Arachnophobia At The Watergate

July 31, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Humor, Nixon in the News, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

"Get back, you eight-legged freaks" – actor David Arquette’s ad-lib that inspired the title of the 2002 film Eight Legged Freaks, which was called Arach Attack in production

There was also the 1990 film Arachnophobia with Jeff Daniels. But both of these Hollywood epics somewhat pale in comparison with what transpiredthis week at the ever-newsworthy Watergate complex in Washington.

The management of the Watergate East, the oldest part of the building which houses co-ops (many of whose residents are on the elderly side), periodically sends a newsletter to those who live there.  The current issue, according to Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger of the Washington Post’s Reliable Source column, was rather on the alarmist side:

Nearly half of it, according to the reporters,

was devoted to a cautionary tale about public restrooms. In lurid detail, the building’s management described the tragic deaths of "three women in North Florida" — far from the Watergate, but knock on wood anyway — who took ill after visiting the same restaurant … where toxicologists later found "a small spider … the Two-Striped Telamonia (Telamonia Dimidiata)." Also, a Jacksonville lawyer died with "a puncture wound on his right buttock" after getting off a plane from Indonesia — and officials found spiders’ nests in the toilets of four planes!

"So please," Watergate management warned its residents, "before you use a public toilet, lift the seat to check for these creatures. It can save your life!" (Watergate toilets themselves were not implicated — but still!)

A scary tale indeed – poisonous Asian spiders imported into Florida (a state where many noxious species from abroad have made their home) and obviously ready to hitch rides on vehicles moving up I-95, perhaps to wreak havoc on the Washington tourist industry right around the Labor Day weekend.  It was definitely one of those situations where one pictures our President ripping off his jacket and shirt to display that big letter "O" so familiar from T-shirts hawked during Inauguration Week, and getting on the hotline to Spiderman (who’d naturally know how to handle a situation like this – indeed, might be able to cajole the creatures with an arachnoid version of beer diplomacy).

However, things weren’t quite as bad as the Watergate East management was reporting. Roberts and Argetsinger continue:

The story is completely bogus. It’s a well-traveled urban legend — the kind of tantalizing falsehood that circulates in e-mails forwarded from your mom — that has long since been debunked. Just Google "telamonia" and you’ll see.

The Watergate was not psyched to discuss this. "This was only for residents," said a woman in the management office who declined to give her name. "We realized that it was an Internet hoax, so we have sent another letter telling them that."

The telamonia is a real-life critter. But "it’s a jumping spider, found mostly in Burma or Himalayan regions," [Rick Vetter, a University of California-Riverside entomologist] said, "and no jumping spiders are known to be dangerous."

And so it is that the lavatories of America are not threatened by murderous critters that somehow got past Samuel L. Jackson (or whoever is now in charge of keeping such things off of planes). It’s true that our own brown recluse spider is a rather dangerous thing – I recently had to crush one that was stubbornly trying to invade my father’s house in Indiana – but it’s not known for its affinity for toilet seats. Spidey can go back to weathering the blasts of J. Jonah Jameson, in that happy land where daily newspapers are still thriving.

Pynchon In Nixonland

July 31, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Book Review, Culture, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Thomas Pynchon, the mystery man of modern American letters (though not exactly all that mysterious – his voice is, after all, a familiar one to regular viewers of reruns of The Simpsons), has a new novel out in about a week. Its title is Inherent Vice, and it’s his venture into detective fiction, in which, according to the early reviews, he brings his customary blend of hazy paranoia, eccentric characters, and goofiness alternating with high seriousness to the hard-boiled tradition of Hammett, Chandler and Ross Macdonald (who, of course, had some of their qualities in their own work).

Pynchon often writes in an historical setting. Much of V., his first book, takes place in pre-WWI Europe. Gravity’s Rainbow, his most acclaimed novel, sets its action in a hallucinatory Europe of WWII. Mason & Dixon features the adventures of the two famed Englishmen in the 1760s as they the line bearing their name, and Against The Day, his thousand-page 2006 opus, describes a plot occuring between the 1880s and 1919.  Inherent Vice is set in a past now much more distant than the Second World War was in 1973 when Gravity’s Rainbow appeared – the Los Angeles of 1970.  Yes, Pynchon, who reportedly lived in the LA suburb of Manhattan Beach in that time, is now giving his diverse readership a tale of the days of bell-bottoms and waterbeds. As Christopher Taylor reports in his review in tomorrow’s Guardian:

Although Doc [Sportello, the private-eye protagonist of Inherent Vice] himself is vague about what year it is, the novel is also located quite firmly during the run-up to Charles Manson’s trial, which started in June 1970. The murders committed by Manson’s followers are a well-worn symbol for the end of the 60s, and we’re encouraged to see Doc as a kind of anti-Manson, Manson’s non-evil double. Nixon and Reagan are much discussed too, making the book serve as a loose prequel to Vineland [Pynchon's 1990 novel set in Northern California] in which burned-out hippies and fascist cops get to grips with Reagan’s America. Yet the book’s most effective crushing-of-the-60s-dream scenes are more equivocal about who or what did the crushing than the plot’s top-down conspiracy suggests. Watching people in a record shop listening to rock’n'roll on headphones "in solitude, confinement and mutual silence", or passing through a town where old TV shows are endlessly reviewable, Doc gets glimpses of "how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all", with technology dispersing communality as much as aiding it.

