The Charlottesville Massacre (Almost)

In an April 30 talk at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, where he worked for eight years before I recommended him as the first federal Nixon library director, Tim Naftali revealed that over cocktails in Charlottesville, Virginia one evening in June 2010, Reagan library director Duke Blackwood (left) and Naftali's boss, assistant archivist of the U.S. Sharon Fawcett (below), demanded his resignation -- as a sop, Naftali said they claimed, to loyalists of disgraced Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman:

If I would resign, I would get my [Watergate] exhibit....They wanted to give my head to the archivist of the United States on a platter...[Then] maybe the Nixonians would stop pushing. I thought this was outrageous...[They said,] "Tim, this is the only way your Watergate exhibit is going to happen. You've got to resign."...I didn't, of course.

Beginning in the fall of 2009, Richard Nixon and Haldeman's lower-level, non-policy operatives had been waging a ruthless campaign to stop Naftali's Watergate exhibit at all costs. They failed. The National Archives opened the exhibit in March 2011, generating the most publicity for the Nixon library since it opened 22 years ago. But there's no question that it was a close call for Naftali, since, as he tells it, his bosses at the Archives were at war with one another over how to handle the demands of Haldeman's operatives. That Blackwood was essentially carrying the Watergate for them is especially significant since he's a federal official who is paid a six-figure salary by U.S. taxpayers -- just like the Nixon factotum-turned-U.S. senator, Lamar Alexander, who also had Naftali in his sights, at the behest of one of Nixon's advance men.

Why roll out all that firepower? According to Naftali, the Haldeman tribe wanted to perpetuate the Watergate coverup by keeping the public from seeing videotape in which operatives such as Fred Malek discussed counting Jews in the federal government and Dwight Chapin, jailed for Watergate-related crimes, accused Nixon of being present when 1972's campaign dirty tricks were launched. "They were defending themselves," Naftali said of those who had taken control of the Nixon foundation. "It was no longer about the president."

Naftali knew he would have been crazy to submit to Blackwood and Fawcett (a colorful account of Blackwood's maneuver was first published, without his name attached, by historian and blogger Maarja Krusten). Later events revealed by Naftali in his hour-long Miller Center talk made clear that some at the National Archives (presumably including Fawcett, or so Naftali implies) were willing to replace his Watergate text with an outline dictated by the foundation's Watergate truth squad, of which perjurer Chapin was the most notable member. If Naftali had quit, it's a good bet that the custodians of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, faithfully preserved all these centuries, would have shredded his exhibit before the ink dried on his severance check.

Instead, the archivist of the U.S., David Ferriero, ultimately and unmistakeably backed Naftali. Fawcett announced her own resignation and reportedly received a consultancy offer from Haldeman's men. Based on Naftali's public comments, many questions remain about her role. Why did Fawcett need Blackwood's help in trying to axe Naftali? Did Ferriero know she was using one of his library directors to leverage the ouster of another (some NARA observers are certain that she acted on her own authority)? Did Fawcett, a canny civil service lifer, really think the scholarly community would've stood by while she greased the skids for a widely respected Cold War historian for the sake of the reputations of Bob Haldeman, Fred Malek, and Dwight Chapin?

Whether we learn the answers to any of these questions, Naftali's triumphant if emotionally charged presentation at the Miller Center proves that the dictum about history being written by the winners also applies to scrappy public historians who defeat shadowy private interests. The library director with nine lives even scores a late hit on his would-be executioner by critiquing the Reagan-adoring federal museum in Simi Valley, California, which in 2011 finally added a full exhibit on the Iran-contra scandal. That effort doesn't impress the curator of the Nixon library's warts-and-all-gate. "'Mistakes were made'; passive voice," Naftali said, summing up Blackwood and his colleagues' handiwork on the Reagan scandal, which some argued was worse than Watergate. "Reminds me of Pravda."

