The Yorba Linda Plumbers

Co-author on the beach near Provincetown

On vacation last month in Cape Cod, I had the opportunity for extensive meetings with Richard Nixon's last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor, to discuss a book project we've been mulling for a while. You can probably guess the subject. O'Connor babysat Nixon's grandchildren, traveled with him to Russia and China, nursed him through a variety of crises and a couple of epic missteps, and held his hand when he died in 1994. I'll offer insights about 37 beginning at our first meeting in San Clemente in the spring of 1979 and ending when I oversaw his Yorba Linda funeral 15 years later. I also withstood his angry family and wrangled with the the feds over his tapes and other materials as Nixon library director and co-executor of his estate until 2009, two years after O'Connor and I had brought Nixon's wilderness-wandering black sheep of a private library into the federal system.

We have a lot to figure out when it comes to process and timing, focus and theme, what to include and leave out. What would even tempt us post-presidential Nixonites to combine our nearly 60 years of Nixonalia in one Nixo-narrative? We're married, for one thing, though that doesn't means it's wise to write a book together. I'll undoubtedly gain insights about gracious collaboration that will be useful in upcoming counseling sessions with couples being married at St. John's Episcopal Church.

All kidding aside, since we've been working together since the day after Labor Day in 1980, when she first buzzed me into Nixon's Foley Square offices under the eye of his Secret Services agents, I anticipate a joyful process of research and writing. We also look forward to reconnecting with the Nixon we knew and respected for his achievements and in spite of his massive failings. We spent tens of thousands of hours with him during the last 15 years of his life, when he had mellowed considerably without losing his keen interest in moderate GOP politics (which are now inoperative) and his desire to influence U.S. foreign policy, especially in China and Russia. There's no denying Watergate, the vulgar White House tapes, and his penchant for dirty tricks. But from the man who traveled the world without portfolio -- and after 1985, without Secret Service agents -- serving as an honest broker between his successors and their counterparts abroad, we gained a deep appreciation for the statesman who had left the world safer than he found it when he resigned in August 1974.

Nixon and Kissinger

Besides, Kathy and I have been doing the Nixon two-step for years, in speeches, at parties, and with friends. "Please," said a clergy buddy just last weekend over pasta in New York after our party of five had seen Tom Hanks and Courtney B. Vance in "Lucky Guy" (which beautifully evoked the 1980s New York we remember so well). "Please tell Nixon's last joke." Aw, shucks, I said. Demurring just for a moment can inspire the petitioner to order another bottle of wine, and so it was Saturday night. Many years ago, just a few months before Nixon died, he had taken Kathy, her assistant, and me to dinner at his hotel in Dana Point, California, where he'd encamped to finish what would be his last book. It was rewrite time, and Nixon and O'Connor had summoned me with my laptop. After a long day's work, he leaned forward in the booth in the disarmingly informal manner he assumed when out to dinner with friends and aides. "Bebe told me a new joke," he whispered. "Wanna hear it?" Did we ever.

Unindicted co-authors

But as for the joke, I''ll have to tell you later. Just to tantalize you, telling it properly required Nixon to speak in falsetto. It was naughty in the relatively innocent way of Depression-era elites. Men of his and Bebe Rebozo's generation called it bathroom humor, meaning that it was scatological but also that gentlemen did their best to keep it among themselves in their manly enclaves, whether the locker room or the Bohemian Grove. One of Kathy's stories is about waiting for Nixon outside the men's room at a hotel where he and Henry Kissinger were attending an event together. She could hear them joking in their growly baritones and teasing each other like little leaguers.

A little boy or girl resides in most of us, whether presidents or priests. Nixon was a wide-eyed naif when it came to sexuality, matters of the heart, and their mysterious nexus. History has yet to appreciate how much he enjoyed and craved the attention of intelligent, capable women, chiefly, of course, his beloved Patricia Ryan. Yet women flummoxed him. As for Pat, while he always loved and respected her, his profound introversion and selfish decision-making kept their relationship out of balance. Too many instructions to several generations of aides began with the words, "Call Mrs. Nixon and tell her that...." If his temperament and deepest desires were barriers to the fearful intimacy of mutual vulnerability, so too with millions of his overachieving mid-century cohort, for whom dirty jokes were a way of whistling past the bedroom door.

There was even some bathroom humor in our day at the Nixon library. Pace Rick Perlstein and Jeb Magruder, 37 probably never gave direct orders to the White House Plumbers, authors of Watergate and co-destroyers of his presidency. But he was embroiled with library plumbers not once but twice -- and I'm not even talking about the acolytes of disgraced chief of staff Bob Haldeman who now control Nixon's private foundation in Yorba Linda. After 2009's Haldeman renaissance, triggered by his fellow operatives' hatred of John Dean, Kathy's 29 years of dedicated service to Nixon and his family were repaid with acts of such savagery and sadism that she lost interest in her mentor for a while. I give thanks that her ambivalence has dissipated to the point where she can separate her feelings about Nixon from all his Woodward and Bernstein-celebrated men and their enablers.