This is not the first time the 37th President has shown up in Pynchon’s fiction. In 1972, the writer selected a quote from Joni Mitchell’s song "The Circle Game" to use as the epigraph to the final section of Gravity’s Rainbow (at that stage still titled Mindless Pleasures). Reportedly, his publisher could not secure permission to use the quote (which appeared in the advance galleys of the book), so at the last minute Pynchon inserted instead the single word "What?" and attributed it to RN (who also appears in the last pages of that book under the name Richard M. Zhlubb). 

No word yet on whether Spiro Agnew shows up in the new novel.

Correction: The Joni Mitchell song Pynchon quoted in the original text of Gravity’s Rainbow  was "Cactus Tree" from her first album rather than "The Circle Game," and the lines he used for an epigraph were:

She has brought them to her senses,
They have laughed inside her laughter;
Now, she rallies her defenses
For she fears that no one will ask her
For eternity
And she’s so busy being free

After The “Beer Summit”

July 31, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, News media, Nixon in the News, Obama administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 3 Comments 

It is now a little over twenty-four hours since the eminent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge (Mass.) Police Department sat down at a white lawn table on the South Lawn of the White House, joined by President Obama (with Vice President Biden acting as wingman, to broadly use a term of military and slacker lingo), in an effort to settle the differences that arose two weeks ago.

As most of the world knows – or at least that part of the world with access to cable and satellite TV – the incident that brought this meeting about occured on July 16 when Sgt. Crowley, answering a 911 report of a possible burglary, went to a house in Cambridge and found Prof. Gates in its foyer – quite naturally, since it was his own house. Gates, who had just struggled with a jammed front door (which was misinterpreted by a passerby who was the one who phoned 911), was in an irritated mood, and his conversation with the officer, when the latter asked for his identification, escalated to his arrest on a charge of disorderly conduct.

At first the incident was one for the inside pages of newspapers around the country and it took two days for all three network evening newscasts to run stories on it. But after extensive blogging and Twittering raised Prof. Gates’s arrest to the level of a national controversy, a reporter asked the President about it last week, at the very end of a press conference intended to focus exclusively on the health-care initiatives now in Congress. Since Obama is a onetime president of the Harvard Law Review who later taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for an even dozen years, it would have seemed logical for him to reply that, given his friendship with Gates (and his even closer friendship with Gates’s legal advisor Charles Ogletree, his onetime professor at Harvard Law), it would be inappropriate for him to comment for the moment. Instead, he offered the opinion that "the Cambridge police" (ie, Sgt Crowley) had acted "stupidly" in bringing Gates downtown.

This provoked a firestorm of criticism from law-enforcement professionals around the country, not to mention regular citizens. Starting on July 23, when Obama made his remarks, the Pew Research Center began conducting a poll to determine the president’s current levels of popularity and support. It found that the whites polled, especially those from a blue-collar background, strongly disapproved of Obama’s statement on the Gates case, by a two-to-one margin. Indeed, the overall percent of those polled who approved of Obama’s performance dropped from 53 percent among those polled on July 23 and 24 to 46 percent on July 25, the day that Obama walked into White House Press Secretary Robert Gates’s briefing to say that his words could have been better "calibrated."

Shortly after Obama’s effort to clarify his remarks, the White House announced that he had invited Prof. Gates and Sgt. Crowley to come down to the White House and have a friendly beer – the post-Y2K version of smoking the peace pipe, presumably. Reporters clamored to know just what potent potables, as Alex Trebek would put it, were going to be on tap. At first the White House announced that Obama would have a Budweiser, then changed that to a Bud Light – a Chief Executive has to beware of those extra calories, y’know. It was also reported that Sgt. Crowley would order a Blue Moon.

As for Prof. Gates, at first it was suggested that he might have a beverage other than beer – after all, these tweedy academic types are hard to tear away from their sherry and white wine. But then it was learned that he, too, would order a beer – a Red Stripe.

