Another President With “Game”?

May 14, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Nixon family, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Sports | 1 Comment 

Many articles about President Obama have suggested that he is the first President to display any considerable skill as a basketball player. (Herbert Hoover used to toss a six-pound medicine ball over a volleyball net, but Hooverball’s another game altogether.)

But such may not be the case, as recounted in Alex Pappas’s article about President Nixon’s grandson, GOP congressional candidate Chris Cox. Recalling the time he spent with his grandfather, he says:

“I remember we went to lots of baseball games together and played basketball together. I tell you, he had a mean shot from the top of the key.”

And from a story by the Associated Press:

The aspiring politician says his grandfather, who mostly talked with him about the Mets and Giants before his death in 1994, when Cox was 15, did provide advice that may come in handy between now and November.

“What he would tell me is the only way you lose is if you stay on the floor,” Cox said. “You’re going to get knocked down time and time again, but keep coming back. And keep trying. The only time you lose is when you stop trying.”

Smells Like San Clemente Spirit

April 13, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Music, Nixon Library, Nixon in the News, Popular Culture, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

A few weeks after the 37th President boarded Air Force One for his last trip as President, David Bowie stood in a studio in Philadelphia and asked the country’s young Americans, “do you remember your President Nixon?”

Not long after that, Neil Young, recording “Campaigner,” reminded the world that “even Richard Nixon’s got soul.”

But it turns out that at the same time, another rock’n'roller was starting his career with songs referring to RN – a musician who, though he is not yet in the Rock’n'Roll Hall of Fame with Bowie and Young, is sure to join them sometime after 2013, when his eligibility starts 25 years after his recording (as opposed to performing) career began.

During his final live shows with Nirvana, in the fall and winter of 1993-1994, Kurt Cobain sometimes brought out an Epiphone Texan guitar for the acoustic portion of the show, which he had found in a store in Los Angeles. It sported a “Nixon Now” bumper sticker from 1972, and is now renowned among students of the Nirvana oeuvre as the best-sounding acoustic Cobain ever used. (At the end of 1994, eight or so months after the deaths of Cobain and Nixon, a blowup photo of Kurt playing this guitar was displayed in the Nixon Library exhibit “Rockin’ The White House.”)

But it turns out that this was not the first time that President Nixon entered Cobain’s musical world. From RTTNews.com comes this article:

Early recordings from a young Kurt Cobain were recently discovered at a garage sale in Aberdeen, Washington.

Producers Jack Endino and Butch Vig [the producers of Nirvana's first two albums] both verified that the tapes are self-recordings of Cobain, who is believed to have been 8 or 9 years old at the time. According to reports, it sounds as though he is playing an acoustic guitar and ukulele, sometime around 1974 or 1975, based on the content of songs about Richard Nixon. [Note: Cobain was born on Feb. 20, 1967, so he may have been as young as 7 when he recorded this material.]

Several cassettes labelled “KDC” – believed to stand for Kurt Donald Cobain – in black magic marker were found at the sale. The tapes are estimated to be worth millions.

Bruce Herschensohn’s New Book

March 31, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under International Affairs, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Library events, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Vietnam | 9 Comments 

On April 19, political commentator, former assistant to President Nixon, and 1992 Republican senatorial candidate Bruce Herschensohn comes to the Nixon Library to discuss his new book American Amnesia, which presents his thesis that had Congress been prepared to support Presidents Nixon and Ford when they asked for military aid to South Vietnam after North Vietnamese violations of the 1973 peace accords, then Hanoi’s forces would not have been able to defeat that nation in 1975. The theme of his book has particular relevance as American forces prepare to depart from Iraq, a nation whose future may be determined by the whims of its eastern neighbor Iran unless the United States is ready to ensure otherwise. In today’s Victorville (California) Daily Press, Herschensohn discusses his book:

On January 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed by the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam and the Viet Cong. North Vietnam agreed to an immediate cease fire, and South Vietnam was promised the same sort of freedoms guaranteed Americans under the First Amendment.

Officially, the war was over.

But, Herschensohn says, the U.S. wasn’t so naive as to believe there would be no more hostilities by North Vietnam after American troops went home. So, the accords promised piece-for-piece replacement of any military assets South Vietnam used to defend itself after the Americans left.

“We didn’t do it,” Herschensohn said flatly. “Congress saw a way that we could lose (the war) by not appropriating funds in the piece-for-piece provision.”

Editors note: Bruce Herschensohn will be at the Nixon Library on Monday, April 19, to discuss and sign copies of American Amnesia. For more information click here.

Managing The Nixon Oval Office

February 19, 2010 by admin | Filed Under Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Foundation, Nixon Library, Nixon Library events, Nixon family, Nixon in the News, Pat Nixon, Presidential libraries, Richard Nixon, Yorba Linda | 6 Comments 

On Presidents’ Day 2010, more than five thousand packed the Nixon Library and were welcomed with cherry pie and appearances by Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. Then at 1:30 pm, RN’s Oval Office Team presented the second Nixon Legacy Forum, The Effective Use Of the President’s Time, a look at RN Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, how the Office of the President operated and why it became the model for successive administrations.

Twenty-two members of the Haldeman family were in the audience including widow Jo Haldeman, their son Hank, daughters Anne and Susan, and their grandchildren. Dwight Chapin, former Deputy Assistant to President Nixon, moderated the panel of key staff including Larry Higby (Special Assistant to the President and Assistant White House Chief of Staff), Steve Bull (Special Assistant to the President) and Ron Walker (Special Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Presidential Advance). Chapin’s service to RN started as a young field man in the 1962 California gubernatorial race. After the former Vice President’s defeat, he went to work for Haldeman at the J. Walter Thompson advertising company. It was during this time that Haldeman – who served as Campaign Manager in 1962 and Director of Advance in the 1960 Presidential campaign – spearheaded the organization of RN’s comeback.

“These weren’t the wilderness years.” Chapin explained. “These were the strategic planning years.”

As an example, Chapin pointed to a memo that illustrated a new and innovative strategy for winning in 1968. Outlining the need for more effective time management, Haldeman told RN that he could reach more voters through the use of television in one or two key events with substantive messages, buying much needed time for him to rest, reflect and write.

This was a radical concept that totally changed the way campaigns went thereafter.” Larry Higby added. “It became the style for how we started to communicate as a White House.”

Higby, the youngest of the staff, also began his career working for Haldeman on the 1968 campaign while in graduate school at UCLA. At twenty-three years old, he became Assistant White House Chief of Staff.

“My first job was to find a book on how the presidency worked.” We had just ninety days to build a corporation from scratch.”

The Nixon organizational model would be groundbreaking. Previous White Houses implemented the cabinet form of government where decision-making was delegated to cabinet officials. John F. Kennedy, Higby explained, worked freestyle, forming coalitions and committees for the most important policy issues. While President Johnson managed like a legislator and focused heavily on his domestic agenda, a reflection on his over 20 years on Capitol Hill.