An Order Better Not Followed

According to notes kept by his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, on July 3, 1971 President Nixon let his suspicions about Jews and liberals in the civil service get the better of him. He believed they were purposely manipulating economic data to hurt his administration. Historian Maarja Krusten offers reflections on the politics of scapegoating (which comes from Torah, ironically enough -- Lev. 16:8,10):

The segment [of notes] covered Nixon’s directive to Haldeman to have [White House operative Fred] Malek [shown below] check “sensitive areas,” uncover “Jewish cells,” and to put a “non-Jew in charge of each.” Haldeman, who occasionally dragged his feet on orders from Nixon, didn’t blink an eye. And so the Nixon White House sent Fred Malek off to count Jewish civil servants.

Nixon may have been uncomfortable about some of the things recorded on his tapes or recorded in White House documents. I sympathize with that to some degree. His records were seized and the rules changed on him. But trying to take out the people at NARA who worked and still work with those materials only demonstrates the same acculturation that led Nixon and Haldeman to send Malek off to count Jews at BLS. Nixon didn’t like the way the bureau was handling the release of unemployment figures. Instead of directing James Hodgson, Secretary of Labor, to work through the timing issues, he went nuclear. And sent Malek off to do some things Malek and Haldeman should have resisted, in my view. This set up a situation where Malek later had to confront, or not, what he had done.

It was a classic example of not liking an outcome and personalizing the issue based on assumptions, rather than working out a rational and fact-based solution. Just like assuming Fred Graboske and his staff were biased against Nixon and trashing their reputations (“incompetent clerical level archivists.”). Or calling for Tim Naftali to find an Alger Hiss library to head, when he sought to put up an historically sound exhibit about “abuses of governmental power.” There couldn’t be a clearer demonstration of the management culture within the Nixon White House that resulted in those abuses than observing what NARA has faced since the 1980s.

Hissing And Moaning

As reported last week, the anger of former aides of Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, toward Nixon library director Tim Naftali (left) reached a fever pitch in mid-2009 when he invited former White House counsel John Dean to give a speech. They consider Dean a rat for testifying against Nixon and helping send their friends to jail for their Watergate crimes.

Like Barack Obama's least successful critics, Nixon's men and their fellow travelers used Cold War rhetoric against the apostate. Historian Maarja Krusten writes at NixoNARA:

Susan Naulty, who used to work as an archivist at the private Nixon library, wrote critically in The Washington Times in 2009 of Tim’s decision to invite...Dean to speak at the library. In what seemed to me to be a fundamental misunderstanding of Naftali’s actions, she complained, “The question, though, nags: Why promote John Dean? Why does hostility toward Mr. Nixon continue unabated on the left?” My reaction was very different. I didn’t see the invitation to Dean as promoting him but merely one of providing an opportunity for one of many players in historical events to speak at the library. And of course, having once been mistaken for a liberal by Nixon’s side, I shook my head at the use of terms such as hostility and “the left.”

I'm the one who publicly lodged that accusation against Krusten, who campaigned for Nixon in 1968, when she was 17, and voted for him four years later. I've since apologized.

Another Naftali critic, writing on the foundation's blog, called on him to go run a museum honoring Alger Hiss (above), who was a Soviet communist agent. Crude as it was, the comment helped clarify the factors that rendered Naftali's critics impotent in the last battle of Watergate.

First up is the sheer injustice of the smear. Naftali is an empiricist and a civil libertarian who loves his country and would despise a traitor like Hiss. Author of a respectful biography of George H.W. Bush, Naftali presents, as Nixon usually did, as a non-ideological moderate and foreign policy realist. He and Nixon would probably have found relatively little to disagree about in either domestic or international affairs.

The Hiss smear did have one obvious salutary outcome. It motivated Krusten, a knowledgeable insider with strong ties in the archival community, especially at the National Archives, to start her blog to provide Naftali with rearguard support in Washington as he researched, wrote, and defended the library's new Watergate exhibit.

Another irony of the ideology-based campaign of Naftali's critics is that most writers in the first wave of Nixon revisionism in the 1980s, especially when it came to his domestic policies, were moderates or liberals. When I first recommended Naftali to the then-archivist of the U.S., Allen Weinstein, as the first federal library director, it wasn't because of his views about Nixon but because, as one of the brightest Cold War experts of his generation, he would take Nixon seriously, no matter where the massive record he left behind led scholars. The case is often made that a presidential library director should like or love the president in question. I'd say it's the job of the president's family and friends to care about him. It's the federal director's job to care about history.

