Liberals Rediscover Nixon (Again)

September 26, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Economic issues, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

In the Washington Post, economist James K. Galbraith of the University of Texas - who is not only one of the leading liberal figures in his field, but the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, William F. Buckley Jr’s eternal Firing Line antagonist - examines the current crisis. He notes that there are two problems facing the United States in the economic field that dominate everything else. One is the housing meltdown. And when he gets to the other one, his solution is a bit unexpected:

The second great crisis is in state and local government. Just Tuesday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced $1.5 billion in public spending cuts. The scenario is playing out everywhere: Schools, fire departments, police stations, parks, libraries and water projects are getting the ax, while essential maintenance gets deferred and important capital projects don’t get built. This is pernicious when unemployment is rising and when we have all the real resources we need to preserve services and expand public investment. It’s also unnecessary.

What to do? Reenact Richard Nixon’s great idea: federal revenue sharing. States and localities should get the funds to plug their revenue gaps and maintain real public spending, per capita, for the next three to five years. Also, enact the National Infrastructure Bank, making bond revenue available in a revolving fund for capital improvements. There is work to do. There are people to do it. Bring them together. What could be easier or more sensible?

Is it time for some old Nixon hands in the domestic and financial areas to rummage through their filing cabinets and get their briefcases ready?

The New Two Americas And The Edwards Zone

September 5, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Democratic Party, Domestic issues, Election 2008, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Nixonland Nitpicks, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Yesterday brought some news that was surely welcome in Democratic circles.  When last heard from, former senator and 2004 vice-presidential candidate John Edwards was ready to visit the campuses of America, starting next Monday at Hofstra University, and continuing to Salem State in Massachusetts and the University of Illinois, to lecture students and whoever else might be interested about his tried-and-true theme of “two Americas;” what he had learned on the campaign trail; and other odds and ends that might strike his fancy.  He was even to debate Karl Rove on September 26 in Buffalo.

But, following an announcement that the Salem State events (which was to be with his wife Elizabeth) had been cancelled, Edwards has now stated through his agent, to the disappointment of CSPAN junkies and bloggers everywhere, that he will not make the above appearances and, indeed, that his schedule will remain empty until after Election Day, explaining:

Nothing is more important than electing Barack Obama and Joe Biden. I don’t want my appearance at these events to be a distraction from the important issues of the election, or from the important purpose of these meetings.

The last phrase is a bit unclear, but Edwards seems to be suggesting that he expects that he can simply appear in front of any audience in the country, eight weeks from now, and deliver his populist message of old as if the Rielle Hunter scandal had never happened.  He may be disappointed, and not just because there have been some hints that one or another of the major general-interest magazines is contemplating an article on the scandal.

When Edwards last was appearing in public, the term “two Americas” was being treated by the mainstream media in the way he defined it - one rich and privileged (read: Republican Party), the other poor and downtrodden (read: Democrats and trial lawyers), in the most fire-breathing tradition of Tom Watson or Melvin Belli.  

But now Edwards’ rhetoric, and the variations upon it played by Sen. Hillary Clinton after he withdrew from the race, seem almost as dated as a copy of Coin’s Financial School.  The last seven days have seen the emergence of a new version of “two Americas.”

One America consists, more or less, of Boston, Martha’s Vineyard, the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Hamptons, Georgetown, some larger college communities like Ann Arbor and Madison, and portions of Beverly Hills and Malibu.  In this America, Gov. Sarah Palin and her family are figures of ridicule and their very emergence on the national scene is a source of bewilderment. (See www.huffingtonpost.com, passim.)

The other America is bordered by the communities of Lubec, Maine to the east; Naalehu, Hawaii to the south; and, rather fittingly, Adak in the Aleutian Islands to the west and Barrow, Alaska to the north. (Can I be that sure about Naalehu, in one of Sen. Barack Obama’s several native states? I think so.  This week, not long after Gov. Palin’s speech, I talked with a counterculture type, of the sort found in abundance on the Big Island, who wasn’t hesitant about declaring herself a citizen of this America.)  It is a place where Gov. Palin and her family are admired, respected, and even loved.  Obama and, especially, Sen. Joe Biden, a man who has campaigned by the side of a lot of officeholders around the country over the years, are both well aware that it exists, though it may take some time for everyone in their organizations to catch on.

In the course of a week, as poll data is starting to show, Gov. Palin, simply by being herself, has come quite a way toward reassembling the “New American Majority” that Kevin Phillips wrote about so many years ago, long before his career settled down into churning out one anti-Bush book per year and making the rounds of left-wing internet talkshows.  Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson has started to realize which way the wind is blowing, and Paul Krugman at the New York Times, discussing the shift in the electoral temper, invokes Rick Perlstein’s Franklins/Orthogonians dichotomy from Nixonland.  (Perlstein, meanwhile, discusses this week’s events here.)

Speaking of Nixonland, Sam Tanenhaus, author of the acclaimed biography Whittaker Chambers and editor of both the New York Times’ “Week In Review” and book-review sections, reviews it (and Thomas Frank’s The Wrecking Crew) at The New Republic this week.  His discussion of Frank’s book is a little on the perfunctory side - understandably so, since The Wrecking Crew is, for all its fury and fire-breathing, a pretty one-sided and slightly cartoonish treatment of the lobbying culture, predicated on the idea that every K Streeter is 100% committed to eternal GOP rule. 

