"Jackson Place," Ch. 1: Just Watch

Painting of 716 Jackson Place by Robin Rogers Cloud

People sometimes tried to sneak into the White House. Tonight, Emily was sneaking out.

As she opened the door of the northwest gate, the one closest to the West Wing, she smiled guiltily at Carl, the handsome uniformed Secret Service agent who always flirted with her. She only had trouble with high heels when she was nervous, and she had never been more nervous in her life. Stepping over the threshold of the little guardhouse, she tripped and almost fell flat on her face.

“Are you okay, Miss Weissman?” he said, jumping to his feet and peering over the reception desk. As she recovered her balance, he looked at her calves and ankles with an expression of deep concern.

Photo by Paul Matulic

“Eyes front, officer,” she said, smoothing her pleated skirt down the front of her thighs. Carl studied this maneuver as well. “I’m just going out for a second. Be right back.” She opened the door facing Pennsylvania Ave.

He called after her. “Strange night to go out,” he said.

“Strange night, period,” she said, waving so Carl could see she had her wallet and ID. The door clicked shut behind her. The sidewalk was crowded with protestors and tourists, who were all dappled with long summer sunset shadows. The mood was momentous and festive at the same time. She felt dozens of eyes glance at her for a minute. Nobody recognized the short redhead in the navy blue dress.

She smiled to herself. Maybe they wondered if she was the secret love child of the president and his notorious redheaded secretary, Rose Mary Woods.

Then she realized that in two and a half hours, they would know exactly who she was.

It was 7 p.m. on Thursday, August 8, 1974, the day the White House had reliably informed its press corps and the world that President Richard Nixon would announce his resignation.

She turned east, crossed 15th St., walked half a block south, and entered the Old Ebbitt Grill, inhaling air conditioning and the smells of cigar smoke and frying cheeseburgers. She walked quickly along the bar, hoping she didn’t run into anyone from the office. A flight of stairs at the back led down to the rest rooms and a small row of phone booths.

She entered one of the booths, closed the folding door, and took a deep breath. Then she dialed home, reversing the charges. Her father answered, which he only did when he was expecting a call or was worried about something. Otherwise it would ring until Elijah came back or her mother finally picked up. He told the operator he would pay for the call.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call for your anniversary on Tuesday,” she said.

“Your mother was a little disappointed,” he said in his kind voice. Emily could picture him in his plaid sweater and corduroy slacks as he sat at the kitchen table with the Detroit News. Her mother was probably still at the sink, washing the dinner dishes. “I told her you were busy, getting ready for tonight.”

She closed her eyes. Busy didn’t quite capture it. She had been conspiring fiendishly to shatter her colleagues’ lives and plunge the nation into chaos. She wondered if her parents would ever speak to her again. She said, “Did you guys have fun? I hope you took mom out.”

“Top of the Pontch, after work,” he said proudly. They couldn’t quite afford it, but Emily’s mother loved the view of the Detroit River from the restaurant in the Pontchartrain Hotel.

“Well done, dad,” she said. When he didn’t respond right away, she said, “I wish I could tell you more about what I’ve been up to.”

They had gotten used to Emily not being able to talk about work. “We trust you,” he said. “At least it will be over soon.” Sidney and Marian Weissman had despised Richard Nixon for their entire adult lives. They’d voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and George McGovern in 1972. In 1969, they’d even gone to a demonstration against the Vietnam war at Wayne State University, during the October Moratorium. She had been in college in Ann Arbor and had called her father and asked if the Revolution offered a senior citizen discount.

She’d always been more conservative than her parents. They had raised her with a heart for justice and those in need. She’d just drifted toward the political center. They’d finally come to terms with it. But they couldn’t hide their disappointment when she told them she was going to work in the Nixon White House at the beginning of the Watergate summer of 1974.

Emily heard Marian say something. Her father said, “Your mother asked about Irwin. When does he plan to take the bar? You still seeing him?”

Sitting in the darkness, twirling the phone cord with her free hand, she smiled. Sidney’s Irish Catholic bride had become a card-carrying Jewish mother, always wondering about her boyfriends and their professional prospects. Her last year of law school in Cambridge was a breeze. Irwin Fried had been a pleasant distraction. But he was too serious and not sexy, and he didn’t like the Rolling Stones or baseball. “Tell mom sorry,” she said.

