotes a character in a David Ignatius novel, a CIA psychiatrist: “Treason is the ultimate mid-life crisis.” Be that as it may, Kendall and Gwen Myers appear set to conclude their lives in prison.

The nuttiest quote in the article comes from James Abourezk. The former Senator was the first person Gwen Myers called after her arrest, and he states: “If we had ended the embargo years ago, there would have been no spying and none of this stuff would have happened. To me, if the Cubans are spying, it would be a defensive thing.” Really?

There’s a lot more of interest in the article – the description of Kendall Myers’s deep Anglophilia, especially his fascination with those model modern Englishmen Burgess, Maclean, and Philby; the fact that his PhD thesis was a contrarian defense of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy; and a lot more. All in all, this is a fine, must-read work of journalism. Don’t miss it.

9.26.60

September 26, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Media, News media, Public Opinion, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Forty-nine years ago tonight —on Monday  26 September 1960— the first televised debate ever held between presidential candidates was broadcast coast-to-coast.   Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy faced off in the studios of WBBM-TV, the Chicago CBS affiliate, and together they forever changed the face of American politics.

For some reason the first of the four YouTube videos of the first Nixon-Kennedy debate is disabled.  You can see it here.

Here are parts 2-4:

A transcript of the first Nixon-Kennedy debate can be found here.

The influence of the TV debates in general —and of the first one in particular (viewership declined with each subsequent rematch)— in changing voters’ minds has become a subject of some debate.  But in what would become the November 8 cliffhanger, any factor was bound to be significant.  As Erika Tyner Allen described it:

At election time, more than half of all voters reported that the Great Debates had influenced their opinion; 6% reported that their vote was the result of the debates alone. Thus, regardless of whether the debates changed the election result, voters pointed to the debates as a significant reason for electing Kennedy.

The outcome of the first, and most important, debate ended up turning on appearance rather than substance.  RN had only been out of the hospital for a couple of weeks, and  had carried on a grueling campaign schedule right up until he arrived at the studio.  He had lost an inch in collar size but hadn’t bought any new shirts.  He looked tired and gaunt.  To add insult to injury (literally) RN wore a light suit because he had been told that the background would be dark.  It wasn’t, and he faded into it while Kennedy popped vigorously out.

JFK, who had a recently-refreshed Palm Beach tan, had spent the afternoon resting, in one way or another,  in a hotel room.

Marshall McLuhan famously analyzed the debate, ascribing Kennedy’s victory to his objective, disinterested, “cool” persona; while RN’s arsenal of talents (resonant voice, rigorous logic) were better suited to the “hot” medium of radio.  Indeed, polls showed that people who listened to this debate on radio considered RN the winner.

Several years ago, the late Don Hewitt, who produced that first debate, recalled some of the determinative atmospherics.

And RN, in RN, agreed:

It is a devastating commentary on the nature of television as a political medium that what hurt me the most in the first debate was not the substance of the encounter between Kennedy and me, but the disadvantageous contrast in our physical appearances.  After the program ended, callers, including my mother, wanted to know if anything was wrong, because I did not look well.

What turned out to be a telling range of skin tones: On stage on the night of 26 September 1960, JFK, producer Don Hewitt, and RN.

9.23.52

September 23, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, History, Media, News media, Pat Nixon, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Taking matters into his own hands:  On 23 September 1952, RN went on radio and TV to answer charges of financial impropriety.   The phenomenal success of his speech assured Ike’s victory and put RN’s bench mark on the emerging medium of television.

Today is the fifty-seventh anniversary of the speech that changed the course of RN’s life and of politics as practiced in America.

It was also the first of the remarkable comebacks from defeat or adversity that marked his long career.

Garry Wills described the spectacular risk RN took, and the stunning success he achieved:

Nixon first demonstrated the political uses and impact of television. In one half hour Nixon converted himself from a liability, breathing his last, to one of the few people who could add to Eisenhower’s preternatural appeal — who could gild the lilly. For the first time, people saw a living political drama on their TV sets — a man fighting for his whole career and future — and they judged him under that strain. It was an even greater achievement than it seemed. He had only a short time to prepare for it. The show, forced on him [by Eisenhower's advisers], was meant as a form of political euthanasia. He came into the studio still reeling from distractions and new demoralizing blows….[A]t the time he went onto the TV screen in 1952, he was hunted and alone.

It had all started several days earlier.  On 14 September 1952,  just as RN was launching his campaign as Ike’s VP  with a whistlestop train trip aboard the Nixon Special, up the coast from Pomona to Seattle.  Three thousand miles across the continent the New York Post ran a headline: Secret Nixon Fund!  Secret Rich Men’s Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary.

Under Dorothy Schiff’s ownership and Jimmy Wechsler’s ownership, the Post in those days was a proudly-identified left-wing tabloid.   The story was completely bogus, and the rap was totally bum.  Far from being secret, the fund had been solicited by letters to hundreds of supporters throughout California, individual contributions had been limited to $500, and the account was administered by a trustee and was regularly audited.

But the reporters smelled blood in the water, and the story soon overwhelmed all campaign coverage.

Not the least of the many ironies of the Fund Crisis was that the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, did have an unreported secret slush fund of campaign contributions that he had used for purely personal expenses.

It was finally decided that RN should take his case directly to the American people with a speech to be broadcast both on the radio and the new medium of television.  Depending on the popular reaction to the speech, he would either remain on the ticket or voluntarily withdraw.

The approach he took to this situation was as inspired as it was unprecedented.  Instead of the self-serving boilerplate blather usually produced in such situations, he decided to take his national audience on a guided tour of his net worth.  In addition to proving that he clearly met Ike’s ethical standard of being “clean as a hen’s tooth,”  the speech showed that he was just a regular guy, like most of his viewers.

While Adlai Stevenson’s ‘52 campaign slogan was “Let’s talk sense to the American people,” his rhetoric was often elegant bordering on highfalutin.  But RN’s plain speech put everything right out front right up front:

I come before you tonight as a candidate for the Vice Presidency and as a man whose honesty and — and integrity has been questioned.

Now, the usual political thing to do when charges are made against you is to either ignore them or to deny them without giving details. I believe we’ve had enough of that in the United States, particularly with the present Administration in Washington, D.C.  To me the office of the Vice Presidency of the United States is a great office, and I feel that the people have got to have confidence in the integrity of the men who run for that office and who might obtain it.

I have a theory, too, that the best and only answer to a smear or to an honest misunderstanding of the facts is to tell the truth. And that’s why I’m here tonight. I want to tell you my side of the case. I’m sure that you have read the charge, and you’ve heard it, that I, Senator Nixon, took 18,000 dollars from a group of my supporters.

Nothing like this had ever been seen or heard before.  The effect was immediate and electric.

From the moment RN’s image faded off the screen, the Checkers Speech —as it immediately became known— was controversial in direct proportion to its success;  in other words, off the charts.

Nixon supporters reveled in the tsunami of national warmth and support for this honest and plainspoken young man who had, by risking all, turned the tables on his foes.  And his foes, not surprisingly, carped that it had been mawkish and unseemly and embarrassing.

RN preferred to talk about the “Fund Crisis” — because the speech, important as it was, was only part of a greater and no less significant story of a badly wronged man fighting back and coming out on top.  But although the Fund Speech was RN’s preferred term of art, that tale continues to wag the dog, and it has gone down in history as the Checkers Speech.

The drama of those September days has been described by many authors — including RN himself, who made it the second of his Six Crises.   More than four decades later, Six Crises presents incomparably the most vivid and dramatic account, and it still makes exciting reading.   In the first volume of his Nixon trilogy, Stephen Ambrose surveys a lot of the press coverage.  And Conrad Black’s recent magisterial biography supplies both drama and analysis:

Abandoned by everyone except his wife, his mother, [political adviser Murray] Chotiner, [RNC Chairman Arthur] Summerfield, [RNC public relations director Robert] Humphreys, and a few others, put right to the wall and verging on nervous and physical exhaustion, Nixon had staged a political version of MacArthur’s Inchon landing.  He had destroyed his enemies, given the vice presidency a political significance it had never had in 164 years of the history of the office, sacked his judge and the kangaroo court around him and replaced them with his friends in the National Committee, while impeccably restating the greatness of Eisenhower.  Dwight D. Eisenhower was, by most measurements, a great man, but his greatness was not in evidence on this occasion, and that was not the description of him uppermost in Nixon’s thoughts at this time.