However, Tanenhaus not only provides a very acute and insightful assessment of Nixonland  but uses the book as a jumping-off point for a long, carefully considered examination of President Nixon’s relationship with the conservative movement of his time; how his policies related to the New Deal/Great Society tradition, the development of neoconservative and neoliberal thought in the Nixon years (with special attention to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s role in urban policy); and what the events of those years can tell us now, where the future of the Republican party and conservatism is concerned.  It’s one of the rare book reviews that repay repeated readings.

Frost/Nixon Preview & Riellegate Update

August 21, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Entertainment, News media, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 3 Comments 

Gawker today links to a clip it says is from Youtube, though the clip, at this point, cannot be located on Youtube itself.  It is no less than the trailer of Ron Howard’s movie Frost/Nixon, starring Frank Langella reprising his acclaimed Broadway performance as President Nixon, and not scheduled to open until December.  (The trailer first appeared on a Danish site and has subtitles in that language, though the soundtrack is in English.)  I was able, using the Gawker link, to play two-thirds of the trailer before it cut off; when I tried to reload the clip it wouldn’t play.  But if you can get it to work, it’s well worth seeing. 

Meanwhile, the most interesting aspect of the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter affair continues to be the money aspect - though TMZ.com did locate a few amusing seconds of Hunter bantering with Chuck Woolery as a contestant on the game show Lingo in 2002.  Death By 1000 Paper Cuts, the most determined blog investigating the story, today notes that a journalist working for PBS Radio in North Carolina is examining the curious story of the extensive use by the Edwards campaign of an airplane registered to the law firm founded by the campaign’s finance chairman, tort lawyer Fred Baron, but controlled (to use his own term) by Baron.  (Here it should be noted that the firm had acrimoniously terminated its connection with Baron several years before the Edwards campaign started using the plane.)  

Most finance chairpersons of presidential campaigns work gratis; Baron, however, was very handsomely compensated by the Edwards campaign.  The Death By 1000 Paper Cuts post notes a number of occasions when substantial payments were made to Baron by the Edwards organization for the use of “his” plane, which just happened to coincide with significant dates in the timeline of the Edwards/Hunter saga. 

I’ll point out once again that, when it comes to coincidences, I’m still intrigued by the fact that the Center For Promise And Opportunity, the well-funded nonprofit foundation set up by Edwards ostensibly to fund a mammoth scholarship program for poor students across the nation, abruptly went out of business (along with the scholarships it sponsored at the single high school where it manifested concrete results) a week or so before Rielle Hunter fled to St. Croix (a place with easy air access to various discreet financial institutions) and the former vice-presidential nominee went on ABC to confess his “liason.” Whither went its assets?

And (as Frank Gannon writes below) according to Radar magazine’s site, the New York Times is now looking into Edwards’ involvement with a so-far-unnamed person who apparently has some connection to Duke University.  (But when will we hear from the Washington Post?)

Update: the blog of the Dallas Morning News reports that although John Edwards seems to be skipping the Democratic convention next week, Fred Baron will continue his 20-year tradition of attending it.  The post also quotes an Obama campaign source as denying that Baron is involved with planning events for the campaign in Colorado, as had been previously reported.

Some Concluding Reflections On Nixonland

July 26, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, History, Nixon in the News, Nixonland Nitpicks, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | 2 Comments 

This week I finished Rick Perlstein’s book Nixonland. My conclusions are not very much changed from what I previously posted, and as I mentioned previously Oxford historian Dominic Sandbrook’s review in the London Telegraph expresses an opinion of the book close to mine.  But there are some aspects about the book’s account of the 1972 campaign worth mentioning.

Perlstein, as a progressive intellectual, is preoccupied with the problem of how the Democratic Party - once perceived as the champion of the common man, the defender of working-class and middle-class Americans of non-WASP origin and of unionized workers - came to be alienated from these groups in the 1960s and early 1970s, and how that party came to be seen as captive to an intellectual elite that looked down on ordinary citizens.  This is, after all, still a concern with Democratic activists as they face November and start to wonder what might happen if Sen. John McCain starts to avoid accidents like the one that happened with the applesauce this week, and continues to build on his seemingly unlikely base of blue-collar support in Rust Belt states, as shown in recent Quinnipiac Poll results.

So the concluding chapters of his book explore how it was that Sen. George McGovern, who in the 1972 primaries more than held his own among blue-collar voters when challenged by Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson, was unable to gain any traction in that area after his party’s convention in Miami Beach.  On page 698 of Nixonland, he has a particularly telling quote in this context.  In the Oral History Collection of the New York Public Library, Perlstein found a study put together by the American Jewish Committee, “The Politics Of American Jews: The Election of 1972.” (This, incidentally, represents the kind of resource that would have improved Nixonland enormously, and Perlstein would have been well advised to look for more in this area, rather than mine old newspapers via Proquest and Lexis/Nexis as he was often content to do.)

The study quotes Gus Tyler, who was in 1972 a top leader of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Tyler (still alive and writing occasionally for the Jewish newspaper, the Forward, at age 96) was, in the 1930s, chairman of the youth organization of Norman Thomas’ Socialist Party, and at age 60 was a prime example of the liberal union leader, a proud Democrat, but well aware of the rank and file’s disillusionment.  As he watched Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman whoop it up for the cameras, and saw the radicals of 1968, now raised to the status of delegates, get into shouting matches with the representatives of the old-school Democratic machines from the cities, and listened to hour upon hour of heated rhetoric from militant leftists now convinced they had captured the Democratic Party once and for all -

“…he wondered [Perlstein says] what this all must look like to the farmer in Iowa, a housewife in Bensonhurst, ’somebody out there,’ he later reflected to an interviewer, ‘in Peoria.’  All of these people had given the Democrats a landslide in 1964. They had trusted the Democratic Party. In the interim they had seen America plunged into chaos.  And then they looked at this convention and thought, ‘Here are the people who are responsible for this chaos.’”

