The View From Jackson Place

It's exciting to see the view counter near 250,000. Thanks to those who are still checking in at the rate of about 120 a day. I'm not posting much, but I'm writing like mad off-line, three pages a day until Christmas or bust. As for what continues to drive readership here, the Episconixonian proudly retains its status as the universal authority if you need an accurate transcript of Clark Griswold's interfaith prayer for his wife's aunt from the movie "National Lampoon's Vacation." If you don't believe me, Google or Bingle "Aunt Edna's Prayer." This post, about a Nixon/Alger Hiss-themed episode of "The West Wing," gets about a hundred readers a month.

The photo shows Jackson Place, the townhouse in Lafayette Square across from the White House, which the Nixon administration first set aside for the use of former presidents. In March 1994, after former President Nixon's last trip to Russia, my wife and Nixon's last and best chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor, were there when he gave a bravura off-the-record presentation to a high-ranking audience of sitting and former national security officials. It was the last time I saw him alive. More to come.

Keeping Sabbath And Staying Home

Maybe I’m imagining it. I can’t give you hard data. But whether it’s because of the price of gas, the economy, or Orange County’s peerless weather this year, I’m pretty sure that more St. John’s congregants and school parents than ever have told me that they’re staying home this summer.

Staycation is a word, by the way – or technically, a neologism, which means a term that’s on the way to being accepted as a word. Its working definition is “no extra baggage charges or lost luggage, jet lag, jellyfish stings, or gaining five pounds on a cruise to Alaska.”

What staycation doesn’t mean is no fun, rest, or change of perspective. It doesn’t mean no Sabbath. The psalmist sings, “My boundaries enclose a pleasant land” [16:6]. We take our capacity for Sabbath wherever we go, just as we can ruin our vacations by packing our accustomed anxieties (and our e-mail-loaded iPhones) along with our sun block and swimsuits.

It’s the same with church. We don’t need to be in church to thank and praise God, talk to God from the depths of our heart, seek and obtain forgiveness for our sins, participate in sacrament, and live a more abundant life. But the discipline of regular attendance helps turn our minds toward the divine. By the same token, while we don’t need a folding chair, Corona with a wedge of lime, Daniel Silva novel, and stretch of beach on Maui to relax and enjoy life, they sure help set the stage.

If I’ve just described your vacation, you may not be even be reading this. If you are, put down that laptop get back to having fun. If not, here’s your guide to a five-star staycation:

Take little trips. Do we really need to be reminded of the diversions within a few hours’ drive? Since Kathy and I were on the St. John’s Holy Land pilgrimage, I decided not to take much more time away this summer. But I’m taking five or six days in August to drive to San Diego, see friends, and spend a couple of days on retreat, ending up at Camp Stevens in Julian to check up on my younger daughter, Lindsay, who’s on the staff. A six-day cruise to Mexico? Just fine. Spending six days (or six hours, if that’s all that’s available) doing exactly what I want? Priceless.

Do exactly what you want. A spiritual counselor told me that her definition of Sabbath was watching a whole season of “The West Wing” in one day. That’s because she loves “The West Wing.” Her point was that Sabbath is whatever you find enjoyable and reinvigorating – watching sports, baking cupcakes, playing video games, hiking, talking to friends, going to the movies by yourself, or just sleeping in. Above all, never feel guilty for indulging yourself. Remember that, at least in English, Sabbath doesn’t start with “sh” (for “should”).

Try something new in your life and at St. John’s. What I love most about vacations is the new or atypical: Seeing historic places, scuba diving, eating four meals a day. The staycation dictum is the same: “Just try it.” Rent a flute and sign up for a lesson. Download Scrabble or Angry Birds on your phone. Amaze and confound your grandchildren by learning to text or joining Facebook. Have a frozen yogurt with chocolate sprinkles. Have another.

At church, sample the noon healing service on Wednesday or the Saturday evening community Holy Eucharist. They only last about a half-hour, giving you more time for “The West Wing” or Angry Birds. Come to the fellowship dinner on Aug. 11 or yoga and the labyrinth on Aug. 16. Join a parish reading circle. If you’ve been tempted to try spiritual direction, what better time for a deeper conversation with God than the lazy days of summer? Call me and ask for a referral. If you’ve never tried the discipline of daily prayer by the hours, get out The Book Of Common Prayer and turn to pps. 137-140. Tell God I said hello.