The role played by PN throughout the Fund Crisis was pivotal and inspirational.   And it wasn’t easy for her, as Julie Nixon Eisenhower revealed in her biography of her mother; and as RN described in the interviews I conducted with him in 1983:

The homely and memorable example of the cocker spaniel has come to dominate —and characterize— thinking about the speech.  In fact, aside from RN’s heartfelt peroration and the central core of reporting his net worth, the speech was an example of extremely sophisticated and hard hitting political rhetoric.  As RN wrote in RN, even  the pooch had a political pedigree:

On the plane [a night flight from Portland to LA where the speech would be delivered], I took some postcards from the pocket of the seat in front of me and began to put down some thoughts about what I might say.

I remembered the Truman scandal concerning a $9,000 ink coat given to a White House secretary, and I made a note that Pat had no mink — just a cloth coat.  I thought of DNC CHairman Mitchell’s snide comment that people who cannot afford to hold an office should not run for it, and I made a note to check out a quotation from Lincoln to the effect that God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them.  I also thought about the stunning success FDR had in his speech during the 1944 campaign, when he had ridiculed his critics by saying they were even attacking his little dog Fala, and I knew it would infuriate critics if I could turn this particular table on them.

“It isn’t easy to bare your life”:  When RN arrived in LA, he refined his thoughts for the speech on a yellow pad.

But enough exposition — here is the speech itself.  After all this time, and despite the outdated and stilted production values of the hastily mounted production  (the opening and closing titles were RN’s Senate calling card)  its human honesty and emotional intensity can still pack a punch.  Imagine what it must have been like when there had never been anything like it.

The complete text of the speech and an mp3 audio will be found here.

Every Dog Has Her Day — And Checkers’ Was 23 September 1952

In my 1983 interviews, I asked RN if he had ever played a practical joke on anyone.  He thought for a moment and replied:

Yes. Oh, I remember, for example, the — the Gridiron speech that I made in 1953.

This was, in effect, similar to a practical joke. That was after I had made what was called the Checkers speech in the fund controversy.  And so, the Gridiron had a very rough skit on me about Checkers, and I knew that it was going to be rough. And I had learned it in advance, thanks to them.

[Political columnist and later best selling novelist] Fletcher Knebel came on set.  He was dressed as a dog, and he cried, and so forth and so on.

And so what I did was to get the real Checkers, our Checkers, and I arranged to have that dog brought to the — backstage in the Statler where the Gridiron was held, and when I made my speech, I started out in a way that really scared my supporters to death.

I remember [newspaper publisher John S. Knight] Jack Knight, who was a great supporter of mine at that point, was just sitting there saying, “He mustn’t do it. He mustn’t do it.” — because I started out and I said, in a very serious way, “I know that everybody is supposed to take whatever barbs are thrown at the Gridiron dinner in good form”, and so forth and so on, “and not respond. But this is one time you’ve gone too far.  Fun is fun, particularly when that is directed against a lady.  And now I want you to see the real Checkers.”

And then Knebel came out holding Checkers.  Checkers, of course, was a female. Well, it brought the house down, and my supporters thought,  ”Well, he’s not as serious as we thought.”

Bob Greene, Richard Nixon, Civility, And Mystique

September 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Healthcare, Hillary Clinton, Interviews, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Obama administration, Presidents, Public Opinion, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, TV News, U.S. History, Vietnam | 3 Comments 

Yesterday, Bob Greene – the veteran journalist, not Oprah’s trainer – wrote a column for CNN.com about the nation’s winter of partisan discontent. (Well, yes, it is September, but the air did get perceptively colder this morning.)

For decades, Greene’s column at the Chicago Sun-Times, then the Chicago Tribune, was syndicated across the country, and many of his two dozen books were bestsellers. Seven years ago this week, a scandalous incident from 1988 involving a female high-school reporter surfaced and resulted in Greene’s dismissal from the Tribune. Since then he has maintained a much lower profile, but from time to time he still has unexpected and fairly perceptive things to say.

Sunday’s column opens with a reference to high-school “chicken” races. As longtime readers of Greene know, the days of his adolescence in the early 1960s, and his childhood memories of the 1950s, are never far away from his mind, so the allusion to Rebel Without A Cause is not unexpected. Then he draws a comparison between teenagers frantically racing toward a collision, and the intensity of the current debate over health care and “big government.” Greene expresses the view that when compared to the feelings generated in the last few months, even the arguments surrounding the 2008 election seem to evoke a vanishing atmosphere of civility.

To prove this point, he tells of traveling the country last fall, asking various ordinary Joes (plumbers or not) and Janes whether they planned to vote for then-Senator Barack Obama or Senator John McCain – and then asking them what they found to admire in the man they did not plan to vote for. He quotes an Obama voter who, not unexpectedly, admired McCain’s fortitude as a POW in Vietnam, and a McCain voter who observed that Obama was energetic, charismatic, intelligent. “People seemed to welcome this exercise,” says Greene, but then he glumly muses: “Somehow, it feels that a similar experiment would be doomed to failure now,” and that “it feels like we’re all in one of those old hot-rod movies[....], speeding straight toward each other’s headlights.” And then he wonders what can be done about it:

One answer may be found in an unlikely place — in words spoken by the most divisive political figure of his era.

Richard Nixon, in his first inaugural address during a time of widespread public rage in the United States, talked about “reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord on earth.”

Nixon’s presidency would end in shambles. But on its first day, here is what he said about how to soothe the anger that was consuming the nation:

“To find that answer, we need only look within ourselves. … To lower our voices would be a simple thing.”

Some people’s feelings about Nixon undoubtedly cloud their opinion of everything he ever did. Yet what he said as he took office in a time of nonstop partisan conflict is worth considering as we pass through similar days:

“In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading.

“We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another — until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.”

Bob Greene has thought about RN’s life, and the lessons to be learned from it, for a long time. Indeed, in his mid-twenties he covered the 1972 campaign and wrote a book about it, Running. a decade later, he scored a one-on-one interview with the ex-President, which stretched over several of his columns and is included in his 1985 book Cheeseburgers, and extensively excerpted in his 2004 book Fraternity: A Journey In Search Of Five Presidents.

In that interview, Nixon reflected at some length about how a President should be perceived by the public. He told Greene: “A president must not be one of the crowd. He must maintain a certain figure. People want him to be that way. They don’t want him to be down there saying, `Look, I’m the same as you.’ . . .In all the years I was in the White House, I never recall running around in a sport shirt, let alone a T-shirt. Or sneakers and the rest.”

When RN said this, he had in mind leaders he greatly admired like Charles De Gaulle of France, Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, or Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore – men whose rather austere and remote personal style nonetheless commanded enormous respect and admiration from their countrymen (or, as would be said now, countrypersons). While this sort of political style has generally been less admired by American voters, as the careers of John Quincy Adams – or Richard Nixon – demonstrate, there’s no doubt that most Americans do want their Presidents not to be too folksy or too accessible to the public. Dwight Eisenhower certainly struck the right balance. He was from middle-class, heartland America – but he was not “the same as” the ordinary voter. Ronald Reagan, as “down-home” as he could be, was always meticulous about keeping a certain mystique around his personality.

In the case of Barack Obama, the mystique has started to fall away, in a rapid and, for many of his followers, disillusioning manner. Twelve days ago he delivered a speech before Congress on health care which, in itself, was a good effort at rallying the nation to his cause, though far from a grand slam or a home run – more like a double. Then the Congressional leadership became preoccupied with punishing Rep. Joe Wilson for shouting “You lie!” during the address, and forced a vote on the matter which seemed to many Americans like an exercise in pointless overkill. Obama’s latter-day Brain Trust seemed aware of this, but no one in the Capitol Hill Democratic leadership was bothering to take heed of their concerns.

Today, Newsweek.com has a blogpost about the latest poll data. It turns out that most of the surveys do find an increase in Obama’s favorability ratings following the speech – but by one or two or, in CNN.com’s survey, five points, from 53 to 58. Compare this to the polls following Richard Nixon’s November 3, 1969 speech on Vietnam, when 77 percent of Americans expressed support for his policies – a spectacular rise from the President’s numbers before the speech. Even Jimmy Carter’s notorious “malaise” speech in 1979 temporarily lifted his approval rating from 25 to 37 percent, before the Iranian hostage crisis lowered it for good.