By contrast, RN managed like an executive.   “H.R. Haldeman was his Chief Operating Officer,” explained Steve Bull. “While Dr. Kissinger was the Vice President of International Affairs and John Erlichman was the President of Domestic Affairs.” It was the Cabinet officers’ job to ultimately execute the positions from the White House.

A retired Marine, Bull’s path to White House was trailed after returning from Vietnam in 1966. He hardly recognized his country as rising crime, social upheaval, and protests against the war were dividing the country. He saw RN as the leader who could bring the country together.

After working on the successful 1968 campaign, Bull joined the White House team as the President’s Special Assistant, managing his day-to-day schedule and moving officials in and out of meetings.

“I was not a confidant.” Bull said.  “It was a senior to subordinate position. My job was to run the Oval Office. I was kept around because I was trustworthy. Trust was important.”

Managing RN’s work environment was also important. Bull explained that RN was a private person. He didn’t like meeting with large groups or numerous advisers. He was a contemplative man whose best course was to rely on his own instincts. He needed time to shape his agenda and map out the long term.

He essentially “shaved two days into one,” Chapin said.  RN started his day early by reading the daily news summary and meeting with Kissinger, Haldeman, and other White House senior advisers and cabinet officials.  During the afternoon, RN would take a short 40 minute “power” nap, change and retreat to his private study in the Executive Office Building, where he would “write out long thoughts, shape his agenda, and constantly be looking ahead,” Higby explained.

As Director of the first Office of Presidential Advance, it was Ron Walker’s job to constantly look ahead. Now the President of the Richard Nixon Foundation, Walker prepared hundreds of foreign and domestic trips for RN including the historic trips to China and Russia in 1972.

After working as a volunteer advanceman during the 1968 Campaign, Walker worked on the transition and the first inaugural. Following inauguration, Chapin invited him to construct the first Office of Presidential Advance.

Not only did Walker create the office, but he also perfected the art first pioneered by Haldeman.

“We wanted to be the mantel of the Presidency,” Walker explained. “When I went into the White House to work for Dwight and Bob, the first thing I thought was important was that I write an advance manual.”

The manual took six months and amounted to 397 pages, constituting what Haldeman initially developed for political campaigns and refining it to advance the President of the United States.

The Nixon White House had “all of those elements necessary to move the President of the United States outside the White House,” Walker said. “We had advance men who knew how to run airport arrivals, how to put motorcades together, how to do press conferences, how to handle the press,” and who were able to effectively “work with Secret Service,” and “the White House Communications Agency.”

On the last day of the 1972 campaign, Walker advanced President Nixon to Greensboro and Spartanburg, South Carolina at midday, flew to a sunset rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico and landed in Ontario, California for a torch light parade of fifty thousand with appearances by John Wayne and the Carpenters.

The next morning at the White House, the President thanked the advance team for their hard work and told them if it not for what they had accomplished he wouldn’t have earned a second term.

To give a sense of their efficiency, RN later told Walker that his team could have took the beaches at Normandy.

Nearly forty years later at the President’s Library in Yorba Linda, the Oval Office Team also performed with masterful efficiency, finishing two minutes ahead of schedule. “The program was to run from 1:30 to 3:30, this program ended at 3:28,” Walker concluded, “that’s called a good advance.”

A Race – And Candidate – To Watch

January 29, 2010 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, History, Nixon family, Nixon in the News, Pat Nixon, Politics, Presidents, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, White House | 3 Comments 

Nearly 65 years after his famous grandfather was first asked to run as a Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representative from that state’s 12th district, 30-year old Christopher Cox has put his hat in the ring for the seat in New York’s first district on Long Island. Cox, the son of Edward and Tricia Cox, and grandson of the 37th President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, is a fiscal conservative who champions limited government and lower taxes.

He also has politics in his blood.

And like his grandfather, who was swept into office as part of a Republican landslide in the 1946 off-year elections in the aftermath of World War II and too many years of “New” and “Fair” Democratic deals, he hopes to ride the current wave of discontent and frustration all the way to Capitol Hill. In doing so, he could make a little bit of history, as well. Cox graduated from Princeton and New York University Law School, and served as a John McCain delegate and was the New York State Executive Director of McCain’s 2008 Presidential run.

New York’s first district encompasses Suffolk County, the eastern part of Long Island, with its signature north and south forks and places such as Brookhaven, Smithtown, and the Hamptons. The region is picturesque—still pastoral in part. Richard Nixon loved it out there, even writing his 1968 Republican nomination acceptance speech at Gurney’s Inn in Montauk.

Edward Cox, Christopher’s father, is the current chairman of the New York Republican State Committee. His ancestors were well known in state and local politics, business, and jurisprudence—and his own political resume includes experience as an attorney in the Reagan administration.

Of course, those of us old enough to remember recall the images of a beautiful White House wedding back on June 12, 1971, as Ed took Tricia Nixon as his wife.

Should Christopher Cox get the GOP nomination, he’ll face an uphill race against the Democrat incumbent—Tim Bishop, who has held the seat since 2003. Interestingly, in spite of the fact that Bishop trounced his opponent in 2008 by 16 points, Barack Obama only garnered 51% of the district’s vote in 2008—a rare case that year of a local Democrat out polling the “Yes, We Can” national juggernaut. So to many observers, certainly Chris Cox among them, the seat is very much in play.

It’s been said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. The year was 1945, and a young Naval officer was transferred that January to a post in Philadelphia after his tour in the South Pacific. He and his wife contemplated their post-war future. Richard and Pat Nixon also awaited the arrival of their first child.

In September of 1945, while still on the east coast, Richard Nixon received a letter from Herman Perry, a Whittier, California banker, inquiring: “Would you like to be a candidate for Congress on the Republican ticket in 1946? Jerry Voorhis expects to run. Registration is about fifty-fifty. The Republicans are gaining. Please air mail me your response if you are interested.”

The rest, as they say, is history—but none of it was a foregone conclusion.

The seat had been held since 1936 by Jerry Voorhis, a sometimes-New Deal—sometimes further left— Democrat, who had had long been covered by Franklin Roosevelt’s electoral coattails. He had made a career attacking insurance companies, oil companies, and banks—even going so far as to advocate the funneling of all profits from the Federal Reserve System into the Federal Government’s general revenues.

Nixon quickly sized up the situation and the offer and replied: “I feel very strongly that Jerry Voorhis can be beaten, and I’d welcome the opportunity to take a crack at him,” promising “an aggressive, vigorous campaign.”

In fact, Nixon made good on his word and took the fight to Voorhis in 1946. Facing a tough and effective speaker and campaigner, Voorhis was put on the defensive right from the start and never really figured out what to do. During debates with Nixon, one observer said that Voorhis, “pauses, breathes heavily, adjusts his glasses nervously with both hands, etc.,”—this was contrasted with Richard Nixon’s bold style and manner.

