Two Crises

Noting that the Romney campaign has not yet disseminated a "crisis narrative" as part of the process of humanizing its somewhat mysterious candidate, Sheryl Gay Stolberg obliges with an article describing his reaction to an auto accident in France in 1968, when he was serving as an LDS missionary, and Ann Romney's MS diagnosis 14 yeas ago. Age 21 at the time of the accident, in which a friend was killed, Romney was already cultivating cool:

“Mitt was deeply enmeshed in thinking about leadership,” said Douglas D. Anderson, a friend who is dean of the business school at Utah State University. “He developed a very early set of core beliefs and values that had to do with being cool under pressure, that had to do with looking for opportunities where others saw threats, that had to do with being analytical and somewhat detached in order to look at reality the way it is, rather than how it is being perceived by people who are driven by the hysteria of the moment.

“And out of that,” Dr. Anderson went on, “came a pattern of living that was reinforced by events like that critical accident in France.”

How Nixonian. Otherwise uninterested in introspection, 37 eagerly plumbed his crisis narrative and even wrote a book about it, Six Crises. He was acutely aware of his reactions to political and even mortal emergencies, bragging that he stayed calm and rational when others panicked. He applied the same discipline to a president's loneliest work -- making life-and-death decisions when his smartest advisers wildly disagreed with one another. Long before George W. Bush called himself "the decider," Nixon talked about "the April 30 decision" and "the May 8 decision," when he announced that he was sending troops into Cambodia in 1970 and B-52s to attack Hanoi and Haiphong in 1972.

Once he'd given himself enough time to decide, undecide, and redecide, as his aide and friend Ray Price called it, he rarely second-guessed himself. Soon after I'd joined Nixon's former president's staff, one morning in 1981 he wandered down the hall from his office in 26 Federal Plaza in New York, without a word handed me a copy of his memoirs with one of his business cards marking the May 8 section, and disappeared again. Media reports suggest that while making decisions about how to battle al-Qaeda and whether to send a team to find and kill Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama has brought the same steely qualities to bear.

Nixon didn't always keep his passions under control. He often felt far more deeply than he let on, and he came to regret some of the decisions he made when he was feeling angry or resentful. It would have been better if he'd occasionally delved deeper, according to the theory that the feelings we fully own are less apt to control us. But in addition to his severe introversion and shyness, Nixon had that World War II-Great Depression generation reticence going on.

Stolberg describes Romney as rarely bringing up personal matters and as having a charitable if not an empathetic temperament. "Mitt Romney will never disgrace the office," Anderson told her. "He will set an example of moral rectitude. But don't expect him to sit down and feel your pain." People do want a president who cares, especially in a country where everyone isn't white, male, straight, and rich. But a leader's inner process, including the ability to be unemotional and occasionally ruthless, is even more important.

The New Paternalism

Andrew Sullivan sticks up for Nixon speechwriter, presidential candidate, and pundit Pat Buchanan, fired this week by MSNBC:

Sixteen years ago, when I came out as HIV-positive and quit [The New Republic's] editorship, Buchanan, who had sparred relentlessly in public with me over gay equality, wrote me a personal hand-written note. He wrote he was saddened by what he heard - which was then regarded as an imminent death sentence - and wanted to say how he would pray that I would survive, if only so we could continue to argue and fight and debate for many more years. He was one of only two Washingtonians who did such a thing. I was moved beyond words. But he knew I loved a good argument as well. Over a gulf of ideological and philosophical difference, we could debate reasonably.

He's a complicated man and I will not defend for a second his views on many things. But he is also a compassionate and decent man in private and an honest intellectual in public. It says everything about the polarization of our discourse and the evolution of cable news into rival sources of propaganda that this ornery figure, still churning out ideas and books while others his age are well in retirement, is now banished.

For shame. Another step backward from real debate on cable "news".