Nixon and Kathy in China, 1993

If Nixon had wanted his mid-level White House and campaign operatives in charge of his library, legacy, and estate, they would have been. When Kathy and I were working together in Nixon's offices in New York and New Jersey, we oversaw the original private library from architecture to museum cases. Precise historicity was not our ethic. Amid vaunting presentations about Nixon's peacemaking initiatives, we installed a polemical defense of his Watergate actions written by a young devotee of Julie Eisenhower and a video on the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debates in which the eloquent Democrat never actually spoke. While I included the the most damning portions of the famous “smoking gun” cover-up tape from June 23, 1972, I wrote a script for the exhibit in which I did my best to exonerate Nixon of criminal motives. With a commercial filmmaker, I co-wrote a 30-minute museum orientation film, “In the Arena,” that presented Nixon in heroic hues and at least until recently was still being shown at the federal library. I brought in a camera crew one morning and peppered him with 70 questions. His businesslike answers ended up, along with earlier footage, in an interactive “Presidential Forum” feature.

Nixon dutifully reviewed the exhibit text and made some changes. He didn't care as much about the library as we did. He reminded me repeatedly that, for better or worse, his legacy belonged to historians, not factotums writing paeans in exhibits paid for by his rich friends. The artifact that really mattered to him was his birthplace, where a school caretaker and his family were living as we got started on the library. We returned it to its 1913 appearance with the help of some restoration specialists I knew in National City, California, where I’d been a reporter ten years before. Thanks to their good work and Nixon’s late sister-in-law Clara Jane Nixon, who for years had preserved a houseful of his parents Frank and Hannah’s own furnishings, house wares, and knickknacks, library visitors can enjoy an authentic glimpse of a turn-of-the-century southern California farmhouse, a three-dimensional snapshot of the working class, goat milk-drinking upbringing of which Nixon was so proud.

Over our many Mimi's lunches during the next 19 years, Clara Jane told me absorbing stories about the Nixon family and gently defended her husband, Donald, whose financial imbroglios had embarrassed his brother (and had continued into the 1980s, when I'd fielded Don's calls in Nixon's New York City office). As if to remind me that her husband wasn't the only Nixon brother who was subject to judgment, she missed few opportunities to say how offended she'd been by the bathroom language Nixon and his aides had used on the White House tapes.

2 BR, 1/2 bath

The first Yorba Linda bathroom emergency was our proposal to keep the toilet in his birthplace. The architects were convinced there’d been one in the house as Frank Nixon had built it in 1912, but Nixon disagreed strenuously. He told me that the family had used an outhouse at first, though he conceded indoor plumbing might have been installed by the time they moved to Whittier in the early 1920s, when he was nine.

He finally approved the john but not another of my and the architects’ schemes. Since the front of his family house faced away from the main library building, they wanted to pick it up and turn it around. The idea made sense to me but not the man whose father had built the sturdy bungalow 75 years before. It had survived multiple owners, suburban sprawl, brush fires, heavy metal teenagers, and the existential burden of being the spawning ground of the most controversial American politician of the 20th century. During Vietnam, vandals had torched Pat Nixon’s girlhood home in nearby Artesia. When I pitched the architects’ idea, he didn’t say a word; he just stared at me. “On the other hand, Mr. President,” I said, “we can leave it right where it is. I just wanted to let you to know what these guys were up to.”

There was a second latter-day Nixon plumber caper. Years before, when we showed him drawings the National Archives had prepared for a federal Nixon library in San Clemente, he was outraged to find that the employee restrooms were bigger than the public’s. He wrote to the Nixon foundation’s volunteer executive director, John Whitaker, a former advance man and White House domestic affairs adviser, and ordered a massive escalation in toilets and urinals in the public restrooms and a corresponding reduction in bowls for bureaucrats.

Even after the San Clemente plans fell through, over the years Nixon’s memo took on the authority of sacred canon. Our architects plumbed all its nuances. As a result, visitors to the Nixon museum never had to wait in line for its ample facilities, with their recessed lighting, marble counter tops, and terrazzo floors. In the basement, the tiny staff restrooms were done up in battleship grey tile and linoleum, with one stall each plus a urinal for the men that was set about eight inches from the floor for accessibility's sake. The appointments included lockers for the security guards.

On the library's opening day in July 1990, I was especially nervous about whether Nixon would feel we got his birthplace right. He said we had, although he suggested we rearrange some of the furniture, including the old piano he'd first learned to play by ear. We were flush with pride until he made a pit stop in the downstairs men's room in the brand-new library building. He emerged looking preoccupied and started slowly down the hall, stopped and looked over his shoulder, started walking again, and then put a hand on my arm so I’d turn to face him.

President George H. W. Bush, former Presidents Reagan and Ford, and their first ladies, along with a crowd later optimistically estimated by library marketers at 50,000, waited above in the burning sun for the dedication ceremony, but first Nixon had a burning question. “As I recall, at one point I may have made something of an issue about the restrooms,” he said. “But for God’s sake please tell me that’s not the only urinal in the goddamn place.”

Antichrist? But Where's He On The Life Issue?

Rick Perlstein argues that Christian evangelicals are already getting over their worries about an LDS nominee and president:

[Their critical language was] strikingly similar to the way they characterized Catholics generations ago. As the Baptist college president quoted by the [New York] Times put it, they fear "the Mormon Church will use [Romney’s] position around the world as a calling card for legitimizing their church and proselytizing people." But they're getting over it. Here is Billy Graham's much more political son Franklin, for instance, speaking in December on the air of Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network: "the fact that he is a Mormon doesn’t bother me at all."

That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the right comes around too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.

But it's not exactly a matter of discarding religious prejudice. The faithful have just realized that the purpose of political activism is obtaining policy outcomes. Perlstein notes the antipathy to Barack Obama shared by evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics and shows how they first linked up over abortion and gay rights. Romney will probably win them if they're sure he's not squishy on social issues. But the most theologically conservative won't ever get over his religion. Untold thousands are saying to themselves even as they vote for Mitt: "Nice guy. Too bad he's going to hell."

