First Lord Of China

Later U.S. ambassador to China, Winston Lord served as an aide to NSC adviser Henry Kissinger in the Nixon White House. As the Shanghai Daily marks the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon's 1972 visit, Lord trumpeted his own achievement during Kissinger's cloak-and-dagger advance trip the year before:

We were flying secretively from Pakistan to Beijing on a Pakistani plane, and as the plane got close to the Chinese...border, I was in the front of the plane, and Dr. Kissinger was in the back of the plane, so as we went into Chinese territory, I was the first. I always told everyone, and Kissinger agrees, that I was the first American official to visit China in 22 years.

Presidential Plattitudes

When Oliver Platt blazes onto the screen as White House counsel Oliver Babish in "West Wing" 2:19, called in to grapple with a brewing scandal about President Bartlett's health, he's an instant Nixon three-fer. In his first scene, fumbling with a microcassette recorder, he says, "It's stuck on record. It won't stop recording things. It's just what you want lying around the White House counsel's office, because there's never been a problem with that before." Platt also shows up in the best Nixon movie ever, "Frost/Nixon," playing one of British journalist David Frost's researchers, Bob Zelnick.

Finally, Platt's the son of diplomat Nicholas Platt, who accompanied Nixon to China in 1972 and later served as president of the Asia Society. The actor talked about the Nixon-Platt connection in an April 2010 interview with NPR's Terry Gross:

We were living in Japan when Nixon resigned. And I remember, very clearly, we were driving out to the country and the news came over the radio. My parents pulled the car over and they told us all to listen.... [My father] actually just published a memoir about it called China Boys, about the opening of China; and he really had a remarkable perspective on it. He literally - he has a home movie, you know, of Nixon getting off the plane and shaking Zhou Enlai's hand and he's standing literally, you know, 15 yards away from him when that happened. And so he really, I think my father had complicated feelings about it.

Nine Songs On The 241

If your iPod's on shuffle and "Revolution 9," from the Beatles' so-called White Album, comes up, you're probably going to be tempted to skip to the next song. That I didn't do so this morning seemed to be a signal to see what I could learn from a southbound from Yorba Linda, Tuesday-before-Thanksgiving random playlist. My theory, you see, is that when your iPod has more than 10,000 songs (I have 10,005), it becomes sentient. Sometimes, like this morning, it picks nine perfect songs right in a row.

Choosing the Beatles' longest, most obscure cut was my iPod's challenge not to be MP-3 ADD -- not to skip over two, four, or ten songs while looking for the perfect one but instead to settle down and hear what the spirit of music was saying. So I gritted my teeth and listened carefully to the John Lennon-Yoko Ono sonic adventure that Paul McCartney and producer George Martin fought tooth and scale to keep off the album. I'm glad they failed. A pastiche of found sounds, from choirs to passionate moaning, "Revolution 9" matches the album's foreboding theme and tone.

As you might imagine, a minute-by-minute summary of the song is on-line, including a transcript of Lennon saying, about a minute in:

They found a shortage of grain in Hartfordshire, and every one of them knew that as time went by, they’d get a little bit older and a little bit slower…factory work…five percent in the, in the uh, the district, they were intended to pay for...

We'll revisit that Hartfordshire factory with Mick and the boys in a moment. The Beatles were actually quoted in my second song, Paul Simon's "Mother and Child Reunion," from his first solo album in 1972: "I know they say 'let it be', but it just don't turn out that way." Named for a dish in a Chinese restaurant and written about a deceased pet, the song, like the White Album, echoes with Vietnam-era urban elite discouragement, as do other songs on the album "Paul Simon" such as "Everything Put Together Falls Apart" and "Paranoia Blues." It was, after all, the year of the reelection of Richard Nixon, for whom no one Pauline Kael and probably Paul Simon knew in Manhattan would vote. A year later, as Watergate raged, Simon released the more elegiac "American Tune," set to music from J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion: "We can't be forever blessed."