These choices provoked a new controversy. Budweiser is now owned by the Belgian conglomerate that brews Stella Artois. Blue Moon is a Belgian-style beer made in Colorado by the Coors company, nowadays owned by the Canadian firm Molson. And Red Stripe, the quintessential Jamaican beer, is now the property of a British company. Not an American owned-and-operated brew in the bunch. So, at the last minute, Prof. Gates one-upped his companions by ordering Sam Adams instead – a rather fitting choice, since that beverage is named for the "firebrand of the Revolution" who was also a Boston native.(Vice President Biden, perhaps rather prudently, requested a non-alcoholic brew.)

After the beers were duly sipped, Sgt. Crowley informed the reporters that he and Gates had "agreed to disagree" (or, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank put it, were no longer "at lagerheads") and the situation seemed to have settled down, as the media moved on to the latest phenomenon of the Obama era, the "cash for clunkers" program.

But it’s hard not to look at that longshot of professor, policeman, President, and Veep sitting at that little white table and think that the Republic has come a long way from Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and James Farmer meeting JFK and LBJ at the White House. In those days the issue of race in America was as serious as it still is now, but nobody cared much about what was in the glasses of those men (and one woman, Dr. Dorothy Height, the only one still with us) when they met.

But this time, the President’s attempt to "cool down" a situation that was a hot one, to the degree it was hot, mainly because of Gates’s response to a policeman’s polite questioning, was slightly ham-handed from start to finish. Many columnists with a conservative reputation have weighed in, but it’s worth noting that the Wall Street Journal’s Thomas Frank, as liberal a punditas there is in the Fourth Estate, hit the nail on the head:

Conservatives won this round in the culture wars, not merely because most of the facts broke their way, but because their grievance is one that a certain species of liberal never seems to grasp. Whether the issue is abortion, evolution or recycling, these liberal patricians are forever astonished to discover that the professions and institutions and attitudes that they revere are seen by others as arrogance and affectation.

The “elitism” narrative routinely blind-sides them, takes them by surprise again and again. There they are, feeling good about their solidarity with the coffee-growers of Guatemala, and then they find themselves on the receiving end of criticism from, say, the plumbers of Ohio.

The Gates incident was a trap that could not have been better crafted to ensnare President Barack Obama, who is himself a loyal son of academia’s most prestigious reaches, and to whom it was immediately obvious, even without benefit of the facts, that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in the situation.

Mr. Obama’s way of backing out of his gaffe was just as telling: He invited Mr. Gates and the policeman who arrested him to the White House for a beer, the beverage so often a gauge of a politician’s blue-collar bona fides. One symbolic gesture, hopefully, can exorcise another.

But one has to wonder if it’s as simple as that. As NewsMax.com noted this week, the Pew poll showed Obama with a lower approval number than Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon or George W. Bush had at this point in their presidencies – and Nixon was presiding over a country deeply divided and polarized, while Bush was a half-year past a bitterly disputed election. None of these three rode into office on the wave of adultation that Obama enjoyed. He’ll have to move rather more carefully, and choose his words with greater forethought, if he wants to avoid getting mired in more controversies like the Gates one.

Sen. Kerry Wants A Nixon To China Redux

July 30, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under China, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) — writing at The Huffington Post — wants to strengthen Sino-American relations on climate change and to "change the world" again just as RN did 37 years ago:

When Richard Nixon first visited China back in 1972, his journey seemed far longer than the seven thousand miles that actually separate Washington from Beijing. He was bridging the gap between two worlds separated for a generation.

President Nixon understood that such a moment demanded a dramatic signal to drive home a new diplomatic reality. To do that, he chose a simple gesture, but one laden with meaning. Zhou Enlai, China’s premier, had nursed a grudge ever since Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to shake his hand back in 1954. And so, when Nixon walked out onto the tarmac in Beijing, he took several steps toward Zhou with his hand obviously, unmistakably outstretched. The message was clear — and powerful — and it marked a watershed in US China relations.

 

Adopting The Nixon-Goes-To-China Model

July 30, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under International Affairs, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Donald Macintyre, a writer for  Australia’s Independent, thinks Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should make a prudent gamble in the Middle East:

Yet, despite all this, diplomats are still convinced that the US President is determined to see progress. They are struck by the adminstration’s pointed emphasis that a peace deal is an American interest as well as an Israeli and Palestinian one. There is still hope of some form of a temporary but relatively far-reaching freeze at least on West Bank settlements. There is talk of Obama producing a "peace plan" in September. Hopes of making such a plan lift off then are based partly on the notion that it is easier, on the Nixon-recognises-Red China model, for the political right to make peace and partly on the gamble – and it certainly is a gamble – that Netanyhau will eventually be driven less by ideology than a desire to have a place in history and not to fall out irretrievably again with the Americans.