Last weekend President Obama, evidently wishing to build on what small momentum his speech generated, took the unprecedented step – for a President, anyway – of appearing on five Sunday-morning talk shows on the same day: NBC’s Meet The Press, CBS’s Face The Nation, ABC’s This Week, CNN’s State Of The Union (formerly Late Edition) and Univision’s Al Punto.

This garnered the President the distinction of having achieved something approaching what media folk call a “full Ginsburg.” Back in 1998, in the first frenzied Sunday after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, that ex-intern’s attorney, William Ginsburg, appeared on the first four of the aforementioned shows as well as Fox News Sunday. This achievement remained unique for about five years, then Vice President Cheney duplicated it, to be followed by then-Senator John Edwards (during his weeks as Sen. John Kerry’s running-mate) and then-DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. The last to manage it was then-Senator Hillary Clinton in the fall of 2007 when she was still the Democratic presidential nominee-apparent (and, in the minds of many in the media, virtually the President-elect).

But it’s one thing for even a Vice-President to undertake such a feat – and another for a President to think he has to make the rounds of the talking-heads programs. (Or, for that matter, the talk shows – if the Chief Executive feels he needs to make his case on The Late Show With David Letterman as I write this, can Carson Daly or Chelsea Handler be that far behind?) When that President pointedly declines to appear on Fox News Sunday, apparently because the network decided not to broadcast his speech to Congress, the semblance of a mystique certainly diminishes, and some, like Dwight Schwab of examiner.com, are even ready to compare Obama’s quarrel with Fox to Nixon’s difficult relationship with the networks. (For me, another analogy comes more readily to mind – former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura’s honeymoon with the media in 1998 that so rapidly turned sour. But that’s a subject for another post.)

So it makes sense for President Obama to try to follow in the path RN outlined in that first inaugural – a path RN himself found difficult to follow, because of the polarization that he inherited – and also to maintain an image befitting a President instead of a Sunday-morning regular. The right approach for him is not to start thinking about going on Olbermann, Matthews, King and Maddow – or Conan, Colin, and the two Jimmies – on the same night, but instead to focus on the effectiveness of getting his message across on the stage that only a President can command.

Gander Sauce Now Appearing On White House Menu

September 21, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, National Security, News media, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Presidents, Public Opinion | Leave a Comment 

From the earliest days of RN’s administration he was plagued with leaks of highly classified material that ended up in the media.

RN condemned the leaks as undermining his ability to end the war and conduct the nation’s foreign policy.

The anti-war establishment justified them as acts of conscience, and the media celebrated them as examples of a free press at work and doing its very best.

Now everything old is new again, and it will be interesting to see how President Obama deals with the leaks that are already causing him problems.  The most serious appeared today as a story by Bob Woodward on the front page of the Washington Post:

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict “will likely result in failure,” according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.

How will —how can?— the President maintain his former equanimity regarding leaks now that he is actually in charge and his policies will be at risk because of them?  Will the goose sauce he dished out so liberally as a Senator and a candidate be so tasty now that he’s the gander?

RN knew how the  accumulation of leaks had driven LBJ into an increasingly narrow corner.

In RN, he vividly recalled his visit with Johnson at the White House  on 12 December 1968:

I sat on one of the sofas in front of the fireplace in the Oval Office while he sat in the king-size rocking chair that he had brought in to replace Kennedy’s smaller one…..

Jabbing his finger at my chest, his voice raised, he said, “Let me tell you, Dick, I would have been a damn fool to have discussed major decisions with the full Cabinet present, because I knew that if I said something in the morning, you could sure as hell bet it would appear in the afternoon papers.  It’s the same thing with the National Security Council.  Everybody there’s got their damned deputies and note-takers with them sitting along the wall.  I will warn you now, the leaks can kill you.”

But RN didn’t take LBJ’s advice to hunker down and only deal with a minimum of aides; and he was soon being threatened with the death of a thousand leaks.

The leaks began almost with the start of my administration, and before long I experienced firsthand the anger, worry, and frustration that Johnson had described.  In the first five months of my presidency at least twenty-one major stories based on leaks from materials in the NSC files appeared in New York and Washington newspapers.  A CIA report listed forty-five newspaper articles in 1969 that contained serious breaches of secrecy.

Within a matter of days after the NBS held its first meeting on the Middle East on February 1, the details of the discussion that had taken place were leaked to the press.  Eisenhower, whom I had personally briefed on this meeting, considered any leak of classified foreign policy information, whether in war or peace, treasonable.  When he saw the news story he telephoned Kissinger and warned him in no uncertain terms.  “Tighten your shop,” he said.  “Get rid of people if you have to, but don’t let this go on.”

Not only did it go on; a trickle became a tsunami.

Today, forty years later, leaks are an inevitable part of the Washington scene, where agendas and egos first mix, then match, and then go looking for a friendly reporter.

It will be interesting to see how the Democrats, so long used to enjoying the leaks undermining and embarrassing the Republicans, will handle this particular reality of the power they now possess.

The Madding Crowd — Now And Then

September 16, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, News media, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Popular Culture, Public Opinion, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 3 Comments 

There must be something in the water over at the Daily Beast where posts sympathetic to RN (albeit unintended and/or inadvertent) have now appeared twice in three days.

First it was Chris Matthews’ admiring exposition of the role Edward Kennedy and a panoply of Kennedy partisans played in bringing down a President who had just been re-elected with the second biggest landslide in American history.

Today it’s Lee Siegel, one of the Beast’s most dependably provocative provocateurs, who provides the latest answer to the question “Is Obama the New Nixon?”.

Mr. Siegel urges a general untwisting of panties over the recent Tea Party rally on Pennsylvania Avenue.  Despite the deepest fear (and fondest hope) of cable TV, the current wave of protest doesn’t represent a political apocalypse about to plunge the country into civil war.

But, he says, it does represent something very different and very important: the rise of a new counterculture.  He writes:

The parallels between today’s right-wing radicals and radical tactics of the 1960s are striking. Sixties’ Dada theatrics—e.g. Allen Ginsberg leading people in an attempt to levitate the Pentagon (my favorite)—are echoed in the alarmist and conspiratorial theatrics of right-wing cable television. Then, too, just as the radical left was inspired by a few personalities—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Mark Rudd et al.—today’s radical right is whipped up by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin et al.

And while the new counterculture’s racist images of Obama are sickening, they are similar in their emotional violence to the images of the old counterculture’s Representative Villain, Richard Nixon—caricatures which ran the gamut from violent to pornographic. Just as Nixon exemplified middle-class, middle-aged white, repressive stasis, so Obama exemplifies—for his haters—ceaseless, wearying, uprooting change.

Each man presented the perfect vexation to enraged opponents—Nixon a hurdle to change, Obama a wide-open door to an uncertain future.

And he ends with an appeal for some patience and some perspective:

In other words, everyone, calm down. What we are seeing is the good, old American Berserk in action. It’s just that, ever since the 1960s, we are not accustomed to seeing it come from the other side.

The central role the counterculture played in American history during the 1960s and ‘70s, and its impact on the Nixon presidency, has been pretty much overlooked and undervalued.  But, in fact, the 1960s represented the apotheosis of the axiom: Let me write a country’s songs and I don’t care who writes its laws.

RN arrived in the White House just when the elements of a perfect storm had fallen into place: a debased elite that had lost confidence in itself and its values; a youth cohort that was economically empowered, intellectually flattered, hedonistically assaulted, and that felt personally threatened by the war and the draft; a mass media that had achieved almost total national saturation and exercised a virtual monopoly on public opinion; and a hard core of organized radicals —ranging from loopy anarchists to regimented terrorists— that knew how to intimidate the elite, exploit the media, and inspire and/or amuse the kids.

Today’s protesters are really very different from those of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

What the protesters of the ‘60s and ‘70s reflected and represented was a top-to-bottom crisis of the entire American —indeed, of Western— culture.  What we’ve been dealing with so far in the summer of ’09  is still only a politically-triggered media-driven populist phenomenon.