A younger, equally skillful lyricist working from a smaller pallet, Belfast-born Christian folksinger Brian Houston wrote my third song, "Practical Reminder," a mid-tempo rocker from his 2005 album,"Thirteen Days In August," about an unnamed local Eleanor Rigby, an Enneagram 2 with a full-on martyr complex:

She's always loneliest when she's with other people
She just saves all of her tears until they leave
For if politeness were a virtue, then I know she's be a saint
She could deny herself for Ireland in the next Olympic games

Living a less circumscribed life was the great, deeply troubled Janis Joplin, whose powerful last album, "Pearl," was recorded with a band called Full Tilt Boogie and released a a few months after her 1970 death from a heroin overdose. FTB were journeymen musicians whom Joplin was proud to have assembled into the rock-solid, cool-rocking band she'd always wanted. She wrote the song that blasted from my Saturn's speakers this morning, "Move Over," which is well lubricated by Ken Pearson on the Hammond B-3 organ and features a powerful guitar solo by Canadian John Till, who some years before had been hired by Ronnie Hawkins after the musicians later known as the Band abandoned him for Bob Dylan.

It always seems to come back to the Band lately. The next song the mischievous iPod dished up could've been a Band song, with its country-style acoustic guitar and, I thought I heard, the hint of a mandolin. But as promised, it's back to Hardfordshire for the Rolling Stones' "Factory Girl" from 1968's "Beggars Banquet." I always thought of this Jagger-Richards song, which even has a country fiddle on it, as an invocation of an American mountain folk tune, but as a matter of fact, all that music came from England, Ireland, and Scotland to begin with. As Keith Richards said in 2003:

To me "Factory Girl" felt something like "Molly Malone", an Irish jig; one of those ancient Celtic things that emerge from time to time, or an Appalachian song.

Ancient indeed, since that was two songs in a row that had me wallowing in memories from high school. Thankfully, Lyle Lovett came along next with something newer, a genuine American country song, "Promises," from his stunning 1996 album "The Road To Ensenada." A sad, hopeless-sounding apology, it's a song St. Paul would have loved:

Promises given
And promises broken
Words stain my lips
Just like blood on my hands

And words are like poison
That sinks down inside you
And some things you do
You just don't understand

This minor-key Lovett original took me from nostalgia to discouragement to curiosity. When did he and Julia Roberts split? The year before the album came out, I see. Evidently Lovett fans have been plumbing it for clues about their breakup for years.

My musical buddy and recent pilgrimage partner Gary Baker tells me that his fellow Van Morrison fans are similarly well informed about the Belfast-born (that's twice in nine songs) living legend's love life. (There are relatively few details at Morrison's otherwise exemplary Wikipedia page.) His "Gypsy In My Soul" turned out to be the next song in my rotation. By this time I was hurtling past Rick Warren's Saddleback Church and listening to Morrison's nasal, supple tenor:

It’s just the gypsy in my soul
Make me pack up my things and go
It may seem like I’m on a roll
But it’s just the gypsy in my soul

Morrison, who used to live near members of the Band in Woodstock, appeared at their Last Waltz concert in 1976. Bob Dylan was in Woodstock as well, and in 1967, in the house called Big Pink, the Band recorded a song he wrote, "Orange Juice Blues," that was released in the 1970s on "The Basement Tapes." The ninth and last song in in my random playlist, it was playing as I rolled into the St. John's Church parking lot. Richard Manuel's beautiful, lost falsetto rang in my ears all day:

I had a hard time waking this morning
I got a lotta things on my mind
Like those friends of yours
They keep bringing me down
Just hangin' round all the time

Nixon And Kennedys Agreed On Jack Miller

Jack Miller -- mob-prosecuting veteran of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and a wood-chopping, brush-clearing lion of Washington -- died on Saturday at the age of 85. Richard Nixon hired him after his resignation to deal with the Ford pardon and the National Archives. Gracious and courtly, he and his law partner, Stan Mortenson, made a practice of visiting the former President every year at Christmastime for dinner and RN-mixed martinis.

Jack was my attorney, too, when I served as an executor of the Nixon estate after his death in 1994. Jack, Stan, and their colleague Scott Nelson (who now works for Ralph Nader's Public Citizen) helped me figure out how to settle one lawsuit related to the Nixon White House materials and try another in federal court.