Nixon And Beer Diplomacy

July 30, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, White House | 2 Comments 

Though they never actually had a beer together, but Alex Koppelman over at Salon Magazine lists the Nixon-Elvis Oval Office encounter as among the top casual White House meetings:

On December 21, 1970, Elvis Presley got his wish and had a meeting with President Richard Nixon at the White House.  He wanted Nixon to make him a "Federal Agent-at-Large" in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. According to notes taken by a Nixon aide during the meeting, Presley repeatedly told Nixon of his support for the president, and showed Nixon his wide array of law enforcement memorabilia, including numerous police badges from around the country. He even mentioned to Nixon that he thought the Beatles promoted an anti-American spirit.

Obama Is The New Nixon

July 30, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under International Affairs, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

At The New Republic, Michael Crowley writes that President Obama resembles RN more than any recent President because of his active agenda and passionate interest in foreign affairs:

Whether he is shaping the White House’s message on Iran, or personally cajoling Asian leaders to crack down on North Korea, or brokering power deals among NATO allies, Obama has, in effect, been his own national security advisor and secretary of state. Unlike Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, who had world events thrust upon them, Obama seems to be more in the mold of Richard Nixon or George H.W. Bush–a president involved in foreign policy because of, not in spite of, his priorities and personal interest. "He’s very engaged, very hands-on," says his longtime foreign policy adviser, Mark Lippert, now chief of staff at the National Security Council (NSC)….

To this administration, process is not simply the poor cousin of strategy. Process is what allows harmony and progress amid multiple challenges and viewpoints. Senior Obama aides call it "regular order"–a system that gives the president a diversity of views with minimal infighting and back-channel maneuvering, little leaking to the press, and no public airing of dirty laundry. "Regular order is your friend," says Denis McDonough, director of strategic communications for the NSC. "The system only works if you have adult behavior."

Thus far, the system has confounded skeptics who predicted melees among big-name advisers and conservatives who warned that Obama lacked the experience to govern in such dangerous times. "The level of harmony is just striking," says James Goldgeier, a national security aide in the Clinton White House and a political scientist at George Washington University. There are signs, however, that the administration’s approach to foreign policy, however well-intentioned and well-executed, is vulnerable to unexpected challenges–the very kind that are likely to multiply the longer the president is in office.

Nixon Assistant: Obama Should Have Given The Gates Affair More Thought

July 29, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Barack Obama, Civil rights, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Earlier today, Robert J. Brown an African-American, activist, and former police officer who served as President Nixon’s special assistant for civil rights answered questions about President Obama’s handling of the controversy surrounding the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and the issue of racial profiling at The Washington Post:

Potomac, Md.: Do you think President Obama should have weighed in on this issue?

Robert J. Brown: I think that it would’ve been better if he had given it a little more thought and gotten a little bit more advice and counsel; however, I think the way he has handled it so far has been brilliant. I also feel that there’s a great sincerity about President Obama in this field because he has been confronted by the same kinds of inequities that most black people have been faced with. So naturally he would have the kind of sensitivity that no other president has ever had.

_______________________

Atlanta, Ga.: Should there be a national set of procedures for police conduct and procedures

Robert J. Brown: Most police departments have rules and regulations and codes of conduct already. The problem is that many of them don’t have the kind of sophistication, the training, etc., and that’s a problem. I recall many years ago when we were having huge racial problems in the country there was established a huge community relations department in the Justice Department in Washington. The first director of that department was Gov. Leroy Collins of Florida. I think some variation is probably needed now as much as it was then but in a much more sophisticated way.

Back then you had a lot of demonstrations in the street and much violence but today it’s more subtle but it’s still there and we’re still grappling with it. It has not gone away and there need to be some major ways to deal with it.

Buchanan Discusses The Nixon Comeback

July 28, 2009 by David Emig | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

The former RN staffer makes some interesting insights into RNs comeback in 1966-1968, as part of a comparison between RN and the former governor of Alaska.

Uncovering the Nixonian Holy Grail

July 28, 2009 by David Emig | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, Watergate | 1 Comment 

From “Mother Jones”, there seems to be a new attempt afoot to find out what was on the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap on the tapes.  Not from the tapes, but Haldeman’s notes during the meeting.

Emig And Stokes Talk The “Kitchen Debate”

July 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, Russia, The New Nixon | Leave a Comment 

On WAVA radio, TNN’s very own David Stokes (a minister and radio talk show host) and David Emig discussed today the 50th anniversary  of Vice President Nixon’s tour de force (chronicled here by Frank Gannon) against Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev at the American Exhibition in Moscow. For Emig, it was a great “preview” and “foreshadowing” of RN’s foreign policy. Listen below (the conversation starts roughly halfway into the audio track):

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TNN And “The Kitchen Debate” Go Live

July 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, Russia | Leave a Comment 

TNN contributors David Emig and David Stokes will be discussing the famous "Kitchen Debate" between then Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow 50 years ago this month.  The interview will air on a Washington, DC drive-time talk show, The Don Kroah Show,  which Stokes is guest hosting for a few days.  This can be heard live via the web from 5:15-5:30 (eastern) at wava.com, or locally in the DC area on WAVA 105.1fm and 780am.

