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He's Ba-a-a-ack!
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The New York establishment? "They're done!" The press? "The enemy!" Professors? "The enemy!" Richard Nixon continues to spook the nation from beyond the grave with the latest eavesdrop on taped Oval Office conversations.
It could have come straight out of Oliver Stone’s screenplay of Nixon. “Never forget,” rasped the 37th president to his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. “The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The Establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times.”
It has become a fixed point on the holiday calendar, an annual treat that combines nostalgia with nausea, what Nixon’s investigative assassin Carl Bernstein describes as “the gift that keeps on giving.” A smoldering new batch of White House tapes has been released featuring, in his own words, the unadorned paranoia and melodramatic egotism of Richard Nixon, the president we love to hate.
It is his opponents in the press rather than the American people, still less the Vietnamese, that concern Nixon. “This should have some effect on our brethren in the press, shouldn’t it?” he asks Kissinger.
This year, the new Nixon tapes act as a trailer for the upcoming movie Frost/Nixon, in which Frank Langella follows in Anthony Hopkins’ shoes and adopts the complex, crippled character of the most enigmatic yet transparent president America has ever endured.
The latest tape dump catches a particular moment—the decision to bomb the North Vietnamese back to the peace conference table in Paris over Christmas 1972. While there are few new nuggets of fact to excite historians, there is the forbidden pleasure of eavesdropping on the frozen, scratchy, echoing voices caught in candid conversation by the White House’s primitive automatic bugging system, which rough recorded for posterity at Nixon’s insistence all conversations and phone calls in and out of the Oval Office.
In November 1972, Nixon had just been elected president by the largest margin in American history, an overwhelming majority of the popular vote, 47 million to George McGovern’s 29, and 49 states out of 50 in the electoral college. (The holdout was Maine.)
Yet within just a few weeks of this ringing personal endorsement, Nixon was again wrestling with his demons, and the Black Dog of pessimism and depression had once more consumed him. Around the edges of hearing reports about the Christmas bombing campaign, which drove the North Vietnamese to resume the negotiations led by Kissinger to end the Vietnam War, Nixon can be heard snarling at his perceived enemies in “the Establishment.”
Kissinger tells Nixon that a New York friend, a prominent Democrat, was going to write an open letter to the president. “Protesting?” asks Nixon, before he answers his own question, “Of course.”
Kissinger, who hung up on his friend after blaming Democrats like him for starting the war and then preventing Nixon from ending it, bemoans “that New York establishment...”
“They’re done. They’re done,” interjects Nixon, as if his recent landslide had not merely defeated but liquidated his opponents. More interested in the public relations problem of how best to present the bombings to the people and how to stop the resumed peace talks from interfering with his inauguration than the details of the diplomatic process, Nixon cannot get the press off his mind.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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I believe that I just hit the wrong key and either erased my comment, or sent it mid-sentence. Can't tell.
Sounds like this kind of talk is somewhat of a Republican trait....rants all around, and they have the nerve to complain how Obama can only talk, at least he's coherent and sensible when he does speak.
All I can say is thank heaven that chain has been broken by a Democrat at long last...the very thought of McCain and Palin having to address us with their rants as well would have been just too much!!!!
McGovern won Massachusetts. . .Nixon got Maine
Now I have the answer...I erased it.
I wanted to thank you for the link to the Nixon tapes site.
I am eternally fascinated by these recordings.It leads me to ask: Why did Richard Nixon allow himself to be recorded? It doesn't seem in keeping with someone so paranoid. Which suggests that he either never thought those recordings would be heard or, (more probable and frightening),that he had no idea how outrageous he sounded. And what of his confidantes--men like Kissinger (who sounds like nothing more than a toady in these excerpts)?
I was a girl of 12 at the time of the Watergate hearings and I found them riveting. I remember "Mo" Dean, in all her platinum-blonde prettiness, as she sat steadfastly behind her husband, John, during his testimony. I particularly remember feeling an amazing pride in the actions of Archibald Cox. My overwhelming feeling was that of a confidence in our system of government; an assurance that it could examine itself closely and correct itself.And if a 12-year-old felt that, what must the adults in the country have felt?! I've lost that confidence during these past eight years. They've seemed a grand amplification of Nixon's demons--there is the hostility toward, and demonization of, the press and science. And there is the insistence that those who dissent are sleeping with the enemy. It makes me wonder what would've become of Richard Nixon had he become president in 2000? Sadly, I'm not sure he wouldn't have simply skated on through his term unscathed.
Which brings me to Barack Obama. I don't believe any one person, however gifted (and ain't he!), could singularly remedy the mess we're in. However, I do believe that what Obama has in spades is integrity, and the "Archibald Coxness" to defend and remind us of what is beautiful and right about democracy and the rule of law. We particularly need this now because things are likely to get more desperate as our economy struggles. And that doesn't usually bring out the best in people.
He was a very disturbed man. He serves well as comic relief in the entertainment industry, though.
Fascinating
I believe, to it everlasting credit, Massachusetts, not Maine, was the hold out.
Mr. Wapshott should know that the "holdout state" that cast its electoral votes for McGovern in 1972 was Massachusetts, not Maine!