Historical inquiry certainly hasn't been the strong suit of the lower-echelon, non-policy White House aides now controlling Nixon's foundation. Instead, they've devoted much of their energy to trying to rehabilitate their mentor Haldeman, muzzle their enemy Dean, and keep the museum-going public from seeing brand-new videos in which their friends Fred Malek and Dwight Chapin discuss counting Jews in the federal government and Nixon's alleged involvement in dirty tricks. But the restoration of Nixon's legacy will ask something more of his advocates than tending 40-year-old grudges and alliances. Too bad Nixon's foundation has just apparently cut itself off from the one institution, the former Nixon Center, which devoted itself not to refighting old wars but applying Nixon's principles to help keep the U.S. from becoming overextended in new ones.

Third, Nixon operatives with ties and interests in the Reagan and Bush-Cheney camps may not grasp how far the GOP has drifted from 37's centrist moorings. If few Republicans outside the pressure cooker of the Haldeman alums' mutual admiration society were willing to join them in denouncing Naftali as a leftist, it may be because some of them have decided that Nixon was one, too.

Fourth, while Nixon's red-baiting was generally rooted in substance, the Naftali critics' left-baiting was just the result of his allegedly not being devoted to Nixon. And yet it's easy even for his friends to admire Nixon's qualities of mind and heart and his peacemaking achievements and still be disappointed by his failures and errors. There's not much resonance anywhere, left, right, or center, for a purist position on our most controversial modern president.

Instead, Nixon legacy building will be generational, arc-of-history stuff, the work of many decades, as he himself understood. It will grow out of careful study of his times, policies, and temperament by scholars rather than maneuvers by operatives whose reputations may be just as weighted down by Watergate as his without being buoyed by anything like his brilliance and dogged vision.

Finally, Haldeman's men claimed to be fighting a battle for Nixon's reputation that was actually lost years ago. Ask the average fifth grader what she knows about Nixon (I have, many times), and she'll usually say Watergate. Like it or not, he's taken that hit. If his library tried to cover it up with a whitewashed museum, most visitors would know it. When they see Naftali's all-in exhibit, most of them will say, "I already knew about that." Why spend months battling an exhibit that does nothing to worsen Nixon's reputation? If we're confident about how history will ultimately view him, we needn't fear people knowing the truth about the trip to China, the break-in at the Watergate, or anything in between.

Naftali's foes may have thought they could end the left-wing threat by bringing what they took to be their political savvy and insider contacts to bear. But for all these reasons and perhaps others, they didn't get much if any traction. So John Dean gave his speech. Tim Naftali opened his Watergate exhibit. And now it's pretty clear who's in charge at the Nixon library.

The Naftali Doctrine

That's Kathy O'Connor, President Nixon's last chief of staff, with his brother Edward and our Nixon foundation friend Ric Leczel this morning after ceremonies marking the opening of the new Watergate gallery at the Nixon library.

Ed was stooping to stay in the frame. The Watergate opening is standing tall as a national story. Follow the links to the LA Times (Chris Goffard's first take), Orange County Register, Associated Press, USA Today, Washington Post, and ABC News -- where, if the story makes the evening news, it will be introduced or reported by former Nixon aide Diane Sawyer. The AP's Michael Blood favored me with a quotation as follows:

John Taylor, who worked for Nixon after he left the White House and helped design the original exhibit, said it was difficult for those who revere Nixon to deal with Watergate. He said the content in the new exhibit made him uncomfortable but with the passage of time, "you can hear the truth, you can accept the truth and you can learn from the truth."

"In the next 50 years America is going to answer the question, what is the sentence that goes with Mr. Nixon?" Taylor said. "Is it, he went to China, or that he quit? For that to be a fair dialogue, this day had to happen."