“I didn’t like him, either,” he said. “So we’ll see you soon? I assume you’ll get some time off.”

Emily said, “Dad, I need you and mom to watch tonight.”

“Like we’d miss it? Your mother and I have been waiting to see Nixon get what he deserves ever since Alger Hiss.”

Emily and her father had been having this argument since she was in high school. Hiss was a New Deal-era diplomat whom a friend, Whittaker Chambers, had accused of being a Soviet spy. As a young congressman from California, Nixon had ridden the case to political superstardom. “Nixon was right,” she said. “Hiss was guilty. Besides, you were grateful for Vietnam. Remember we said a prayer for the president because of the draft, because Bennie didn’t have to go.” Benjamin was her little brother, now in his last year of college.

“He should’ve ended it four years ago,” he said.

She pressed. “He ended it.”

He relented. “Blessings on him for that. Blessings on you, too. You’ll come see us soon?”

“Please, dad. Just watch.”

Jackson Place, a novel, will be published on July 21 in print and e-book at Amazon.com.

The View From Jackson Place

It's exciting to see the view counter near 250,000. Thanks to those who are still checking in at the rate of about 120 a day. I'm not posting much, but I'm writing like mad off-line, three pages a day until Christmas or bust. As for what continues to drive readership here, the Episconixonian proudly retains its status as the universal authority if you need an accurate transcript of Clark Griswold's interfaith prayer for his wife's aunt from the movie "National Lampoon's Vacation." If you don't believe me, Google or Bingle "Aunt Edna's Prayer." This post, about a Nixon/Alger Hiss-themed episode of "The West Wing," gets about a hundred readers a month.

The photo shows Jackson Place, the townhouse in Lafayette Square across from the White House, which the Nixon administration first set aside for the use of former presidents. In March 1994, after former President Nixon's last trip to Russia, my wife and Nixon's last and best chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor, were there when he gave a bravura off-the-record presentation to a high-ranking audience of sitting and former national security officials. It was the last time I saw him alive. More to come.

"It's The Cover-Up That Gets You"

"It's not the crime that gets you," Richard Nixon warned his White House aides 40 years ago this summer, after the Watergate break-in. "It's the cover-up." While he cited the Alger Hiss case as an example, the story of King David, Bathsheba, and her husband, Uriah, would've worked just as well. Most of us are covering something up. Since the morning of July 20 in Aurora, Colorado, we've experienced humanity at its worst and best. David embodies that tension as well. My sermon for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost is here.

An Order Better Not Followed

According to notes kept by his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, on July 3, 1971 President Nixon let his suspicions about Jews and liberals in the civil service get the better of him. He believed they were purposely manipulating economic data to hurt his administration. Historian Maarja Krusten offers reflections on the politics of scapegoating (which comes from Torah, ironically enough -- Lev. 16:8,10):

The segment [of notes] covered Nixon’s directive to Haldeman to have [White House operative Fred] Malek [shown below] check “sensitive areas,” uncover “Jewish cells,” and to put a “non-Jew in charge of each.” Haldeman, who occasionally dragged his feet on orders from Nixon, didn’t blink an eye. And so the Nixon White House sent Fred Malek off to count Jewish civil servants.

Nixon may have been uncomfortable about some of the things recorded on his tapes or recorded in White House documents. I sympathize with that to some degree. His records were seized and the rules changed on him. But trying to take out the people at NARA who worked and still work with those materials only demonstrates the same acculturation that led Nixon and Haldeman to send Malek off to count Jews at BLS. Nixon didn’t like the way the bureau was handling the release of unemployment figures. Instead of directing James Hodgson, Secretary of Labor, to work through the timing issues, he went nuclear. And sent Malek off to do some things Malek and Haldeman should have resisted, in my view. This set up a situation where Malek later had to confront, or not, what he had done.