Even more interesting than the demons of religious prejudice that conservative evangelicals and their political toadies are keeping under wraps for politics' sake are the ones they're proudly taking out for a walk. In 2010 Newt Gingrich and others in and out of government made constitutional history by arguing that U.S. citizens who were Muslims should not be permitted to worship as they choose within a certain distance of the World Trade Center. Just as insidious is the implicit conservative evangelical proposition that mainline Christians --such as Obama, for instance -- aren't Christian at all.

Smiling All The Way To The White House

During the Watergate years of 1973-74, Ronald Reagan looked like a loser because of his unstinting support of Richard Nixon, from whom most (though not all) Republicans eventually fled as though he carried the plague. In a recent talk at Penn's Walter H. Annenberg school (endowed by Nixon and Reagan's mutual friend, who also brimmed with Reaganesque cheer), Rick Perlstein, at work on an 800-page book about Reagan and the 1970s, says 40's critics were missing the potency of optimism:

Pundits presumed the country wanted politicians who shared self-pity about the terrible meal history was serving them -- the politics of malaise, you may say. Of course it turned out they preferred Ronald Reagan...in [his] unshakable conviction that it was the most wonderful thing he'd ever eaten, and that the worse things got, the more forcefully and resourcefully he would figure out a way to reveal an underlying redemption underneath....

Thus in his first term, when Nixon was just an old regular president, he was available for Reagan's criticism. In his second, when he became the public symbol of all that was chaotic in a world that was falling apart, then Reagan became Reagan. [Nixon] could not but be inexorably defended. There was a logic to everything Reagan said about Watergate -- that Nixon was one of the good guys, a protector, that good guys are always innocent; and that even if it should happen that they somehow weren't, Watergate did not involve genuine crimes; and even if it did, it revealed nothing essential about the American character, which was a transcendent character simply by virtue of being American.

It was just this sort of performance of blitheness in the face of what others called crisis that was fundamental to who Ronald Reagan was... It was fundamental to why he made so many others feel good, which was fundamental to what he would become and how he changed the United States.

Newt Is The New Nixon III

Carter Eskew, quoting Rick Perlstein's Nixonland:

”Politicians. . .make their life’s work convincing 50 percent plus one of their constituency that they understand their fears and hopes, can honor and redeem them, can make them safe and lead them toward their dreams.. . .” In the 1960’s, “America was engulfed in a pitched battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. The only thing was: Americans disagreed radically over which side was which. . .” In 1964, the voter “pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else. . .seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.”

Sounds at least plausible today, doesn’t it?

Milhous And Son

In his first outing as a regular Rolling Stone columnist, Nixonland author Rick Perlstein writes about lessons he thinks Mitt Romney learned from his father, George, and from the way Richard Nixon defeated him in the 1968 GOP primaries. Father and son are shown above in 1964. Perlstein describes the elder Romney as a paragon of progressive Republican rectitude whose critique of the Vietnam war was misunderstood and unfairly devalued. In 1968,

[Nixon ran] what you might call a robotic campaign, just [BSing] about Vietnam, hinting he had a secret plan to end it. The truth was a dull weapon to take into a knife fight with Richard Nixon – who kicked [George] Romney's ass with 79 percent of the vote. When people call his son the "Rombot," think about that: Mitt learned at an impressionable age that in politics, authenticity kills. Heeding the lesson of his father's fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician. In 1994 he ran for senate to Ted Kennedy's left on gay rights; as governor, of course, he installed the dreaded individual mandate into Massachusetts' healthcare system. Then he raced to the right to run for president.

Nixon's famous for promoting the truism that Republicans should run to the right in primaries and the center in the general. Perlstein makes some intriguing points. But if the main one is that Mitt Romney's following Nixon's advice, he's hardly the first, and he won't be the last as long as the nomination process is so heavily influenced by social conservatives. I'm not arguing in favor of inauthenticity as a leading political virtue. But the fact is that no one admitting to the mortal sin of being a moderate can be nominated in today's GOP, leaving the candidate who may still believe in the broad-gauge, non-ideological party of Lincoln, Rockefeller, and Nixon the choices of not running, changing parties, or playing hide the pragmatist.

Perlstein believes that Romney, if he's nominated, will stay right during the general election. "[T]he party won't have it any other way," he writes. But Romney's outfoxed the party so far, evading one conservative challenger after another in the GOP fire swamp (though he was singed last night in South Carolina). What activists will expect from him in return for their eventual grudging support is something he'll have to take into account. Nixon's advice the day after the convention would be: "You owe them nothing." By the same token, some on the right may decide that a Romney loss would be better in the long run. If a few conservatives end up staying home, so be it, because with or without them, only the Massachusetts moderate has a chance against Barack Obama.

Petit Fors And Againsts

I'm grateful for historian Jeremy Young's comments on my recent Rick Perlstein post. Young wrote here and here (at "Daily Kos," no less!). Perlstein's shown at left, Young at right. Young writes:

The strawman here is Perlstein's imagined claim that Nixon was responsible for the political polarization of the late 1960s and after, down to our own time. If this were actually Perlstein's argument, his book would be pure partisan hackery, not to mention boring and unoriginal. Plenty of people have blamed plenty of things on Nixon; nothing new in that.