Mr. Nixon trusted Jack implicitly and liked him enormously. His Washington Post obit is here.

Give rest, O Christ, to your servant with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.

Groovin' Up Slowly

Whenever I hear two songs in a row on the radio by the same artist, I still wonder if somebody died. On the evening of Dec. 8, 1980, WNEW-FM, then New York City's flagship rock station, played a long John Lennon block. Then the DJ (had they brought in the legendary Scott Muni that dark night? I can't quite recall) said that Lennon had been murdered outside his and Yoko Ono's apartment building at 72nd St. and Central Park West.

By then, I'd been working for former President Nixon for three months in his office in 26 Federal Plaza. The next day I typed out a few pages saying that Lennon and the 37th President, as prophets of peace, had been toiling in different sections of the same vineyard. Yes, it was impossibly callow. Among other things, my essay overlooked the FBI's surveillance of Lennon during the Vietnam war, though I probably got in a lick or two about the naivete of Lennon's facile if heartfelt peace talk.

Two of RN's more senior aides, Paul Bateman and the legendary Ray Price, wisely induced me not to submit it to the Village Voice, which had been my plan. But when someone else wrote to the Voice saying that if a Beatle had to get shot, too bad it wasn't Paul McCartney, I did submit a letter taking umbrage, which, as I recall, was published. Another letter to the Voice around the same time said in its entirety: "Imagine John Lennon with no possessions," which seemed churlish then and even more so now.

At Strawberry Fields, in Central Park right across from the Dakota, sitting crossed-legged and flashing the two-fisted peace sign appears to be de rigueur. Maybe there was something to the Nixon comparison, since tourists standing in the doorway of RN's chopper at the Nixon Library do pretty much the same thing. When Kathy and I visited the Lennon memorial on Friday, it was more moving than ever. To have just recorded tunes as sweet as "Woman" and "Watching the Wheels," to have been so contentedly in love, to have one of the greatest rock and roll voices ever (think "Twist and Shout" and "Yer Blues"), and to die at 40. You get to be my age, and the poignancy and tragedy definitely creep up on you. Come together, right now!

Means And Ends And More Means

An honest if troubling article by John Judis. He begins with politics 101: Presidents and candidates rise and fall with voters' confidence in the economy and satisfaction with their own situations. (That's also why President Obama won decisively in '08 after the mid-September meltdown, as any Democratic nominee would have, and why he never had a mandate for massive change.) The scary part is that since the recovery is halting at best, especially on the jobs front, Judis counsels Obama to save Democratic candidacies in the upcoming gubernatorial and midterm elections, and himself in 2012, by spending recklessly on a Rooseveltian alphabet soup of public works and jobs bureaus -- "colorful new agencies," he calls them:

Obama should turn a deaf ear to those who are calling for fiscal responsibility. He should keep pouring money into jobs and into the pockets of people who will spend until the unemployment rate begins going down and wages begin going up.

Ironic that Richard Nixon was accused of acquiescing in wage and price controls while pressuring the Fed to keep credit and money flowing in the run-up to the 1972 election, boosting employment but causing inflation in the years that followed, especially after the controls were lifted. If Nixon manipulated the economy to stay in office, it was so he could end the Vietnam war and consolidate his course-changing policies toward China and the Soviet Union. Judis wants Obama to hand out government jobs so he can win another term and make government even bigger.

Repudiate The Racists, And Mean It

Townhall.com, the conservative web site, circulates a daily e-mail offering links to its columnists and other resources. This morning's edition includes the picture at left (advertising something called the "National Republican Trust PAC") as well as a column by mainstream conservative Steve Chapman, who writes:

Obama may be a "post-racial" figure, but there is still a significant slice of the electorate that has never gotten past his skin color.

For anyone who regards blacks as irredeemably alien or inferior, Obama is a nightmare, not just because he is black but because he so thoroughly confounds racist stereotypes.

But that's a minor factor, not a decisive one. It is Obama's party and policies that are the real source of the opposition.

