President Nixon And Gen. Chang

When they were working together on Richard Nixon's secretly recorded White House tapes in the 1980s, Fred Graboske and Maarja Krusten had a Star Trek thing going on. Now a government historian, Krusten is shown here in Vulcan makeup during her NARA days.

As Nixon's chief of staff from 1984-90, I wasn't a Trekkie, but I was definitely Trek friendly. That might've been the basis for some dialog with Fred, Maarja, and their colleagues. But as I reflected tonight, in a comment on a Krusten post about the tension between Nixon and the archivists, I'm not sure we would've been interested in detente:

I’m sure we all remember the old Vulcan proverb: Only Nixon could go to China.

And yet I fear we Nixonians failed the test Kirk ultimately passed in “The Undiscovered Country.” (I labored for a while over a Gorkon vs. Chang paragraph but, you’ll be relieved to to read, abandoned it.) The idea that two Nixon voters (at least) were laboring, without any guidance from agency lawyers, to do the best they could to apply the law and regs to the unique reality of the Nixon records would have been completely alien (think Romulan!) to us on Nixon’s team. I obviously can’t say to what extent the NARA side appreciated Nixon’s overpowering frustration at being a class of one when it came to the processing of a collection over which he and his family had had no oversight whatsoever before the countdown to massive and potentially humiliating openings began.

What I do know (with the useless wisdom of hindsight) is that if we’d all sat down in a room together, we at least could’ve understood one another better — though NARA’s legal and regulatory strictures might not have enabled much of a change in the release schedule. And that might be the rub. Maybe the Nixon side didn’t want understanding. We wanted our shot at the timing of a donor library, and we could only get that by unleashing Gen. Chang and Shakespeare’s dogs of war, which is to say legal maneuvers and political pressure.

The empathetic hearing we got from NARA management beginning in 1989 came as as big a surprise to us as to you. I especially regret the impact on individual careers and lives. As I’ve discussed with Maarja off-line, Kathy O’Connor (Nixon’s last chief of staff; she was holding his hand when he died) and I now have a personal understanding of how painful it can be to be pawns on a hidden chessboard (three-dimensional!).

When "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" was released in 1991, I faxed Nixon a memo from the Nixon library, which I was then running, telling him that he'd been mentioned, and by Mr. Spock, no less. I don't believe he was any more impressed by this news than by my report on "Nixon In China" a few years before.

It's Been 43 Years. I'm Almost Over It.

Stop me before I comment on this post about Star Trek films and directors. Okay, okay: The best was last (Star Trek, directed by J. J. Abrams) and the worst was first (Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Robert Wise).

Hat tip to Instapundit

We Still Have Money In This Century

Star Trek makes $31 million in a little over 24 hours.

All Let Down

This New York Times assessment of the inter-generational dynamics of Star Trek is a complete muddle:

[A] scene in which an aged version of Spock (played by Leonard Nimoy) converses with his younger self (played by Zachary Quinto) becomes a platform for the regret that the grown-up children of the 1960s feel for letting down the youth of today, just as they might have felt they were let down by their leaders. “It’s kind of a baby boomer apology for where we are,” [movie co-writer Roberto] Orci said. “Not that I’m asking for the baby boomers to apologize.”

Why in the world not?

Only Obama Could Go To Hollywood

Via Matthew Yglesias, Leonard Nimoy describes his first meeting with Barack Obama a couple of years ago at a private home in LA:

And he came through the house, saw me and immediately put his hand up in the Vulcan gesture. He said, “They told me you were here.” We had a wonderful brief conversation and I said, “It would be logical if you would become president."

If I may strike a bipartisan note, in 1991, I wrote RN a memo telling him breathlessly that his name had come up in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, when Spock (played, of course, by Nimoy) said, "There is an old Vulcan proverb: Only Nixon could go to China."

Respect Them, Or They'll Kill You

News from the anti-Klingon defamation league.