Advice To Palin: Write Six Crises

July 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, Sarah Palin | 6 Comments 

Over at the National Interest, Jacob Heilbrunn argues that Sarah Palin did the smart thing by resigning her post as Alaska governor, but needs to polish – not raise — her public profile with an influential book:

Nixon was down and out when Six Crises appeared. He had been a two-term vice president for Dwight Eisenhower, but was savaged by the liberal press as vile right-winger, much as Palin has been. He ran for Governor of California against Edmund G. Brown, Sr. in 1962. But his book made it clear that he was the real thing: he covered everything from the Alger Hiss case to his tour of South America to his kitchen cabinet debate with Khruschev. Throughout, Nixon suggested that he was the man to turn to in a crisis—calm, collected and possessed of shrewd judgment.

Palin has never served in Congress or in a presidential administration, which is something of a handicap. Or is it? It may be that Palin’s lack of experience is her strongest plus. She can campaign as an outsider in 2012, someone who was unafraid of even leaving political office in Alaska. She can present herself as untainted, the voice of the people. She certainly retains a blunt speaking style. In her farewell address, she instructed the media, “How about, in honor of the American soldier, you quit makin’ things up?” In her book, which might be called Seven Crises, she could recount both personal stories—such as the trauma her family has endured—as well as a chapter on how she thinks America should deal with North Korea. There’s plenty of fodder for a rich and thoughtful book that positions her for the next presidential race.

It’s also the case that the Obama administration could flub up in coming years. As Frank Rich has observed, Palin could be well-positioned for a new run—just as Nixon made a comeback that no one expected, so could Palin. If the war in Afghanistan is going nowhere three years from now, Palin can score the administration for failing to have a plan to defeat the terrorists. If Iran gains a nuclear capability, the administration will be on the defensive as well. And a ballooning deficit, coupled with higher taxes on the middle-class and wealthy, would provide a target-rich environment for Palin. The administration has already generated considerable unease among voters with its tax and spending plans.

Ultimately, however, Palin will need to preserve her status as a maverick. Like John McCain, she has been an unpredictable force in American politics. The media knows that the only thing worse than having Palin around would be not having her as a potent force. For the GOP she presents as many dangers as she does possibilities. But for a party that has exhausted its old political formula, she offers the chance to reinvent it in her image—spunky and unpredictable. Whether the GOP, let alone the electorate, can live with that is another matter. But for now, Palin is the most powerful figure on the Right, and she’s not going away.

 

Healthcare Wisdom From RN

July 26, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Healthcare, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | 3 Comments 

Our entire healthcare system would not be placed under the heavy hand of the federal government, and as I said in my state of the union message, most important, the great majority of doctors in this nation would be working for their patients rather than working for the government.

"We can be proud of the fact that the healthcare system in the United States in terms of quality is the best in the World. What we want to do is to be sure is that quality is available to all. But in making it available to all don’t reduce the quality. Because if medical care is free and its poor that isn’t the right approach, and isn’t the American way of doing things. The American way is to build on the present system, which is a great system."

More On The Ticket That Never Was

July 25, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | 14 Comments 

Today’s Washington Post has an article by Frank Mankiewicz in which the political director of the 1972 McGovern campaign goes into more detail about the notion he toyed with in the hours after his candidate received the nomination one sweltering summer night in Miami Beach: to ask Walter Cronkite, "the most trusted man in America" (according to a poll Mankiewicz had recently examined), to be the South Dakota senator’s running-mate.

Mankiewicz observes (as I recounted in my first post on this subject earlier this week) that it was Sen. Robert Kennedy who proposed, in the early weeks of 1968, that Cronkite run for the seat occupied by New York’s other senator, Jacob Javits. According to Mankiewicz, this was after Cronkite, who had turned against Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House on Vietnam, pleaded with RFK to run against LBJ; this was before the New Hampshire primary gave a shot in the arm to Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s quixotic antiwar candidacy. Kennedy replied (in Mankiewicz’s hearing), "I’ll do it, Walter, if you run for the Senate in New York." This proved unfeasible not only because Cronkite was a Connecticut resident (though RFK had not let his own status as a Virginia resident keep him from running in 1964) but because he was also a registered independent and as such did not meet the requirements to file as a Democrat.

But Mankiewicz kept the conversation in mind, and after McGovern was turned down by Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey, and Ted Kennedy in turn, he brought up Cronkite’s name. The idea was dismissed by the rest of the candidate’s brain trust as unrealistic, and McGovern did not contact the anchorman.