This illustrates, in a nutshell, why the organization of Sen. Barack Obama is so diligent about presenting a cheerful, upbeat, orderly face to the world.  The memory of the McGovern campaign’s manifestations of chaos still rankles among its older figures.

But it should be emphasized that not all of Perlstein’s account of 1972 focuses on the self-destruction of the Democrats.   He manages to work in dozens of references to Republican skulduggery and discusses the policies of the Nixon Administration in what is usually an extremely jaundiced fashion - claiming, for example, that President Nixon and Dr. Henry Kissinger’s efforts to secure peace in 1972 were no more than plans “to stab America’s soldiers and South Vietnamese allies in the back.”  To demonstrate that thesis, he does no more than refer to the President’s August 3, 1972 conversation with Dr. Kissinger. Did Perlstein actually listen to the recording, available to anyone who chose to listen for years? If his footnotes are any indication, no - he cites an Associated Press account from 2004, and refers to a conference presentation made by Jeffrey Kimball at the JFK Library in 2006.   He comments that one account has it that Dr. Kissinger wondered, speaking of a peace agreement, if it was possible to “sell it in such a way” as to gain South Vietnamese President Thieu’s acceptance, then notes that others have transcribed the words as “sell out in such a way.”  Why couldn’t Perlstein have just gone ahead, put on headphones, and decided for himself? And, while he was at it, listened to at least some of the dozens of other conversations available from this period that put that segment into context?

I’ll have a few more things to say about Nixonland in coming days but for now, I’ll repeat that though the book is one extremely well-written and vivid narrative, it is not, in any way, a really full, objective, or exhaustively researched account of Richard Nixon, the events in the years immediately before his presdency, and that presidency’s history until the end of 1972, and that any reader should keep that in mind.

Pat Buchanan Meets Rick Perlstein

June 25, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, History, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon in the News, Political Philosophy, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 7 Comments 

Yesterday morning, toward the end of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, host Mika Brzezinski suppressed a giggle as she introduced Nixonland author Rick Perlstein. Viewers might have been forgiven for assuming the giggle was no different from any of the others that the frothy Ms. Brzezinski emits from show to show. But indeed it was, for it was a portent of video fireworks that, while not quite as noisy as, say, any recent Keith Olbermann rant about Sen. Clinton, were still pretty impressive.

A minute into the interview, as Perlstein was finishing his standard opening for this kind of chat, Ms. Brzezinski introduced none other than Pat Buchanan, with journalist Mike Barnicle alongside him. Buchanan opened with a telling question: “Rick, did you enjoy my memos?” Buchanan’s reply: “You know, I loved your memoir” - presumably referring to Buchanan’s book Right From The Beginning, though it is not cited in Nixonland’s bibliography. Buchanan: “I mean the memos to Mr. Nixon and Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Mitchell.”

Now, when Perlstein visited the National Archives in College Park, he had every opportunity to read the Buchanan memos, whether or not he enjoyed them. I have previously pointed out that, in contrast to his first book Before The Storm for which he interviewed a number of important figures in the Goldwater campaign of 1964 and examined masses of unpublished archival documents, Perlstein did little research of that kind for Nixonland, drawing instead on books and newspaper and magazine article of the era. But given this book’s strong emphasis on the 1968 and 1972 Nixon campaigns, one would have thought that, since Perlstein did not obtain an interview with Buchanan - and he would likely have had little trouble getting one - he would have compensated by examining the numerous pages of Buchanan memos, touching on campaign and other political matters, in the Archives’ Nixon Project files. But none of these memos figure in his book or are cited in the source notes.

In other words, the MSNBC clip shows a historian making contact for the first time with a person who should have been an important source for the work being discussed - and with less than ten minutes to spare, there is not really time for an in-depth talk. Instead, there’s considerable verbal jousting, during which Perlstein gets so flustered that, at 6:45 in the clip, he gets the Caracas mob attack on Nixon in 1958 mixed up with his rather more peaceful visit to Lima a few days earlier. And the historian seems to still have a bit of trouble believing that, in the distant days he chronicled, Bob Novak could have been considered a liberal. Unfortunately, early on Buchanan acknowledges that while he read Before The Storm he has not yet had the chance to thoroughly read Nixonland, and his questioning of Perlstein suffers somewhat because of that. If Conrad Black were available for such an appearance, Perlstein would really have been in trouble. But the clip is nonetheless well worth viewing, especially to see some of Barnicle’s reactions.

Editor’s note: Mr. Perlstein notes in the comments section that he tried but could not get an interview with Mr. Buchanan.

Rick Perlstein Replies To Sean Wilentz & Happy 1000th

June 23, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Nixon in the News, Presidents, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

This morning Nixonland author Rick Perlstein replies to The Age Of Reagan author Sean Wilentz at The New Republic’s site, and what he has to say will take Roger Stone’s mind off the question of which shirt to wear tomorrow, if only for a moment. The historian also promises to look into the question of just what moved Ronald Reagan to select Richard Schweiker as his running-mate in 1976, a move that’s puzzled me to this day.