Finally, The Kobayashi Maru Test Explained

The new Star Trek movie (the first one actually called Star Trek) has a charming young cast, nonstop action, great effects, even a slavering beast resembling a Venus flytrap that chases James Kirk across the terrain of a desolate ice planet. The Enterprise NCC-1701 -- that's the Enterprise, not one of its alphabetized successors -- gleams in the sun like the gangly Trekkie love object it's been for over 40 years. I first gazed on it in 1966, when I was 12, which is an impressionable age.

And so at five this afternoon, we were mostly people of a certain age sitting in the dark, and from the whispers and knowing laughter you could tell we were watching a home movie revealing secrets about old friends' youthful lives that we'd suspected or guessed all along. There's Scottie as a young man, for instance, just like you'd expect to find him -- marooned at an outpost on a desolate ice planet because nobody believed his theories about mid-warp beaming. Young McCoy, Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu are there, too, along with the exquisitely cast Kirk (Chris Pine, shown here) and Spock (Zackery Quinto), hating each other at first (can you say Kobayashi Maru?) and yet fated for a male bonding clutch-o-rama that will transfigure the universe.

Literally, because the film, brilliantly directed by J.J. Abrams ("Lost," Armageddon, Mission Impossible III), involves a classic mind-numbing Star Trek time travel scenario that, at the end of the movie, has set the core narrative (stay with me here) on a course that is fundamentally different from what unfolded in the original 1966-69 series, the seven movies featuring the original cast, and indeed all the other series and films that sprang from them. One may think that it's all just a setup for a sequel that will enable the Enterprise crew to go forward in time (or back, whatever) and correct the time line. But if they did, then the characters we know and love would have known that all this happened in the past, and talked about it, unless in the sequel, their memories are erased...

Oh, never mind. If Star Trek weren't such a good movie, I might be upset that it's the narrative equivalent of the season of "Dallas" without Bobby Ewing, later explained as a bit of nightmare-inducing mustard on Victoria Principal's cheeseburger. Abrams revamps Star Trek for our times without disrespecting it. Our century's sophisticated, Obamian ethos is a bit too cool for Gene Roddenberry's naively Utopian original vision, hence the altered time line's elements of global catastrophe, genocide, and parental demise. But the core relationships among the characters -- based on the timeless propositions that broken people can create families from strangers, adversity molds character, optimism is a powerful force in the world -- remain intact. Star Trek even improves on the purely human dimensions of the original by movingly envisioning the circumstances of Kirk's birth as well as the young Spock's relationship with his mother and even revealing a love affair between the core characters that you'd never expect -- unless, if the time line is ever restored, they...Oh, never mind.

Obama Is The New Spock

Steve Daly in "Newsweek":

It's the Spock plot strands that give the new "Trek" its best shot at once again commanding the zeitgeist. Spock's cool, analytical nature feels more fascinating and topical than ever now that we've put a sort of Vulcan in the White House. All through the election campaign, columnists compared President Obama's unflappably logical demeanor and prominent ears with Mr. Spock's. But as Spock's complicated racial backstory is spun out in detail in the new "Trek"—right back into childhood—the Obama parallels keep deepening. Like Obama, Spock is the product of a mixed marriage (actually, an interstellar mixed marriage), and he suffers blunt manifestations of prejudice as a result. As played by Zachary Quinto, the young Spock loves his human mother, but longs to assimilate completely into his Vulcan father Sarek's ways, eschewing messy emotions the way all Vulcans do. Young Spock is constantly being told by Vulcans and humans alike that he's either seething with inappropriate emotions—indeed, he takes Kirk by the throat at one point—or that he's not emotional enough and shouldn't be so repressed. Obama may or may not be a fan—the White House says he isn't, but Trekkies have claimed him as one of their breed ever since he said, "I grew up on 'Star Trek'—I believe in the final frontier," at a campaign stop last year. If he does check out the new movie, I can imagine he might feel a special empathy for Spock's position, given the chattering class's insistence that he needs to show more emotion, too.

As When The World Was Young*

Aging boomers unite and arm photon torpedoes: The new trailer for the new Star Trek movie, which opens May 8 (*Name that old Star Trek movie!)