Buchanan is indeed gracious in person, as I can attest from his and Shelley's periodic visits to the Nixon library when I was director. I haven't read the book that angered MSNBC, but I'm well aware of the broad outlines of his sometimes bizarre thinking -- diversity is hurting the United States, the U.S. shouldn't have have entered World War II, it would be better if we could return to the social and cultural conditions he remembers from his 1950s boyhood in Washington, D.C. He's also accused of antisemitism and excessively harsh criticism of Israel's allies in the U.S., although on this question his often-derided views about Jewish influence on our media and politics don't differ dramatically from those of Palestinians' advocates in progressive circles.

It's also important to remember his opposition to the Iraq war, a classic if lonely expression of conservative isolationism. Although in her memoirs Condi Rice makes a respectable case for the Bush administration's process in the run-up to war in 2003, I'm still not sure Buchanan was wrong.

I don't defend his more noxious views, which Howard Kurtz wrote had become too "radioactive" for a cable network that Kurtz says has moved sharply left, as it evidently grasps for Fox News' intellectual near-irrelevancy. It's funny Kurtz used that word. In the early 1980s I was part of a Nixon team reading through White House files to flag documents we felt should be kept secret on privacy and other grounds. The same adjective occurred to us as we read some of Buchanan's pugnacious prose on the antiwar movement and class politics, foundational expressions of what later became known as the culture wars. As I recall, I wrote a letter that Nixon signed and sent to Buchanan saying jokingly that he needn't worry, because we'd buried his memos in lead-lined drums under the National Archives. Of course Nixon also got memos from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ray Price, and other more moderate advisers and aides. He usually wanted to hear all perspectives on difficult questions before he made up his mind. On other occasions, such as when Buchanan was writing for Vice President Spiro Agnew, Nixon let Pat's right-wing freak flag fly. Here Buchanan seems to be quoting Agnew reading a script by Buchanan.

I also concur with Sullivan that one needn't agree with Buchanan to oppose his firing. Chris Matthews, who expressed regret about his bosses' move, isn't an apologist for racism, antisemitism, or homophobia. He's an advocate for vigorous debate as a hallmark of a healthy democracy. The man who fired Buchanan, Phil Griffin, exhibits more authoritarian impulses, believing that his views "should [not] be part of the national dialog." That reminds me of another example of the annoying new paternalism among our cultural and political elites: Rick Santorum saying that contraception is "not okay" and that as president he'd try to limit its availability. What happened to media tycoons and politicians who gave us credit for thinking for ourselves?

Groovin' Up Slowly

Whenever I hear two songs in a row on the radio by the same artist, I still wonder if somebody died. On the evening of Dec. 8, 1980, WNEW-FM, then New York City's flagship rock station, played a long John Lennon block. Then the DJ (had they brought in the legendary Scott Muni that dark night? I can't quite recall) said that Lennon had been murdered outside his and Yoko Ono's apartment building at 72nd St. and Central Park West.

By then, I'd been working for former President Nixon for three months in his office in 26 Federal Plaza. The next day I typed out a few pages saying that Lennon and the 37th president, as prophets of peace, had been toiling in different sections of the same vineyard. Yes, it was impossibly callow. Among other things, my essay overlooked the FBI's surveillance of Lennon during the Vietnam war, though I probably got in a lick or two about the naivete of Lennon's facile if heartfelt peace talk.

Two of Nixon's more senior aides, Paul Bateman and Ray Price, wisely induced me not to submit it to the Village Voice, which had been my plan. But when someone else wrote to the Voice saying that if a Beatle had to get shot, too bad it wasn't Paul McCartney, I did submit a letter taking umbrage, which, as I recall, was published. Another letter to the Voice around the same time said in its entirety: "Imagine John Lennon with no possessions," which seemed churlish then and even more so now.

At Strawberry Fields, in Central Park right across from the Dakota, sitting crossed-legged and flashing the two-fisted peace sign appears to be de rigueur. Maybe there was something to the Nixon comparison, since tourists standing in the doorway of his chopper at the Nixon library do pretty much the same thing. When Kathy and I visited the Lennon memorial on Friday, it was more moving than ever. To have just recorded tunes as sweet as "Woman" and "Watching the Wheels," to have been so contentedly in love, to have one of the greatest rock and roll voices ever (think "Twist and Shout" and "Yer Blues"), and to die at 40. You get to be my age, and the poignancy and tragedy definitely creep up on you. Come together, right now!