Kathy and I went to work trying to get the private Nixon library into the federal system in the mid-1990s. Nixon family members desiring a richer settlement from a lawsuit torpedoed our first effort in 1996-97. We finally succeeded in 2007 -- well, we plus $1 million for some blue-chip lobbyists.

That still left the matter of our polemical 1990 Watergate gallery, which had outlived its usefulness, as often happens at first-generation presidential museums that have to grapple with unpleasant or controversial events. Today's unveiling of a stunningly presented, federally anointed replacement was a tribute to Cold War historian and exhibit curator Tim Naftali as well as to two archivists of the U.S., Allen Weinstein (shown signing the handover papers in 2007) and David Ferriero. Ferriero in particular withstood considerable pressure from the Nixon-Bob Haldeman aides who took control of Nixon's foundation as Naftali was conducting his painstaking work.

At today's ceremony, attended by 200 federal library staffers and loyal volunteers (that's Kathy with docents Connie Mesko and Gloria Norton), both Ferriero and his deputy, Sharon Fawcett, amply praised Naftali's professionalism and integrity. Kathy and I were especially pleased to hear that, having gotten him into these often treacherous straits in the first place. Today's mountaintop moment after two difficult years had Naftali waxing prophetic in his eloquent prepared remarks, praising the durability of the U.S. system when one of the three branches abuses its power and suggesting that all presidential libraries should exhibit curatorial as well as archival integrity and openness.

While the Naftali doctrine should be given close attention by Ferriero and his colleagues whenever principles of good practice at presidential libraries are discussed, the structural difficulty with his approach is that a president's rich friends won't contribute millions to see a warts-and-all museum or indeed wart one. Read more about libraries and money here. Until now, NARA has put up with a generation or two of museum hagiography in exchange for warehouses for storing millions of pages of memos and letters as well as photos, gifts, and other artifacts. Now that the vital records of an eight-year administration can be stored on a few MacBooks, will presidential libraries persist? Tune in in two years or six. If there is an Obama library and museum, you can bet that Roger Ailes and Sean Hannity will be howling for curatorial integrity and openness as strenuously as any Nixon critic ever did.

While I have a pretty good idea what's in the Watergate gallery thanks to the background at nixonlibrary.gov, I look forward to spending a quiet afternoon with the massive interactive exhibit, walking that long, hard road with 37. I'll be especially interested to learn who won the argument between Naftali and Nixon's White House men over whether the museum-going, taxpaying public has been permitted to hear substantial excerpts from oral history interviews with Naftali in which Dwight Chapin, Fred Malek, and others discuss dirty tricks, counting Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other discouraging moments from an era when a peace-making, partisan warrior of president, caught in the maelstrom of a war he didn't start, mediated between his dreams and demons.

In any event, it was high time for the Nixon library, now in its 21st year, to grow up and accept that the judgment of history, no matter how it comes out for Nixon, lies beyond the reach of advocacy by family, friends, consultants, and especially those whose own reputations hang in the balance alongside the president they served, often honorably but sometimes, as this new exhibit shows, not.
Above photo, showing Nixon library director Tim Naftali briefing the media on the Watergate gallery, is by Jebb Harris of the Orange County Register.

Chapin Away At The Truth

The Nixon foundation's campaign against the Nixon library's new Watergate exhibit became public in an Aug. 6, 2010 New York Times article. The foundation has now published a portion of its 132-page complaint, dated Aug. 2. Among other things, Nixon's White House aides criticize library director Tim Naftali's use of his oral history interviews with, well, Nixon's White House aides, including some involved in Watergate or Watergate-related activities.

Naftali's subjects all signed gift and release forms, which the foundation described as follows:

We note that the “Gift” document conveys the interview to NARA “for eventual deposit” with NARA and that the Donor’s wish is that the “Interview be made available for research as soon as possible, and to the fullest extent possible, following its deposit with NARA."

The foundation's argument is that even though the interviewees agreed that their comments should be made available to researchers and scholars to the fullest extent possible, they shouldn't have been been available to Naftali, the researcher and scholar whom the archivist of the United States asked to assemble a Watergate exhibit. The foundation refers to Naftali's proposed exhibit videos as "snippets" and "brief excerpts."