Where Perlstein scores, and scores big, is in accepting that many of Nixon's basic assumptions about politics (at least those not rooted in paranoia) were accurate. There really was a silent majority; there really was a widespread belief among middle-class whites and white ethnics that elite liberalism and civil rights were succeeding on the backs of their own suffering. This sentiment led to class and racial warfare and left white middle-class Americans ready to drop liberal causes in exchange for security and the maintenance of the status quo. It also made them racist, in the way that petit-bourgeois people often become racist in times of economic strain: in a desperate desire to maintain their status above the people and races in the class below them.

I replied:

Thanks for your post and for linking to mine. It’s been a couple of years since I read Nixonland. I read it on Kindle, and I believe the author actually got the news from me that it had been Kindled. I mention this only because all my underlining is somewhere on Amazon’s server and therefore a little too difficult to get at. So my comments are impressionistic rather than specific, and I apologize in advance if I’ve forgotten something from Rick’s massive and entertaining narrative.

All that being said, I readily concede your basic point. I get that it wasn’t a Nixon biography and that Rick was saying that Nixon was superbly prepared by his upbringing and temperament to understand and exploit the fears and resentments of those you refer to as petit-bourgeois people. I’ll even go so far as to say that a better title would’ve been “Americaland,” seeing as — according to your own analysis — Rick was arguing that Nixon was the incarnation of our country at its worst.

Making Nixon seem like the target was the smarter move, since otherwise it would’ve been obvious that Rick was actually excoriating the tens of millions of fear-motivated, sometimes racist petit-bourgeois people who voted for him. Of course one person’s petit-bourgeois is another person’s indispensable GOP primary voter. That being said, as I recall, Rick showed that Nixon was exceedingly careful about what he said about so-called wedge issues during 1966-68. He eschewed the cheerful demagoguery of Gov. Reagan, for instance.

And then there’s the matter of what he did in office. The southern strategy is one thing, but telling George Shultz to get schools in the deep south desegregated is another. The law and order issue is one thing, but setting up methadone clinics in the big cities is another. I don’t recall that Rick seemed very interested in Nixon’s policy agenda. But his breathtaking foreign policy, and what Nixon library director Tim Naftali recently called his progressive domestic initiatives (from the EPA to national health insurance), would seem to have deserved at least equal mention alongside his political tactics.

If Nixon the politician was a reflection of America at its worst, what might we say about Nixon’s substance? Given that the petit-bourgeois masses gave the author of that relatively progressive agenda an historic landslide re-election victory, don’t both Nixon and all those angry, fearful Americans, thanks to his leadership, look like something far greater than the sum of their resentments?

I don’t say this to minimize Watergate. But as I assume Rick would be among the first to concede, Watergate’s biggest winner was the Goldwater-Reagan right. Did Nixon’s failure make RINOs an endangered species? It appears so, and I think that’s a devastating loss. You write that we need drastic action to solve our problems, whereas I, a committed incrementalist, get the willies just typing the words. I’m with Stephen Ambrose: When we lost Nixon, we lost more than we gained.

My principal beef with Rick’s book, having to do with the Ellsberg break-in, is here.

Thanks again. I tried to leave this at Daily Kos, but it wouldn’t let me sign up!

Moderately Overlooked

As historians such as Rick Perlstein and Sam Tanenhaus mull the rightward progression of the GOP and conservatism from the age of Nixon to the age of Beck and Hannity, historian Maarja Krusten starts with her mother, a Nixon fan right through Watergate's bitter end, especially because of his foreign policy. Today, she doesn't watch Fox News, and she reasons that you can't balance the budget without more revenue. Her daughter concludes:

Nixon was a moderate and a pragmatist. He was not a conservative. Nor were all his supporters. Did some Nixon voters later vote for Reagan and become Fox News fans? Absolutely. Yet there also were people such as my Mom. There’s a lot in the mix. As with all issues Nixonian, working through the motives and objectives requires discernment.

Among other things, one discerns that moderates are dissed, devalued, and demoted. We don't have a cable station. Few if any Republicans would dare utter the word "moderate" without swearing or spitting. At first blush, we indeed appear to be a dwindling tribe. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as moderates has fallen from 43% to 35% since 1992. During the same period, self-identified conservatives increased from 36% to 40%, while the liberals edged up from 17% to 21%. That means we've lost 4% each on both ends of the spectrum, a symptom, Gallup says, of our increasingly polarized politics.

But those numbers, while great news for Fox News' and MSNBC's ratings, aren't so great for the GOP's general election chances in 2012. Conservatives are prone to saying that moderates are really liberals. Spend three minutes on FreeRepublic, and you'll get the picture. Stipulating their point for the purposes of argument, that makes the U.S. electorate 56% (liberals plus moderates) to 40% conservatives. Nixon's oft-quoted dictum was that Republican candidates always had to scurry to the center to contend in general elections. This year, primary-season contenders will have had to spend so much time in birtherland and Obama-ignored-Easterland that reclaiming a sufficient share of the center back from the president may be impossible.

Perlsteinland

In Nixonland, historian Rick Perlstein (left) argued that Richard Nixon's class resentments inspired him to bait the privileged elites he hated (plus win a whole bunch of elections) using wedge issues such as anti-communism, race, and law and order, igniting the hyper-partisanship that roil our politics today.

That was and remains hard for Nixonites to swallow, since today's mainstream conservatives are far to Nixon's right. Sam Tanenhaus (below), another leading authority on Cold War-era politics, has argued that the culture wars' Fort Sumter moment was actually the far right's outrage over Nixon's moderate to liberal foreign and domestic policy agenda. If that's true, and if you're a liberal or moderate, then you have to end up admiring Nixon, at least grudgingly, for battling his way to the top of a party that had nominated an extremist such as Barry Goldwater (another Perlstein subject) four years before and then proceed to go to China and create the EPA. Maybe Nixon was just acting smart instead of acting out.