But years later, as I mentioned earlier, Cronkite told McGovern that had he been asked to run on the 1972 Democratic ticket he would have accepted. Mankiewicz says that Cronkite also told a corporate board (on which both men served in the 1990s) that he would have agreed to the vice-presidential nod "in a minute."

Mankiewicz notes in his op-ed that at the time of the Democratic convention Nixon’s lead over McGovern had narrowed to four to seven points in some polls. He is sure that with Cronkite on the ticket, McGovern could either have won or lost by such a narrow margin that, after RN’s resignation – he evidently assumes the Watergate saga would have played itself out in the same manner – the McGovern-Cronkite ticket would have been renominated in 1976 and would have captured the White House.

This is how the op-ed concludes. But it’s worth noting that Mankiewicz does not go on to wonder if McGovern would have achieved re-election in 1980, with Cronkite succeeding him in the White House for eight years.

(This scenario is also called "Dan Rather’s Nightmare." Indeed, the most intriguing part of this alternate history is what would have happened at CBS if Cronkite had quit anchoring in 1972. Rather, at that time, did not have the prestige that he had by 1980 when he took over at CBS Evening News. My guess is that Roger Mudd, or possibly the now-forgotten George Herman, would have been the more likely person to replace Cronkite had he left earlier.)

It may be that Mankiewicz is aware that most likely, if McGovern had been "vindicated" by a near-win in 1972 and won in 1976, we would have seen a Presidency more or less the same as the Carter years, except worse – rampant inflation, friction with Congress, one misstep after another in foreign policy, with the Soviet Union gaining ground across the globe – with the same result: the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Flush Times At The Watergate

July 25, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Nixon in the News, U.S. History, Watergate | 1 Comment 

This week, the Watergate Hotel went up for auction and, despite its enduring notoriety as the site of the June 1972 break-in that ultimately brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency, found no takers – at least for the moment. (The development corporation that owned the hotel planned to convert it into condominiums last year, in partnership with Lehman Brothers, but the collapse of the latter firm and the ensuing recession terminated this plan.)

Quite a number of news stories have appeared about the hotel in recent weeks because it’s on the block, but today’s Toronto Globe and Mail has the most elegantly written and fascinating story I’ve seen so far. In recent years, the Watergate has become mainly known as the residence of very well-established Beltway figures, often on the elderly side, such as former Sen. Bob Dole, the late Robert McNamara, and the late Ralph De Toledano.

There are also some efficiencies occupied by people whose work sometimes brings them to Washington, such as Placido Domingo. But in its earliest years, before the break-in connected the Watergate forever to a particular period in American history, it was quite the glitzy and glamorous place – even attaining the ultimate in DC prestige by hosting movie stars like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Ingrid Bergman. The article’s opening paragraphs describe an aura still hinted at even in the somewhat musty atmosphere of the present Watergate:

In better days, when beautiful people decorated the restaurant and yet-to-be infamous burglars skulked in the hallways, the Watergate Hotel was all about class. The black-and-white Italian marble floor in the lobby gleamed. Bouquets of fresh flowers blossomed by a grand entrance. The rooms, including 13 presidential suites, offered exclusive views of the Potomac River.

The caviar came on demand. “Everything you need or want at your fingertips (the one you use to ring for the elevator),” boasted an early brochure for the Watergate complex, a boomerang layout of apartments and office buildings, shops and swimming pools with the hotel as the hub. The Washington Post called it, in 1970, the “snob appeal” complex, a cachet exaggerated only by its future scandals and spilled secrets.

7.24.69

July 24, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Apollo XI XLth, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | 4 Comments 

 

Watchful waiting: RN aboard the USS Hornet in mid-Pacific waiting for the Apollo XI command module splashdown.

24 July 1969: Day 9 of Apollo XI’s Mission to the Moon

6:47 a.m.- Crew awakens and begins to prepare for splashdown. 12:21 p.m.- Command and service modules are separated. 12:35 p.m.- Command module re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere. 12:51 p.m.- Spacecraft splashes down 825 nautical miles southwest of Honolulu and about 13 nautical miles from the recovery ship, the U.S.S. Hornet. 1:20 p.m.- Hatch of command module opens and frogman hands in isolation suits. 1:28 p.m.- Astronauts emerge from the spacecraft in isolation suits and are sprayed with a disinfectant as a guard against the possibility of their contaminating the Earth with Moon "germs." 1:57 p.m.- Astronauts arrive by helicopter on the flight deck of the Hornet. Still inside the helicopter they ride an elevator to hangar deck and then walk immediately into the mobile quarantine trailer in which they will remain until they arrive at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Houston early July 27. 3:00 p.m.- President Nixon welcomes the astronauts, visible through a window of the trailer. Speaking over an intercom, he greets them, extends them an invitation to attend a dinner with him August 13. and tells them: "This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation…. As a result of what you have done, the world’s never been closer together …. We can reach for the stars just as you have reached so far for the stars."