Of course, down through the years, the story of the 1946 campaign, as told by many Nixon detractors, has been that it was dirty and underhanded. But, as one biographer has written:

Politics is a rough occupation, and Voorhis had led a sheltered life. He should have seen Nixon coming and responded more effectively and promptly to his attacks… It was not an edifying example of clarity of political debate at its best, but it wasn’t the infamous prostitution of the political process that Nixon-haters have sold to a drooling posterity either.

On election night, Nixon basked in the glow of victory after winning 57% of the vote. He would regularly say over the remaining years of his life that every election win was special—but that first one always remained the most vivid and rewarding. He, Pat, and their nine-month old little baby girl, Tricia, were on their way to Washington, where they’d all (joined by little sister, Julie, less than two years later) live for 20 of the next 28 years.

In early 1947, as Richard Nixon began serving in Congress, he made his way to a debate in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. The subject was American labor, particularly the merits of the Taft-Hartley Bill. His opponent was also a former Naval officer, who had as well been elected in November of 1946—one of the few bright spots for the Democrats that otherwise discouraging night. His name was John F. Kennedy.

JFK would later concede that Nixon bested him that night. They left the stage, had dinner, and then shared a compartment on a train back to Washington talking into the morning hours about life, politics, the past, and the future. In fact, those two young men on a train, Nixon at 34 years of age, Kennedy not yet 30, would figure significantly in the future of the nation. They were young men in a hurry—part of a new generation of leaders.

These days we watch another class of young politicians testing the waters. John F. Kennedy, Jr. died tragically, long before we could ever see him run for office. His big sister, Caroline, made an awkward attempt to get Hillary Clinton’s vacated Senate seat, but never seemed to catch on—or up. Now the torch has been past to an even newer generation as Tricia’s son, Christopher, runs this year.

It will be very interesting to watch—and remember.

Reminiscing About RN and EP

January 14, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Music, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, White House | Leave a Comment 

“Picture Of Nixon And Elvis Worth A Thousand Words,” reads the headline in this morning’s Los Angeles Times, and, sure enough, the article by Faye Fiore, the paper’s Washington reporter, that appears below it spends about a thousand words (or more) describing the circumstances that brought about the now-familiar image of the thirty-seventh President and the one and only King meeting in the Oval Office.

(Interestingly, the photo from that day most often seen, with Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley both looking at the camera, is passed over in favor of an image of the President facing the camera and Elvis looking at him.)

The article is based on the eyewitness accounts of the event given by former White House advisor Egil “Bud” Krogh and Jerry Schilling, Elvis’s close friend, when they appeared at the National Archives last week. Most of what they tell has appeared in many books about Elvis and/or Nixon, notably Krogh’s own volume The Day Nixon Met Elvis (which includes a foreword by RN penned just before his death), and Schilling’s book Me And A Guy Named Elvis.

But at the archives, some interesting sidelights were mentioned. Krogh remarked on the little-known fact that toward the end of his Presidency, when Nixon was being treated for phlebitis, Presley phoned to wish him a quick recovery. (And in 1975, when Elvis himself was hospitalized, the President phoned him from San Clemente.)

Krogh also pointed out one remarkable aspect of the 1970 meeting at the White House; despite Presley spenting several hours in the White House after the meeting, getting a tour and meeting several dozen thrilled White House staffers (and their wives), not one word leaked out about the King’s visit for more than a year, until columnist Jack Anderson, looking at an advance copy of John Finlator’s book The Drugged Nation, found a passage about it. (Finlator, the former deputy director of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, had helped arrange for Elvis to be presented with a BNDD special assistant’s badge.) It’s hard to imagine a megacelebrity’s visit to the Oval Office could be kept that much under wraps today.

Time’s Man (Whoops, Person) Of All Time

December 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, News media, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Secretary Clinton | 1 Comment 

Tonight, Diane Sawyer, former aide in the Nixon White House who also was an editorial assistant for RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, made her debut as anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight. She did not get around to mentioning her old boss.

But over at NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams found some time for the thirty-seventh President. He reported on a blog called Teqnolog, which this weekend examined the thousands of images at Time magazine’s site to determine whose face had appeared on that venerable newsmagazine’s cover more often than any other.

The winner was not a complete surprise. I recall reading in Time once or twice in the last fifteen years that Richard Nixon had been on the cover more often than anyone else. But Technoloq did a breakdown on the 15 others who had appeared on the cover ten times or more. Here they are:

RN – 48 covers
Ronald Reagan – 45
Bill Clinton – 33
George W. Bush – 31
Jimmy Carter – 27
Barack Obama – 24
Gerald R. Ford – 20
Lyndon B. Johnson – 19
George H.W. Bush – 18
Dwight D. Eisenhower – 18
Hillary Clinton – 16
John F. Kennedy – 14
Saddam Hussein – 12
Franklin D. Roosevelt – 11
Al Gore – 10
John McCain – 10

It should be mentioned that these figures include covers in which the sixteen mentioned appear with other people, such as Henry Kissinger, or Leonid Brezhnev, or each other. (In fact, in 1976 Reagan, Carter and Ford were on the same cover.) In Nixon’s case, he appeared by himself on 24 of his 48 covers, while FDR and Hussein were solo on almost all of their covers.

It may not be much of a surprise that the Secretary of State was the only woman on this list (though the former Governor of Alaska may catch up by 2012), but to have Saddam Hussein appear on more covers than, say, Stalin or Castro or Gorbachev or even Churchill is somewhat startling.

The blog pointed out that President Obama, in less than two years, or about 100 weeks, since he scored his first Time cover, has risen to sixth place on this list, while it took RN until the early Seventies, nearly two decades after his first appearance, to get to 24 covers. Teqnolog remarked that at this pace, it would take Obama only another two years to surpass RN, by which time he’d still be in his first term, and that if he were re-elected and featured as frequently as he is now, he could perhaps have his face on as many as 150 covers.

And even if the President failed to be re-elected, he’d still stand a good chance of building on such a number – FDR, JFK, Reagan, and of course RN were on the cover more than once after leaving office.

Herbert J. Miller Jr., 1924-2009

November 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under In Memoriam, National Archives, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | 3 Comments 

Last Saturday, Herbert J. Miller Jr., known as “Jack” to his friends and colleagues, died at age 85 in Rockville, Maryland. Miller, a native of Minnesota, came to Washington after service in WWII, graduated from George Washington University’s law school in 1949, and went to work at Kirkland & Ellis, one of the city’s best firms. Thus began one of the most varied and impressive legal careers in a city that hardly lacks great lawyers.

In 1961, Miller was persuaded by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to leave private practice and join the Justice Department as head of its criminal division. For the next four years, he was the leading figure in the successful prosecutions of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa; political fixer Bobby Baker; and many of the biggest names in organized crime. On several occasions his opponent in the courtroom was that legendary advocate, the late Edward Bennett Williams.