In other news, what you’ve just read is the 1000th post since TNN started in February. As the subject of Wilentz’s new book (and Perlstein’s next) said on Election Night of 1984, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” (Or, to use words made famous by the man who entertained President Nixon and Italian President Sandro Pertini at the White House one April night: the best is yet to come.)

Who’s Mr. Conservative: Reagan or Nixon?

June 19, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

That is the query Barron YoungSmith, an intern at The New Republic, poses at the magazine’s website this week.  (YoungSmith is a 2006 Brown University graduate, incidentally.  And some people were amazed that 39-year-old Rick Perlstein was fascinated enough by the Nixon era to devote six years to a book about the period.) 

The “it,” in this case, is nothing less than the post-1960 conservative revolution.  After noting the differing theses of Perlstein’s Nixonland and Sean Wilentz’s The Age Of Reagan, YoungSmith proposes a synthesis: ”Nixon’s government was like pagan Rome, while Reagan’s was like the Christian Empire after Constantine.”  He explains that while Richard Nixon set up the “physical infrastructure” of the conservative resurgence (ie, the “electoral coalition, tactics, cultural tropes”), it was Ronald Reagan who infused it with “conservative ideology” and “turned Nixon’s machine to new ends.”  

And elsewhere at the magazine’s site, Wilentz and Perlstein themselves debate the question, in the exchange-of-letters format familiar to Slate readers.  Anyway, Wilentz has started to do so. His initial contribution argues that one element of the infrastructure YoungSmith discusses, the switch of the “solid South” from Democratic to Republican, was not a done deal by the end of the Nixon era, pointing out that Carter won the whole area (except Virginia, where he lost by less than two points) in 1976.   Interestingly, Wilentz is sure that had it not been for Watergate, Nixon would have been unchallengeably the dominant American political figure of recent times, or, as he puts it, had the scandal never happened his book could have been titled The Age Of Nixon rather than The Age Of Reagan (which, Wilentz assures us, will end this year no matter who’s elected). So far Perlstein hasn’t replied but stay tuned.

Speaking of Nixonland, John Coyne Jr., a leading figure of National Review’s 1960s heyday and former speechwriter and assistant to Vice President Agnew and Presidents Nixon and Ford, wrote a perceptive review of that book in last Sunday’s Washington Times.  (Thanks to Jonathan Movroydis for the heads-up about this.)

Correcting the Record

May 19, 2008 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under American Politics, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

There has recently been an uptick in Nixon commentary online and in the print press.  Not surprisingly, some of it is factually inaccurate.    Reviewing the Perlstein biography, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas writes: 

The establishment press had been flummoxed by it all. In 1966, the pundits were sure that the Republican Party would pick a reasonable, moderate candidate, someone with a little Kennedyesque charisma like Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York, or maybe New York City’s attractive young mayor, John Lindsay. None of the pundits imagined that Richard Nixon, the sweaty, shifty-eyed loser to JFK in 1960, could take the GOP nomination.

Nope, not even close.  A persual of the New York Times in 1966 shows just the opposite. On June 12, James Reston wrote that the GOP nomination race had already narrowed down to Nixon and Michigan Governor George Romney.  On September 4, Arthur Krock said that Nixon was “the Republican, on whom, by common party acceptance, has devolved the role of field commander.”  And on September 16, a Times news story summed it up:  “Most Republican professionals willing to stand up and be counted this early in the game think that former Vice President Richard M. Nixon will be their Presidential nominee in 1968.”

Meanwhile, The Huffington Post has reviewed a play about Nixon’s opponent in the 1950 California Senate race, Helen Gahagan Douglas.  “When urged to respond to Nixon’s misrepresentation of her beliefs and values she stated, `I will not get in the mud with him.’”  Actually, she got plenty muddy.  Among other things, she accused him of “nice, unadulterated fascism.”  Evoking the image of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, she referred to the “backwash of Republican young men in dark shirts.”

No doubt more inaccuracies are on the way.

Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland - First Impressions

May 11, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

Tomorrow marks the publication of Rick Perlstein’s nearly 800-page history Nixonland: The Rise Of A President And The Fracturing Of America. Over the weekend the book was reviewed by Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, by George Will in the New York Times Book Review, by biographer/historian Douglas Brinkley in the Austin American-Statesman, and by Bruce J. Schulman of Boston University in the Boston Globe.

I’ve read the first third of the book, from its turbulent opening - the Watts riots in August 1965 - to the point where Richard Nixon contests the Wisconsin primary in late March 1968. In the space of 250 pages Perlstein describes a whirlwind of events - the civil rights movement’s journey from the triumph of the Voting Rights Act to the militancy and violence of Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers; the escalation of the Vietnam War; Martin Luther King’s struggle to advance open housing in the face of hostility in Chicago; increasing unrest on college campuses and the rise of the hippies; and the almost complete inability of the liberal intellectual and media establishment of the time to get a handle on what was happening.

In his previous book, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater And The Unmaking Of The American Consensus, Perlstein, despite being as thoroughly liberal-minded as any of his peers among younger historians, produced a carefully documented and quite even-handed account of the insurgency which made Goldwater the 1964 Republican nominee. That book relied on a mountain of archival material almost completely untapped by previous historians of the period, and on interviews with several of the most important surviving figures among the circle of National Review intellectuals and mostly young idealists who, over four years, confounded the Republican establishment and launched a conservative revolution which, though seemingly crushed by Lyndon Johnson’s landslide, came back two years later, and, over the course of a decade and a half, transformed the American political landscape.

