Nixon's Still The One?

Richard Nixon's friend R. Emmett Tyrrell, founder of the American Spectator, was in the middle of Robert Caro's latest volume on Lyndon Johnson when he came across Woodstein's latest on Nixon and Watergate. Tyrrell writes:

[H]ow would Woodward, or for that matter Caro, compare Nixon and Johnson? Nixon labored to end the war that John Kennedy created and Lyndon Johnson bungled at massive expense in lives and treasure. Nixon was on track to save South Vietnam before he was driven from office. Nixon did save the state of Israel even as he was fighting off impeachment. He and Kissinger played the Soviet Union and China like a Stradivarius, ending the performance with China as a virtual ally. All and all, it was not a bad record.

Then there is Johnson. Among Caro's many infelicities, lazy research is not one of them. He faithfully records how President Johnson turned the purchase of a $17,500 radio station into a vast media fortune through the manipulation of such federal agencies as the FCC. By middle age, he, a lifelong government employee, was a millionaire. He stole his first election -- in high school! -- his Senate seat in 1948, and the state of Texas for his running mate in 1960. That last race was against Nixon, who would not contest the contest. Then there is his psychological makeup. He was insecure, unstable, often a wreck. As vice president, he was an emotional ruin from run-ins with the Kennedys until that sad day in Dallas, when in a car ahead of him, John Kennedy was shot.

Almost eerily within minutes of the president's death, Johnson underwent a kind of emotional epiphany, rising to his former bluff, albeit phony, self. Very rudely, within a half hour of Bob Kennedy's discovery of his brother's death, President Johnson called to conduct business. The insensitivity is shocking.

Yet ever since Nixon was driven from office, we have been led to believe Nixon was squirrely and a threat to our democratic ways, and Johnson was...well, what was Johnson? We are on the road to national bankruptcy because of his poorly funded policies today. I say, wherever he is, bring back Nixon. Nixon's the one.

Taking Charge In Dallas

The April 2 New Yorker presents a meticulously researched account by LBJ biographer Robert Caro of the day Lyndon Johnson became president. It culminates with his stage-managing this iconic scene above Air Force One as it idled on the tarmac in Dallas -- making sure Mrs. Kennedy and her husband's casket were aboard and that she would be present to lend her legitimacy to the transition of power, for the same reason demanding that as many Kennedy assistants as possible cram into the stiflingly hot stateroom, arranging the placement of the photographer and witnesses, researching the words of the oath, and deciding that it would be administered a federal judge, Sarah T. Hughes, whose appointment he'd favored as vice president but whom the Kennedys at first had blocked:

The scene was still eerie: the gloom, the heat, the whispering, the low, insistent whine of the jet engine, the mass of dim faces crowded so close together. But one element had vanished: the confusion. Watching Lyndon Johnson arrange the crowd, give orders, deal with [Kennedy aides Ken] O'Donnell and [Larry] O'Brien, [Johnson aide] Liz Carpenter, dazed by the rush of events, realized that there was at least one person in the room who wasn't dazed, who was, however hectic the situation might be, in complete command of it.

In the agony of the moment, Johnson encountered resistance from Kennedy aides, some of whom didn't like him and didn't think having the ceremony in Dallas was necessary. Johnson had become president the moment Kennedy died; wasn't that enough? But Johnson understood the stricken country needed to witness the continuity of authority, and there was no better way than to conduct this sacred ritual. His left hand rested not on a Bible but a pocket-sized Roman Catholic missal.