It was a classic example of not liking an outcome and personalizing the issue based on assumptions, rather than working out a rational and fact-based solution. Just like assuming Fred Graboske and his staff were biased against Nixon and trashing their reputations (“incompetent clerical level archivists.”). Or calling for Tim Naftali to find an Alger Hiss library to head, when he sought to put up an historically sound exhibit about “abuses of governmental power.” There couldn’t be a clearer demonstration of the management culture within the Nixon White House that resulted in those abuses than observing what NARA has faced since the 1980s.

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.

Nixon Karma

Historian and former Nixon tapes archivist Maarja Krusten on the controversies, both archival and curatorial, swirling around Richard Nixon's federal library:

[T]he Nixon foundation actually had a choice. It need not have entered into a library partnership with NARA. It had established its own library in 1990, one which held Nixon’s pre- and post-presidential records. It could have continued to maintain a privately administered library and museum, with full control of exhibits and public programs. It chose to partner with NARA in the federal library that opened in 2007. Second thoughts? Perhaps. NARA’s fault. No.

Sometimes, it seems to me as someone who once voted for him that an incredible amount of bad karma surrounds the Nixon records. Nixon made the mistake of recording his conversations, then seeking to suppress them or limit disclosures from them. His successors are required to turn over to the National Archives the records of high level governance. A lawsuit which could have been avoided forced into the open all sorts of details about NARA's handling of Nixon’s materials which otherwise might never have been exposed. The decision of an official associated with the Nixon foundation this year to refer to NARA’s Nixon library director as a candidate for administering an Alger Hiss library raised red flags and led me to decide to blog about my past experiences. Sometimes it seems like a never-ending story.

Second thoughts? An interesting question. As Nixon's chief of staff, library director, and legal co-executor, I was promoting the library's federalization within a year or two of his death in 1994. Members of the Nixon family opposed a 1997 settlement that would've accomplished the handover smoothly, with some money left over for an endowment. After that fiasco, finally consummating a less advantageous marriage took another ten years and around $1 million in lobbyist fees.

Our motives for wanting to nestle under the wing of Mother NARA? It depended. Not everyone had an opinion about federalization. I and others believed it was vital to Nixon's historical legacy. Some family members and foundation board members who actively favored the handover were being practical. They were tired of raising money to run the private library, or they feared that donations would dry up when their generation was gone.

I can only remember one person who actively opposed the 2007 handover, an arch-conservative Nixon White House staffer who believed that federal employees, now and for all time, would be unable to treat Nixon fairly. Kathy O'Connor and I spent a long lunch pleading with him not to write a newspaper column calling on the library's supporters to join him in ending charitable contributions to the Nixon foundation. When we went ahead with the handover, which both Nixons' daughters favored, he took back his records for fear that they would some day fall into federal hands. As other former White House operatives have become more actively involved at Nixon's foundation, perhaps his is now the prevailing view. They've taken the lead role in opposing the government's new Watergate exhibit, for instance.

But although Nixon's restored birthplace seems frozen in 1913, the year of Nixon's birth, time passes as inexorably in Yorba Linda as anywhere else. Before long, the aides won't be there anymore, but the papers, tapes, and other historical materials will be. They are the Nixon library. If there is to be a restoration of Nixon's historical standing, which has been battered down even more by reaction to the latest tapes opening, it will be rooted in the work of scholars and researchers whose outlooks weren't molded by Vietnam and Watergate and all the bad karma (to use MK's apt language) that attended them. They will little note the rearguard scuffles that have occurred since his presidency and death. Instead, they'll consult the records, remember what Nixon did as well as what he said, and write their articles and books.

Nixon himself was a long-ball player when it came to his legacy. He knew it was in the hands of students and scholars as yet untrained or even unborn. Yes, we who knew him, and invested much of ourselves in him and his works for good or ill, may wish we could hurry up that long restorative process. We can't, though it's understandable if we try. But for whose sake are we trying, exactly -- his, or ours?

Alger Hiss Is Daniel Galt

The best Nixon-themed "West Wing" episode ever is the Alger Hiss story line in episode 2:16, oddly titled "Somebody's Going To Emergency, Somebody's Going To Jail," a line from the Don Henley song "New York Minute," with which the episode begins and ends. I don't remember an earlier episode using a rock and roll song, and while later choices by series creator Aaron Sorkin and his crew are sublime, this one I don't get. In view of the episode's dominant father theme, "The End Of The Innocence," one of the great paternal betrayal songs of all time and the title cut from the album on which "New York Minute" appears, would've been more apt, but maybe it was thought to be too obvious.