Perlstein's now researching the last volume of his political triduum, on Ronald Reagan. I had assumed (well, hoped) that as a political progressive, Perlstein would at least be tempted by the idea that the U.S. had lost more than it gained when Nixon was ousted, as another Nixon biographer, the late Stephen Ambrose, wrote in his own third volume. The Reagans, Goldwaters, and Buckleys always knew Nixon wasn't one of them. If the right had fought harder for Nixon in 1973-74, might he even have been able to hold on? Did any key conservatives come to the conclusion in the depths of Watergate that you could discredit liberal Republicanism by letting Nixon go down the tubes?

If there's anything to Tanenhaus's theory, it will take Perlstein a considerable amount of intellectual engineering to get from Nixonland to Reaganland without leaving the impression that he scapegoated Nixon for the sins of the Reagan-Goldwater wing of the party by blaming him and not it for today's political rancorousness.

Aptly rendering Reagan, and especially his latter day, right-of-Reagan acolytes, without redeeming Nixon -- that would need to be Perlstein's secret plan.

One approach is just to say that Nixon's failures de-legitimized his substance, leaving a vacuum for GOP extremists to fill. Perlstein would be onto something there. Deep down, Nixon himself thought Watergate was worse than most of his critics did. They thought he was guilty of hurting the presidency. He believed he helped contribute to the deaths of millions in Cambodia and Vietnam as U.S. resolve to continue to support anti-communist regimes crumbled amid the distractions of Watergate. If Perlstein plays his cards right, he can blame Nixon for Reagan and Pol Pot both.

There's a hint of Perlstein's approach to his Reagan book in his new "Mother Jones" article about lying and politics. He doesn't say lying started with Nixon. How could he after devoting so much attention to the Pentagon Papers, which embodied the vast, fateful mendacity of two Democratic administrations? And yet he writes:

[A] virulent strain of political utilitarianism was already well apparent by the time the Plumbers were breaking into the Democratic National Committee: "Although I was aware they were illegal," White House staffer Jeb Stuart Magruder told the Watergate investigating committee, "we had become somewhat inured to using some activities that would help us in accomplishing what we thought was a legitimate cause."

Even conservatives who were not allied with the White House had learned to think like Watergate conspirators. To them, the takeaway from the scandal was that Nixon had been willing to bend the rules for the cause. The New Right pioneer M. Stanton Evans once told me, "I didn't like Nixon until Watergate."

Though many in the New Right proclaimed their contempt for Richard Nixon, a number of its key operatives and spokesmen in fact came directly from the Watergate milieu. Two minor Watergate figures, bagman Kenneth Rietz (who ran Fred Thompson's 2008 presidential campaign) and saboteur Roger Stone (last seen promoting a gubernatorial bid by the woman who claimed to have been Eliot Spitzer's madam) were rehabilitated into politics through staff positions in Ronald Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign. G. Gordon Liddy became a right-wing radio superstar.

So Nixonland ethics and personnel were mainlined into the Reagan GOP -- and that's not to mention the worst Rogering of America, as Perlstein sees it. That began with Nixon, too, specifically his corrupt first vice president, Spiro Agnew, who excoriated the networks for their criticism of the administration:

There evolved a new media definition of civility that privileged "balance" over truth-telling—even when one side was lying. It's a real and profound change—one stunningly obvious when you review a 1973 PBS news panel hosted by Bill Moyers and featuring National Review editor George Will, both excoriating the administration's "Watergate morality." Such a panel today on, say, global warming would not be complete without a complement of conservatives, one of them probably George Will, lambasting the "liberal" contention that scientific facts are facts—and anyone daring to call them out for lying would be instantly censured. It's happened to me more than once—on public radio, no less.

In the same vein, when the Obama administration accused Fox News of not being a legitimate news source, the DC journalism elite rushed to admonish the White House. Granted, they were partly defending Major Garrett, the network's since-departed White House correspondent and a solid journalist—but in the process, few acknowledged that under Roger Ailes, another Nixon veteran, management has enforced an ideological line top to bottom.

Lying (more than ever before, "every day," worse than the Maine, worse than the Pentagon Papers!), continuing Watergate-style opportunism, media balance instead of "truth telling," partisan politicking disguised as cable news -- all laid at the feet of Nixon and his men, all because he didn't get into that snobby club back at Whittier College.

Not So Clear After All

UC Irvine professor Jon Wiener, writing on April 5 about the Nixon library's new Watergate exhibit:

The exhibit makes clear how, with the country in turmoil over an unpopular war, the president became obsessed with "enemies" and formed a secret unit, "the plumbers," to carry out illegal assignments.

Wiener overreached by saying that Nixon personally authorized the plumbers to break the law. While I look forward to reviewing the exhibit in detail, nothing in the on-line resources the library published last year shows that Nixon knew in advance about the plumbers' fateful burglaries in September 1971 (at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office) and June 1972 (at the Watergate).

Did Nixon contribute to an atmosphere in his wartime White House that resulted in wrongdoing? Yes, and he admitted as much. But that's just not the same as authorizing or knowing in advance about specific criminal acts. This distinction is more important to some than others. In July 2008, I wrote that historian Rick Perlstein, in his book Nixonland, had misconstrued a secondary source in a way that gave the impression that Nixon had known in advance about the 1971 burglary. Perlstein replied that I was technically right but that the "preponderance of the evidence suggests that Nixon probably knew what was going on." And yet criminal culpability hinges on technicalities, not assumptions or atmospherics.