The most frightening reality is over the last 30 years the pubs have gotten even better at it. The press wil remain their enemy as long as they continue to lie and mislead.
As the latest Nixon tapes are played in media news and we watch commentators and pundits laugh them off, I shudder in horror. Despite the fact this happened 35 years ago, I can't help but wonder if similar conversations and strategies were alive and well the past 8 years. The only difference...no proof.
Nixon is the historical gift that keeps on giving. Unlike any other deeply flawed leader in recent memory, he has allowed us to somewhat see all the flaws and imperfections that made a highly intelligent man choose poorly. Unlike those like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Bush, the dearth of his documentation in either audio or writings is copious. If more leaders believed in such meticulous record keeping, we might glean some psychological insights into how to remedy such deep flaws or screen such leaders from office.
When the Bush W tapes are released, we will be amazed again.
Paranoia fits the Republican tradition
In the L.A. Times, Neal Gabler has an article that analyzes exactly what "conservative" Republicans have been doing, tracing their strategy back to Senator McCarthy, not to Senator Goldwater, who in 1964 lost in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history and wrested the party from its Eastern establishment wing.
What Gabler believes is that, because of this tradition, the Republican Party will continue to move rightward. Fear and blame; rabble-rousing; the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys and Bill O'Reillys; and now Palin. This is the direction the Party will take. Probably because it cannot be believed as the party of small government or fiscal responsibility or moral integrity; all credibility lost in the harsh reality of events; at least not until people forget and these actualities become memories and fade. It is a dangerous approach because it incites people to do violent things, especially as times become more stringent.
According to Gabler, the myth made it possible for Nixon to hide behind and co-opte conservatism, talking like a conservative while governing like a moderate, disenchanting true believers. Ronald Reagan, next, embraced it wholeheartedly, becoming the patron saint of conservatism and making it the dominant ideology in the country, even though he didn't practice it in terms of fiscal responsibility or size of government. George W. Bush picked up Reagan's fallen standard and "conservatized" government even more thoroughly than Reagan had, cheering conservatives until his presidency came crashing down around him. That's how Gabler believes the mythology tells it.
Gabler's thesis is that the real connection is from Sen. Joe McCarthy, to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. McCarthy attacked alleged communists and the Democrats whom he accused of shielding them, as well as the centrist American establishment, Eastern intellectuals and the power class, many of whom were Republicans, including moderate ones. McCarthyism became a means to play on the anxieties of Americans, convincing them of danger and conspiracy even when they didn't exist, which he used to build power and support. George H.W. Bush used it to get himself elected, terrifying voters with Willie Horton (and denigrating Dukakis as a commander-in-chief). His son used fear of 9/11 and convincing voters that John Kerry was a coward and a liar and would hand the nation over to terrorists, tried and true McCarthy tactics used very aggressively, and W. then used fear and stealth in pushing through totalitarian unconstitutional measures. The thread continued through McCain and then Palin, probably through Rove (who also coached W.), and I quote from Gabler, "That's why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama's relationship with onetime radical William Ayers."
It is, I believe a shame, because some of the original precepts of fiscal responsibility and keeping government out of peoples' lives and moral integrity are well worth preserving. The Republican Party which stood for those princples was a Grand Old Party. But, I hate to say it, those are all too easily trumped by fear-mongering and, I might add, difficult to achieve. I would nominate the Republican Party today as the Party of Fear, as opposed to the Party of Solutions. And, if that's the direction it's going in, yes, it's a shame.
The consistent thing about guys like Jeb Bush, in line with the old Republican philosophy, is to be against something, not for it; to be in a position to scare people, not to advocate good positive things. Putting people and ideas down is the tack they have taken; witness McCain's whole campaign; witness Sarah's natural proclivities. So Jeb Bush starts off by surfacing and proposing that the Republicans start a "shadow government" to watch, and criticize, and follow what Obama's Administration does closely.
What bothers me about this, deeply, I might add, is the fact that it is not being supportive in any way. No one is saying, if we want to survive, we have to work together, guys. No, the implication is that "they" (Democrats) are the enemy. And in this terrible time, when the country is literally falling apart, and everybody is unsettled, these isolated Republicans are settling in to be critical. As if they aren't losing their savings, too; as if they are exempt; as if, should the country really fail, they wouldn't be affected. Quite a blind spot. isn't it. They aren't even pretending to help, to support, to work with their counterparts to make things better for everybody, themselves included. How antedeluvian, how "old school", how traditional, how like McCarthy and all of the Republican demogogues, to stand back and continue criticizing the Democrats who are working very hard, very earnestly, to fix what went wrong with this country.
So Jeb Bush is nothing more than another toxic Republican, joining in the long line of negative right-wing naysayers and destroyers, no better than Limbaugh and Hannity and O'Reilly. Pretty disgusting, I'd say. Stand on the sidelines and criticize while the Titanic goes down; criticize everything the crew and captain does. Disgusting, guys, absolutely disgusting. For more, see: www.ocpatriot-runningcomments.blogspot.com.
Thank you.
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