The ranks of today’s protesters, while growing apace, is still specifically segmented.  It is comprised of a lot of average citizens who are fed up with the extravagance and corruption of government and the arrogance of its representatives; of a smaller, and overlapping, group that is motivated by conservative media; and of a miniscule fringe of LaRouche wingnuts that the media consciously neglects to identify and unconscionably presents as representative.

But —whether he’s right or wrong about an emerging counterculture— it’s promising that Mr. Siegel is thinking and writing along these lines.  There can be no balanced assessment of RN’s presidency without an understanding of what he was up against.

Diane Sawyer To Become ABC World News Anchor

September 2, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under News media, Obama administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, TV News, TV News Personalities | 3 Comments 

In 1868, Benjamin Disraeli, upon achieving the office of British Prime Minister, at the age of 63 and thirty-one years after first winning election to the House of Commons, said: “I have reached the top of the greasy pole.”

Disraeli was much admired by Richard Nixon for his determination and persistence, and I have the feeling that somewhere RN is giving the thumbs-up to Diane Sawyer, his former assistant and collaborator on his memoirs (and also Ron Ziegler’s assistant at the Nixon White House press office), who – a few weeks after turning 64, and thirty-one years after entering the field of broadcast news at CBS – will replace Charles Gibson as the host of ABC World News, starting next January.

It’s been a long time coming. Back in 1993 when Connie Chung briefly co-anchored with Dan Rather at CBS, network insiders wondered if Sawyer, who had joined ABC in 1989, might one day replace Peter Jennings. But following Jennings’s death in 2005, ABC instead named Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff as co-anchors. Within a matter of weeks, Woodruff was gravely injured by a roadside bomb while covering the Iraq war, and for several months afterwards, Vargas alternately co-anchored with Charles Gibson and Sawyer, the co-hosts of Good Morning America.  At the end of May 2006, Vargas resigned, and Gibson replaced her, with Sawyer staying on as host of GMA.

At the time, there were reports that Gibson would retire at the end of 2007 and Sawyer would replace him. But as the 2008 presidential campaign picked up steam, Gibson elected to stay for at least another year – and then for a year longer, to cover the start of the Obama Administration. This was not completely to the liking of ABC News’s top brass; after leading the ratings in 2006 and 2007, Gibson was overtaken by Brian Williams at NBC. But now, at the age of sixty-six, the retirement of the ABC anchor has been announced by the network.

How long Sawyer will remain in the anchor’s chair is hard to guess. Traditionally, evening network news anchors, no matter how successful, have retired on reaching or approaching the age of sixty-five; Dan Rather, who lasted at CBS Evening News until he was seventy-three, and Gibson are the only exceptions. Sawyer’s sixty-fifth birthday will come in December 2010, less than a year into her stint as anchorperson. But if she can improve on ABC’s declining ratings and bring them somewhere close to the level of NBC’s, she probably can stay on longer, and perhaps can outlast Katie Couric, who’s struggling at CBS.

DSPQ

September 1, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Double Standard Paranoia Quotient, News media | Leave a Comment 

A week ago tomorrow —on Wednesday 23 August— Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is up for re-election this year, told an employee of a home state newspaper that had just run the results of a poll indicating that his road to re-election might not be entirely smooth, that he hoped the paper would go out of business.

The wish, as is well known, is father to the thought.  And, as is also well known, Senator Reid is a man of estimable —and in many respects inestimable— power; a man who should be careful what he wishes for.  Or at least careful about taking his wishes out for walks in public.

On Sunday, a columnist for the newspaper in question —Sherman Frederick of the Las Vegas Review-Journal— revealed the encounter and took the Senator to task:

This newspaper traces its roots to before Las Vegas was Las Vegas.

We’ve seen cattle ranches give way to railroads. We chronicled the construction of Hoover Dam. We reported on the first day of legalized gambling. The first hospital. The first school. The first church. We survived the mob, Howard Hughes, the Great Depression, several recessions, two world wars, dozens of news competitors and any number of two-bit politicians who couldn’t stand scrutiny, much less criticism.

We’re still here doing what we do for the people of Las Vegas and Nevada. So, let me assure you, if we weathered all of that, we can damn sure outlast the bully threats of Sen. Harry Reid.

On Wednesday, before he addressed a Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce luncheon, Reid joined the chamber’s board members for a meet-’n'-greet and a photo. One of the last in line was the Review-Journal’s director of advertising, Bob Brown, a hard-working Nevadan who toils every day on behalf of advertisers. He has nothing to do with news coverage or the opinion pages of the Review-Journal.

Yet, as Bob shook hands with our senior U.S. senator in what should have been nothing but a gracious business setting, Reid said: “I hope you go out of business.”

Later, in his public speech, Reid said he wanted to let everyone know that he wants the Review-Journal to continue selling advertising because the Las Vegas Sun is delivered inside the Review-Journal.

Such behavior cannot go unchallenged.

You could call Reid’s remark ugly and be right. It certainly was boorish. Asinine? That goes without saying.

But to fully capture the magnitude of Reid’s remark (and to stop him from doing the same thing to others) it must be called what it was — a full-on threat perpetrated by a bully who has forgotten that he was elected to office to protect Nevadans, not sound like he’s shaking them down.

No citizen should expect this kind of behavior from a U.S. senator. It is certainly not becoming of a man who is the majority leader in the U.S. Senate. And it absolutely is not what anyone would expect from a man who now asks Nevadans to send him back to the Senate for a fifth term.

I banked this story on Sunday because I was curious to see if it would attract any attention —or grow any legs— in the mainstream media.

The Review-Journal, which Wikipedia describes as taking “a libertarian editorial stance,” isn’t just some marginal blatt bordering on pennysaver status.  It’s one of Las Vegas’ two dailies, and the largest circulation daily paper in Nevada.  So while it is undoubtedly a pain in the ass to the Majority Leader, one might expect that his ill wishes would be considered a story.

One might.  But one would be mostly wrong.

It surfaced —under the anodyne headline “Reid in Flat for Reported Remarks About Newspaper”— in The New York Times’ “Caucus” blog.

The Washington Post, which reported the unfavorable poll, has yet to note this result.

And here’s where the DSPQ comes in. As an exercise, substitute Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Louisville Courier-Journal for the names in this story. And tell me, honestly, how long it would take before there was a nationwide groundswell of third estate indignation about assaults on free speech and the dangers of legislators threatening newspapers at the best of times, much less when the few surviving dinousaurs are already on the ropes.

San Jose Mercury-News On Nixon, Kennedy And Health Care

August 30, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Healthcare, News media, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Today’s San Jose Mercury-News has an editorial that begins by pointing out some similarities between the national health-care program advocated in the early 1970s by President Nixon, and the one that President Obama is now trying to get through Congress. The editorial then explains:

Nixon’s plan failed because of one powerful opponent: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. He stood firm in favor of a single-payer system, and the moment was lost[...]

The Kennedy skill at collaboration had yet to evolve in the early 1970s. And given the family history with Nixon, who had run against John F. Kennedy, a Nixon-Kennedy plan for national health care was probably asking too much at the time.

The editorial concludes with some advice for the President:

Obama’s mistake has been allowing opponents to frame the debate and put him on the defensive. The Obama who was a master communicator during the campaign can recapture the lost momentum. He has to hammer home the folly of doing nothing, which is what his opponents want, and convince the American people that only through reform will they be assured of affordable, high quality health care in the future. The current system is not sustainable.

While providing health care to the 20 percent of Americans who now have none is critical, the president needs to aim his arguments toward the 80 percent who have coverage at the moment — at least until they get laid off — and are scared to death that they will have inferior care in the future[...]

The president has the oratory skills to turn this around. He also happens to be right about what’s needed. Richard Nixon, that well known socialist, would agree.

His First Appearance On Meet The Press

August 30, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under News media, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

The thirty-nine year old California Senator and Vice Presidential nominee took part in his first of seven “unrehearsed and spontaneous” conferences in September 1952:

More On Ted Kennedy, Nixon, And Health Care

August 26, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Healthcare, News media, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Senate, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

The story of how President Nixon’s plan for comprehensive health care for all Americans fell by the wayside in 1974 because Sen. Ted Kennedy thought it possible to get a plan more to his liking enacted after a Democratic President entered the Oval Office has been the subject of several previous posts at TNN, and the Senator’s death late last night has served to remind J. Lester Feder of this. His post at Newsweek.com today, in part, reads:

[T]he Obama health reform package Kennedy supported in his last days is similar to one Kennedy helped defeat when proposed by President Richard Nixon. If anything, the Obama plan is more conservative. Nixon would have mandated that all employers offer coverage to their employees, while creating a subsidized government insurance program for all Americans that employer coverage did not reach. It would take a miracle to pass such a plan today—a public insurance plan and an employer mandate are two provisions of the proposals now in congress that are most in doubt.