Columbia has landed: Having traveled 952,700 nautical miles since 16 July, the Apollo XI command module splashes down in the distance as RN and NASA Administrator Dr. Thomas Paine watch from the USS Hornet.

 

 

RN’s Welcome Home and Chat With Apollo XI Astronauts

Neil, Buzz, and Mike: I want you to know that I think I am the luckiest man in the world, and I say this not only because I have the honor to be President of the United States, but particularly because I have the privilege of speaking for so many in welcoming you back to earth. I can tell you about all the messages we have received in Washington. Over 100 foreign governments, emperors, presidents, prime ministers, and kings, have sent the most warm messages that we have ever received. They represent over 2 billion people on this earth, all of them who have had the opportunity, through television, to see what you have done. Then I also bring you messages from members of the Cabinet and Members of the Senate, Members of the House, the space agency, from the streets of San Francisco where people stopped me a few days ago, and you all love that city, I know, as I do. But most important, I had a telephone call yesterday. The toll wasn’t, incidentally, as great as the one I made to you fellows on the moon. I made that collect, incidentally, in case you didn’t know. But I called three, in my view, three of the greatest ladies and most courageous ladies in the whole world today–your wives. From Jan, Joan, and Pat, I bring their love and their congratulations. We think it is just wonderful that they have participated at least in television in this return. We are only sorry they couldn’t be here. Also, I will let you in on a little secret. I made a date with them. I invited them to dinner on the 13th of August, right after you come out of quarantine. It will be a state dinner held in Los Angeles. The Governors of all the 50 States will be there, the Ambassadors, others from around the world and in America. They told me that you would come, too. All I want to know is: Will you come? We want to honor you then. MR. NEIL A. ARMSTRONG. We will do anything you say, Mr. President, anytime. THE PRESIDENT. One question, I think all of us would like to ask: As we saw you bouncing around in that float out there, I wonder if that wasn’t the hardest part of the journey. Did any of you get seasick? MR. ARMSTRONG. No, we didn’t, and it was one of the hardest parts, but it was one of the most pleasant, we can assure you. THE PRESIDENT. Well, I just know that you can sense what we all sense. When you get back now incidentally, have you been able to follow some of the things that happened since you have been gone? Did you know about the All-Star Game? COL. EDWIN E. ALDRIN, JR. Yes, sir. The capsule communicators have been giving us daily reports. THE PRESIDENT. Were you American League or National League? Col. ALDRIN. National League. MR. ARMSTRONG. Neither one. THE PRESIDENT. There is the politician in the group. MR. ARMSTRONG. We are sorry you missed that. THE PRESIDENT. You knew that, too? MR. ARMSTRONG. We heard about the rain. We haven’t learned to control the weather yet, but that is something we can look forward to. THE PRESIDENT. Well, I can only summarize it because I don’t want to hold you now. You have so much more to do. You look great. Do you feel as great as you look? MR. ARMSTRONG. We feel great. THE PRESIDENT. Frank Borman feels you are a little younger by reason of having gone into space. Is that right? Do you feel a little bit younger? MR. ARMSTRONG. We are younger than Frank Borman. THE PRESIDENT. He is over there. Come on over, Frank, so they can see you. Are you going to take that lying down? ASTRONAUTS. It looks like he has aged in the last couple weeks. COL. FRANK BORMAN. They look a little heavy. Mr. President, the one thing I wanted–you know, we have a poet in Mike Collins. He really gave me a hard time for describing the words "fantastic" and "beautiful." I counted them. In 4 minutes up there, you used four "fantastics" and three "beautiful." THE PRESIDENT. Well, just let me close off with this one thing: I was thinking, as you know, as you came down, and we knew it was a success, and it had only been 8 days, just a week, a long week, that this is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation, because as a result of what happened in this week, the world is bigger, infinitely, and also, as I am going to find on this trip around the world, and as Secretary Rogers will find as he covers the other countries in Asia, as a result of what you have done, the world has never been closer together before. We just thank you for that. I only hope that all of us in Government, all of us in America, that as a result of what you have done, can do our job a little better. We can reach for the stars just as you have reached so far for the stars. We don’t want to hold you any longer. Anybody have a last–how about promotions? Do you think we can arrange something? MR. ARMSTRONG. We are just pleased to be back and very honored that you were so kind as to come out here and welcome us back. We look forward to getting out of this quarantine and talking without having the glass between us. THE PRESIDENT. Incidentally, the speeches that you have to make at this dinner can be very short. If you want to say "fantastic" or "beautiful," that is all right with us. Don’t try to think of new adjectives. They have all been said. Now, I think incidentally that all of us, the millions who are seeing us on television now, seeing you, would feel as I do, that, in a sense, our prayers have been answered, and I think it would be very appropriate if Chaplain Piirto, the Chaplain of this ship, were to offer a prayer of thanksgiving. If he would step up now.