Nixonland’s opening describes the early post-Goldwater stage of this process, but the conservative movement in this book take a back seat to the story of Richard Nixon’s resurrection from defeat in 1962 to triumph in 1968. This book differs from Before The Storm in the use of sources. When Perlstein wrote the earlier book he was limited in his choice of published materials. Not more than 15 or 20 books had really examined the Goldwater campaign (or, for that matter, the conservative movement of the early ’60s from which it emerged) in any significant depth, and the newspaper and magazine articles of the time were, as often as not, written by reporters who regarded the Goldwater campaign as hopeless before he actually secured the nomination, and as a mortal threat to the future of civilization the moment they heard his acceptance speech at the Cow Palace. Perlstein therefore had to do tap into previously underutilized material, and this gave Before The Storm an arresting, fresh quality.

For Nixonland, however, Perlstein had a vast pool of material to work with; hundreds of books, tens of thousands of newspaper and magazine articles and op-eds, and uncounted hours of television footage and radio broadcasts document the period he discusses. He therefore has used less unpublished archival material and interviews, and has relied more on books and articles.

In the first 250 pages of Nixonland, a few memos from the Nixon Library and a dozen or so letters sent to Illinois Sen. Paul Douglas from constituents are referred to or quoted; the footnotes mention interviews with a Don Rose (apparently consulted regarding the Chicago open-housing disturbances of 1966), Lee Edwards (about Nixon’s efforts to reach out to the Young Americans For Freedom and other elements of the conservative movement) and Nick Salvatore and Ryan Hayes (about New York mayor John Lindsay’s conflicts with the NYPD).

For everything else, Perlstein relies on books, old articles and columns, and, sometimes, radio and TV coverage from the period. His main sources among newspapers (at least in the first 250 pages) are the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times - in those days, a fairly balanced group representing liberal, conservative, and middle-of-the-road opinion. Where newsmagazines are concerned he most frequently refers to US News And World Report, and justifiably so. (As hard as it may be for younger readers to believe, that magazine was once famous not for its annual college issue but for being much more fact-oriented than Time or Newsweek.) Perlstein hardly cites Newsweek at all and treats Time as being primarily a mouthpiece for Pentagon propaganda about Vietnam or as the purveyor of overblown, somewhat preposterous feature stories like the ones in 1966 and 1967 celebrating the arrival of youth as a major force in American culture.

When it comes to books, Perlstein keeps at hand three or four titles regarding a particular person or aspect of the period under discussion, and cites them frequently. In his two chapters concerning Nixon’s pre-1965 career, for example, he makes heavy use of the late Fawn Brodie’s well-known and controversial psychobiography from 1981, and the much less-known 1972 book The Running Of Richard Nixon by Leonard Lurie. Perlstein also picks up (and runs with) an argument he acknowledges borrowing from Chris Matthews’ Kennedy And Nixon - that the 37th President’s career, in many ways, reprised his Whittier College days when he organized a society of hard-working, determined outsiders, the Orthogonians, in opposition to the Big Men On Campus-led Franklins. Where Vietnam is concerned, the historian makes heavy use of A.J. Langguth’s Our War and, to a lesser degree, Christian Appy’s Working-Class War; Tom Wells’ The War Within is much referred to for his account of domestic opposition to the conflict.

The America Perlstein describes in the first part of Nixonland is a nation steadily moving to the brink of apocalypse. Though the constant in these pages is Richard Nixon, carefully assessing the direction in which the political and social winds are blowing, Perlstein spends most of these pages recounting a series of dramatic and violent events. Racial, social, political division and discord are the dominant themes. Paragraphs present snapshots of passions and violence, sometimes in almost random sequence. Thus, on p. 110, the reader finds:

At the Sherman House Hotel in Chicago, Cook County Democratic headquarters, Martin Luther King warned in a press conference, “We are in for darker nights of social disruption,” and that “the power elite seems to prefer sporadic outbreaks of violence to the rightful recognition of an organized nonviolence movement,” and to whites who saw King as the [Chicago open-housing protest] riot’s ringleader it sounded like a threat. He then announced he had brokered a truce among Chicago’s street gangs. (The next day a gang member shot three rivals.) In an ornate reception room in New York’s City Hall, fifty-nine East New York youths screamed about “our turf” and “their turf” and nearly broke into a fistfight. (Mayor Lindsay sent out his youth board director and a rabbi to convince the local godfather, Don Alberto Gallo, to broker a peace.) A nightclub in the Bohemian district of the North Side of Chicago was raided for obscenity (”Included in the skits,” the papers reported, “were love-making scenes…and the tearing of clothing”). In Cleveland white vigilantes shot dead a twenty-nine-year-old black man; a black sniper shot out the rearview mirror of an Ohio National Guard jeep.

From a mafioso brokering a deal among gangs, to a nightclub bust for improper performance art, to interracial violence? These are some pretty abrupt transitions. But when Perlstein puts together the pieces to form a verbal mosaic of a specific event or sequence, such as the 1967 Newark riots or the disintegration of George W. Romney’s presidential candidacy, he is much more effective, and displays considerable narrative skill of a kind rarely seen among historians since the days of Allan Nevins, Samuel Eliot Morison and the young Arthur Schlesinger.