This strikes me as an important concession that there's a virtually unprecedented and potentially dangerous factor in the national political mix as the result of Obama's election that has nothing to do with his policies. Whether the racist fringe is "significant," "minor," or "not...decisive" (all different things; Chapman seems a bit conflicted) begs the question of whether conservatives and Republicans must become vigilant about repudiating rhetoric and tactics designed to attract and perhaps even inflame racists.

It's a difficult problem for any candidate. Political coalitions and blocs of voters are assembled across a broad spectrum. A Republican candidate knows that she gets votes from pro-choice fiscal conservatives and gun show attendees with Confederate flags and Birther bumper stickers on their pickups. The Democrat gets votes from world-government lefties and suburban moderates. Neither candidate wants to offend the fringe. The Townhall e-mail itself reflects the tension, presenting Chapman's column as well as a picture of Obama that is obviously intended to make him look like Nation of Islam security guard.

Let's be perfectly clear about this stuff. Appeals to the racist fringe are unacceptable. The racist fringe is unacceptable. Responsible Republicans should condemn it, and candidates should say they don't want their votes. You know who did it in 1962? Richard Nixon, when he spurned the Birchers. It helped him lose the California governor's election that year. But it couldn't be helped. It needed to be done. As a matter of fact, the propriety of the move notwithstanding, it prepared the GOP for the mainstream. It's time to get out the Nixon playbook again.

And They Weren't Even Free-Roaming Elephants

You don't meet anyone who has visited the Joshua Tree National Park, in the southern California high desert, and not loved it. Looking up from a Grand Slam at Denny's, you'll meet brave young Marines and their families from the base about three miles north of town. At the Twentynine Palms Inn, while eavesdropping on the conversations of Marine officers and LA intelligentsia in the cozy dining room and bar whose walls brim with the work of local artists and photographers, you could look up from your prime rib and homegrown pickled vegetables and see famed LA video diarist Huell Howser picking up an order of cheesecake to take home for dessert. On his "California's Gold," Huell's done programs about his getaway home of Twentynine Palms, but evidently not for 11 years. Kathy and I are selfishly pleased he's keeping reasonably quiet about our favorite place in the world.

And in the desert, sentinel trees, living rocks, and silence, although sometimes you think you hear Gram Parsons' voice on the wind. Ohio-born writer and essayist Deanne Stillman has written several books and essays about Joshua Tree and its denizens. Her latest book is Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West (June 2008). You can visit her website and read the first chapter here. Before I left the Nixon Library in February, we corresponded about the possibility of her giving a talk in Yorba Linda -- especially since, as it turns out, President Nixon signed the Wild Free-roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, which Stillman features in her book.

Dan Rather Without Quite Enough To Do

If the veteran newsman had made his way to the famed El Adobe in San Juan Capistrano or Olamendi's in Dana Point, he could've gotten the real scoop on 37's love for Mexican food. Wonder how the folks at "the Daily Show" persuaded him to wear that wig?

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Altering History

In a new collection of his writings, Jonathan Alter of "Newsweek" reprints his April 1994 obit of President Nixon and writes in a blurb that some had accused him of spitting on RN's grave. He adds that the director of the Nixon Library, "the friend I tapped to bring Nixon to 'Newsweek' in 1988," had never spoken to him again. Excuse me if I didn't get the quote exactly right. I didn't buy the book. That library director, now former, is I. And I'm confounded.

First of all, I wouldn't say Alter and I were friends. We went to the same prep school, but he's three years younger, so our paths barely if ever crossed. When I was working for President Nixon in New York City in the 1980s, we talked a few times, though my recollection is that it was always in connection with his duties at the magazine. We had lunch once, too.

In 1986, President Nixon ran into Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham at a publisher's conclave in San Francisco, after which, it's widely understood, she, not Alter, tapped the former President for the famous "He's Back" cover for "Newsweek." Alter wrote the article. I don't remember reading his 1994 obit. I didn't read it tonight, either, when I spotted the book at Border's. I would have, but the subplot about moi was far too distracting.