I guess it depends on what you mean by snippet. The videos and White House tape segments which Naftali had chosen for the exhibit have been available for months at nixonlibrary.gov. Among them is a two-minute, 40-second super-snippet in which Dwight Chapin, who organized dirty tricks for the 1972 Nixon campaign, claims that President Nixon was present when Chapin was ordered to ramp up. Chapin says:

One day the buzzer goes off, and I go into the president’s office, and he’s sitting there with [chief of staff Bob] Haldeman. And they say, “Do you know—“ -- by they, Bob says it, the president’s sitting there – “Do you know anyone who can do Dick Tuck-type stuff? We should have somebody like that.”

Chapin describes hiring Donald Segretti, his USC roommate, and arranging for Nixon's personal attorney, Herb Kalmbach, to pay him. Chapin continues:

I gave [Segretti] some direction. I aimed him at [Democratic candidates] Muskie…[and] Humphrey…He went and innovated and did whatever he did…I never questioned this, because to me, Dick Tuck had always been— This had been part of what I had grown up with….Their request to have a Dick Tuck type-guy was not that insane of an idea. Now you can look at it and say, “You mean to tell me the president of the United States is sitting in his office with his chief of staff; you’re coming in there; and they’re talking about dirty tricks stuff and there’s a Vietnam war and why the hell aren’t they running the war and why are they focused on this stuff?” Can’t answer that. I mean, we had all been in campaigns. Nixon had always had this little rinky-dink crap pulled on him….I don’t know what prompted it that made them buzz me in there, but I went in, that’s what they asked me to do, and that’s what I did. It’s not a good excuse, but that’s what I did.

Watch the video here. Chapin's charge is explosive. During the long months of Watergate in 1973-74, Senate, House, and special prosecutor investigators tried but failed to obtain evidence of Nixon's direct involvement in arranging campaign dirty tricks.

It's also important to remember that Chapin did federal time for perjury. He doesn't say when he was buzzed into Nixon's office, but if it was after February 1971, when the taping system was installed, then the conversation would've been recorded. No such tape has turned up so far, except Chapin and Naftali's. When the new Watergate exhibit is unveiled on Thursday, it will be interesting to see whether those now controlling Nixon's foundation have managed to persuade the National Archives to withhold Chapin's interview and, perhaps, others (such as White House aide Fred Malek's unrepentant conversation with Naftali about counting the number of Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

If Chapin himself has had second thoughts about his late hit on Nixon, he was well positioned to have an influence on the exhibit's final contents. We also learn from the foundation's Aug. 2 memo that a member of the five-person task force brought on board to critique Naftali's work was none other than Dwight Chapin.

Exit The Valkyries And Richard Nixon

My two concerns about Libya, stated better by others. First, Jacob Heilbrunn on the roots of the Iraq and Libyan wars:

Contrary to popular opinion, the Iraq War was not simply the product of neoconservatives. It was also championed by liberal hawks. An alliance between the two factions propelled the debate forward. It was forged in Bosnia, welded together by Iraq, then seemed to fall apart as the liberal hawks went AWOL. Now the liberal hawks have returned with a vengeance....

[I]f the venture goes south, Obama knows squarely where to stick the blame. [Hillary] Clinton, [Samantha] Power, and [Susan] Rice have taken their biggest gamble. The liberal hawks and neocons may well have prepared a new foreign policy disaster should Libya devolve into tribal warfare. And so this is a crucible for the idea of humanitarian intervention. If it fails, the liberal hawks will return to ignominy. At least until the next crisis erupts.

And "HuffPo" on President Obama's poor consultation with Congress. I'd raise my hand on that one as well. I definitely feel insufficiently consulted with, principally because the U.S. hasn't mentioned one vital U.S. interest to explain its decision to go to war in Libya. Obama actually veered in the direction of rash overstatement when he said Friday that Qaddafi was a risk to "global peace and security." That reminds me of George W. Bush stressing WMD instead of his freedom agenda in justifying the Iraq war. For his turn, Obama used strategic rhetoric to justify a humanitarian war.