Tomorrow, I’ll discuss Perlstein’s treatment of the 1968 campaign and the early years of the Nixon Administration. In the meantime, this discussion at Matt Yglesias’ Atlantic Monthly blog is worth examining. It involves several dozen commenters (and Perlstein himself) taking on his sweeping reference in Nixonland to the South Vietnamese army as a “joke.”

Nixon in Denver

March 19, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Culture, Nixon in the News | Leave a Comment 

A mile-high recording of the opera “Nixon In China” is in the works.

Secret Scandals?

March 16, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under News media, Nixon in the News | Leave a Comment 

According to a caption writer at the Seattle Times:

Former President Richard Nixon rose from the ashes of scandal at least twice, becoming an author and statesman.

“At least”? And when exactly was the first one?

Tan, Rested, and Ready on a Bipartisan Basis

March 14, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008, Nixon in the News | Leave a Comment 

Move over, Sens. Clinton and McCain, at various times dubbed “the new Nixon.” Our own Jack Pitney was the first to notice correlations between RN ‘68 and Obama ‘08, and now Rod Dreher says the man from Illinois needs to reach all the way back to ‘52 and make a Checkers speech.

Would They Stop The Presses Today?

March 12, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Iraq War, Nixon in the News, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

Two debatable assertions from the LA Times, both evidently made by USC journalism professor Geoffrey Cowan, co-writer of “Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers,” a radio play being reprised this week in Los Angeles, as he offers comparisons between the Nixon and Bush eras:

In the prevailing political climate leading up to and sustaining the war in Iraq, it’s an open question whether a document comparable to the Pentagon Papers would be published today with the approval of the courts, as Cowan is the first to admit. For starters, both the New York Times and the Washington Post are generally considered to be more conservative than they were in 1971. “A number of things are different,” says Cowan, who left UCLA to become dean of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and is now a professor there. “We’re in a state of war (emphasis added), a war on terrorism that may never end; the Internet has changed things; the Supreme Court has changed; and the papers themselves have changed.”

Hard to tell if it’s Cowan or reporter Sean Mitchell making that strange assertion about the Times and Post. What would Laura, Sean, and Rush say? How about Pat (Buchanan) and Bill (Safire)? As for the situation in 1971, the U.S. still had greater forces in Vietnam (despite RN’s steady pace of troop withdrawals) than in Iraq today. Yet the Nixon Administration’s critics, having turned against the war, wanted it to observe peacetime rules. This tension was at the root of the Pentagon Papers controversy itself, not to mention Watergate the following year. Daniel Ellsberg was a hero to the antiwar movement. But to a commander-in-chief, it was abhorrent that a former Pentagon consultant would leak classified documents. Why? Simple: We were in a state of war. Too bad that Cowan and the LA Times would even suggest otherwise.

The “What If?” Corner

March 5, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

David Greenberg casts a skeptical eye on the “legend” that the 1960 election was stolen from RN and the Republicans. He concludes with this hypothetical question:

If no pall had been cast over the 1960 election, would Watergate have happened?

A more fateful question: If Nixon really was elected and had taken office, would Vietnam and the Cuban missile crisis have happened? (Note: I first posted this after it popped up in a search engine; but that was because Greenberg had linked to it in a current “Slate” article. This 1960 election article was actually written in 2000. I should’ve been more careful about the date!)

New York Times Endorses Nixon

March 4, 2008 by Paul Saunders | Filed Under International Affairs, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Those who have not seen the New York Times editorial page today may be interested in the paper’s editorial on Russia’s elections, “Putin’s Mini-Me (Or Not?).” Broadly speaking, the Times editors express concern over Russian democracy and wonder whether Putin’s successor Dmitry Medvedev will follow through on rhetorical suggestions that he might take a softer line both inside and outside Russia. For readers of The New Nixon Blog, however, the penultimate paragraph may be the most notable:

The United States and its allies need Russia as a partner to address many international challenges, including Iran, Kosovo and arms control. They must deal pragmatically with the realities of Russian power, as the administrations of Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush once did.

The editors qualify this by following it with a couple of sentences arguing that the U.S. must also continue to press for greater freedom in Russia, including at the G-8 meeting later this year. Needless to say, this is no less true than the first half of the paragraph–the hard part is in finding the right balance between these two goals.

One Man’s Transformation

March 2, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

In January Sen. Obama was ridiculed by Sen. Clinton for saying that Ronald Reagan had a transformational effect on America. Nixonites and Clintonistas have a beef as well. The full Obama quote, as repeated by William Safire:

Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.

While Obama puts RN and Clinton in the same nontransformative boat, journalist Tom Wolfe doesn’t. Below is from Robert Stacy McCain’s article, “A Writer in Full,” in the March 2008 “American Spectator,” covering Wolfe’s talk at the magazine’s 40th anniversary gala:

[The Lewinsky affair, Wolfe] says, is practically the only thing anyone will remember about Clinton’s eight-year Presidency, whereas despite the stain of Watergate, “Nixon is remembered for certain shrewd policy maneuvers,” including his historic diplomacy with China and successfully disengaging the United States military from Vietnam. Even before negotiating U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, however, Nixon “ended the anti-war movement in five minutes,” Wolfe notes. Nixon “called off the draft, and that was the end of the anti-war movement,” Wolfe says, adding that this illustrates that the hippie protestors of the sixties were actually more concerned with avoiding military service than with anything so noble as “peace.” Compared to the Nixon legacy, Wolfe then asks, what achievement will mark Bill Clinton’s place in history, other than the Lewinsky scandal?