7.24.59

July 24, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under History, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | 2 Comments 

Здравствуйте!: RN and PN arrive in Moscow for what would be a tense and historic trip. Photograph by Howard Sochurek for Life magazine.

Fifty years ago today, Bill Safire knocked down a barrier and shouted to RN’s military aide Don Hughes: "This way to the typical American house."  And the rest is history.  (History recently recounted here (etc.) by Jonathan Movroydis; the Safire story is amusingly detailed in his memoir Before the Fall and recalled in today’s New York Times). In addition to the various staff and State Department officials, the Nixon party included atomic submariner Admiral Hyman Rickover, Milton Eisenhower, and Harvard historian and sage William Yandell Elliott.  The official party were covered by some seventy reporters with their own 707. Time magazine gave RN a send-off cover, showing him against a backdrop of St. Basil’s and the Kremlin on Red Square and Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome that was the centerpiece and symbol of the American Exhibition the Vice President was traveling to open.

The Kitchen Debate, in addition to being significant, was pithy, colloquial, provocative, and is still worth reading both as a piece of history and as a battle of wits.  RN was unfazed by Khrushchev’s calculated use of homely (and frequently vulgar) phrases and proverbs; in fact, saw and raised the Soviet Premier on his own ground.

Khrushchev: "Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you’ve shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets. We have a saying, if you have bedbugs you have to catch one and pour boiling water into the ear." Nixon: "We have another saying. This is that the way to kill a fly is to make it drink whisky. But we have a better use for whisky."

A complete transcript is here.  (And for RN’s gutsy oneupmanship regarding the comparative nature of barnyard scents at the meeting preceding the Kitchen Debate —which had to be expurgated for 1960’s Six Crises— check out page 207 of 1978’s RN.)

The Kitchen That Made History: The US Veep and the Soviet Premier with First Deputy Premier and old Bolshevik Anastas Mikoyan in the middle and a young Leonid Brezhnev over RN’s shoulder. The photograph was taken by Bill Safire, whose ingenuity engineered the historic confrontation. Following on RN’s demonstration of grace under pressure during the life-threatening ride from the airport in Caracas, the facedown with Khrushchev elevated the Vice President’s already well-burnished foreign policy credentials in the lead-up to the 1960 presidential election.  Time magazine, summarizing the trip, said that RN  “managed in a unique way to personify a national character proud of peaceful accomplishment, sure of its way of life, confident of its power under threat.” And Newsweek waxed all but ecstatic:

It was first a contest of men.  Here was Dick Nixon,  young (46), slender, eager — the son of a California grocer, an American man of success.  Opposing him was Khrushchev, aging (65), short, bull-strong — the son of a peasant, ex-coalminer, successor to Stalin.  It was, too a contest of nations….their secret deadly talks could change the course of history.

RN takes a walk in Moscow.  The Soviet government barely publicized his trip and exercised ruthless crowd control.  But whenever RN could break free the crowds were curious and enthusiastic.   Photograph by Howard Sochurek for Life magazine.

The Diplomate

July 24, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under History, Nixon in the News, Pat Nixon, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

In the Soviet Union in 1959, as on all of RN’s Vice Presidential diplomatic trips abroad beginning in 1953, PN continued to break ground by pursuing her own independent and substantive schedule.   Her work was recognized by Life magazine with its 10 August cover.

The late Herb Klein was the Veep’s Press Secretary on this trip, and he later recalled an otherwise unheralded event:

Shortly after arriving at the Spaso House [the American Ambassador's residence where the Nixons were staying], the Vice President asked Pat if she would like to take a walk with him through the town.  I walked with them, and there was only one American Secret Service man, and one Embassy representative who acted as interpreter.  This was one of the few times the Nixons have been able to go through a public area unnoticed.  the Soviets seemed to notice only that Mrs. Nixon wore shoes with pointed toes.  In a small store she gave two little children some candy.  their parents were amazed when the interpreter told them that the candy was given by the wife of the Vice President of the United States.

In addition to Moscow, the Nixons visited Leningrad, Sverdlosk, and Novosibirsk — where PN broke through the language barrier (and the distancing ploys of her official hosts) to mix with the crowds.

50 Years On

July 23, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, Russia | 1 Comment 

Bill Safire was also at the American Exhibition in Moscow and saw the "Kitchen Debate" first hand. He writes his 50 year reflection in an op-ed at The New York Times.

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