In 1965, Miller went into private practice and founded Miller, Cassidy, Larocca & Lewin, which, until its dissolution in 2001, was among the handful of Washington’s most high-powered firms. In his years with the firm, Miller represented organizations as diverse as National Public Radio and NASCAR. He kept in touch with Robert Kennedy and was a pallbearer at the latter’s funeral in 1968; the following year he was retained by Sen. Edward Kennedy for a time after the Chappaquiddick accident. (However, Miller’s own views were those of a liberal Republican; he ran for lieutenant governor of Maryland on the GOP ticket in 1970, his only venture into the political fray, but was defeated.)

But as famed as some of Miller’s clients were, all of them pale in prominence compared to the man whom the attorney represented for nearly two decades: Richard Nixon. Miller was first engaged by the former President just after his resignation in 1974, and from then until RN’s death (and for a number of years afterwards, representing his estate) Miller diligently labored on behalf of his client’s legal interests.

In the first weeks of this work, his task was to deal with Gerald Ford’s White House regarding the pardon which the thirty-eighth President gave his predecessor in September 1974. Then, through the years, Miller carefully worked on the litigation over the ownership and accessibility of the White House tapes, which culminated in the agreement which made them accessible to the public. Among the other Nixon-related cases in which he was involved was the one which led to the 1982 decision by the Supreme Court that the former President could not be sued in civil court for his actions during his time in office – a decision whose ramifications are felt every time a Chief Executive returns to private life.

But to say all this still does not indicate how versatile Miller was. He could argue the profoundest constitutional issues before the Supreme Court and then – as he did once – defend his mother-in-law on a speeding charge in traffic court. His bulldog tenacity in a courtroom was offset by amiability and good humor outside it. Truly, he was an exemplary figure in his profession.

“The Fugitive,” Guest Starring Carl Bernstein?

October 23, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Barack Obama, News media, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate, White House | 1 Comment 

Late last week Alexander Cockburn, one of the elder statesmen of unreconstructed radical journalism, posted an article on his CounterPunch.com site in which he discussed President Obama’s prospects of prevailing in his feud with Fox News. Unlike many more mainstream journalists, he seems to think that the President might actually prevail over the channel that shamelessly gives a forum to He Who Shall Not Be Named, as Glenn Beck was yesterday identified, in Harry Potterspeak, in a Senate committee hearing by Democratic lawmakers too scared, or something, to mouth his moniker aloud – I kid you not.

In his column, Cockburn, like many another left-leaning pundit this week, takes note of the Nixon White House’s conflicts with liberal newsmen in the early Seventies. (And, unlike most of them, he points out that not all of the press corps in those days endorsed lapses in objectivity and decorum. As an example Cockburn mentions the famed moment at a news conference when Dan Rather, upon being greeted with applause when RN called on him, replied to the President’s question, “are you running for anything?” with “no, Mr. President – are you?” and points out that many of Rather’s peers thought that the crack was inappropriate.)

Then Cockburn follows with this paragraph, by way of arguing that the Nixon White House was not especially skilled in fending off attacks from the press:

Actually it’s a measure of how sloppy the Nixon people were that across the entire Watergate Scandal they failed to excavate Carl Bernstein’s family ties to the Communist Party, nor the fact that every few weeks Bernstein would take time off from his investigative labors with Bob Woodward and drive up to Vermont to visit his cousin Shoshana who at that time was living under an alias in Brattleboro, one jump ahead of the FBI which had her on its Ten Most Wanted list as a radical bomber. People often overestimate the surveillance capacities of the state. One leak of that info to one of Nixon’s pet columnists and the Watergate scandal would have been over.

Huh? Good ol’ lovable Carl Bernstein, winner of his hometown’s Howdy Doody contest in the 1950s? Carl, with his all-American love of classic rock’n'roll? (Even while looking into Watergate he reviewed concerts for the Washington Post.) Carl, who’s visited a thousand college campuses (last week making a rare appearance with Bob Woodward at the University of Texas-Permian Basin) genially lecturing the students about the noble profession of journalism?

Of course, the Pulitzer winner’s hard-working middle-class parents and the difficulties they faced over their political views a half-century ago have never been a secret – he wrote a whole book about them, Loyalties, back in the 1980s – but never has there been any word before that he once used to drop in, from time to time, on a New England cousin who was wanted by the FBI.

Well, after some Googling, I figured out who Cockburn must have been talking about.

Between July and November 1969, New York City was hit by eight bombings of the offices of such institutions as Chase Manhattan Bank, Standard Oil, and General Motors, as well as Federal facilities. Most of the bombings occurred in the late-night hours and produced no fatalities, although one of them, hitting the Marine Midland Building, produced nineteen injuries. On November 12, just after the last of these attacks, a radical in his thirties, Sam Melville (a would-be nom de guerre, no relation to the novelist) was arrested (along with George Demmerle, the FBI informant who’d put the authorities on his trail) as he was loading dynamite onto National Guard trucks outside the 69th Regimental Armory in midtown Manhattan. Melville was found guilty of the bombings, sent to Attica Prison, and was killed there during its 1971 riots. His girlfriend and co-conspirator Jane Alpert was arrested at the same time as himself, but jumped bail a month before her sentencing and went underground, ultimately emerging to serve a prison sentence.

Another suspect in the cast who dropped out of sight while the authorities were searching for her was Patricia (or Pat) Swinton. Ms. Swinton, at the time of the bombings, was advertising manager of Rat, a radical-feminist underground paper for which Ms. Alpert wrote. Ms. Swinton ultimately made her way to Brattleboro, Vermont, where she settled down on a commune called Total Loss Farm (celebrated in a “classic” counterculture-era book by Raymond Mungo, whose subsequent works include a biography of Liberace). There, she took the name Shoshana – which indicates that she was the cousin of Carl Bernstein to whom Cockburn refers. (In 1975, she was located and apprehended, then acquitted by a Federal jury. Contrary to Cockburn’s heated description, Ms. Swinton was never on the Ten Most Wanted list.)

Of course, close students of Carl Bernstein’s career will realize that, back in ‘72, the ready availability of a particular organic substance, the medicinal value of which is now regarded as a legally recognized fact in fourteen states (and this week, tacitly, by the White House), was probably what brought him to Total Loss Farm almost as much as looking in on his wayward kinfolk.

But Cockburn’s claim that exposure of the journalist’s visits to Ms. Swinton would have resulted in Watergate being “over” is a tenuous one. It’s not especially a sure thing that Carl Bernstein would have been let go by the Post had they learned he was hanging out with a fugitive cousin in a Vermont commune – after all, this was the heyday of radical chic, and even a figure as elegant as the Georgetown doyenne Kay Halle would routinely offer her hospitality to a variety of unkempt rock stars and hippies in town to work for George McGovern.

It’s true that it doesn’t seem too likely that he and Bob Woodward could have stayed with the Watergate story had this been known. However, other reporters were chasing the Watergate saga too, such as the diligent, secretive, and staggeringly well-sourced Sandy Smith at Time, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Seymour Hersh at the New York Times. So Cockburn’s notion that Watergate would have fizzled away with Woodstein out of the picture, while it may conform to the version of American history taught by the Post every fifth June 17 and August 9, doesn’t really hold up under examination.