But Kennedy helped kill Nixon’s proposal not only because he preferred a government insurance option for everyone, but because he believed it was politically achievable. Medicare, the government program for the elderly, was then only nine years old, enacted as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s campaign to expand the social safety net. Liberals hoped this would be a first step towards a national health insurance program that the next Democratic president could enact. That victory seemed around the corner—Nixon proposed his plan in 1974, while embattled in the Watergate scandal.

President Jimmy Carter did not make health reform a priority, however, and Kennedy later regretted rejecting Nixon’s proposal. “It was a rare moment in his senate career where he made a fundamental miscalculation about what was politically possible—a lot of liberals did,” says Yale University political scientist and progressive health reform advocate Jacob Hacker. “What was not recognized by anyone at the time was that this was the end of the New Deal Era. What would soon come crashing over them was the tax revolts” that ushered in Ronald Reagan and a conservative, anti-government philosophy.

For a generation born after the “Reagan Revolution” it’s hard to describe the degree to which Ronald Reagan’s rise to the Presidency came as a complete shock to the liberal elites and intelligentsia, especially in such places as Georgetown and Cambridge. In his autobiography The Prince Of Darkness, the late Robert Novak mentions a column he wrote in 1965 after seeing Reagan speak, when the latter was still a year away from running for governor of California; in it, he compared Reagan’s style at the podium to JFK’s. Novak writes that after the column appeared, his fellow journalist Mary McGrory called him, aghast, to ask how he could possibly compare the late President to a washed-up actor. And the truth is that, as an examination of newspapers from 1976 and even 1979 shows, many pundits took it as an article of faith that Reagan, even if nominated, would meet with the same fate as Barry Goldwater in 1964.

The Way It Is — And Almost The Way It Was

August 26, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, News media, U.S. History | 3 Comments 

Robert Nedelkoff has noted —here and here— the remarkable revelation —first by Senator George McGovern in a 2008 New York Times op-ed, and, more recently elucidated, by Frank Mankiewicz in the Washington Post— that candidate McGovern had considered offering the 1972 vice-presidential slot to “the most trusted man in America,” CBS anchor Walter Cronkite; and, at least equally amazing, Cronkite’s later statement that he would have accepted it.

What might have been: Except for George McGovern’s (apparently erroneous) belief that he would have turned down the offer to join the ticket, America’s “most trusted man” could have had a shot at being America’s 39th Vice President.

Last Sunday on C-SPAN’s consistently superb Q&A, Brian Lamb interviewed Mr. Mankiewicz.   Still going nattily strong at 84, he served back in the day as Robert Kennedy’s press secretary during the 1968 campaign, and then managed George McGovern’s 1972 run against RN.

The interview is highly recommended as an insight into the life, times, and personality of a fascinating man.  More particularly, it revealed the genesis of Walter Cronkite’s opposition to the Vietnam war —which apparently began some time before he first expressed it on air, ostensibly as the result of the reporting he had just done from Vietnam— and its hitherto unknown (and, for a network anchor, its ethically dicey) extent.

LAMB: ….. Walter Cronkite had made his statement on Vietnam on his newscast. That would’ve been February the 27th, 1968. And this is only about 30 seconds. It was longer than that, but let’s just listen to a little bit of that.

MANKIEWICZ: Sure.

(VIDEO CLIP)

WALTER CRONKITE, AMERICAN BROADCAST JOURNALIST: It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer’s almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation. And for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the north, the use of nuclear weapons or the mere commitment of 100 or 200 or 300,000 more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

MANKIEWICZ: Hmm.

LAMB: It was longer. He went on to say, ”To say that we were closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence the optimists who have been wrong in the past,” and it goes on.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: But my question is – he came back – when did he meet with Senator Kennedy? Was it between that moment and that moment that he announced?

MANKIEWICZ: No, I think it was before that, before …

LAMB: Before he had gone to Vietnam?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I think he had another trip to Vietnam. I think he’d been there before.

LAMB: And when you were sitting there listening to him suggest to Senator Kennedy he had to run for president to stop the war …

MANKIEWICZ: Right.

LAMB: … what was going through your mind?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I welcomed him as an ally. A lot of them on the Senator’s staff wanted him to run. Some did not. And here I thought was a pretty important fellow in America saying, ”Yes, you should run.” It may have helped him make up his mind.

LAMB: But in a bigger way or discussion, what about an anchorman for a major network getting involved in politics and the public didn’t know it?

MANKIEWICZ: Not very – it didn’t happen very often, if at all. That’s right. I was very – well, that’s one reason I favored Walter Cronkite to be the vice presidential nominee four years later with Senator McGovern. And as it turns out, as I wrote in the Washington Post, a year or two ago, Senator – Walter Cronkite told Senator McGovern that if he had only asked him he would’ve accepted. So if the ticket, in ’72, would’ve been McGovern and Cronkite, I think it would’ve been a different election.

You can read the transcript here, or follow the link to watch the program.

The deeply disturbing aspects of this situation seem only to have occurred to UVA Professor and political expert Larry Sabato.  In an important article —”Are the Top Journalists Insiders or Outsiders?” — he raises questions that are as pertinent today as they would have been in ‘68 and ‘72.’

Decades later, everyone knows that Cronkite was a Democrat. After his retirement, he gradually made no secret of his party affiliation and philosophy. But at the time, CBS went to great pains to present him as nonpartisan, and most Americans accepted that this was true. (The other networks played the same game with their anchors, whatever their underlying political philosophy–and not all were Democrats, by the way.) Now we learn that Cronkite was prepared to run for vice president on the 1972 Democratic ticket, had he been asked.

But it is the 1967 Cronkite meeting with Robert Kennedy that stuns. Cronkite willingly became an active player in national politics, choosing a personal favorite for president and directly attempting to induce a prominent politician to run for the White House. Are we to believe that Cronkite’s private importuning had no effect on his reporting? Can anyone defend this as even vaguely ethical for a man in his position? Cronkite was a citizen, of course, and if his views on Vietnam and his preferences for president were strong, he had the option to step down as anchorman and enter the political arena in some fashion. Or he could have transitioned into a newspaper columnist or TV commentator, openly pushing the agenda of his choice. Instead, Cronkite had his political cake and ate it journalistically, too.

All of this suggests what most people have always supposed: there is a partisan predisposition among some of those at the top of the journalism profession, despite their denials. Furthermore, some elite journalists do not step back from their bias but privately seek to re-make the world as they prefer it to be.

The remarkable case of Walter Cronkite leads to certain questions. Did he do similar things in additional cases? How about other prominent anchorman and reporters of that time? Were they behind-the-scenes players while pretending to be passive observers?

And what of today’s line-up? Everyone knows the ideological predispositions of many prominent personalities at liberal MSNBC and conservative FOX. Much of the programming at these networks is more in the category of commentary than nonpartisan news–though even at these networks there are plenty of correspondents who try to fulfill the old ideal of the disinterested reporter.

How about the anchors and hosts at ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN? What about the White House reporters who have frequent, one-on-one, off-the-record chats with the presidential press secretary and the chief of staff? Are they ever asked to offer strategic and tactical advice–or do they volunteer it?–when the cameras are not on, and there are no witnesses? Is this happening now in the Obama administration and did it happen in prior Democratic and Republican administrations?

Usually these could be seen as impertinent questions, but not after the Cronkite revelations.

The reporter or anchor has classically been portrayed as the outsider, battling the establishment to deliver the truth in the public interest. In the modern day, many of these reporters and anchors have become millionaire celebrities, part of the semi-permanent floating establishment they are supposed to check. How often do they succumb to the temptation to use their fame and position to influence elected and appointed officials, or gain access as the social equals of those elected officials for self-aggrandizement?

What we’ve just learned about “the most trusted man in America” gives us the right to ask.