Other writers have overreached in attempting to pin advance knowledge of the burglaries on Nixon. There's plenty in the Watergate story that reflects poorly on Nixon and his men without imputing to him crimes that he didn't commit.

Electric Lady Nixonland

Is this how the Egyptian revolution started? Noticing a spike in sales at Amazon of his book Nixonland, historian Rick Perlstein tracked it to this philly.com item about last night's surprise Grammy phenom:

Lady Antebellum are the Nixonland not-so-silent majority candidate, this year's stealth Taylor Swift, the voice of Middle America with a pretty, de-twanged sound that's all about harkening back to a "simpler" time.

Why that would cause anyone to buy a $14 tome about 1960s-70s politics is beyond me, but I don't have time to worry about it, because I just remembered I need to download some Lady Antebellum.

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.

Richard Nixon, Matchmaker

On Facebook tonight, I jokingly told historian and Nixonland author Rick Perlstein that I wished he'd used a weather-lengthened Newark layover to visit Richard Nixon's old northern New Jersey neighborhood. He replied that he'd done so many times, including when attending mass with his in-laws at Christmas.

Ain't no flies on me. To Google! Perlstein and his wife, Kathy Geier, made news in May 2001, in the New York Times "Vows" column, where we learn that, in his ineffable way, 37 helped make two, one (as with my Kathy and me as well):

Their first date was at the Living Room Cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where, it turned out, they were neighbors. Ms. Geier discovered that she had read and admired his pieces in Lingua Franca magazine, while Mr. Perlstein learned that she shared his passion for "the lunacy of Richard Nixon."

Ms. Geier, who handed out Nixon fliers as a child during the 1972 election, said she got her devotion to politics from her staunch Republican parents, Patricia and Henry Geier. Her father, an investment banker, was once mayor of Westwood, N.J.

Nixon, Conservatives, And The Cultural Wars

In 2008's Nixonland, Rick Perlstein argued that Richard Nixon helped ignite today's culture wars with his law-and-order, southern-strategy, damn-the-radicals campaign in 1968. As I blogged at the time, Perlstein's sprawling, colorful narrative didn't close the deal for someone who believes that conservative culture warriors were the chief beneficiaries of Nixon's demise. In fact, as I wrote on the Nixon foundation website in 2002, it was the best thing that ever happened to Ronald Reagan:

While the fringes of American politics might not have the sheer numbers, they have massive influence. In a political firefight, embattled centrists can be weakened and even done in by flanking fire.

It happened to Richard Nixon during 1973-74. The left had always hated him for his crusading anti-communism. Their antagonism was magnified by his Vietnam policies, which many so-called neoconservatives, ironically, vastly underrate to this day. But we sometimes forget that many on the right also disliked his domestic and economic policies as well as his rapprochements with China and the Soviet Union.

During Watergate, no one was surprised when leftist antiwar firebrands such as Robert Drinan and Bella Abzug demanded his resignation. But the political earth moved when they were joined in March 1974 by conservative GOP Sen. James Buckley. Buckley warned that if RN didn’t resign, Republicans would be wiped out in that November’s mid-term elections.

After learning in August 1974 that conservative lions such as Barry Goldwater had also abandoned him, President Nixon gave up the fight, even though he hadn’t yet been impeached. Republican House and Senate candidates took a massive hit in November. Indeed the party did so badly that it’s reasonable to speculate it would’ve fared better in 1974 if the President had stayed in office until the House could impeach and the Senate try him.

Perhaps remembering what had happened to Republicans that dark November, during 1998-99 most leftist Democrats, many of whom despised President Clinton, stuck by him through his impeachment crisis. Suffering no left-wing defection comparable to Buckley’s and Goldwater’s was the key to his political survival.

The dynamic was subtly different during and after Watergate. For many conservatives, after the Goldwater debacle in 1964 the issue wasn’t so much whether the GOP would dominate politics but who would dominate the GOP. Perhaps some conservatives anticipated that MR (moderate Republicanism) would be discredited along with RN.

I doubt many Republicans intentionally moderated their support for President Nixon to help pave the way for President Reagan. But their profound antipathy to many of his policies might have kept some from fighting as hard as they would have for someone they considered a true-believing conservative.

Whatever conservatives’ calculations at the time, Watergate and its aftermath unquestionably revived the prospects of the Goldwater-Reagan wing of the party.

An analysis in the New York Times by Sam Tanenhaus (biographer of Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley, Jr.), makes clear that the right's distrust of Nixon (which had some sinister aspects as well) was actually, pace Perlstein, the genesis of today's culture wars. Tanenhaus argues that the same dynamic, but with an essential theological coloration, is now dogging Barack Obama. Here's an extended excerpt, but please read the whole thing:

To an early supporter like the writer Andrew Sullivan, Mr. Obama’s religious journey offered possible deliverance from decades of ideological strife. “He was brought up in a nonreligious home and converted to Christianity as an adult,” Mr. Sullivan observed in a celebrated essay in the December 2007 issue of The Atlantic. “But — critically — he is not born-again. His faith, at once real and measured, hot and cool — lives at the center of the American religious experience.”

In retrospect the idea seems not only mistaken, but perhaps misbegotten, for it was premised on a misreading of America’s ideological warfare, in particular the influence of evangelical religion on the tenor of American politics....