I first posted this on September 26, 2009.

"Everybody Ought To Shut Up"

Though the Obama campaign was famous for its imperturbability and also its discipline when it came to dealings with the media, the Obama White House's private deliberations about an important national security question are essentially being conducted in public as weekly and sometimes daily stories are leaked purporting to represent the mind of the President and his advisers. If this is by design as far as the White House is concerned, it doesn't appeal to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, former director of the CIA and a former NSC adviser in his own right. On a flight to Wisconsin yesterday, Gates said he was appalled by the leaking and hinted he would fire Pentagon leakers if he finds them (Who you gonna call?: The Plumbers). He added, "Everybody ought to just shut up."

The New York Times, which reported Gates' outburst, is also carrying this story, in which we learn that the ambassador to Afghanistan, retired Army Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, sent a cable to Washington opposing sending more U.S. troops, as requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, for fear that the Afghan regime will become too dependent on the U.S. for security. It seems likely that Eikenberry, who has advanced degrees from Stanford and Harvard, is remembering the deepening of South Vietnam's dependency on the U.S. that occurred after President Ngo Dinh Diem was murdered with our acquiescence in 1962 and President Johnson massively escalated our military involvement in 1965.

As we already know, Vietnam is also on the mind of the U.S. commander in Afghanistan. The Times article hints that McChrystal took Eikenberry to the woodshed, getting him to soften his stance in subsequent cables. During a meeting in Kabul, according to the Times:

General McChrystal did not refer to the cable directly, but specifically challenged General Eikenberry’s conclusions, according to one official familiar with the meeting. General McChrystal, he said, said that no alternatives had been offered besides “the helicopter on the roof of the embassy,” a reference to the hasty American withdrawal from Saigon in 1975.

It's a pregnant analogy. It suggests that McChrystal fears another U.S. humiliation if we withdraw hastily and also, knowing the ruthlessness of the Taliban, that he has a pretty good idea of the fate that would likely befall anyone in Afghanistan associated with the U.S. intervention. Obviously Obama wants to avoid both that outcome as well as the kind of lavish, open-ended commitment that would essentially turn Afghanistan into a U.S. protectorate. All the news accounts make clear that this is the line he's trying to walk.

It's a fascinating challenge for a President: Believing he has the opportunity to make a discerning decision that takes Vietnam's lessons into account without being obsessed with them. One lesson he should not neglect is Lyndon Johnson's own unavailing efforts to control a fluid and unpredictable military and political environment by his daily micromanagement of the Vietnam war. Once Obama finishes agonizing, he had better get out of the way.

As I've said before, I'm glad Obama is taking his time on the policy reappraisal. But Gates is right about the leaks. They are beginning to make the President look silly and even weak. For instance:

At a National Security Council meeting on Wednesday...Mr. Obama picked up on General Eikenberry’s arguments about growing Afghan dependence, according to a senior official. The president, he said, was far more assertive than in previous sessions, pressing his advisers about the wisdom of four proposals for adding troops. The change in his tone, from listening to challenging, was palpable, officials said.

Next they'll be counting the number of times he arches his eyebrows. This sounds like a Biden dove trying to demonstrate to the press and public that the Clinton hawks are losing favor with the prince. Once I would've thought that someone authoritative was trying to signal what the President was really thinking, but it appears that the White House may just be incompetent, at least in this area. While Obama takes his responsibilities in this weightiest of matters seriously, those around him may not take them seriously enough to enable him to do his deciding, undeciding, and redeciding (as Ray Price used to say about RN) in private. For Presidents, Hamlet is not a good paradigm.

Safire Goes Out

The sad news comes from Washington of the death of one of President Nixon's legendary triumvirate of first-string speechwriters, William Safire, at the age of 79. While a line between two points is too simple a metaphor for these unique talents, Safire tended to occupy the middle ground between Ray Price and Pat Buchanan. His Nixon affiliation ranged from 1959 (where he actually snapped the most famous picture of the so-called kitchen debate between Vice President Nixon and the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev; note Leonid Brezhnev, who would unseat Khrushchev five years later, over RN's shoulder) until the early 2000s, when he played a behind-the-scenes role during some of the ups and downs in the Nixon extended family.

