For 364 days a year archivists toil anonymously, transcribing hundreds of hours of often banal, taped conversations. Then they pick out a few titillating excerpts to nab a headline in the next day’s newspapers.
How much time has the recently so widely celebrated scholar of the Nixon Presidency actually spent with Nixon White House records? There’s nary a National Archives transcript to be found. As archivist Maarja Krusten recently wrote in comments at “The New Nixon” and as most Nixon scholars know well, NARA decided a generation ago not to make transcripts, since it took 100 person hours to transcribe an hour of tape (300 hours before PCs were available). Instead, archivists supply finding aids in the form of outlines.
And is Perlstein so unfamiliar with NARA practice that he thinks government archivists actually “pick out…titillating excerpts” and feed them to the papers? Perlstein meets Nixonstein: That’s what 37 and his cronies were supposed to think. Hundreds of dedicated professionals are cringing at the accusation. Perlstein and “Newsweek” owe them an apology.
Elsewhere in his column, writing about Vietnam, Perlstein misuses the tapes as he did a secondary source in Nixonland when he tried (but failed) to show that President Nixon had foreknowledge of plans for a break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. As the Miller Center’s careful transcripts have shown, while Henry Kissinger was consistently pessimistic about whether South Vietnam would survive the withdrawal of U.S. forces, President Nixon was all over the map, sometimes saying that South Vietnam couldn’t survive, other times saying it must for the sake of U.S. credibility.
In his article, Perlstein tries to have it both ways:
In moments of candor both men admitted that Saigon would inevitably fall to the communists within a couple of years. Yet they were determined to stave off the collapse for a “decent interval”—the real purpose, as Nixon well knew, of the Christmas bombings. The two men told another story to the American people, our allies in the Saigon government and perhaps even themselves. In the new tapes, Nixon justifies his decision to use the most fearsome bomber in the fleet by saying that one final, swift, savage blow might force communist negotiators to give up their claim to non-communist South Vietnam. The only person he’s trying to convince is himself.
So if on one tape, Nixon says he doesn’t think Saigon will survive, he means it. If on another, the President says he thinks the bombing will blunt Hanoi’s ambitions, he doesn’t mean it.
How does Perlstein know? He doesn’t. He’s just pushing the “decent interval” theory, which is an ideological construct, the rearguard action of the antiwar movement.
The real history of the Vietnam war, and therefore the Nixon Administration and Watergate, has yet to be written. That work will take open-minded writers who among other things will take into account evidence, undercovered by scholars such as Stephen J. Morris, that the December bombings had precisely the chilling effect on the communists that the President had hoped. It was the distraction of Watergate that may well have doomed Saigon, not the Nixon policy.
***
In a response on the New Nixon version of this post, Rick Perlstein tells me that for this tapes release, the Nixon Library indeed highlighted tape segments that it thought was most interesting, unlike National Archives practice during prior openings.
No comments:
Post a Comment