Conservatives disenchanted with the moderate presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford threatened to bolt the Republican Party, prefiguring the Tea Partiers of today.

[Conservative publisher Bill] Rusher, for one, urged restive conservatives to form a third party, the Independence Party, that would form a “great coalition” composed of “the great bulk of middle-class Protestants.” Its natural tribune, Mr. Rusher wrote, was Ronald Reagan, who would in fact go on to challenge Mr. Ford in 1976 — a campaign that had the crusading atmosphere of a third-party insurgency.

All this signaled that political protest had migrated from the fringes to the mainstream, where it remains today. Seen from this perspective, Mr. Obama, who fits the 1960s idea of a consensus politician, appears to be firmly planted in one camp, with his establishment pedigree and his urban sensibility. He has overt connections to the underclass, through his work as a community organizer, and to the overprivileged, through his Ivy League background, but little to the alienated middle class. To this group he seems not so much the outsider of his actual biography but, rather, a burnished product of “the new elite” or “the new class,” to quote terms that came into vogue in the 1970s.

Mr. Obama’s Christianity also puts him in a particular camp. He is the Christian who seems as deeply immersed in the Social Gospel as in the Gospels, who acknowledges “I didn’t have an epiphany,” and describes his faith as “both a spiritual, but also intellectual, journey.”

It’s not that Mr. Beck and his followers don’t recognize Mr. Obama. They do, or think they do, all too well.

Tanenhaus's analysis rings instantly true to the practicing pastor. Rusher's crusading early-1970s Protestantism has long since burst most denominational constraints. As an Episcopalian in Orange County, California, I do ministry along the edges of the chasm that's opened between mainstream Protestantism (what Obama has been practicing as a member of the United Church of Christ) and neo-evangelicalism. Rick Warren and Saddleback Church (a Southern Baptist church that tries hard to look fashionably post-denominational) are just two miles up the freeway from St. John's, after all.

Besides that, ask any Roman Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, or indeed UCC congregant how often she's disclosed the name of her denomination only to have a suburban neighbor or coworker reply, "I go to a Christian church." What are we, chopped liver? Just about. Ask the teachers at a Corona, California evangelical school about it. They were fired this summer because their baptisms weren't legitimate -- the school's way of saying they weren't really Christians.

That's just what some are saying about Obama, isn't it? Not a real Christian. As good as a Muslim.

Three cheers for Sam Tanenhaus for nailing this.

Strip Search

Politicians love to collect the original art of editorial cartoons in which they feature, and Richard Nixon's domestic affairs advisor, John D. Ehrlichman, although doomed, was no different. In February 1973, not long before Nixon fired him over Watergate, Ehrlichman wrote to Garry Trudeau asking for a Doonsbury strip parodying Nixon's relative disinterest in domestic affairs. The letter was released last month by the Nixon library. Read a blogger's sardonic take here.

I met with Ehrlichman many years ago at the library, when he was trying to enlist our support for a TV project on the scandal. He died in 1999. He always blamed Nixon for making the decision for which he went to jail: Over Labor Day weekend in 1971, sending burglars to get dirt on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Scholars Stanley Kutler and Rick Perlstein have also tried to pin the Ellsberg caper on the chief. After all, it's the Watergate mother lode. If Nixon had even known about it at the time, it would tend to put a criminal coloration on his Watergate actions and statements beginning in June 1972. But none -- neither scholars nor self-serving aides -- has actually made the case.

When The Nixons Stayed Seated

In an essay about the angry movement that the Obama White House calls Palinism, "Newsweek"'s Jon Meacham describes a moment of prophetic action by Richard Nixon against Goldwaterism -- as the stage was being set for a GOP wipeout that November that conservatives would proclaim (as they so often do when they help Democrats win) as a great victory:

Richard Nixon sensed trouble. seated in the cow palace in San Francisco at the GOP convention in 1964, he listened as Barry Goldwater said: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty—is—no—vice." A 41-second ovation ensued. Then Goldwater continued: "And let me remind you also—that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." As Rick Perlstein reconstructs the scene in his book Before the Storm, Nixon reached over to keep his wife, Pat, from rising politely with the crowd. Later Dwight Eisenhower called the Goldwater speech an offense to "the whole American system." The crowds did not care: Goldwater was one of their own, riding in from Arizona to take the GOP from the Ikes and the Rockefellers.

"The New Nixon" Improves "Nixonland"

In an interview (actually, an exchange of e-mails) with the editor of the History News Network, Nixonland author Rick Perlstein tips his hat to "The New Nixon," the blog I launched in February 2008 at the Nixon Foundation:

I actually quite appreciated most of what was said at the New Nixon blog. New Nixon blogger Jack Pitney made several useful corrections in particular I was able to incorporate into six subsequent printings.

Less popular with the distinguished author was the revelation by your (still on hiatus) Episconixonian correspondent last July that Perlstein had altered the meaning of a quotation from another book to make it appear as though President Nixon had known in advance about a plan to break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist in September 1971. Perlstein told HNN:

[Dr. Taylor's] right on the narrow point, but I think more broadly the preponderance of the evidence suggests that Nixon probably knew what was going on.

Which prompted me to reply to Perlstein:

I appreciate that you think the preponderance of evidence suggests RN [knew] about the Fielding job in advance, but there's actually no evidence that he did. My lack of historical training and a Ph.D notwithstanding (although your describing me as Dr. Taylor was a mighty buzz), I don't think your gut call on Nixon's complicity is a justification for making a secondary source sound like he's saying what he actually didn't say.