As for my never talking to Alter again, I don't know why I necessarily would have, since we didn't have a social relationship. In any event, Alter's statement in his book is false. We definitely did speak after his obit, and there were thousands of witnesses. A year or two after RN's death, we debated one another on a cable TV show. I expected the conversation to be reasonably friendly, since we did know each other, but Jonathan had a better understanding than I of the emerging etiquette of cable news channels. He ripped into Nixon and taunted me personally for defending him. If Alter means I hadn't talked to him since that episode, he's right. Actually, I've always assumed that he wouldn't have wanted to talk to me.

Take "Das Kapital" And Shove It, Nikita

Jeffrey Lord on the contrast between Obama vs. Chavez in Trinidad and Nixon vs. Khrushchev in Moscow 50 years ago.

The Silent Majority Always Endures

From "The League of Ordinary Gentlemen":

After decades of gripping tightly to a self-conception founded on Richard Nixon’s idea of the “Silent Majority“–and to be fair, that self-concept was not without objective justification–the grass roots conservatives, after a period of cognitive dissonance in which they tried to convince themselves we were still a “center right nation,” is recognizing that the Silent Majority has become the Silent Minority.

Ah, but for President Nixon the silent majority was never a grassroots conservative coalition but a center-dwelling one, people appalled by the far left's Vietnam-era shenanigans but also unmoved by purist Goldwater-Reagan conservatism. RN envisioned the U.S. not as a center-right but a moderate nation. The silent majority is always there for the picking, as President Obama may have discovered.

The President Called

Being trained for ordained ministry includes being schooled in the language of vocation and call. Both for ordained people and the laity, priesthood isn't a job but a vocation, something we grow into, work that becomes richer and deeper in the doing and that also helps us reach further into ourselves, work that is supposed to etch and mold you, to change the way you look at the world and at God's own work in creation. A baptized person's priesthood, whether ordained or not, is supposed to envelop and interpenetrate us. So we don't decide we want a job in the church. We set out to discern whether we are called, through our priestly vocation, to serve for a time in a place alongside the people of God.

Many years before I knew any of this lingo, I knew I was called to serve President Nixon. In the spring of 1979, I was a 24-year-old senior at the University of California, San Diego. I'd fallen a year behind my peers while working on the student newspaper and then two more while working full-time as a reporter in National City, California.

Sam Kernell's class in the American Presidency met twice a week that spring. As my classmates and I awaited his arrival one Tuesday, this thought came into my head, as clear as Johnny B. Goode's guitar: What if you are ever offered a job working for Richard Nixon? I wasn't a Republican, and I'd never been involved in politics. Whose voice was calling me? You tell me. Two days later, Sam walked in and said that the 37th President, then five years out of the White House and living 50 miles up the coast in San Clemente, was looking for research assistants to help with a future book (published in 1982 and titled Leaders).

I wrote two research papers, then went to work for him in New York City as a research and editorial assistant. I was his chief of staff from 1984-90 and came back to California to run the Nixon Library in September 1990.

And then he died. I may have thought I had been called to serve President Nixon. I may have considered him a vocation. I may even have understood that the experience had changed me forever. But as also sometimes happens on the path to Christian vocation, others had discerned differently. That week in April 1994, in separate conversations, two members of the President's extended family (though neither of them his blood relations) denounced me in a razor cold way that I had never experienced before, even from an angry teenager. It's what a prince's retainers experience when he dies and his successors turn out to have retainers of their own. For her part, Kathy O'Connor, RN's last chief of staff and by that time a loyal aide for 14 years, who had once spent her days fielding invitations for President Nixon from all over the world, found herself presiding over an office where the phone did not ring for weeks as she packed up his files and artifacts. (She is now the Nixon Foundation's chief, a distinct improvement over her predecessor.)

It wasn't a good time, and not just because the boss was gone. My first marriage began to unravel. My best friend among our volunteers, Don Bendetti, who had confidently promoted me for the Library job for reasons I never fully grasped and was yet another of my surrogate fathers, went into the hospital not long after RN's death and had a five-way bypass. Everything tasted of ashes.