But this is a good occasion to mention an article by veteran journalist Max Holland in the new (November) issue of Washingtonian. (A longer version, according to the magazine, is to appear at Holland’s washingtondecoded.com site, but is not up yet.) In it, Holland looks at a long-standing Watergate conundrum: who was H.R. Haldeman talking about when, in a taped White House conversation on October 19, 1972, he told President Nixon that John Dean had learned that a lawyer associated with the Washington Post (and identified by Haldeman as formerly being with the Justice Department) had identified Mark Felt as the main source of Bernstein and Woodward’s Watergate stories?

Holland looks at a number of attorneys with Post (or Washington Post Company) affiliations at the time, and concludes that two men – the late Harold Ungar, who worked for Justice in the early 1950s and who was on retainer to the Post in 1972, and Edward L. Smith, Newsweek’s counsel at the time (and a onetime Justice attorney) – could fit Haldeman’s description, though Smith, still living, told Holland that he wasn’t the person who ID’d Felt. (Thanks to Maarja Krusten for letting me know about this article.)

The Statue In Yorba Linda

October 1, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under China, Cold War, Nixon Library, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Yorba Linda | 6 Comments 

“Leader’s Exhibit:” A statue of Mao ZeDong is featured with the bronze likenesses of nine other world leaders during RN’s presidency at the Nixon Library.

Today, as is noted elsewhere at TNN, the People’s Republic of China celebrates its sixtieth anniversary. The day is being marked with celebrations throughout that nation and in Chinese communities around the world. But there are also a considerable Chinese with a profound distrust and dislike of Communism who are, here and there, registering their protests of the PRC’s policies.

Probably the largest number of active protesters are associated with the Falun Gong movement, but there are also some whose animosity toward the PRC’s institutions is very personal and heartfelt. One of these people is Kai Chen. Chen is a 56-year-old resident of Los Angeles in the real-estate business. He was born in the People’s Republic, into a family associated to some degree with the Kuomintang party of Chiang Kai-shek, who had, in 1949, been forced to leave the mainland for Taiwan. This status meant that Chen’s family suffered considerably in the Cultural Revolution, and that he was, as a teenager, denied a university education and sent to work in the countryside.

However, it happened that by the age of fifteen, Chen had reached the height of six-foot-seven, quite unusual for a Chinese, and, around the same time, discovered the game of basketball. By this time the Cultural Revolution was moving toward its final stages and the PRC’s premier, Zhou Enlai, envisioned basketball as one of the sports that might enable his country to end its twenty years of comparative isolation and reach out to the world.

Of course, the big breakthrough in this area came when the PRC’s ping-pong team, after playing against its US counterpart in Japan, invited the Americans to China, which dovetailed with behind-the-scenes diplomatic overtures and helped make possible President Nixon’s historic trip to China in February 1972. But although it would take a few more decades before players like Yao Ming became NBA superstars, the Chinese basketball team, on which Chen played for a time, played a significant part in the 1970s and 1980s in building friendly relations between the PRC and the West.

In 1981, Chen moved to Los Angeles to further his education. After obtaining his degree from UCLA, he went into business in California, found success in his field, and raised a family. But his memories of his mistreatment in the China of Mao Zedong have remained, and, as such interviews as this one (and his 2007 autobiography One In A Billion) show, he feels that not only was he exploited as an athlete for the political purposes of a regime he has long detested, but that Beijing has continued to use sports in the same way to the present, most spectacularly in the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Last year, Chen visited the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, and entered the room which features one of its most prominent and written-about exhibits. What he found there upset him, and led to the protest which he made, with several others at the Library today.

When the original staff of the Library was planning the building’s permanent exhibits two decades ago, they decided to devote one of the rooms to a set of life-size bronze statues of nine men and one woman, from around the world, whose leadership qualities had formed the subject of individual chapters in Leaders, one of RN’s most readable and fascinating books. The ten statespersons selected for the Hall of World Leaders were, alphabetically, Konrad Adenauer, Leonid Brezhnev, Winston Churchill, Charles De Gaulle, Nikita Khruschchev, Mao Zedong, Golda Meir, Anwar al-Sadat, and Shigeru Yoshida, and Zhou Enlai. In the exhibit Mao and Zhou are depicted sitting on couches, much in the way that they had talked with Nixon during his trip in 1972; the others are standing. Near the statues is this quote from the President: “They are leaders who have made a difference. Not because they wished it, but because they have willed it.”

When Chen came to the Library, he was angry that Mao, a person he regards as a mass murderer comparable to Hitler and Stalin, was featured among the other leaders, and he wrote about this to Timothy Naftali, the current director of the Nixon Library. Chen’s letter and Naftali’s response can be found here.

For a while, word of Chen’s dismay with Mao’s presence in the Hall was limited to his own website and to a handful of blogs. But yesterday the Los Angeles Times published Mike Anton’s article describing the controvery and Chen’s plan to stage a protest. In it, Chen is quoted as saying: “Mao was the biggest mass murderer in human history. His hands were dipped in the blood of American soldiers who fought in Korea and Vietnam. … How can that image be put alongside world leaders like Winston Churchill and De Gaulle? It’s a perversion of American freedom. You don’t put an anti-American symbol in a U.S. museum.” Naftali wrote to Chen that he personally was less comfortable with having a statue of Mao in the room than was the case with the other leaders, and his view of the issue, as reported in the Times article, is much the same:

“I think having a statue of a person in a museum can imply respect,” he said. “I thought there might very well be confusion among visitors. With Churchill, Meir and Sadat all in the same room, there is an equivalency there and the implication that they’re all alike. They were not all alike. Mao was a mass murderer.

“It seemed to me out of place in a publicly funded museum,” Naftali added. “I don’t think it’s the best way to teach history.”

Naftali’s remarks have met with some puzzlement and criticism from those who worked, full-time or on a volunteer basis, at the Nixon Library during the decade and a half that it was operated by the Richard Nixon Foundation before becoming a part of the National Archives group of presidential libraries a few years ago. In all that time, Foundation assistant director Sandy Quinn told Jessica Terrell of the Orange County Register yesterday, no visitor made a complaint about Mao’s being featured in the Hall. Since Chen’s correspondence with Naftali a notice has been put in the Hall saying that the presence of these ten figures in the room does not constitute an endorsement of all of their policies.

The questions that Chen’s protests raise are not that easy to dismiss. The website of the NBC station in Los Angeles played the controversy for laughs today with an article titled “Pinko, Commie Statues Shock, Offend At Nixon Library.” The piece is credited to Olsen Ebright and Joseph McCarthy (presumably not that one, returned to earth at age 101) and is illustrated with the familiar photo of RN flashing the double V at the entrance to the helicopter on August 9, 1974 – but tinted as pink as, presumably, the late Helen Gahagan Douglas’s underwear.