Above all, if you’re not traveling this summer, remember why people go on vacation to begin with: For refreshment, reorientation, and (if we’re smart) relationship. We can fly around the world ten times without ever finding such comforts. We can rejoice in them without even leaving the house.

This post originally appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the St. John's parish newsletter. My thanks to JP Allport for the labyrinth photo and sacredsandwich.com for this cartoon:

Will McAvoy, My Hero

For his new HBO series "The Newsroom," Aaron Sorkin has created an idealistic hero akin to President Josiah Bartlett of "The West Wing," this time a cable TV anchor played by Jeff Daniels. Here's McAvoy in a conversation with his boss, played by Sam Waterston:

I'm a registered Republican. I only seem liberal because I believe hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not gay marriage.

Scriptwriting Nixon Out Of History

"West Wing" 3:9, "The Women of Qumar," is notable for C. J. Gregg's (Allison Janney) prophetic witness against U.S. arms sales to a Saudi Arabia-type country (I guess "The West Wing" didn't want to offend the Saudis, either), the beginning of the goofy flirtation between Josh Lyman and Amy Gardner (played by Bradley Whitford and Mary-Louise Parker, shown here), and President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) asking his aides when the U.S. had "passed" the Clean Water Act and finally answering the question: 1972. Why didn't teleplay writer and series creator Aaron Sorkin say it was Richard Nixon who signed it? Maybe for the same reason Sorkin's script for "The American President" said that "the courts ruled on" instead of "Nixon signed" Title IX, granting equality to women in collegiate sports.

You Broke Some Laws, But That's Not The Point

"West Wing" 3:7, entitled "Gone Quiet," contains an Aaron Sorkin teaching about the politics of presidential investigations that was probably inspired by the Clinton impeachment and trial (though not, one assumes, the Nixon near-impeachment and resignation).

White House counsel Oliver Babish (Oliver Platt) is questioning First Lady Abbey Bartlet (Stockard Channing) about her participation in the cover-up of her husband's MS. When she offers to make a deal with congressional investigators, but takes a surprising line:

You broke some laws, Abbey, and quite frankly you should be ashamed of yourself, but this investigation isn't about that. It's about the criminalization of politics, an attempt to do in the hearing room what they couldn't do at the ballot box.

Breathing Easier With Nixon

Reference to a Nixon-era policy on "The West Wing," episode 3:5, "On the Day Before": Bartlett aide Josh Lyman, defending the administration's environmental policies against charges that they cost jobs, says, "The decline in manufacturing isn't because of the environment...You want to see a study that says that if we hadn't passed the Clean Air Act, about two million more people would've suffered from heart disease, bronchitis, [and] respiratory illness?" President Nixon signed a substantial toughening of the Clean Air Act in 1970.

A Kylish Gesture

Presidents Day weekend is a fitting time to announce that I've resumed my careful study of "The West Wing" from beginning to end, with special focus on Nixon references and resonances. I've just started watching season three, which would seem promising because of the investigations of President Josiah Bartlett's cover-up of his multiple sclerosis.

Not much on Nixon yet, though. A congressional committee chairman who's antagonized the White House by favoring big tobacco is named Kalmbach, but they don't mean Nixon's jailed personal attorney. Episode 3:01, first aired on Oct. 3, 2001, is Aaron Sorkin's post-Sept. 11 teleplay on terrorism and Islamophobia. It holds up well after nearly a decade. In 3:3, "Ways and Means," producers breach (inadvertently, I assume) their policy of not referring to active-duty U.S. politicians. That's Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) on the TV screen behind Toby Ziegler. And that's a Nixon resonance after all, since Kyl's being honored next month by the Nixon Center.

"Patriotic Song, "Stephen Oliver

My Nicholas Nickleby post prompted some great e-mail and Facebook exchanges. My Andover buddy David Schwartz sent this video melding the third-season finale of "The West Wing," in which composer Stephen Oliver's "Patriotic Song" appears, with a scene from the Royal Shakespeare Company's marathon 1982-83 production of "The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby," for which Oliver wrote the song.