Then I learned that the President had named me as a co-executor of his estate and in doing so had called me his friend in his will. All those years, I had been a loyal, sometimes zealous aide. I had traveled with him around the world and to China and Russia. I had talked with him for thousands of hours and kept my share of secrets. I had been his spokesman and helped him with books and articles and any number of nettlesome difficulties. I cared about him very much. But I never would've been so presumptuous as to call myself a friend.

Then, from the grave, he did. He had called me.

Some family members told me, or made clear in other ways, that they were unhappy about the choice President Nixon had made to settle his affairs. Perhaps he had hoped to spare them. Surviving him were lawsuits over the access to his White House tapes and reimbursement for his Presidential materials. We settled one case and ended up trying the other in federal court. The successful outcome paved the way for getting the Nixon Library into the federal system, which happened last year. My fellow executor, the President's stoic personal attorney, Bill Griffin, and I only managed to close the estate in 2008, after 14 years. Executors' fees were $67,000 each, lest anyone think that riches were in store beyond that cherished "friend" in the last will and testament of a complicated, peace-making statesman.

Intuitively understanding my sense of pride, soon after the President's funeral Don Bendetti had a plaque made taking note of my humbling new status as a Friend of Richard and dubbing me a "blue heart" for being true blue, a designation the President had once used for a couple of White House aides who felt dispirited during the Vietnam years. Ultimately, and especially after I began to follow a call to Holy Orders (I was ordained in January 2004), I understood that my job had become less a means of feeling valuable and useful, more an authentic expression of the servant I was meant to be of a larger purpose.

We learn to discern our calls by listening to our hearts, and to our bishops, if we're lucky enough to have one. Late last year, through both my heart and bishop, God seemed to be saying he wanted me to be a full-time priest. As I say goodbye in mid-February to my work at the Nixon Foundation -- 30 years after first meeting a great if imperfectly understood man who had made the world safer for my children and theirs, a man who deserved my best energies and far, far more -- my heart sounded blue.

For Chapter 7, I'll Need, Oh, 12 Years

Robert Stein, a distinguished figure in U.S. publishing circles, notes the correlation between the methodology of President Bush's upcoming memoir, Decision Points, which will study 12 epochal moments in his Presidency, and Richard Nixon's first book, Six Crises. Predicting that W. will use the format to evade unpleasant subjects such as the aftermath of his decision to invade Iraq, Stein writes:

Nixon's "Six Crises" similarly stopped short of Watergate by only covering events until 1960.

Six Crises stopped short of Watergate because it was published in 1962. It also stopped short of Vietnam and the breakup of the Beatles. Watergate got a third of the space in RN's post-Presidential memoir.

Ought To Have Done Vs. Ought Not To Have Done

Though he praises Frank Langella's subtle, powerful portrayal, Carl Bernstein doesn't like "Frost/Nixon" because it makes Richard Nixon look too good.

That, at least, was journalist and Nixon biographer Elizabeth Drew's assessment, which Bernstein embraced during a restaurant chat with buddies. Drew actually called director Ron Howard "dishonorable." Specifically, Bernstein wishes filmmakers had included RN's denial of an illegal coverup of the Watergate burglary.

If that's a sin (and we may discuss it if you wish), then it's a sin of omission. Neither Bernstein nor anyone else (besides The New Nixon's Robert Nedelkoff and us other true believers) acts offended about another transgression, namely the film's contention that RN's famous "it's not illegal" comment was made about Watergate rather than a controversial plan for cracking down on dissenters during wartime. The demerits of the never-implemented Huston Plan notwithstanding, Howard and playwright-screenwriter Peter Morgan may have worried that, in the age of terrorism, some moviegoers would nod their heads at a President saying that extra steps to combat violent groups such as the Weather Underground were justified.

So what's worse, Carl: Leaving something out, or rearranging the narrative to avoid burdening the audience with ambiguity?

Right Again, Mr. President

President Nixon, Beijing, February 21, 1972:

If [our two peoples] can find common ground to work together, the chance for world peace is immeasurably increased.

Secretary of State Clinton, Beijing, February 22, 2009:

[B]y continuing to support American Treasury instruments, the Chinese are recognizing our interconnection. We are truly going to rise or fall together. We are in the same boat.