Landing On Schorr

Nearly 40 years after Nixon aide Larry Higby called J. Edgar Hoover to order an investigation of CBS reporter Daniel Schorr and five months after Schorr's death, the agency has released his file.

Shultz: "Dean Has A Problem With Me"

George Shultz (later Ronald Reagan's secretary of state) was serving as Richard Nixon's secretary of the treasury when White House counsel John Dean asked him to order 50 politically motivated tax investigations. Shultz told Dean to pound sand. In this interview with Nixon library director Tim Naftali, now available on the library's YouTube site, Shultz said, "It was an improper use of the IRS, and I wouldn't do it."

According to on-line background materials, the library's new Watergate exhibit, opposed by Nixon's White House aides, covers such matters as Bob Haldeman aide Larry Higby's more successful effort to get FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to conduct an investigation of CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr.

RNPR

The Nixon angle on the Juan Williams firing, as the pundit channels the late Daniel Schorr:

I can only imagine Dan's revulsion to realize that today NPR treats a journalist who has worked for them for ten years with less regard, less respect for the value of independence of thought and embrace of real debate across political lines, than Nixon ever displayed.

Time To Get Watergate On The Way

After the Nixon foundation's war over Watergate became public on Aug. 6, National Archives officials said final decisions about the Nixon library's new exhibit, due to have opened on July 1, would be made in a few weeks. But thanks to Wikipedia, one learns that the background for the new exhibit already appears on on the Nixon library website, complete with photos, White House tape snippets, and even a memo disclosing that Nixon's aides had conducted an investigation into whether one of their own, Fred Malek, was Jewish (see "Higby to Haldeman, July 8, 1971"). President Nixon had wanted his staff to find out how many Jews were working at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where he believed liberal opponents were skewing data. White House personnel chief Malek was in line for the assignment, hence the theological exploration by chief of staff H.R. Haldeman's aide, Larry Higby. Malek gives more details in an oral history interview with library director Tim Naftali.

Rooting around, you can get a pretty good idea of the contours of the exhibit. Included, for instance, are details on the White House's attempts to intimidate the late Daniel Schorr, then a CBS correspondent. According to NPR's 1994 interview with Schorr, in 1971 Higby called J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, looking for dirt. Instead, Hoover launched a full-field investigation. When Schorr naturally found out about it, the White House pretended that it planned to offer him a job, which Haldeman and Nixon discuss in this tape segment (which also reveals that they'd sicced the IRS on him). Finally, in December 1971, Hoover, laying one more lie on the pile, wrote a letter to the White House saying the investigation had been completed:

Mr. Schorr indicated surprise at being considered for a Federal position but, nevertheless, furnished the necessary background data.

It ain't pretty. It wasn't going to be. As a foreign affairs visionary, Richard Nixon made the world safer for billions of people in his own time and in generations to come. His positive legacy will ultimately withstand Watergate. But that doesn't mean the story doesn't need to be told. At Fox News, Sean Hannity loves to say about any scandal involving liberals, "If we were caught doing something like this..." Imagine if Obama's aides were caught engaging in shenanigans such as these. If prior administrations did things that were just as dark, as some argue, then let Watergate be fully illuminated in the hope that powerful men and women will at least hesitate to do it again.

To those who still insist that it's unfair to Nixon that presidents get kid glove treatment at some other taxpayer-operated museums, they've got a point, of course. It's an inevitable consequence of a president resigning, not that I ever want to see that proposition tested again. Maybe the lesson is that, after a decent interval, which is to say the first generation after a library opens, all the gloves should come off. Maybe striking a blow for curatorial objectivity at presidential libraries will be Nixon's last historic first.

We're Gonna Hire Our Political Enemies

Thanks to an NPR retrospective on the death of Daniel Schorr (left), I've belatedly learned about a local angle (besides the man from Yorba Linda himself) on the 1974 articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, namely Orange County businessman Larry Higby, once Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman's aide.

It all started when the White House decided it didn't like Schorr's reporting on the CBS Evening News. As Schorr told NPR's Terry Gross in a 1994 (rebroadcast on July 30, a week after Schorr's death; the transcript is here, and you check it out on iTunes here):

[Nixon] had Haldeman have his assistant Larry Higby call J. Edgar Hoover and simply say the boss, the president, wants to have some background stuff on a correspondent named Daniel Schorr.

But either Higby or the FBI's usually pretty canny director missed the point. Rather than dishing whatever dirt happened to be on hand, Hoover ordered a full field investigation, the kind the FBI does on those in line for high-level government jobs. When agents visited Schorr himself, inadvertently revealing that the White House and a federal police agency had developed a constitutionally unhealthful fixation on him, Nixon aides concocted the story that they were planning to offer one of Washington's most prominent journalists the lofty post of PR man for the Council on Environmental Quality.

This bumptious episode turned deadly serious, Schorr told Gross, when the use of the FBI against a journalist was cited by the House Judiciary Committee in one of the three articles of impeachment it approved in the summer of 1974.

Admiring Nixon for his final comeback, Schorr became a regular guest at Nixon Center events in Washington during the 1990s. At one, the ex-president smiled at him and said, "Damn near hired you once." To Gross's apparent surprise, Schorr chose to take Nixon's remark as a backhanded apology. "[Only] he who is without blemish should be casting stones around," Schorr said. "I consider life too short to have grudges, retain grudges, and furthermore, I find him interesting."

Fat Chance, Dan

Invoking "Frost/Nixon," NPR's Daniel Schorr thinks President Bush should announce he was wrong about the central event of his administration, in spite of the dramatically improved situation as the result of the surge:

As he prepares to leave office, Bush might want to look at the Nixon interview and consider doing a do-over — reconsidering the wisdom of invading Iraq.