If you're not a "West Wing" aficionado, all you need to know is that President and playgoer Josiah Bartlett (Martin Sheen) has reluctantly ordered the illegal assassination of a terrorist -- the sometimes dark work of national security as against the idealized vision of nationhood in Oliver's rousing anthem.

Those British Aren't So Smart

They think Leo McGarry from "The West Wing" is real.

Three Watergates

James Lipton called "Two Cathedrals," the last episode of the second season (2:22 to the scripturally minded) of "The West Wing," the best hour of television ever produced. His benediction is far above my poor power to add or detract. I've already waxed goofy about the last five minutes, when Josiah Bartlett (Martin Sheen, above) receives a cleansing civic baptism while Mark Knopfler hymns on his electric guitar.

Episcopal bones tingle during the scenes in Washington National Cathedral, especially the way the young crucifer and candle-bearers move in perfect, reverential unison -- almost as good as at St. John's! Scriptwriter and series creator Aaron Sorkin makes a complete muck of the funeral liturgy for the president's beloved secretary, Delores Landingham. Ending with the prayer of St. Francis? I don't think so.

As for the Nixon resonances, the whole episode's a learn-from-Watergate, it's-the-coverup-that-kills-you allegory. On learning several episodes before that President Bartlett has been concealing his MS for years, aide Toby Ziegler demands that Bartlett consult his anti-John Dean of a White House counsel, Oliver Babish, who instantly puts the sullen if pliable president on the road to full disclosure, special prosecutor, the works.

Thus will Bartlett survive to run again, though his misdeeds are far more egregious and systematic than Nixon's. I can't tell you the number of people who've said to me over the years, "If only Nixon would have admitted what he did, he'd have survived." Of course unlike Bartlett, who submits to Babish's will, and his principled aides, the stubbornly unrepentant Nixon was surrounded by a considerable number of felons and liars who made matters fatally worse.

It would've been nice to try it Bartlett's way, though, and as a matter of fact, I did, too. In 1989 I published a novel, Patterns of Abuse, that amounted to an anti-Watergate in which a Democratic president breaks the law in the service of national security only to have the scandal manipulated for partisan purposes by a scheming Republican editor of the Washington Post. My president lets it all hang out, too.

It sold dozens of copies (some of which are still rattling around). Published on exactly the same day by the same now-defunct house, Wynwood Press, was the first edition of a novel I like to call A Time To Kill by John Grisham. Our editor, a publishing and agenting legend, Bill Thompson -- who helped get Elmore Leonard his first bestseller, Glitz, and also edited Nixon's book No More Vietnams -- discovered Stephen King in addition to Grisham. Two out of three ain't bad!

Bill now helps authors treat their ailing manuscripts. There's a writing doctor in WW 2:22 as well, namely Lawrence K. Altman, M.D., who recently retired as the New York Times medical correspondent. Bartlett's press secretary, C. J. Cregg, puts him in the front row at a press conference in the vain hope that Bartlett will call on him first for a softball about his health rather than the dreaded question about his reelection plans.

I always thought the part was played by Altman himself, but when I said so on YouTube, I was gently corrected by a woman in Washington who said it was her late husband, a veteran character actor. I regret that I can't find his name. He played someone whom Nixon had admired for outstanding coverage of his near-fatal brush with phlebitis during 1974-75, when his critics unfairly accused him of being a faker to avoid coming to Washington to visit with the all-too-real special prosecutor.

Presidential Plattitudes

When Oliver Platt blazes onto the screen as White House counsel Oliver Babish in "West Wing" 2:19, called in to grapple with a brewing scandal about President Bartlett's health, he's an instant Nixon three-fer. In his first scene, fumbling with a microcassette recorder, he says, "It's stuck on record. It won't stop recording things. It's just what you want lying around the White House counsel's office, because there's never been a problem with that before." Platt also shows up in the best Nixon movie ever, "Frost/Nixon," playing one of British journalist David Frost's researchers, Bob Zelnick.