More Consequences Of 1968

March 1, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Culture, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, The New Nixon | Leave a Comment 

A&E is out with a new DVD, “1968 with Tom Brokaw,” whose recently published  Boom! covers the same momentous ground. Helping the former NBC anchor and White House correspondent with the book was ”The New Nixon’s” own Frank Gannon (shown here with “Weeds” actor Andy Milder, cast to play Nixon staffer Frank in “Frost/Nixon” — Frank’s story to tell at a fitting time).

Tales of Two Break-ins

February 22, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008, News media, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, Watergate | 3 Comments 

Though the Nixon Presidency foundered on two famous break-ins, President Nixon denied that he knew about either in advance. Scholars and journalists have been trying to prove him wrong ever since. As the Nixon Foundation first charged, in his 1997 book of Watergate tape transcripts Stanley Kutler edited the transcript of one conversation misleadingly, so that it suggested that the President had had foreknowledge of the 1971 break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Kutler seemed to make his intentions clear when he insisted to an Orange County Register reporter that he’d proven that Mr. Nixon knew about the break-in. According to Max Holland’s “Washington Decoded” website, scholar Joan Hoff seconded our criticism. Kutler fixed the problem in the paperback edition of his book Abuse of Power.

Six years later, hoping to demonstrate that Mr. Nixon had known about the June 1972 Watergate break-in in advance, public television documentary producers exploited the confusion of a troubled Watergate figure, Jeb Magruder. Contradicting his earlier testimony and statements, Magruder told the TV team that on March 30, 1972 he’d heard Mr. Nixon’s voice (coming over a phone reciever held by John Mitchell) approving the fateful break-in at the Democratic National Committee. Since Mr. Nixon was in the White House that day, such a conversation would have been caught on tape. It wasn’t. The White House Daily Diary would have disclosed that he spoke with Mitchell. It didn’t. Mitchell aide Fred LaRue was in the meeting with Magruder; he said the Nixon-Mitchell conversation never took place and that PBS never contacted him. PBS disclosed none of this evidence in its broadcast. In a July 2007 Associated Press article detailing Magruder’s personal setbacks, historian Kutler dismissed the charge. “There is just no evidence that Richard Nixon directly ordered the Watergate break-in,” Kutler said. “Did Magruder hear otherwise? I doubt it.”

Veteran journalist and historian Ron Rosenbaum isn’t so sure. Writing in “Slate” on Valentine’s Day about correlations he sees between Mr. Nixon and Sen. Clinton — an unlikely couple indeed — he again raised what he calls “Nixon’s last lie.” His “Slate” post contains a link to a 2005 New York Observer article in which he claims to have discovered the proof that RN had known about the June 17, 1972 break-in in advance. His argument hinges on an exchange between Mr. Nixon and his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, three days after the break-in. (Our criticism of Stanley Kutler notwithstanding, the exchange below comes from a transcript in his Abuse of Power, the only book available with a broad range of Watergate chatter, rushed out by Kutler and his team after his successful effort to force the National Archives to open the recordings.) Here’s what Rosenbaum identifies as the key exchange:

NIXON: My God, the committee isn’t worth bugging, in my opinion. That’s my public line.

HALDEMAN: Except for this financial thing. They thought they had something going on that.

NIXON: Yes, I suppose.

Rosenbaum argues that Haldeman means that “they,” the burglars, had been after financial intelligence on the activities of DNC chairman Larry O’Brien. Mr. Nixon’s off-handed acquiescence would show that he must’ve known why the burglars had gone in all along. But it’s hard to argue that Haldeman is talking about the burglars or O’Brien when we look at the whole conversation as well as Haldeman’s next comment, which Rosenbaum doesn’t address:

HALDEMAN: But I asked the question: If we were going to all that trouble, why in the world would we pick the Democratic National Committee to do it to? It’s the least fruitful source–

A few moments before, Haldeman had been talking about what “they,” meaning reporters, had been saying about burglar E. Howard Hunt and his check for $690 found in the possession of another burglar. So Mr. Nixon and Haldeman were actually talking about what “they,” the press, were saying about Hunt’s finances. When Mr. Nixon says his public line is going to be that the Watergate wasn’t worth bugging, Haldeman gently implies that the President’s line is bit too absolutist since “they,” the reporters, “thought they had something going on [this financial thing]” — that is, the seeming financial link between the burglars and Hunt, whose association with the White House had already been established. Bugging the Watergate was obviously worth Hunt’s money. Then Haldeman alludes to conversations he’s been having with others about the silliness of bugging the Watergate. Spinning gears? Certainly. Smoking gun? Seemingly not. And yet the Nixon tapes, with their undefined demonstrative articles, endless inside baseball, and sometimes indecipherable mumbling, can be a canvas on which a Nixon critic sees collusion, an advocate confusion. Telling the Watergate story on a strictly factual basis, as the federal Nixon Library has pledged to do, won’t be as easy as it sounds.

