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?

Newt McCarthy II

Not even Spiro Agnew, in criticizing the elite media, said they were un-American.

Suspicious George

When Sen. George McGovern visited the Nixon Library last month, director Tim Naftali gave him copies of recently opened records suggesting strongly that Nixon aides Pat Buchanan and Chuck Colson were behind revelations that McGovern's running mate in his 1972 campaign against President Nixon, Sen. Thomas Eagleton, had been treated for depression. Outraged though McGovern may have been, it's hard to imagine that his campaign wouldn't have used intelligence about, for instance, Vice President Agnew's corruption. Saying that he hadn't known before that the White House was involved, McGovern (mild-mannered and gracious though he is said to be) speculated recklessly to "Vanity Fair" that President Nixon might have been behind the attempt to assassinate Gov. George Wallace:

McGovern pointed out that if you look at elections in a certain way, you could say that Ross Perot elected Bill Clinton and Ralph Nader put George W. Bush over the top. “In 1968, George Wallace had garnered 10 million votes and we figured that, running again in 1972, he might pick up as many as 20 million votes,” McGovern said. The segregationist Alabama governor had been campaigning with the slogan “Send Them a Message,” and it was assumed that his votes would almost all come from Nixon’s base, but on May 15, 1972, an assassination attempt left Wallace paralyzed from the waist down and he was forced to withdraw from the race. I was still wondering where McGovern was going with this when he came to a shocking supposition: “You know, Wallace went to his grave thinking Nixon’s people were behind the shooting. I thought at the time, ‘Well, George is a little gaga.’ But now … you have to wonder … ”

Welcome To The New Nixon

My first blog post ever, at The New Nixon, which I launched at the Nixon foundation on February 18, 2008:
While the handover of the Nixon Library to the National Archives last year was a high point in our institutional life, it was a drag for us personally at the Nixon Foundation, what with being called liars, haters, and belligerent and hostile paranoids who had been mean to Carl Bernstein.
The attacks began in July when a reporter for the Associated Press, Gillian Flaccus, published an article containing a ham-handed poke at our integrity by historian David Greenberg. The private Library’s Watergate exhibit (removed by Uncle Sam a year ago) had text telling visitors that the famous 18 1/2 –minute gap on a Watergate tape might have been accidental. “It’s not only not true,” Flaccus quoted Greenberg as saying, “it’s the opposite of truth. There was a lot along those lines in the library, which was not a matter of interpretation, but flat wrong, a lie.” Having overseen creation of the original museum, and since some experts indeed said it was possible the erasure was accidental, I wrote an article about Greenberg’s charge for the Nixon Foundation web site. In an e-mail, he chastised me for getting “worked up” and said that Flaccus had misquoted him. He told me what he had meant to say was a lie was our exhibit’s presentation about a group of Democratic House members who in 1973 tried to persuade their leadership to leave the Vice Presidency empty long enough following Spiro Agnew’s resignation to enable the Democratic Speaker, Carl Albert, to become President in the event RN resigned. Writes one authority, “This is the closest to a coup d’etat that the country has ever come.” So that wasn’t a lie, either.

In addition to his denunciations via the AP at the time of the handover last summer, Greenberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Will the Nixon Foundation…stay out of all questions of access to tapes and papers? Or will it continue to throw up roadblocks for scholars?” Writing to him again, I said that he hadn’t yet correctly identified a lie in our museum and that, contrary to his derogatory implication, he was well aware that the Nixon family and Foundation had enabled the opening of massive caches of records. Contradicting his own article, Greenberg wrote back, “I did not imply that you are intending to ‘roadblock scholars on documents’.” For attempting to hold him accountable for falsely accusing us of being liars to tens of millions of newspaper readers, he accused me of “belligerence…hostility and paranoia.”

More such unpleasant qualities in your Nixon Foundation servants were identified by LA Times reporter Christopher Goffard in an October 2007 article celebrating Carl Bernstein’s appearance at the Nixon Library. My wife and colleague Kathy and I had hung out with Bernstein in Austin once. We even had invited him to go see Steve Earle at La Zona Rosa with us (he politely declined). We weren’t in Yorba Linda for his visit because Director Tim Naftali arranged it while we were on a cruise that had been scheduled for months. Goffard implied that we had snubbed Bernstein intentionally and went on to report that Bernstein had long been an “arch-villain” who “elicited special loathing” at the private Nixon Library.

The evidence for Goffard’s attacks? You guessed it: Our old Watergate exhibit, which, Goffard wrote, “falsely accused” Woodward and Bernstein of wrongdoing. It’s certainly true that the exhibit (written by a diligent and highly ethical political insider, Bob Bostock) contained a quotation about “Woodward and Bernstein’s failure to address any of the ethical deficiencies of their investigative reporting, including offering of bribes, illegally gaining access to telephone numbers, and talking to members of the grand jury.” But was this the work of a snarling Nixon partisan? Not hardly. The quote came from The Wars of Watergate by historian Stanley Kutler. A reliable critic of the late President, Kutler was praised for his book’s meticulousness by the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh. Just to be perfectly clear, this means Christopher Goffard has called Stanley Kutler a liar. Work it out peacefully, okay, guys? And next time, leave us out of it.

For including Kutler’s words in our museum, did my colleagues and I deserve to be attacked in the news columns of the LA Times? For our positions on Watergate issues about which gentlemen might differ, why did an historian call us liars? I guess there are folks who are even more emotionally invested in this Nixon stuff than we are. Richard Norton Smith, historian and visionary head of five Presidential libraries, is right: History really is too important to be left to the historians – or for that matter, to the journalists. That’s where you come in. Welcome to The New Nixon.