Finally, Platt's the son of diplomat Nicholas Platt, who accompanied Nixon to China in 1972 and later served as president of the Asia Society. The actor talked about the Nixon-Platt connection in an April 2010 interview with NPR's Terry Gross:

We were living in Japan when Nixon resigned. And I remember, very clearly, we were driving out to the country and the news came over the radio. My parents pulled the car over and they told us all to listen.... [My father] actually just published a memoir about it called China Boys, about the opening of China; and he really had a remarkable perspective on it. He literally - he has a home movie, you know, of Nixon getting off the plane and shaking Zhou Enlai's hand and he's standing literally, you know, 15 yards away from him when that happened. And so he really, I think my father had complicated feelings about it.

Hoynes Employs The Nixon/Otter Defense

Speaking of Nixon references in "The West Wing" (okay, I'm pretty much only speaking to myself), in episode 2:18, as Toby Ziegler tries to figure out why Bartlett's vice president, John Hoynes (Tim Matheson), is acting like he's about to run for president, he wonders aloud whether an "Eisenhower and Nixon" scenario is afoot. With this implicit reference to President Eisenhower's hints in 1956 that he might dump his VP, Richard Nixon, Toby is suggesting that Bartlett may have let it be known that he's considering looking for a new running mate, prompting Hoynes to feign a move to challenge him for the Democratic nomination (in 2002, oddly enough).

In this episode, we also learn that Republican deputy White House counsel Ainsley Hayes (Emily Procter) is an Episcopalian. Duh.

Nixon Props

In "West Wing" 2:17 -- an episode in which a silver-maned senator who looks a lot like former Sen. John Warner, an ex-Nixon advance man, conducts an epic filibuster -- Bartlett aides Josh, Toby, and Sam caucus in Josh's office. On the wall behind his head, you can see a photo of Presidents Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Nixon that was taken in the White House in 1981 before the three formers departed for Anwar Sadat's funeral.

Alger Hiss Is Daniel Galt

The best Nixon-themed "West Wing" episode ever is the Alger Hiss story line in episode 2:16, oddly titled "Somebody's Going To Emergency, Somebody's Going To Jail," a line from the Don Henley song "New York Minute," with which the episode begins and ends. I don't remember an earlier episode using a rock and roll song, and while later choices by series creator Aaron Sorkin and his crew are sublime, this one I don't get. In view of the episode's dominant father theme, "The End Of The Innocence," one of the great paternal betrayal songs of all time and the title cut from the album on which "New York Minute" appears, would've been more apt, but maybe it was thought to be too obvious.

The episode aired in February 2001, a month after George W. Bush (speaking of father issues) took office. Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) has just learned that his dad had been conducting a long-term affair. Then Stephanie Galt worms her way into his office to enlist support for a presidential pardon for her grandfather, Daniel Galt, the Hiss of the piece. He'd died in prison in the early 1950s, six months after a perjury conviction in connection with his alleged spying for the Soviets. (Read about the details here.) Stephanie's father -- "a sweet man in a bow tie," she says -- is dying, and she's driven to try to clear his father's name.

Having argued Galt's innocence in his senior thesis at Princeton, Sam swings into action with prophetic vigor, only to learn from the national security adviser that Galt had been guilty as charged. At first shocked he'd been so wrong, his rage at his own father nearly gets the better of him. He stops just short of denouncing Galt to his granddaughter and finally sends her away with just enough hope to comfort her father through his last three months. Then Sam gets a hug from Donna Moss (Janel Moloney) and calls his dad.

When the episode first aired, I wrote a mash letter to Sorkin, who wrote the script, praising his courage. The only discordant note (and it's hardly the show's fault) are the decrypted cables that the NSC adviser shows Sam. They're the fictional equivalent of the VENONA papers, Soviet cable traffic that the U.S. and British intercepted and decoded during and after World War II. The VENONA intercepts clearly implicated Alger Hiss.

In "The West Wing," Sam learns that the intercepted cables weren't made available to those prosecuting Galt because their codes hadn't been broken until the 1970s. The reality is far more dramatic. When Richard Nixon and the House Committee on Un-American Activities were investigating Hiss in 1948, the government had the intercepts but, to keep the Soviets in the dark, didn't reveal them to Congress. Federal prosecutors didn't have them for Hiss's perjury trial. During all the years Hiss and his family proclaimed his innocence, nobody knew about VENONA. As two generations of American liberals castigated Nixon for having unfairly persecuted Hiss, the feds kept their own counsel.