One Of The Stories He Told

August 26, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, In Memoriam, Media, News media, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 5 Comments 

60 Minutes devoted its entire hour on Sunday to its progenitor and long-time executive producer Don Hewitt, who died a week ago today.  In typical 60 Minutes style, the program was informative, provocative, and entertaining.

Hewitt always said that his editorial criterion could be reduced to four simple words: Tell Me A Story.  And that’s what he named his 2002 memoir which was, not surprisingly, informative, provocative, and entertaining.

He devoted two pages of his book to CBS’ 1984 broadcast of ninety minutes of the thirty-eight hours of interviews I had conducted with RN the year before.  My interviews, unlike those conducted by David Frost in 1978 —which were adversarial in nature and which had been taped before RN finished writing his memoirs— captured a more analytical, reflective, and, generally, accessible Nixon.  Although he didn’t know what the questions would be, the project was intended to be part of a video encyclopedia of biography, and the template involved talking him through his memoirs.

Hewitt felt that the result represented a hitherto unseen Nixon —at least at such length and breadth— so he bought the broadcast rights for CBS.  Thirty minutes of the material, introduced by Morley Safer, was aired on each of two subsequent editions of 60 Minutes, and the remaining thirty minutes were shown of American Parade, a Tuesday night news magazine program hosted by Charles Kuralt.

Hewitt took the thousands of pages of typed transcript to his weekend home at Sag Harbor and did the editing personally.  Several times that weekend my phone would ring, and he would say, without any salutation, “This is great.  Listen to this…” and he would then read an entire exchange.  An hour later: “Now listen to these…we can put them together to explain that….,” and then he was gone again.

This was, of course, very flattering; but it was also very instructive.  On his first reading of that mass of material, and with broadcast deadlines looming, he unfailingly picked out the best excerpts (or, as I liked to think of it, the best of the best….) and instinctively saw the ways to organize and relate them.  And his enthusiasm was invigorating.  From even this very limited exposure I sensed how he could inspire, improve, and, at least occasionally drive crazy, the people with whom he worked.

In the end, the three 30-minute segments he produced, which seemed so seamless to the viewers, in fact each represented the hundreds of cuts he made.  I finally got to meet him, for the first time, after the shows were broadcast, when he invited me to his office to talk about Nixon — a subject he found fascinating and frustrating.

Unfortunately, what had been intended to be a coup was turned into a contretemps by the widespread liberal outrage that CBS was paying RN  to talk —that he was benefitting from checkbook journalism— and that, to add insult to injury, he was talking with me. The controversy even reached the level of an unfriendly editorial in The New York Times.

Hewitt was surprised and offended by the onslaught; he was certainly unused to being attacked from his left flank.  He considered many of the critics to be hypocrites; and in Tell Me a Story he addressed both charges in typically direct style:

The first issue is nonsense.  Print journalism pays for book excerpts and other writings by political figures all the time.  In a letter to The New York Times on March 14 that year, I mentioned its own purchase of the rights to something Winston Churchill wrote — and even the Times’s acquisition of serial rights to an earlier Nixon memoir.  More recently, Newsweek published an excerpt of a book by George Stephanopoulos, the former top aide to President Clinton.  The truth is that reputable newspapers and reputable news broadcasts pay for interviews all the time, not in cash but in something more valuable — newspaper space and airtime for an author to plug a book or a movie star to plug a movie or a politician to plug a pet cause.  Who in his right mind sits down to be interviewed without getting something in return?  And let’s face it, “getting something in return” is the equivalent of “getting paid.”  And we all willingly go along with it, because if we don’t, 20/20 will, and if The New York Times won’t, The Washington Post will.  Is there something wrong with it?  No!  Just stop all this “holier than thou” jazz that we don’t pay for interviews because everybody does, all the time.

The second issue: Gannon was not a newsman and didn’t pretend to be, so the tape we bought was not a journalistic interview.  It was an effort to get from Nixon some things he’d never said before publicly, or quite so frankly.  We made sure our viewers knew exactly what the tape was and what it was not, and that Gannon was not a reporter, but someone close to Nixon who got him to say more than anyone else had up to that point.  We also weren’t restricted to any portion of the thirty-eight hours.  It was our choice to select from that tape anything we wanted to.

One of RN’s conditions for doing the interviews with me was that all the material would be available for use in the Nixon Library — which then still lay several years in the future.  The interviews became the basis of what was, when the Library opened in 1991, a state of the art interactive exhibition —the Presidential Forum— in which visitors could choose from an extensive menu of questions and then watch RN’s answers (with the interviewer mercifully edited out) in the comfort of a theater setting.

On Politico last Wednesday, Roger Simon wrote “The birth of political television” — an excellent appreciation of Don Hewitt’s unique contribution to the development of broadcast journalism back in the day when events (like conventions) still contained some element of authenticity, before they became choreographed commercials.

Robert Novak    1931-2009

August 18, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under In Memoriam, News media | 1 Comment 

Novak pictured at work in the Senate press gallery in 1958. At this point in his career, he was a staff writer for the Associated Press.

The Washington Post, where he hung his hat for so many years, remembers the iconic and influential columnist here.

Rick Perlstein On The Town Hall Demonstrators

August 16, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Congress, Double Standard Paranoia Quotient, George W. Bush, Healthcare, New Media, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixonland Nitpicks, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Public Opinion, Richard Nixon, Sarah Palin, TV News Personalities, U.S. History | 9 Comments 

A little over a year ago, when Rick Perlstein published his mammoth study of “the American berserk” – the original subtitle of Nixonland – in the years between 1965 and 1972, he concluded his 748-page saga of heated hardhats and howling hippies (or was it the other way around?) by arguing that the culture and political wars of the late Sixties and early Seventies had not only not died, but had never really gone away.

Perlstein maintained that the 37th President’s legacy to the nation was “a notion that there are two kinds of Americans: one kind viewing themselves as “people of faith,” patriots, “nonshouters,” and viewing the other kind – “liberals,” “cosmopolitans,” “intellectuals” – as “un-Americans, anti-Christians, amoralists, aliens [Perlstein's emphasis].”

The book’s final paragraphs read:

Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not.

How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.

When Nixonland appeared, several reviewers criticized that penultimate statement, and said that Perlstein clearly was mistaken to think that the passions of that time still ran as strong.

But that was last year, and now that many of this month’s “town halls” about the proposed health-care legislation across the country have featured very heated rhetoric, not only at the meetings themselves, but among the crowds assembled outside the venues, Perlstein has written an op-ed for the Washington Post that makes it clear that he considers himself vindicated in his argument.

Now, anyone following the town hall meetings closely knows that many speakers at them have been as fervent about single-payer care and the proposed legislation’s failure to incorporate it, though not as visible in TV sound bites as the ones who have been waving pocket copies of the Constitution and arguing against the bill’s big-government tendencies.

But the leftist voices at the meetings count for nothing where Perlstein is concerned. What he sees is nothing less than the return of the right-wing fervor that swept through parts of America during the Kennedy years. And the op-ed’s title, though probably the work of a dependably liberal Post staffer, sums up its attitude toward the liberatarian and conservative voices at these gatherings: “In America, Crazy Is A Pre-Existing Condition.”

Yes, all the objections raised to the mammoth scope of the bill, and to the possibility that it marks the start of a path which will see Americans turn over as large a percentage of their income to the state as was the case in Sweden at the height of its cradle-to-grave system – or perhaps more – yes, all the worries raised by hard-working citizens, in Perlstein’s opinion, are on a par with the fears of almost 50 years ago that fluoride in drinking water would brainwash children into being Communists, or whatever members of the John Birch Society were supposed to have believed in those days.

(I have to admit that sometimes fluoride does worry me a bit. The other night I was gargling with that new Listerine “Whitening Formula,” or whatever it’s called, in which the active ingredient is sodium fluoride. On the back of the bottle I noticed an instruction not to drink or eat anything for 30 minutes after using it. If the idea is to keep fluoride out of my system, then why would it be in my drinking water? But then again, my dentist tells me there’s been an upsurge in cavities because kids don’t drink as much tap water as they once did. End of digression.)

In the op-ed, Perlstein states:

Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror — powerful elites — find reason to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism: something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing different values down their throats.