Appalling Enemies List

Michael Barone reviews Rick Perlstein's Nixonland:

[M]y reading of this book left me more appalled by Nixon's enemies than by Nixon.

The Canon According To David Greenberg

Jeremy Young gently disputes the idea, proffered by historian David Greenberg, that those who take issue with certain Watergate verities are akin to global warming deniers. Here's how New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt put it on Sunday as he repudiated the work of his colleague Patricia Cohen:

David Greenberg, a Rutgers historian and the author of “Nixon’s Shadow,” argued that the tale did not involve a significant dispute and was more like the Watergate version of global warming, with most historians long ago coming to a consensus and only a few outliers arguing against it. “Professional scholarly consensus is not sacrosanct, but it should count for a lot,” he said.

Hoyt's article may need a review of its own. The positioning of the Greenberg quotation suggests the historian was saying that there's a nearly sacrosanct scholarly consensus about Stanley Kutler's Watergate transcripts as published in his book Abuse Of Power. There's obviously no such thing. Kutler freely admits that he prepared his transcripts quickly and that they contain errors. Several scholars have pointed some of them out, and another is evidently poised to do so. What was at issue in the original Times story was whether Kutler edited the transcripts deceptively, with an eye to telling the story he wanted to tell. If there's a consensus about anything in this controversy, it's that having careful, authoritative transcripts of Watergate conversations would be a boon to historians and history.

My guess is that Greenberg was talking to Hoyt not about the transcripts controversy but about writers such as Len Colodny, James Hougan, Russ Baker, Joan Hoff, Jonathan Aitken, and James Rosen, all of whom look at Watergate differently than most. Several claim that White House counsel John Dean was not only more involved in the cover-up than commonly thought but also an originator of the Watergate break-ins themselves. Are these the writers whom Hoyt, and by implication Greenberg, call outliers, the moral equivalent of global warning deniers? If so, Hoyt should have made that more clear, especially since the upshot of his critique is that his colleague Cohen was careless about such nuances in her original article.

As for Greenberg and others in the Hoyt article who evidently are now to be understood as defenders of the one true faith of Watergate, few are entirely blameless themselves. Without evidence, Greenberg accused the authors of the now-removed Watergate gallery at the private Nixon Library of being liars, either for saying the 18.5-minute gap might have been accidental or for pointing out that some Democratic members of the House hoped to maneuver Speaker Carl Albert into the Presidency. In his book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein, whom Hoyt also quotes as denouncing Kutler's critics, misconstrued a secondary source to make it appear as though President Nixon had authorized the September 1971 Lewis Fielding burglary in advance. And Kutler has yet to explain why he edited his transcript of a July 1972 conversation to obscure its true subject matter and later incorrectly claimed to an Orange County Register reporter that the tape proved that Nixon had known about the Fielding job earlier than he'd always claimed.

That's two historians trying to pin a crime on the late President that he didn't commit and another unfairly attacking the former administrators of his library because they had the gall to present inconvenient nuances to museumgoers. With these supposedly dispassionate professionals trying so hard to prove their points even when the record says otherwise, perhaps we may conclude that the Watergate canon isn't quite as fixed as Hoyt and others would have us believe.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Conservatives Are Annoying

Refreshingly, no insincere lip service about bipartisanship from Nixonland author Rick Perlstein:

[C]onservatives will always be with us. I admit it. They'll always be annoying, and always will be standing in the way of genuine reforms that can make the world a more stable, predictable, prudent, and moral place... The point is just to keep them as far from the levers of power as possible.

Left Battles Right, And Center Wins

"Everything comes down to left vs. right," President Nixon told me one morning in the late 1980s. "Everything." I don't remember the subject, just the way he clinched his fist and set his jaw as he spoke. I'd wondered lately if he was wrong. If the political culture wars as decried by Rick Perlstein and Andrew Sullivan were finally over. If we'd entered a new, post-partisan era. Evidently not, as the New York Times reports:

In cobbling together a plan that could get through both the House and the Senate, Mr. Obama prevailed, but not in the way he had hoped. His inability to win over more than a handful of Republicans amounted to a loss of innocence, a reminder that his high-minded calls for change in the practice of governance had been ground up in a matter of weeks by entrenched forces of partisanship and deep, principled differences between left and right.

While the media theme of the week has been party-line Republican opposition to the bill, I've been more struck by the intensity of the ideological pressure from the left. Many obviously hope the economic crisis will form the pretext for a permanent 20-25% increase in the size and scope of the federal government. For promoting tax cuts instead of social and infrastructure spending, Republicans were accused of defying the will of voters as expressed at the polls in November, opposing the creation of 600,000 (Paul Krugman) or even 4 million jobs, and refusing to work with the dashing young President. Besides, argues Will Bunch, the Reagan tax cuts didn't even work:

In the case of Reagan's massive 1981 tax cut, it did start the great divergence of wealth between the very affluent and the middle class in this country, but it didn't save the American economy, which actually slid into a deep recession the next 15 months.

The success of the 1981 tax cuts by themselves appears to be an article of faith. Others argue that the cruel 1982 recession ended thanks to low interest rates and massive deficit spending (which, after all, is the flip side of tax cuts not accompanied by spending cuts). Those factors, low interest and high deficits, we've definitely got again -- along with both massive Keynesian spending and tax cuts designed to spur consumer spending and business investment. I'm as happy with the bill as it's possible to be about spending nearly $800 billion of taxpayers' money. Better a hodgepodge reflecting a broad range of ideas than a package dominated by left or right.