It's important to give worthy motives their due. Perhaps Obama really fears a Libyan genocide. He's mentioned Muammar Qaddafi's "no mercy" rhetoric at least twice. George Will said yesterday that we've intervened in a civil war in a tribal society we don't understand. Fair enough, but if President Clinton had intervened in Rwanda in 1994, Will probably would've said exactly the same thing, and we might have saved a few hundred thousand lives nonetheless. If Obama or anyone else has evidence that Libya is different than a hundred civil wars before it that didn't lead to genocide, we should see it.

In suggesting that Libya is just a bleeding heart war, like the Washington Post and New York Times before him, Heilbrunn can't resist stressing the divide between, in his estimation, the pro-war "Valkyries" and Obama's more cautious male advisers. The mama grizzlies, this line suggests, were more attuned than the male grouchies to the potential f0r massive civilian casualties.

But if you're afraid of a repeat of Rwanda, as the secretary of state and President Clinton reportedly were, then gender has nothing to do with it. Yet Heilbrunn and the other gender-fixated reporters and analysts seem to be suggesting that women are more likely to commit our volunteer forces out of the goodness of their hearts, even in situations where civilians are at risk but U.S. interests aren't. That's pretty much tantamount to saying women aren't ready to be president, which, I don't think, Heilbrunn and the others really mean.

Actually, I'd put this all down to lazy journalism and a lapse of good taste. Richard Nixon, Bob Haldeman, and Fred Malek were, I trust, the last to count Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nobody would write anymore that a president's African-American advisers had lined up against his white ones. It's also time to stop categorizing presidential advisers by gender.

That shortcoming aside, Heilbrunn and others are providing essential commentary, rooted in principles of Nixonian pragmatism, at The National Interest, published by the Center Formerly Known As Nixon. The Nixon Center's experts did the same after Sept. 11 and during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

But today, the Nixon legacy is silent. "nixoncenter.org" is now inoperative. The web site of its blandeloquent successor, "The Center for the National Interest," though promised last week, is still nowhere to be found. There's also not a word on Libya from Nixon's foundation in Yorba Linda, now controlled by lower-echelon, non-policy Nixon-Haldeman operatives.

On March 10, James Joyner stuck up for the former Nixon Center's decision to throw its founder and namesake over the side. Joyner thinks Watergate and the bigoted comments on Nixon's tapes make it hard to operate a foreign policy center in his name.

I don't buy it. Without his name and personal endorsement, the Center wouldn't have attracted the funding and star power to get started in the first place. That was because Nixon was internationally acknowledged as a course changer, in the words of one top supporter, whose foreign policy principles, at once hard-nosed and enlightened, would have permanent salience in the post-Cold War world. As Joyner himself admits, Nixon was "a giant of American foreign policy [whose] vision looks all the better in hindsight, in a town where neoconservatives and liberal interventionists seem to see no affliction in the world that is not worthy of American military intervention."

Eerily, Joyner wrote that a little over a week before the Libyan war. We need Nixon's vision in foreign policy now more than ever. But his friends in Washington and Yorba Linda had other plans.

Public Museum, Private Interests

Writing at an archivists' forum about the reorganization of the National Archives, historian and former Nixon Project archivist Maarja Krusten reads the tea leaves at The Episconixonian:

John Taylor doesn't sound optimistic about [Nixon library director] Tim Naftali getting his Watergate exhibit up. He wrote at his blog yesterday that "So far, the new exhibit at the federal Nixon library has evidently been blocked by friends and former White House colleagues of [Fred] Malek and [Dwight] Chapin who now control Nixon's foundation."

Despite the considerable pressures on Naftali, I actually do feel guardedly optimistic about his chances. I also feel rueful that NARA official Sharon Fawcett and I saddled him with the task of interpreting Watergate and Watergate-related activities at a presidential library where the affiliated private foundation is now run or influenced by some who were directly involved. Knowing what Naftali originally planned to include in the exhibit, I and others will be studying it carefully when it finally does open, to find out what hidden interests have permitted taxpayers to see in a federally run museum.