Why, of course, “crazy-making panic” is endemic only to conservative Americans, otherwise defined, in the world of the Post, as those people who still insist on regarding Sarah Palin as a political force even after her daughter’s former fiance has started dating Kathy Griffin. Those thousands upon thousands (or maybe millions upon millions) of words, many of them still online, which fretted about Guantanamo in the Bush years presaging internment camps for the young and disaffected in the United States? That was legitimate political discourse, nothing irrational about it.

(As is, presumably, the post at a left-leaning site I read the other day that compared the present political situation in America to that of Germany in about 1930. Anyone for Obama as the new Heinrich Bruening?)

Although, as I write, it will be several more hours before Perlstein’s piece appears in the antiquated ink-on-paper format, it has already stirred up several dozen responses from across the political spectrum. Matt Yglesias has one of the most thoughtful posts about it on the Left. He focuses on these remarks of Perlstein’s:

You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to “debunk” claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president’s program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn’t adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of “conservative claims” to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as “extremist” — out of bounds.

As opposed to the “in-bounds” rhetoric of the SDS and Black Panthers, which got substantial on-air attention. But let’s look at today’s situation. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when President Obama held his town hall meeting about health care this week, William Kostric, a self-described “free stater,” was spotted in the crowd by an MSNBC crew with a sign reading “Time To Water The Tree” (it referred to a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson, which concludes “with the blood of patriots and tyrants”) – and a gun strapped to his leg, which he had a permit to carry.

It turned out that Kostric had not simply brought the weapon to provide a headache to Secret Service personnel who had to worry about any individuals who might not be carrying weapons simply to “make a statement.” He meant for the gun to attract media attention and stir curiosity about what he wanted – which turned out to be, presumably like all the “crazies” Perlstein describes, to get on TV.

And which program finally extended an invitation to appear? Was it Glenn Beck’s show, or Sean Hannity’s, or The O’Reilly Factor, or any of the other shows which, as every schoolperson in Santa Monica or Marin County knows, are diabolically constructed by “elites” to inflame the heartland? No, it was Hardball with Chris Matthews, a show which is not usually viewed as a hotbed for “crazies.”. I assume that Kostric chose Hardball because MSNBC was the channel that gave him visibility. (He also appeared on Alex Jones’s radio talk show, a venue more along the lines of his personal views, but certainly not the creation of any media “elite.” Indeed, Michael Savage, singled out as a rabble-rouser by Perlstein, has not had Kostric appear on his program.)

Perlstein doesn’t seem to realize that most of those who are concerned about the drawbacks of the health-care bill are voicing heartfelt and rational objections. They know that every citizen of the country already is shouldering a share of the national debt equivalent to nearly a fifth of a million dollars and they hope that there’s some way to keep it from going to a quarter of a million. They were not happy with the idea of a President doing his best Lyndon Johnson imitation and insisting that Congress pass over a thousand pages of slapped-together taxes and regulations before the end of last month, before it became clear that would not happen. (And compared to the versions of the health-care bill now in the works, even the most hastily drafted bills of LBJ’s Great Society look like they were penned by James Madison or George Mason.)

But that doesn’t matter to Perlstein; for him, “the tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America’s flora.” However, he’s not going unchallenged about this. One of the more impressive retorts so far has come from Stephen Bainbridge, a professor at UCLA’s law school. The professor sums up the op-ed as follows: “we lefties are rational, nice, kind people who are puzzled by conservative crazies. We’ve got no crazies on our side, of course. Just nice rational people like me.” Then Bainbridge lists some “rational” responses to perceived threats from the Right by left-wing organizations, starting with the Weathermen.

Bainbridge’s post got this prompt response from Perlstein, who says: “I hate the Weathermen. Read my book. So does everyone I know on the left.”

Well, it may be that everyone Rick knows on the Left deplores what the Weathermen, as a whole, became, or some of its actions. But individual former members of the Weathermen, whether or not they still think they were justified in what they did, certainly are not hated by many of his colleagues – indeed, quite the opposite, as Bill Ayers’s recent well-attended book tour demonstrates.

And, before I forget: does Perlstein mention Richard Nixon in his article? Yes, he does, classing RN as one of the “vultures” who exploited the fears sprouting from the “tree of crazy” – and, somehow, managed, by doing so, to secure a 49-state victory in 1972.

With a little help from 47,168,710 “crazies.” Count ‘em.

Setting The Record Straight On Social Security

August 13, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Democratic Party, George W. Bush, Healthcare, News media, Nixon Administration, Presidents, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

In this morning’s Washington Post, Paul Begala, one of the architects of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and later a major White House advisor, contributes an op-ed. In it he argues that, although supporters of an expansive health-care policy (single-payer or otherwise) may be thoroughly dissatisfied with whatever legislation ultimately comes out of the Senate and to President Obama’s desk, they’d be well advised to bite their tongues and support it. As an example he cites the original Social Security legislation of the New Deal, which was quite limited in scope:

No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt’s original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers — a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn’t even cover the clergy. FDR’s Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn’t work, you got nothing from Social Security.

If that version of Social Security were introduced today, progressives like me would call it cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist. Perhaps it was all those things. But it was also a start. And for 74 years we have built on that start. We added more people to the winner’s circle: farm workers and domestic workers and government workers. We extended benefits to the children of working men and women who died. We granted benefits to the disabled. We mandated annual cost-of-living adjustments. And today Social Security is the bedrock of our progressive vision of the common good.

The phrase “our progressive vision” may be taken by some to suggest that the expansion of Social Secuirty was strictly the doing of Democrats, in which case the Post’s Ezra Klein wishes to correct that misconception:

The original Social Security legislation wasn’t “perhaps” a “cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist” program. It simply was those things. But it was something else, too. A start. Over the next 50 years, it was built upon. But not only by Democrats. Some of the largest advances came when Republicans saw political opportunity in strengthening the entitlement. Begala implies that progressives eventually added cost-of-living increases to Social Security. In fact, it was Richard Nixon who signed that bill. Similarly, whether you like the structure of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit or not, it was a massive expansion of an entitlement program, and it was proposed and signed by George W. Bush.

EN On RN

August 10, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under News media, Nixon family, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Ed Nixon, was on CSPAN yesterday to discuss the 35th anniversary of his older brother’s resignation:

In another CSPAN interview dated two months ago, Mr. Nixon discussed his new book The Nixons: A Family Portrait. Click here to order The Nixons from the Richard Nixon Museum Store.

(Hat Tip: Andrew Orszulak)

More Coverage Of The Resignation’s 35th

August 9, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Frost/Nixon, John Dean At The Nixon Library, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Library, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, TV News, U.S. History, Watergate | 2 Comments 

Today marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation, and since I wrote about coverage of this last night, some more articles and op-eds of note have appeared. Apart from the memorable discussion of RN’s achievements on this morning’s Chris Matthews Show, discussed in Jonathan Movroydis’s post below, I have not seen or read about any mention of the anniversary on TV. 

Right now MSNBC, for example, is finishing yet another hour of programming about the Manson murders, since today is also the fortieth anniversary of the murder of Sharon Tate and four others, while other networks have already started running shows about Woodstock’s 40th.

(It may be that a lot of younger viewers nowadays wonder how the coverage of Charles Manson affected the coverage of Woodstock in August 1969. It didn’t, since no one, apart from the killers themselves and a few who had crossed their paths, had any idea at the time who had committed the murders. It was not until December 1 of that year that arrest warrants were issued in the Tate case, which brought Manson’s evil to light, and less than a week later the disastrous free festival at Altamont, immortalized in the documentary Gimme Shelter, continued the ominous note on which the decade finished.)

But the Nixon Administration did come up in today’s New York Times online roundtable about Woodstock’s 40th.  The participants include such notables as Nixonland author Rick Perlstein, novelist Ishmael Reed, social critic Morris Dickstein, and historian Joan Hoff, author of Nixon Reconsidered.  Perlstein makes no mention of RN in his contribution, but Ms. Hoff discusses at some length why she thinks that ”Woodstock had little or nothing to do with the radical-conservative change in politics” that began during the Nixon years; she thinks that the big political story of the period was the rise of neoconservatism and the role it played in the emergence of Ronald Reagan on the national scene.

At NPR’s website, Daniel Schorr, who will turn 93 at the end of this month, speaks of the resignation and how it changed American perceptions of the presidency. He concludes:

After 35 years, Nixon is enjoying a revival of interest because of Frost/Nixon, first a stage play, then a movie based on Nixon’s 1977 television interviews with David Frost, for which Nixon was paid $600,000 — triple his annual salary as president.