The episode aired in February 2001, a month after George W. Bush (speaking of father issues) took office. Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) has just learned that his dad had been conducting a long-term affair. Then Stephanie Galt worms her way into his office to enlist support for a presidential pardon for her grandfather, Daniel Galt, the Hiss of the piece. He'd died in prison in the early 1950s, six months after a perjury conviction in connection with his alleged spying for the Soviets. (Read about the details here.) Stephanie's father -- "a sweet man in a bow tie," she says -- is dying, and she's driven to try to clear his father's name.

Having argued Galt's innocence in his senior thesis at Princeton, Sam swings into action with prophetic vigor, only to learn from the national security adviser that Galt had been guilty as charged. At first shocked he'd been so wrong, his rage at his own father nearly gets the better of him. He stops just short of denouncing Galt to his granddaughter and finally sends her away with just enough hope to comfort her father through his last three months. Then Sam gets a hug from Donna Moss (Janel Moloney) and calls his dad.

When the episode first aired, I wrote a mash letter to Sorkin, who wrote the script, praising his courage. The only discordant note (and it's hardly the show's fault) are the decrypted cables that the NSC adviser shows Sam. They're the fictional equivalent of the VENONA papers, Soviet cable traffic that the U.S. and British intercepted and decoded during and after World War II. The VENONA intercepts clearly implicated Alger Hiss.

In "The West Wing," Sam learns that the intercepted cables weren't made available to those prosecuting Galt because their codes hadn't been broken until the 1970s. The reality is far more dramatic. When Richard Nixon and the House Committee on Un-American Activities were investigating Hiss in 1948, the government had the intercepts but, to keep the Soviets in the dark, didn't reveal them to Congress. Federal prosecutors didn't have them for Hiss's perjury trial. During all the years Hiss and his family proclaimed his innocence, nobody knew about VENONA. As two generations of American liberals castigated Nixon for having unfairly persecuted Hiss, the feds kept their own counsel.

As far as I know, Nixon was never told the cables implicating Hiss existed, not even when he was president. It's an irony at best and an injustice at worst that VENONA was only made public in 1995, decisively vindicating his actions in the first of his many political crises. Too bad it was the year after he died.

U.S. Right Is Soft On Terrorists And Traitors

Forty-three conservative bloggers discern that Richard Nixon was worse than Alger Hiss, Ted Kennedy than John Wilkes Booth, and Woodrow Wilson than Timothy McVeigh. Lee Harvey Oswald doesn't even make the list. Worst person ever in U.S., they say: Jimmy Carter.

The New Knitters

While it's always dangerous to speculate about motives, Michael Barone's assessment of why some people want Bush officials prosecuted rings true:

Whence cometh the fury of these people? I think it arises less from revulsion at interrogation techniques -- who thinks that captured al-Qaida leaders should be treated politely and will then tell the full truth? -- than it does from a desire to see George W. Bush and Bush administration officials publicly humiliated and repudiated. Just as Madame Defarge relished watching the condemned walk from the tumbrel to the guillotine, our contemporary Defarges want to see the people they hate condemned and destroyed.

Bush critics may well respond that their anger over torture isn't opportunistic. Instead, they'd say, the alleged abuses were the inevitable consequence of a mentality of lawlessness typifying the Bush administration from the beginning -- the original sin, of course, being the allegedly stolen 2000 election. In the same way, for many of Richard Nixon's most entrenched antagonists, the narrative that began with the Alger Hiss case was perfected in Watergate. It was in his nature, the argument goes. We should've known from the beginning. Why didn't they listen to us? As I've learned in a half-lifetime promoting the pro-Nixon nuances, it's almost impossible to dissuade those who have such fixed attitudes. Whether they should determine the structure and course of a sober national debate on torture is one of President Obama's many difficult tactical challenges.

Live And Let Spy

Jacob Heilbrunn on Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers and their hold on the right and left in postwar America.