Bob Woodward, Me, And Nixon's "Nonsense"

As she writes this morning at NixoNARA, historian Maarja Krusten was still working at the National Archives' Washington-area Nixon Project in 1988 when journalist Bob Woodward came looking for details about the investigation President Richard Nixon had ordered years before into how many Jews were working for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It was the last year of the Reagan administration. The Nixon aide who received and followed the order, Fred Malek (above), was up for a top GOP job. I was then Nixon's post-presidential chief of staff. After the story by Woodward and his Washington Post colleague, Walter Pincus, was published, I wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Times accusing the Post of recycling a story that Woodward and Carl Bernstein had first reported many years before in their book The Final Days.

The afternoon my article appeared, Woodward called me. While he said that he hadn't recalled the reference to White House Jew-counting in The Final Days until he read my article, he insisted that Malek's prominence in party circles made it news once again. He also questioned my labored contention that Nixon's obsession with Jews could be entirely accounted for by his obsession with liberals.

When I asked Woodward if he thought Nixon was anti-Semitic, he said, "I don't know." As for Malek, he told the Post in 1988 that Nixon's fears about a cabal of Jews manipulating economic statistics to his detriment were "ridiculous" and "nonsense." But more recently, as Krusten notes, Nixon library director Tim Naftali couldn't get Malek to repeat his criticisms on camera:

Malek comes across better to me in what he told Woodward in 1988 than in Ben Stein’s “Leave Fred Malek alone” column in 2010 (shades of “Leave Britney Alone”) or in the oral history interview he later gave [to Naftali] on the BLS matter. (I’ve described Malek’s stance in the latter as “no harm, no foul.”) Yet Malek had more at stake, as he was being considered in 1988 for chairman of the Republican National Committee.

According to an on-line catalog at nixonlibrary.gov, Malek's interview with Naftali is among those to be included the new Nixon library Watergate exhibit. It also features convicted perjurer Dwight Chapin's dramatic charge that Nixon was present when Chapin (right) was ordered to set up a dirty tricks operation for the 1972 presidential campaign.

So far, the new exhibit at the federal Nixon library has evidently been blocked by friends and former White House colleagues of Malek and Chapin who now control Nixon's foundation.

Bring On The Nixon Psychobiographers!

Richard Nixon, who strenuously resisted introspection, despised nothing more than so-called psychobiography, which combined the traditional historical method with speculation about subjects' hidden (even to themselves) motivations. As far as I can tell, that kind of history has gone mainstream, as it probably should have. Leaders are far more than the sum of their memoranda, especially ones as emotionally reserved and complicated as Nixon. Politics probably couldn't have been an unhappier choice for someone of his driven but painfully introverted temperament. Yet he felt called to make a difference, and his powers of solitary concentration and focus enabled him to envision foreign policy moves that made the world safer for billions of people.

Some insiders' insights from historian and former Nixon tapes archivist Maarja Krusten's new blog, NixoNARA. First, from one of Maarja's latest posts:

[I]n Nixon’s approach to issues as a student, a candidate, a president, and a creator of government records, we see...what has become an all-too-familiar refrain, “they’re against us, we won’t be treated fairly, try to out maneuver or crush them.” Ironically, more openness to reflection, and a willingness to consider data rather than relying so heavily on emotivism—a sense that archivists as civil servants would not treat his records fairly–would have made it much easier for him and for the National Archives.

Was his suspicion of civil servants -- not just archivists but members of the diplomatic and intelligence services -- a function of temperament or philosophy? Probably a little of both. Like many during the Cold War, Nixon had a Manichean view of the struggle between freedom and communism. At home, in the political and policy arenas, he saw everything (literally) as a matter of right vs. left. Since civil servants tended to be liberal, it seems not to have been much a stretch for Nixon to conclude that, knowingly or unknowingly, they were participating, if only in a tangential or a symbolic way, in the global communist project. A natural consequence of their ideological bias, in his view, was their hostility to him, the hated persecutor of Alger Hiss.