However, Chen is deeply serious about his complaint, and his years of trauma in the turbulent China of the 1950s and 1960s make his anger at Mao’s presence in the Hall understandable. But I don’t think the founder of modern China should be removed from his couch. Mao is in the Hall because, although he wrested power violently from the Kuomintang regime in a civil war that killed tens of millions; although his misguided ideas of a “Great Leap Forward” and a Cultural Revolution brought about the deaths of millions more; and although his troops bitterly fought United States and United Nations forces for two and a half bloody years in Korea, in his last seven years he sought, with Zhou, to set aside violence and extend the hand of friendship to the United States. President Nixon reached out as well, and, with substantial help from Dr. Henry Kissinger, Winston Lord, Dwight Chapin and Foundation president Ron Walker, and many others, the stage was set for the handshake at the Shanghai tarmac between Nixon and Zhou, and the meeting with Mao, which ended almost a quarter-century of suspicion and hostility, helped prevent the possibility of a third world war between the superpowers, and made possible ties which have been truly beneficial to both countries.

As former Library director, TNN’s John Taylor, points out here, Nixon was a lifelong anti-Communist. He spent more time face-to-face with Chiang Kai-shek than with Mao. But in his years as Vice President, he was ready to have a dialogue with the Soviet Union, in the years after it emerged from Stalin’s shadow, and so met Khruschchev and then, as President, Brezhnev. Both of those men had been part of Stalin’s savage world for decades in their early careers, but when they came to power, they proved able to move beyond that awful legacy.

And so, too, did Mao and Zhou, in the years after 1969, make their efforts to move beyond the chaos, misery and isolation of the Cultural Revolution. That’s why these four men are in the Hall of Leaders – because they met that ultimate test of leadership, to try to make a more peaceful world for coming generations.

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.

Paul Krugman. Now More Than Ever?

September 1, 2009 by Bob Bostock | Filed Under Healthcare, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News | 3 Comments 

I never thought I’d live to see the day when I would recommend one of Paul Krugman’s opinion columns in the New York Times as a “must see” for readers of The New Nixon.

That day has come (actually, it came yesterday, but I was on deadline on a speech, so I’m a day late).
Dr. Krugman’s “Missing Richard Nixon,” is well worth reading, even though it does include one of those gratuitous, de rigueur swipes at RN’s character that any mainstream media column that praises Richard Nixon must, by unwritten law, contain.

And while staunch Nixonites will undoubtedly find some bones to pick in Dr. Krugman’s characterization of RN’s effort to provide all Americans with affordable health care, we should appreciate the column for what it is: a rare example of a liberal columnist finding something in President Nixon’s record that’s worthy of praise. It’s like that old saw about the dog that could walk upright on his two hind legs – we can appreciate it, not because he does it well, but because he can do it at all.

Even more heartening to me were many of the comments left by Dr. Krugman’s readers. I clicked on the comment link with some trepidation, fully expecting to see Krugman roundly excoriated by his devotees for even suggesting that RN had ever done anything praiseworthy. Much to my surprise, most of the comments that mentioned RN were decidedly favorable.

Adam L. of Albany, New York posted this: “I firmly believe that Richard Nixon would be remembered today as one of our greatest and most consequential presidents [except for Watergate]. He got us out of Vietnam, if belated. He achieved a détente with China that prevented the rise of a tripolar globe with two of those poles aggressively opposed to the West. Most importantly, he (along with his successor Gerald Ford) was among the last of moderate Republican presidents…. Nixon was, for better or worse, a leader.”

Scottsdale Jack of Scottsdale, Arizona reminded us that: “The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was founded during Nixon’s Presidency. Can anyone imagine any of the current crop of Republicans doing anything of substance in favor of the environment?”

Mickey Vail of Buenos Aires, Argentina predicted that: “Richard Nixon, who, when history is studied in 50 or so years, will be regarded as one of our better presidents…”

ThinkB4Talk of Potomac, Maryland responding to a previous commenter, wrote: “Nixon is the worst? Nixon opened the door to China. Nixon ended Vietnam war which Kennedy escalated. I am not a Republican. But, I am afraid that I have to disagree with you. Nixon is a president with strategic visions.”

John Thomas of New England wrote: “I miss Richard Nixon, too…. Because he was a master of the political game, because he was a leader, because you could talk to him, and because he would negotiate.

Dr. J. C. Reed, writing from our nation’s capital, wrote: “The simply truth is not only is our political system broken today but it was broken during the Nixon administration. He was hated by the Democrats and their hatred of him was one of the reasons they rejected health care reform.”

Michael in New York City, took Krugman to task for his attack on RN’s character: “As for the failings of President Nixon, those were primarily personal and your perspective on him seems distorted completely. Perhaps you forget that the Nixon administration worked diligently to balance U.S. power abroad and belatedly got the country out of its quagmire in Vietnam under pressing conditions (a war escalated under his Liberal predecessor), opened relations with China and pressed for a detente with the Russians. While not known for his domestic agenda, you rightly point out his push on health care and lest we forget Nixon was perhaps the most environmentally friendly President of our time. The man, after all, did institute the EPA. Let’s not put partisan prejudices ahead of a correct reading of historical fact.”

I have long believed that President Nixon would not get a fair shake from the media or the academic community until those journalists who cut their teeth on their opposition to Vietnam and their pursuit of Watergate had passed from the scene. Perhaps I have been too pessimistic. Perhaps Dr. Krugman’s column, and the response it received from his readers, is the beginning of the long overdue adoption of what President Clinton called for in his eulogy of RN 15 years ago: bringing to a close the judging of our 37th president by anything less than his entire record.

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.

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.

Two Anniversaries

August 8, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Apollo XI XLth, Healthcare, News media, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Senate, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

Last month the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, and of Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin’s historic moonwalk, was the subject of many hours of TV coverage and commentary, and of innumerable column-inches of articles and op-eds in what remains of American newsmagazines and the daily press – not to mention what was written and pictured online.  Next weekend, when Woodstock turns 40, we’ll undoubtedly see an almost equal amount of coverage. 

Back in 1969, these two events were seen by some to represent opposite, perhaps irreconcilable sides of the nation; it may be that for every mud-soaked hippie and teenager in Woodstock who was willing to grant that walking on the moon was “far out,” there were two that would have complained about all the “bread” spent on getting the astronauts to the lunar surface when there were, “like,” so many things wrong with the inner cities, and the environment that needed fixing.  (“Tricia, Tell Your Daddy,” co-written in 1969 by former Phil Spector collaborator Jeff Barry and Jay And The Americans’s Marty Sanders, and recorded by the latter’s band as well as bubblegum singer Andy Kim, presents these sentiments in musical form.)  But today, Woodstock and Apollo tend to be seen in the nostalgic mist of memory and idealism, two sides of the same cherished coin. 

Two other, less happy anniversaries have gone more or less unnoticed.  The Media Research Center’s website pointed out last month that on July 21, 1969, and in the succeeding days before and after Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins splashed down, coverage of the Apollo mission had to jostle for attention with the news coming out of Massachusetts, after it was revealed that Sen. Edward Kennedy, on the night of July 18, had driven off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island adjoining Martha’s Vineyard, and that while he had survived the accident, his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, had not.