Rosenbaum’s “Slate” article principally concerns Sen. Clinton’s Watergate days, not Mr. Nixon’s. He revisits charges by Jerome Zeifman, Clinton’s boss on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, that she was carrying water for the Kennedy family by participating in efforts to keep Mr. Nixon in office until the end of his term in the hope that another Camelot President would move back into the White House as the man from Yorba Linda moved out. Rosenbaum suggests that the senator hasn’t talked much during the campaign about her true political initiation — helping prepare to impeach a President — for fear that Zeiftman’s charges will receive wider play. Returning to Mr. Nixon, Rosenbaum writes that the 37th President “never recovered from being — as it turned out — right about [Soviet spy] Alger Hiss…I believe this incident — in which he was pilloried when he knew he was right — probably helped endanger the paranoia that we have come to call ‘Nixonian’ and that ultimately led Nixon to believe he needed to pre-empt his enemies through the schemes that have come to be grouped under the term Watergate.”

Rosenbaum’s armchair lay diagnosis aside, Mr. Nixon offered a measured critique of his adversarial mind-set in his 1990 book, In the Arena:

In retrospect…I should have set a higher standard for the conduct of the people who participated in my campaign and administration. I should have established a moral tone that would have made such actions unthinkable. I did not. I played by the rules of politics as I found them. Not taking the higher road than my predecessors and my adversaries was my central mistake.

Mr. Nixon atoned for his errors. If Rosenbaum is right — that many journalists and politicians got Hiss wrong and therefore Nixon wrong, contributing to his lifelong assumptions about how to conduct politics — when will they be atoning?

That Week That Changed The World

February 21, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under International Affairs, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

The folks at BBC.com offer a retrospective on President and Mrs. Nixon’s arrival in Beijing 36 years ago today. (Who can spot the fashion faux pas?)

Welcome To the New Nixon

February 18, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Foundation News, National Archives, Nixon in the News | 11 Comments 

While the handover of the Nixon Library to the National Archives last year was a high point in our institutional life, it was a drag for us personally at the Nixon Foundation, what with being called liars, haters, and belligerent and hostile paranoids who had been mean to Carl Bernstein.

The attacks began in July when a reporter for the Associated Press, Gillian Flaccus, published an article containing a ham-handed poke at our integrity by historian David Greenberg. The private Library’s Watergate exhibit (removed by Uncle Sam a year ago) had text telling visitors that the famous 18 1/2 –minute gap on a Watergate tape might have been accidental. “It’s not only not true,” Flaccus quoted Greenberg as saying, “it’s the opposite of truth. There was a lot along those lines in the library, which was not a matter of interpretation, but flat wrong, a lie.” Having overseen creation of the original museum, and since some experts indeed said it was possible the erasure was accidental, I wrote an article about Greenberg’s charge for the Nixon Foundation web site. In an e-mail, he chastised me for getting “worked up” and said that Flaccus had misquoted him. He told me what he had meant to say was a lie was our exhibit’s presentation about a group of Democratic House members who in 1973 tried to persuade their leadership to leave the Vice Presidency empty long enough following Spiro Agnew’s resignation to enable the Democratic Speaker, Carl Albert, to become President in the event RN resigned. Writes one authority, “This is the closest to a coup d’etat that the country has ever come.” So that wasn’t a lie, either.

In addition to his denunciations via the AP at the time of the handover last summer, Greenberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Will the Nixon Foundation…stay out of all questions of access to tapes and papers? Or will it continue to throw up roadblocks for scholars?” Writing to him again, I said that he hadn’t yet correctly identified a lie in our museum and that, contrary to his derogatory implication, he was well aware that the Nixon family and Foundation had enabled the opening of massive caches of records. Contradicting his own article, Greenberg wrote back, “I did not imply that you are intending to ‘roadblock scholars on documents’.” For attempting to hold him accountable for falsely accusing us of being liars to tens of millions of newspaper readers, he accused me of “belligerence…hostility and paranoia.”

More such unpleasant qualities in your Nixon Foundation servants were identified by LA Times reporter Christopher Goffard in an October 2007 article celebrating Carl Bernstein’s appearance at the Nixon Library. My wife and colleague Kathy and I had hung out with Bernstein in Austin once. We even had invited him to go see Steve Earle at La Zona Rosa with us (he politely declined). We weren’t in Yorba Linda for his visit because Director Tim Naftali arranged it while we were on a cruise that had been scheduled for months. Goffard implied that we had snubbed Bernstein intentionally and went on to report that Bernstein had long been an “arch-villain” who “elicited special loathing” at the private Nixon Library.

The evidence for Goffard’s attacks? You guessed it: Our old Watergate exhibit, which, Goffard wrote, “falsely accused” Woodward and Bernstein of wrongdoing. It’s certainly true that the exhibit (written by a diligent and highly ethical political insider, Bob Bostock) contained a quotation about “Woodward and Bernstein’s failure to address any of the ethical deficiencies of their investigative reporting, including offering of bribes, illegally gaining access to telephone numbers, and talking to members of the grand jury.” But was this the work of a snarling Nixon partisan? Not hardly. The quote came from The Wars of Watergate by historian Stanley Kutler. A reliable critic of the late President, Kutler was praised for his book’s meticulousness by the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh. Just to be perfectly clear, this means Christopher Goffard has called Stanley Kutler a liar. Work it out peacefully, okay, guys? And next time, leave us out of it.

For including Kutler’s words in our museum, did my colleagues and I deserve to be attacked in the news columns of the LA Times? For our positions on Watergate issues about which gentlemen might differ, why did an historian call us liars? I guess there are folks who are even more emotionally invested in this Nixon stuff than we are. Richard Norton Smith, historian and visionary head of five Presidential libraries, is right: History really is too important to be left to the historians – or for that matter, to the journalists. That’s where you come in. Welcome to The New Nixon.