As far as I know, Nixon was never told the cables implicating Hiss existed, not even when he was president. It's an irony at best and an injustice at worst that VENONA was only made public in 1995, decisively vindicating his actions in the first of his many political crises. Too bad it was the year after he died.

Time's Up

"A president gets to govern for 18 months."

--Josiah Bartlett/Aaron Sorkin, "The West Wing" 2:14

Missile Seance

More "West Wing" Nixonalia: In season two, episode 12, White House chief of staff Leo McGarry (the late John Spencer) is indulging his quixotic passion for expensive missile defense systems that don't work. When he attempts to enlist his nemesis Lord John Marbury (Roger Rees), the incoming British ambassador, to the cause, Marbury argues that the proposed system violates the ABM treaty -- which was signed by Richard Nixon in 1972 as relations with the Soviets thawed.

Pool Reporters

For the first time since the series ended, I'm watching NBC's "The West Wing" from beginning to end. Someone has to keep the classics alive. And who better to probe the frequent Nixon resonances? Who, period?

Here's one: In a subplot during episode #11 of the second season (2:11, the canonically minded might say), "The Leadership Breakfast," broadcast in January 2001, White House aide Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) proposes a space-saving efficiency: Moving the press briefing room from the West Wing to the Old Executive Office Building. Press secretary C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney) demurs, saying reporters would assume the White House was hiding things from them. "We are hiding things from them," Sam says.

In the course of the show we learn that the press room was built over a swimming pool. What series creator (and 2:11 writer) Aaron Sorkin doesn't reveal is that the pool was installed for FDR and decommissioned and drained by Nixon. The new digs were more spacious than journalists' traditional haunt, the Roosevelt Room, which couldn't contain their burgeoning arsenal of broadcast gear. In addition, Nixon wanted them further away from the Oval Office. He was hiding things from them, too.

When The New Media Were Still Weird

Remember that time when Josh went on a web site and got in trouble with CJ?

Lent I And President Bartlett

Tens of millions of Christians in church today, the first Sunday in Lent, heard the story of Noah (in which God is so grieved by his people's vindictiveness and violence that he washes them away) and the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. Among many other things, the contrasting stories help explain our attitude toward the substance that essentially comprises us. As Harold Kushner has written, our relationship with water is primal. We're both drawn to it and frightened that it will reclaim us.

By their baptism in water and the Holy Spirit, Christians are cleansed of their iniquities (as the world was in Noah's story) and bound indissolubly to God and therefore made ultimately, perfectly safe. It's a powerful, almost magical sacrament, hence the arguments among denominations about whom (infants or believers) and how (aspersion, affusion, immersion, or submersion). In a conversation between services at St. John's this morning, we took comfort from the notion that while doctrine is often the work of men and women, Christian baptism, however it's practiced, is the work of God's spirit, which flows where it will.

During our class, I'd wanted to show the classic scene from the West Wing episode "Two Cathedrals," when President Josiah Bartlett (Martin Sheen), a faithful Roman Catholic who is tempted to forsake running for a second term because he has lied to the American people about his health, experiences a kind of a civic baptism thanks to a tropical storm that has made its way up the eastern seaboard to Washington. Once Bartlett has been drenched and cleansed, you may guess, if you're not a "West Wing" fan, whether he decides to run again.

What makes the sequence pretty much perfect is the choice of the Dire Straits song “Brothers in Arms” as the soundtrack. Mark Knopfler’s silky progressions and finger-plucked guitar runs are hymn-like. Watch how Bartlett’s body man, Charlie (Dule Hill), takes off his raincoat because the President refuses to wear one. Watch when, as Knopfler sings the words “brothers in arms” for the first time, a trinity of Bartlett aides, Josh, Toby, and Sam, is together in the frame. Watch how, as Bartlett prepares to answer a reporter's question about the election, the American flag unfurls -- symbol of his civic faith, just as the Jerusalem Cross in the transcept of National Cathedral, which we also see in this scene, denotes his faith in Christ.

If you’re a Dire Straits or “West Wing” fan, you’ll want to watch this over and over again. If you’re a fan of both, you probably want to be buried with it. Thanks to a persnickety DVD player, I didn't get to show the scene in the class this morning. My thanks to my St. John's brother John Schafer for providing the YouTube link.