For that, Frost got the closest thing to an apology that Nixon ever uttered for having put America through the wringer.

“I let the American people down,” he said, “and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life.”

He did let the people down. And we are still carrying the burden.

And at Truthdig.com, historian Stanley I. Kutler, author of The Wars Of Watergate, offers some thoughts about the resignation, in a gentler tone than has sometimes been the case when he’s written about the Nixon White House.

Speaking of Kutler naturally brings John W. Dean to mind, since both have frequently criticized what they claim are “revisionist” examinations of the events surrounding Watergate. For the last several months, since his appearance at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Dean has shown up from time to time in scenic Southern California locales such as Mission Viejo to promote his apparently self-published reissue of his book Blind Ambition, and last night he spoke to an audience at the Hotel Zoso in Palm Springs.

(Yes, Zoso as in the alternate title of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, the one with “Stairway To Heaven.”  For Watergate students familiar to that passage in Blind Ambition in which Dean describes H.R. Haldeman informing him that the President thought he was dressing like a “hippie” because his tie was wider than usual at the White House, this has to produce a chuckle.)

The Desert Sun, Palm Springs’s newspaper, has an account of this event. It’s worth mentioning that the caption to one of the photos that accompanies the Sun’s article refers to the current edition of Blind Ambition as being a “sequel” to the original 1976 edition of the book. The truth is that, apart from a new afterword of about 100 pages, it is the same book as that published over 30 years ago.  The real sequel to Blind Ambition was Dean’s 1982 book Lost Honor, which is mostly forgotten except for the chapter in which Dean argues at length that Gen. Alexander Haig was Deep Throat, a theory he later abandoned.

“May-or,” “My-or,” Whatever, “Welcome To The Court”

August 8, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, News media | Leave a Comment 

There is a new addition to the national Pronunciation Wars.

Nuclear (nuculer), Taliban (talleyban), and Pakistan (pockistan)* are now joined by Sotomayor.  She says “Soto-my-or”; many say “Soto-may-or.”

Among the many is Chief Justice John Roberts.  During Associate Justice Sotomayor’s swearing in ceremony at the Supreme Court yesterday, the Chief Justice consistently mispronounced his new colleague’s name.  (As did, for example, the C-SPAN announcer —who adopted the Chief Justice’s pronunciation— introducing and wrapping up the ceremony.)

For the media it represents a lack of attention to detail and a diminished demand for accuracy.  In the Chief Justice’s case, it’s an example of the vital importance of good advance work.

*There has been significant Pockistan creep over the last several months, as President Obama’s consistency has slowly worn down media correspondents and commentators. It’s like watching the Grand Canyon being formed, drop by drop.

Worth A Thousand Words (Or 1053, Anyway)

August 8, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Art, Barack Obama, Culture, New Media, News media, Presidents | 5 Comments 

On July 29 of last year Vanity Fair’s website put up a portrait of President George W. Bush by that eminent visual satirist Drew Friedman.  In it, the President was made up to look like that latterday icon of villainy, the late Heath Ledger in his Oscar-winning role as the Joker in The Dark Knight.

At the time, the picture merited comment from less than a dozen bloggers, several dozen more comments at the magazine’s site, and that was it.  It was one of many visual lampoons of an unpopular President, and as such, was worth a chuckle or two from those who viewed it, and then forgotten.

But in recent weeks a similar image of another Chief Executive has provoked a different reaction.  As early as April, posters and stickers began showing up on the walls of buildings here and there in Los Angeles – and, more recently, in other American cities. The image portrayed on them is that of President Obama, his face made up in the especially ominous shade of clown white used by Ledger in The Dark Knight, with a ghoulish red smear around his mouth a la the Joker.  Beneath the picture, one word in lower-case letters: “socialism.”

This poster, of course, brings to mind the celebrated “HOPE” images produced by artist Shepard Fairey (in turn, based on an Associated Press photo) which helped Obama reach the Oval Office last year.  And Fairey himself, fresh from an assignment producing another semi-iconic Obama portrait for Rolling Stone’s cover, was quick to inform the Los Angeles Times that although he didn’t think that the President was a Socialist, he personally thought the creater of the “socialism” poster (who remains unknown, as of this writing) had a right to his or her opinion. (As it happens, the earliest online image depicting Obama and captioned by “Socialist,” in the spring of 2008, was a direct steal of the Fairey/AP image.)

But others are not quite as sanguine.  Rich Lieberman of the San Francisco Chronicle contends that the “socialism” image is “creepy, unfunny, and sinister” and “a piece of garbage” to boot.  At the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott devoted an article to pondering what boundary of taste the image had crossed.  Both Lieberman and Kennicott have duly noted that Obama’s predecessor had been portrayed in the same fashion.  But they both argue that to give the current officeholder such treatment has something wrong about it – perhaps, if not quite racist (Lieberman remarks that the anonymous artist is “probably white,” but is clearly unwilling to affirm that he or she isn’t), then using “urban” imagery in a discriminatory fashion (as Kennicott maintains in a somewhat tortured argument, both in his article and in a lengthy online discussion at the Post’s site).

The latter discussion is rather interesting, not least because one of the commenters remarks that the poster, especially since it originates from LA, may well be meant as a  parody of anti-Obama sentiment instead of the real thing.  This spurs Kennicott to mention Andy Warhol.  But, surprisingly, neither he nor anyone else in the discussion notes that the poster (as opposed to the image it features, of which more in a moment) may well have been inspired by one that Warhol made.

That would be Vote McGovern, a silkscreen created by the famed Pop artist in 1972 as a limited-edition production, proceeds to be donated to Sen. George McGovern’s campaign for the White House.  In it, the face of President Nixon was recolored (in a ghoulish green) and retouched to make him look like Dracula.  McGovern supporters (and Warhol collectors) bought up the entire run of the series.  The next year, Warhol was audited by the Internal Revenue Service.  He always expressed uncertainty about whether this event was related to his silkscreen (though he often was audited during the next three presidencies, nonetheless) but the audit did have one fortunate consequence for students of twentieth-century American history: it made Warhol decide to make an hour-long tape every day, in which, as well as itemizing his personal and business expenses, he gossiped in uninhibited fashion about his wealthy, famous, and just plain bizarre friends and acquaintances. And thus, in 1989, two years after the artist’s death, the American reading public was treated to The Andy Warhol Diaries.

But the use of an altered photograph of a politician did not start with Warhol. Back in early 1963, Richard Hamilton, the British pioneer of Pop Art, was a ban-the-bomb activist, unhappy because Hugh Gaitskell, the head of the UK Labor Party, did not support unilateral nuclear disarmament.  So Hamilton put a Phantom-of-the-Opera mask on a photo on the MP and titled it Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland, though it’s not certain whether this was the inspiration for Warhol a decade later.  And, of course, caricaturists as far back as James Gillray in George III’s time have done brutal pictures of political leaders; this is the tradition to which Friedman’s Bush-as-Joker belongs.

But one thing that Lieberman and Kennicott evidently did not know when they wrote about the “socialism” poster was that its unidentified maker derived (or stole, if you want to put it that way) the Obama-as-Joker picture from a Flickr image posted last January, not by a tattooed neo-Nazi from the Rockies or some other likely candidate, but by Firas Khateeb, a twenty-year-old Palestinian-American engineering student (and Muslim) in Chicago who Photoshopped a 2008 Time cover of the then-candidate. 

Khateeb’s picture did not have the word “socialism” and, contrary to a couple of earlier blogposts which state that he created the image to express his disappointment that Obama was joking about pursuing a leftward agenda, he now states on Flickr that the altered Time cover (and presumably the “socialism” poster) does not express his political views in any way.  Apparently he just thought it would be a bit of a goof to make the President up to look like Heath Ledger.  But that jeux d’esprit has stirred up quite a fuss, not least because, in a rather direct way, it speaks for the disquiet so many Americans feel when their President announces schemes as vast, vague, and downright nebulous as rescuing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by creating a gigantic “bad bank.”

Therefore, the chances seem good that we’ll be seeing more “viral” images like the Joker-in-Chief one emerging, no matter what the pundits think.

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