What happened that night – and in the following days, as Sen. Kennedy tried to explain what had happened -  ended the senator’s hopes for the Presidency, as became clear when he unsuccessfully challenged President Carter in 1980.  But two generations now have no memory of Chappaquiddick, and, in any event, with Sen. Kennedy now gravely ill, it’s understandable that last month the anniversary of this tragedy passed with little comment. (Indeed, I only glancingly thought about Chappaquiddick in late July, and I have more reason to recall it than most: on July 25, 1969, I sat with Sen. Edmund Muskie in a hotel room in New Albany, Indiana, while he watched Kennedy give his televised speech about what had happened – a speech that, at that instant, made Muskie the Democratic front-runner in the 1972 race.)

As the Media Research Center article notes, the anniversary went unnoticed on the evening network newscasts;  Bill Maher unexpectedly brought it up to his startled panelists on his HBO show Real Time, but other than that it went unmentioned on the air.  Ken Rudin devoted a post to Chappaquiddick at his political blog at NPR’s site on July 21 and was deluged with angry comments. Jeff Simon, the arts editor of the Buffalo News, was the only columnist in a daily newspaper to write about the anniversary, and Jon Meacham, Newsweek’s editor, spoke about it in his column in the magazine’s July 27 issue, which was mainly devoted to a long article by Kennedy about the need for comprehensive health-care legislation. 

To turn to another event, which happened thirty-five years ago this weekend: as recently as 2004, the anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation was the subject of  a fair number of articles and op-eds every five years.  But in 2007, the Watergate break-in’s 35th received much less notice than before.  Most likely this not only had to do with the passage of time, but with the fact that Vanity Fair’s unveiling of W. Mark Felt as “Deep Throat” in 2005 removed the mystery that was the linchpin for much of what was written about Watergate in the previous quarter-century.

And such has been the case with this year’s anniversary of RN’s resignation. So far I’ve spotted three items of much significance. One is a column by Matt Lewis in Politics Daily which also reproduces RN’s August 9 remarks in the East Room in toto.  Another is a column by onetime Nixon White House speechwriter Ben Stein in the American Spectator, in which he reminisces, once more, about being present for those remarks, and notes that the resignation had the effect of introducing the first major note of uncertainty in his own life.  The third is an interview with Nixon’s chief of staff at the time of the resignation, Gen. Alexander M. Haig, in the Palm Beach Post.  There, Gen. Haig remarks:

“Watergate was misunderstood because people didn’t realize they had a very visionary president in Richard Nixon,” Haig said. “The only thing that kept him from office, which was his own fault probably and he’d be the first to admit it, is that he wasn’t lovable. That’s because he was preoccupied with the consequences of his acts, and he always took action only after very careful and systematic analysis.”

Haig said it was Nixon, not Ronald Reagan, who should be credited for ending the Cold War.

“He opened the door to China and that won the Cold War without a shot being fired,” Haig said. “People never understood what going to China meant.”

Obama, Nixon, And The Israelis

August 5, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Barack Obama, International Affairs, Israel and Palestinians, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Then and now in the Oval Office: President Nixon pictured with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir on September 9, 1969 (left), and President Obama pictured with now Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on May 18, 2009 (right).

Over at The National Interest in their weekly news compilation, TNI editors are stressing the importance in talking to Israel rather than declare an all or nothing ultimatum on the end to settlements, even to those in close proximity to Israel proper.

According to Aluf Benn editor at the Ha’aretz newspaper writing in the July 27th edition of The New York Times, President Obama’s indifference towards Israel will make Prime Minister Netanyahu less cooperative since he can galvanize a base that views Obama as a “shaky ally” and one that one wouldn’t help in resolving security issues that would come with disbanding settlement construction:

So far, Israelis have embraced Mr. Netanyahu’s message. A Jerusalem Post poll of Israeli Jews last month indicated that only 6 percent of those surveyed considered the Obama administration to be pro-Israel, while 50 percent said that its policies are more pro-Palestinian than pro-Israeli. Less scientifically: Israeli rightists have — in columns, articles and public statements — taken to calling the president by his middle name, Hussein, as proof of his pro-Arab tendencies.

According to historian Alistair Horne in his new book Kissinger 1973, The Crucial Year, under President Nixon the Middle East gained a renewed presence in U.S. foreign policy, albeit in the primary Cold War context.

In 1971, Nixon Secretary of State William Rogers became the highest ranking American diplomat to visit the region since John Foster Dulles landed there in 1952.

For his part President Nixon was already furnishing talks with the Egyptians and Jordanians as early as April 1969 during his first year in office, meeting with Jordan’s King Hussein and President Nasser’s personal emissary Mahmoud Fawzi to discuss the diplomatic tracks for establishing closer ties with the Arab nations and achieving territorial integrity with the Israelis. The meetings with the two Arab leaders were followed by a White House visit from Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that September. Nixon re-assured Meir that he would maintain commitments to supply the Israeli air force with twenty-five Phantom Jets and eighty Skyhawk fighters, as well as $200 million per year in low interest loans for a period up to five years.

President Nixon echoed Dr. Kissinger’s critical sentiments on Secretary Rogers’ plans for the Middle East, to whom the President designated the region to. The plan closely resembles President Obama’s position on the settlement freeze, a stance interpreted by Mr. Benn to “please the Arab streets at Israel’s expense.” Nixon and Kissinger believed that giving up land in return for Arab assurances for peace would only encourage the “extremist elements among the Arabs,” offend the Israelis, and play “naïvely” into Soviet hands.

Nixon knew that he needed Israeli cooperation for a peace framework, but he dually recognized that it was important to make overtures to the Arab states concerning the occupied territory and to stave off military imbalance and international incident with the Soviets.

The delicate balancing act ultimately paid off. When civil war broke out in Jordan (dubbed their “Black September”), between Palestinian forces and the Hashemite Kingdom, the President gained assurances from Prime Minister Meir that Israel would not “precipitately move” on Jordan. But when 300 Syrian tanks crossed the (Soviet allied) Syria border, he authorized Dr. Kissinger to inform Israeli Ambassador Yitzak Rabin that he would approve of an Israeli airstrike on the Syrian military. Luckily Palestinian forces were defeated by the King Hussein and the Syrian tanks disengaged and went back home.

At the conclusion of his op-ed, Aluf Benn ultimately asked that President Obama “speak to us (Israelis) directly,”  assuring him the peace that they “will surely listen.”

According to President Nixon, Prime Minister Meir was piqued when the United States wanted the Israelis to “scrupulously” observe a cease-fire that she believed the Egyptians were intent on breaking. Keeping all options open on the proverbial chessboard,  he remained amenable to Israeli concerns, a flexibility that proved crucial to the Jordanian forces that “Black September” that even Ambassador Rabin credited it to — among other things — “a tough American position.”