Getting to know them better would've enabled a more accurate view, but Nixon's introversion ruled that out. I take exception with those such as Rick Perlstein who focus on Nixon's alleged class resentments. Like many introverts, he resented those who were more socially adept than he, which, in politics, was just about everyone, no matter what side of the tracks they came from. He'd always tell us that socializing was a waste of time, but the real issue was that he didn't enjoy it, because it was exhausting. Instead, he spent a considerable amount of time alone, reading, thinking, planning, deciding, and accomplishing.

And yet there's no question about the unfortunate consequences of Nixon's corrosive assumptions about civil servants. In a comment at Maarja's blog, the former head of the Nixon tape processing unit, Fred Graboske, writes:

Our tapes processing staff held widely-ranging political views. Some, such as Maarja and I, were Republicans. Others were Democrats, some Independent, some agnostic, and one was a Socialist. I saw no evidence that anyone’s personal views of Nixon, or general political views, affected their archival work. President Nixon believed that the civil service was predominantly Democrat in its views (probably correct) and that it consequently attempted to sabotage his programs (not correct). If Nixon had understood this, he could have spared himself some grief during his Presidency...

The nadir of Nixon's cold war against federal bureaucrats was his asking one of his aides, Fred Malek, to count the number of Jews working in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where, Nixon had decided, liberal officials were purposely skewing data to hurt the administration. First he had another aide, Larry Higby, make sure Malek wasn't Jewish. The unsavory episode is described in the upcoming Nixon library Watergate exhibit that's been opposed by Nixon's White House aides.

About the worst excesses of Nixon and his men, another NixonNARA commentator, historian and blogger Jeremy C. Young (shown here), says this:

To be fair, had Nixon possessed “more openness to reflection, and a willingness to consider data rather than relying so heavily on emotivism,” he probably wouldn’t have done the things that make his aides so sensitive to the publicizing of his papers. Gerald Ford, a man possessed of a very similar political worldview to Nixon’s, committed none of Nixon’s sins and was accordingly unconcerned with the publication of his official papers.

Ford also committed none of Nixon's political and policy breakthroughs. He would probably have finished his career as House minority leader if Nixon hadn't turned to him in 1973 as the choice for vice president that would be least offensive to the most U.S. senators. Also thanks to his inoffensiveness, he ended up as the right president for the aftermath of Watergate. But it's hard to imagine him (or Ronald Reagan for that matter) functioning as effectively as Nixon did in the first four years of his presidency -- for starters, transforming relations with the Soviets and the Chinese and the conduct of the Vietnam war.

Nixon's Men And Right And Wrong

Maarja Krusten explores the nuances that emerge from the on-line background material Nixon library director Tim Naftali assembled for the library's new Watergate exhibit, which was opposed by his former White House aides:

One of the topics captured in video interviews is Nixon’s effort while president to remove some civil service officials from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). A bureau official had angered the president due to the way his unit released some unemployment statistics. The topic and its handling offer many lessons on multiple levels. For one thing, while Nixon was alive, his representatives blocked NARA in 1987 from opening a White House document which read, “”everyone in BLS is Jewish look at all sensitive areas ck. Jewish involvement . . . esp. uncover Jewish cells & put a non-Jew in chg of each.” Only after Nixon died did NARA release that note to the public. In considering the current controversy over the Watergate exhibit, keep in mind that a key piece of evidence of Nixon’s mindset remained unavailable for consideration by scholars for 10 years, despite being marked by NARA for release in 1987.

And then there is the contrast between two of the former Nixon White House officials whom Naftali interviewed for the BLS section of the proposed Watergate exhibit. (The video clips are available on the Nixon Presidential Library’s site.) The two men – Charles Colson and Fred Malek – provide a contrast between two cultures, one more capable of learning and introspection than the other, in my view. Colson admits that Nixon sometimes issued directives to him that he knew were wrong. Malek largely shrugs and says of Nixon’s request that he identify Jews at the Bureau, no harm, no foul.

Malek is at left, Colson at right.

Nixon in '12

Via Palin and Malek, says Andrew Sullivan.

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.