At least as famous for his punditry as his politics, he wrote op-ed and language columns for the New York Times for over 30 years. In his affectionate obit, veteran Timesman Robert D. McFadden demonstrated how Safire could combine the politically pugilistic and philological:

Mr. Safire called Hillary Clinton a “congenital liar” in print. Mrs. Clinton said she was offended only for her mother’s sake. But a White House aide said that Bill Clinton, “if he were not president, would have delivered a more forceful response on the bridge of Mr. Safire’s nose.”

Mr. Safire was delighted, especially with the proper use of the conditional.

Groovin' Up Slowly

Whenever I hear two songs in a row on the radio by the same artist, I still wonder if somebody died. On the evening of Dec. 8, 1980, WNEW-FM, then New York City's flagship rock station, played a long John Lennon block. Then the DJ (had they brought in the legendary Scott Muni that dark night? I can't quite recall) said that Lennon had been murdered outside his and Yoko Ono's apartment building at 72nd St. and Central Park West.

By then, I'd been working for former President Nixon for three months in his office in 26 Federal Plaza. The next day I typed out a few pages saying that Lennon and the 37th President, as prophets of peace, had been toiling in different sections of the same vineyard. Yes, it was impossibly callow. Among other things, my essay overlooked the FBI's surveillance of Lennon during the Vietnam war, though I probably got in a lick or two about the naivete of Lennon's facile if heartfelt peace talk.

Two of RN's more senior aides, Paul Bateman and the legendary Ray Price, wisely induced me not to submit it to the Village Voice, which had been my plan. But when someone else wrote to the Voice saying that if a Beatle had to get shot, too bad it wasn't Paul McCartney, I did submit a letter taking umbrage, which, as I recall, was published. Another letter to the Voice around the same time said in its entirety: "Imagine John Lennon with no possessions," which seemed churlish then and even more so now.

At Strawberry Fields, in Central Park right across from the Dakota, sitting crossed-legged and flashing the two-fisted peace sign appears to be de rigueur. Maybe there was something to the Nixon comparison, since tourists standing in the doorway of RN's chopper at the Nixon Library do pretty much the same thing. When Kathy and I visited the Lennon memorial on Friday, it was more moving than ever. To have just recorded tunes as sweet as "Woman" and "Watching the Wheels," to have been so contentedly in love, to have one of the greatest rock and roll voices ever (think "Twist and Shout" and "Yer Blues"), and to die at 40. You get to be my age, and the poignancy and tragedy definitely creep up on you. Come together, right now!

"Sarah, You're No Nixon": Fineman

Months ago I outlined how Gov. Palin might become the new Nixon. It's not happening, writes Howard Fineman at "Newsweek," though he leaves a candle lit on the way out by saying that she should listen to Roger Ailes. My suggestion would be Ray Price.

Just Another Hollywood Nixon

At The Ticker, published by Baruch College in New York City, Alfonso Guerriero shares comments on "Frost/Nixon" from an authoritative source, Ray Price (shown at right in the photo with other members of RN's interview prep team, Diane Sawyer and Ken Khachigian; missing is The New Nixon's Frank Gannon, who was probably either playing the piano or taking the picture):

Price, 78, knew President Nixon for 27 years while working as one of his speechwriters. He wrote both of Nixon’s inauguration speeches, and he helped write Nixon’s resignation speech in 1974. When Nixon resigned from the presidency, Price continued being a loyal friend and collaborated with the president on two of his 10 books before Nixon’s death in 1994. He also helped Nixon prepare for Frost’s interviews, along with...Sawyer and other aides.

Price did not hesitate when offering his thoughts on Frost/Nixon and Frank Langella’s portrayal of the President saying, "[the film] grossly distorted the facts and reduced his character to a Hollywood caricature."