Another Nixon To China Opportunity

August 3, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Barack Obama, China, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, Russia | 1 Comment 

Last week Vice President Joe Biden said that a weakened Russia will bend to the United States. The "great polar bear’s" economy is essentially "withering," it has a dwindling population base, and an anemic banking sector that might not be able to withstand the next 15 years. Russia is also faced with external dilemmas in the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea and less than subservient former Soviet bloc countries.

Russia also faces a China problem, and a turf war that President Obama can capitalized on. The Guardian reports:

while China and Russia have much in common, including a mutual fear of separatism and Islamic radicalism, there are also signal differences. Despite last week’s exercises, and a visit to Russia by Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, in June, politicians in Moscow harbour a deep-seated fear of China – in particular, of Chinese encroachment.

Russian TV recently claimed that Beijing has drawn up a secret plan. According to this top-secret blueprint, China is determined to grab back Russia’s remote, but vast, far east region. China’s strategy includes persuading migrants to settle in Russia, marry local women and steal or co-opt local businesses.

Russia’s far east has always been the most strategically vulnerable part of Moscow’s fissiparous imperium, in what is the world’s biggest country. Some 6,100km (3,800 miles) and an eight-hour flight from Moscow, the far east is home to just 6.5 million Russian citizens. Next door, across the Amur river in north-eastern China, there are 107 million Chinese. Given this demographic imbalance, there is a primordial fear in the Russian imagination that China will eventually try to steal back the Europe-sized far east of Russia – a region rich in mineral resources, trees, coal and fish. The salmon alone are an attractive target. A quarter of the world’s Pacific salmon spawn in the volcanic Kamchatka peninsula. According to the Russian TV scenario, Beijing is furtively plotting to undo the Russian colonisation of the Pacific coastal region, started in the 18th century by tsarist-era adventurers. The area’s original inhabitants were Chinese. These early nomads eked out a meagre living while dodging the tigers that still haunt the Sikhote-Alin mountains.

No Legitimacy, Many Problems

August 3, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under China, International Affairs, Iran, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, Russia | Leave a Comment 

Thirty-seven years ago today Congress ratified the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, in what was the culmination of a diplomatic coup crafted by President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Dr. Henry Kissinger in visits to China and Russia.

During the Cold War, President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger knew that the only course in obtaining such a peace was to establish an unbreakable framework in which legitimate governments could reach settlements at the bargaining table. Revolutionary governments — such as in Russia and the China — were to be limited in their opportunity to invoke the whimsical — if not downright irrational and maniacal — fervency of post-modern ideology in favor of a permanent peace.

According to the Hossein Askari, a George Washington University Professor writing at The Nixon Center’s National Interest magazine, the current regime of Iran has lost all tenets of legitimacy within the Muslim world, relegating itself to a military dictatorship after an evidently rigged election and violent clashes with unarmed protesters. The current regime appears to be left with little choice but effective martial law.

The government cannot regain any pretensions to legitimacy. Yes, it may survive for a few weeks, months, or even for a few years, not as an Islamic Republic, but as a military dictatorship. Ayatollah Khamenei cannot stay on as supreme leader with religious and constitutional legitimacy. He has lost all claims to both as a result of recent events. He could survive as the supreme head of a military dictatorship. The majority of Iranians will not accept Ahmadinejad’s presidency as legitimate.

There are three basic options for Iran. The first is to preserve the Islamic Republic; Ayatollah Khamenei would have to be replaced by a respected senior grand ayatollah, someone with no political ambitions. The constitution would have to be modified so as to afford Iranians a more direct say in the selection of their leaders. There would have to be a new presidential election. This is the preferred solution of the clerical establishment, including Hashemi Rafsanjani, who would, of course, like to be the power behind the throne.

The second, and most likely option is the emergence of an absolute dictatorship. Such a tyranny would in time be overthrown, because Iranians are unlikely to succumb to force. What makes the second option the most likely short-term solution? Religious scholars and Grand Ayatollahs have no guns. But the regime does. The two leaders, namely Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad, are fully aware that the IRGC and the Basij will not give up their privileged status easily and would fight to keep them in power. They will fight until too many Iranians have died or until the regular military turns against the IRGC. The only way that the second option can be avoided is if Ayatollah Khamenei abides by the teachings of the religion that he touts, supports the first option and resigns in favor of a new supreme leader.

The third option would be to abandon the clerical system in favor of a simple republic with a totally new constitution. This is the most unlikely option as neither the clerics nor the IRGC will go away quietly. But in my opinion, this is the option that would best serve the long-term interests of the Iranian people.

In retrospect, the late shah, after a thirty-five-year rule, most of it unpopular, had the decency to yield to the will of the Iranian people and to avoid excessive bloodshed. Unfortunately, the supreme leader and President Ahmadinejad are unlikely to follow in his footsteps.

With a more conventional enemy, this might be an incredible moment of opportunity for a diplomatic coup on the seemingly vulnerable, but armed to the teeth an apocalyptic talking regime with little options, may leave us with very little.

Nixon’s America, Palin’s America

August 2, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under American Politics, Nixon in the News, Religion, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, Sarah Palin | 7 Comments 

Suggesting that conservatives such as Sarah Palin face political doom, a Daily Kos writer observes:

When Richard Nixon won the presidency, the silent majority of Americans was white and conservative. The demographics of this country have changed, and that change is now accelerating. Voters are getting younger, more racially diverse, and less tied to organized religion.

There is some truth here, but a careful look at the data reveals a different picture.

Black and Hispanic political participation has grown over time.  Even so, new Census statistics show that three-fourths of the 2008 electorate consisted of non-Hispanic whites.

In 1974 (RN’s last year in office), the General Social Survey found roughly equal percentages of liberals and conservatives in the population.  In 2006, conservatives outnumbered liberals by 8 points, and a Gallup survey indicates the conservative lead has grown even more.  Granted, self-identification can be slippery, since the definition of terms can shift over time.  And on certain social issues (e.g., gay rights), opinion has become more liberal.  But in other respects, it is hard to argue that RN’s America was more conservative.  Despite a modest inflation rate, he faced pressure to impose wage-price controls.  When he yielded — which he later acknowledged as a mistake — public reaction was overwhelmingly positive.  Today, even President Obama is not talking about such measures.

As for religion, there has been a great deal of hype about a Newsweek cover proclaiming the end of Christian America.  According to the American Religious Identification Survey, the share of Americans who say they have no religion is at a high — but is still only 15 percent.  That figure has barely increased since 2001, and self-identified atheists and agnostics make up less than 2 percent of the population.  When Gallup asked respondents if they had attended services during the last seven days, 39 percent said yes.  That figure was statistically the same as the 1972 figure of 40 percent.

Of couse, serious problems do confront Republicans in general, and Sarah Palin in particular.  But it is a serious misreading of the data to suggest a sudden leftward shift that rules out GOP victory.

(Cross-posted from Epic Journey.)

Palin is Not The New Nixon…Not Yet (Newsweek)

August 1, 2009 by David Emig | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, Sarah Palin | 4 Comments 

Howard Fineman presents one of the better comparisons between RN and the departed Alaskan governor.

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