Anna Another Thing On Watergate

Ken Hughes argues that Richard Nixon ordered a break-in at the Brookings Institution in 1971 not because of his rage over the leak of the Pentagon Papers during wartime, as I've always contended, but because he was worried about what his political opponents might've known about his effort to torpedo the Johnson administration's Vietnam peace process.

The Brookings break-in never occurred. Still, Hughes asserts somewhat dramatically that if the House Judiciary Committee had known about the Brookings tape segment in 1974, and it had led investigators to the Anna Chennault file (she told the South Vietnam they'd get a better deal under Nixon), the articles of impeachment drawn up against Nixon might have included treason (based on the law against private citizens interfering with official U.S. diplomacy).

Hughes says there's no evidence that presidential politics were behind Lyndon Johnson's ordering a bombing halt in Vietnam a few days before the 1968 election, when Nixon was running against Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey. About this, Nixon's advocates beg to differ -- for example, Conrad Black:

[P]erhaps the all-time nadir in American presidential-election ethics was achieved in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson tried to salvage the election for his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, with a completely imaginary claim of a peace breakthrough in the Vietnam talks a few days before the election. LBJ announced an enhanced bombing halt and more intensive talks in which the Viet Cong and the Saigon government would be “free to participate” (i.e., Saigon declined to attend since there had been no breakthrough).

So who did worse playing politics with war: The candidate or commander-in-chief?

Maarja Krusten reflects on Hughes' startling allegations here.

U.S. And China, After The Bear Is Gone

The whole "firebomb Brookings" thing notwithstanding, Jeffrey A. Bader at the Brookings Institution gives Richard Nixon his due for the opening to China and ponders the future of the relationship:

The biggest challenge, as Nixon understood before his death in 1994, was whether the United States and China could sustain the relationship that he helped launch in the absence of a common enemy, the Soviet Union. Nixon believed we could, and should. He was right. But leaders on both sides will need to identify and work together on common interests, internationally and bilaterally, more effectively than they have since 1990 if we are not to be overwhelmed by the security dilemma, economic clash, and ideology. This may not sound like a task as heroic as Nixon’s trip to China, which spawned an opera, but it may be as important to the prospects of continued peace for the next forty years as Nixon’s visit.

Hiss Or History? Part II

Richard Nixon's defenders (0f which I've been one lo! these many years) are wont to say that his tape-recorded comments shouldn't always be taken as official policy, or even a perfectly accurate expression of his real views, since he was prone to let off steam in conversations with trusted aides. The theory is that just because he said, in the heat of his rage over the leak of the Pentagon Papers, that he wanted his men to burglarize the Brookings Institution didn't mean they really should. Just because he kibbutzes with Kissinger about hypothetical Soviet pogroms doesn't mean he'd stand by and let another holocaust occur.

Such defenses of Nixon's blaring taped outbursts often -- usually -- fall on deaf ears. Some are understandably reluctant to accept that the most powerful man in the world didn't usually mean what he said.

But now the family of a disgraced Vietnam-era officer, Maj. Gen. John D. Lavelle, is marshaling evidence from the tapes, namely yet more Nixonian outbursts, to show that the general was carrying out his commander-in-chief's orders. Charles A. Stevenson, a Johns Hopkins University lecturer who used to be a U.S. Senate staffer, opposes the restoration of Lavelle's honor -- and sure enough, he too has discovered that, with 37, presidential commentary doesn't always add up to presidential action or culpability:

Stevenson...noted that Nixon blew a lot of hot air in his Oval Office meetings, rants that shouldn't be mistaken as official policy.

"Nixon said an awful lot of things to his staff, that his staff wisely did not implement," Stevenson said. "Nixon had a practice of saying outrageous things as if they were orders."

Hat tip Maarja Krusten

"What Have You Done For Me Lately?"

Karen Tumulty surveys the debate over American exceptionalism, which President Obama triggered (by being a bit too clever answering a question last year in France) and Republicans are exploiting for political purposes (by sowing more doubt about whether he can be trusted).

The United States was blessed to have been born at the apogee -- indeed as the apogee -- of the Enlightenment in the 18th century. Our founders were inspired to root a nation in their profound understanding of our God-given liberty. No other such nation exists. But that was just the beginning of the story. Still being written, the rest is how we live into our destiny by deepening our commitment to liberty and opportunity for all our people.

No party or politician has a monopoly on exceptionalist props. Some want to limit our freedom by further enhancing the power of the federal government. I'm not a big fan of bureaucrats and regulators, but they're an incredibly easy target. It's also too easy to single out those whose commitment to freedom of religious expression, and freedom from religious persecution, was found wanting as soon as a short-term political advantage could be gained by scapegoating and frightening our Muslim citizens.

Instead, let's try these:

Freedom: When it comes to human liberty, our record as exceptionalist stewards has been improving slowly but steadily. We've been a living exemplar of freedom for centuries, and Americans have fought and died for others' liberty where before great nations fought only for themselves. Yet it took us until 1865 to free the slaves, 1920 to let women vote, and the 1960s to eliminate de jure racial persecution in the South.

Today, some still want to deny gay and lesbian people the right to the same public benefits that heterosexuals receive when they set up households and have children. I'm not taking about the sacrament of marriage, which is the business of the church and other faith institutions. I'm talking about financial and other practical advantages still being withheld from homosexuals because some in politics think it's the government's job to enforce St. Paul's rules, as they understand them, as expressed in the Letter to the Romans.

Opportunity: Also serving as barriers to the full realization of American exceptionalism are those who tolerate and even act to prop up our society's unfair system for funding public education. Teachers in rich districts are paid more than those in poor ones, and higher-poverty schools within districts still sometimes get fewer resources than lower-poverty ones.

What, do you imagine, does God really think about that? When it comes to public education, the favorite conservative slogan is local control. Here, a commitment to gospel principles evades some of those conservatives who number themselves among the faithful. Jesus Christ commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves -- quite literally to worry as much about a child in Watts as one in our own house or neighborhood.

But when we hoard opportunity for our own children and community, we violate the Enlightenment ideals behind American exceptionalism by victimizing the most innocent and powerless among us -- children who can't possibly thrive without a good education. It doesn't excuse our selfishness to say that the federal government lacks the wisdom to equalize opportunity. Our obligation to do so remains.

Tumulty's article says this about our conception of the religious roots of American exceptionalism:

A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that 58 percent of Americans agreed with the statement: "God has granted America a special role in human history."

Gingrich says Obama fails to understand that "American exceptionalism refers directly to the grant of rights asserted in the Declaration of Independence," and that it is a term "which relates directly to our unique assertion of an unprecedented set of rights granted by God."

Unique assertion? I'll grant that, for the reasons I've already given: That the American experiment was launched at a unique time in the the West's intellectual and spiritual development. Unprecedented set of rights? That actually doesn't make any sense. What was unprecedented was humanity's all-too-tardy recognition, as the scales of medievalism fell from our eyes in the 18th century, of the abundant love God has always expressed for all his creatures as unique individuals. We'd been hearing about it through the Hebrew prophets since the 8th century B.C.

But if Gingrich or that 58% in the Brookings poll are saying that God loves America or Americans more than any other nation or peoples, they're obviously wrong. The means of protecting individual rights and diffusing state power that our founders derived from God's law are available to all, and democratic societies around the world are doing pretty well with them. Our special status as stewards of freedom will always exist because the light was first lit on our shores. But that doesn't mean God won't always be asking what we've done for him lately.