Calling On Angels

Al Kaline at Briggs Stadium, 1957

I left my heart in two places (outside of home) in my hometown. The Cathedral Church of St. Paul on Woodward Ave., where I was baptized and confirmed in The Episcopal Church, remains. The other, gone since 2009, was old Briggs Stadium, ancestral turf of the Detroit Tigers, who baptized me into baseball.

Though my mother and godfather usually took me on weekends, my first game was on a weeknight. I was about six. Along with millions of boys and girls, I have an inner YouTube video of that first walk along a darkened passage toward a light-soaked space -- the long white lines, the emerald grass, the clay-red diamond after it had been raked and hosed down, just before determined figures in brilliant raiment would surge from the home dugout, scattering the dirt with their cleats.

Starring in my field of dreams were sluggers Al Kaline and Willie Horton, now in their 70s and still active in the front office. After my mother and I moved to Phoenix in 1967, when I was 12, I kept my Tigers by the tail by clipping box scores and taping them in a scrapbook. When they beat St. Louis in the 1968 World Series, my godfather, who worked at the Detroit Free Press, mailed me the cardboard mat the pressmen had used to make a plate for the front page the next morning. The headline shouted “WE WIN!” to a town that was already experiencing harbingers of last month’s bankruptcy.

In the late 1960s in Arizona, the diamondbacks’ only prey was mice, rabbits, and gophers. While in college, experiencing vocational foreshadowing, I rooted for the Padres. I never cottoned to Yankees or Mets during ten years in New York. But I was in old Yankee Stadium (brilliantly portrayed by old Briggs in the 2001 movie “61”) with Richard Nixon and his son-in-law David Eisenhower on July 4, 1983 when lefthander Dave Righetti pitched a no-hitter against Boston.

Many years later, Kathy and I took Eisenhower to the Big A. He looked around the house that Disney

John and Andy at the Big A, 2013

renovated and said, “I envy you living so close to a major league ballpark.” But I was a utility fan at best until something flipped a switch a few weeks before the end of the Angels’ unremarkable 2012 season. I couldn’t wait for opening day. I’ve already been to the ballpark eight times this year. Kathy graciously watches more games than she would prefer. I use an iPhone app to listen to play-by-play from all over the country.

I’ve resisted using my phone to research whether a sudden spike in childlike enthusiasm says something I should but don’t want to know about my aging brain. While I’ve also resisted Googling “Jesus and baseball,” I wonder about the theology behind all the things we love with innocent abandon – from sports and music and painting to bridge and quilting and fishing and reading and all the hobbies and avocations in between. In March David Ferguson wrote in The Onion, “Find the thing you’re most passionate about, then do it on nights and weekends for the rest of your life.” I suspect most of us indulge our non-remunerative passions not to escape reality but to reveal our true selves to others and even to ourselves.

As people of faith, do our greatest passions also signify something about our conceptions of the sacred? Think about Angels fans wearing Holy Spirit red while celebrating and (so far this season) mourning as one. Children have more fun at baseball than at football and basketball games, and that’s also a holy thing. Others have written more eloquently than I possibly can about the game’s intricacy, its sights and strangely comforting sounds, its history, symmetry, and beautiful displays of athleticism. I enjoy the fellowship in the stands and the comradeship among the players, their youthful quirks and superstitions. I love winning and having faith that we’ll eventually stop losing. Baseball is tidier than everyday life and doesn’t matter anywhere near as much – until it does, when it’s almost like heaven.

This post originally appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John's Episcopal Church.

Nixon's No-Hitter

Dave Righetti strikes out Wade Boggs

Richard Nixon was heading to Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1983, and it was going to be a great day. The Yanks were playing their arch rivals from Boston. His son-in-law and fellow baseball obsessive David Eisenhower was along. It was the 47th anniversary of Nixon's first major league game (Yankees v. Senators) and the 44th of ALS-stricken Lou Gehrig saying that he was "the luckiest guy in the world" as he bade farewell to Yankees fans in their hallowed cathedral in the Bronx.

Nixon had hinted he would have big news for his writing bench, Marin Strmecki and me, and that was exciting, too.

It was also a special day because Nixon said no one had to wear a coat and tie. He wore them almost everywhere, and when we were along, so did we. We would be in Yankees owner George Steinbrenner's box, where an under-dressed Nixon usually wouldn't have been caught dead. The photo below shows him and me at a game the prior September, also in Steinbrenner's box and dressed as though we were attending a funeral. But since it was going to be about 90 degrees in the Bronx that July afternoon, he didn't want us to be uncomfortable, and he especially didn't want to look less formal than his son-in-law and aides.

Not as much fun as the no-hitter

But I said it was a great day, and if you're a baseball fan, you know why: Yankee left-hander Dave Righetti's no-hitter, the first that  megafans Nixon and Eisenhower had seen live.

The seats were great, too, but they would have rather been in the stands. Two years later, Nixon gave up his Secret Service protection, one reason being that the bodyguards on his payroll instead of the Treasury department's were less resistant when he said he wanted to sit among the hoi polloi. In the owner's box, Yankees executives, former players, and journalists had a tendency to drop by to say hello, and while Nixon was gracious, he just wanted to watch the game.

When we reached the seventh inning without a Boston hit, Nixon told us to make sure he was left alone. Baseball people are even more superstitious than politicians, so everybody understood. He spent the time whispering to Eisenhower, who later recalled a boisterous top of the ninth because of some concerns about manager Billy Martin's defensive moves. Marin and I were sitting right behind Nixon, and I remember him being absolutely still during all three outs, as though any wrong move would jinx it. When Righetti struck out Wade Boggs ("with a high inside fastball," Nixon remembered when writing about it seven years later; Righetti says it was a slider away), he jumped to his feet, cheered, and gave us all high fives (a presidential first and last for me).

His sweaty face glowed with perfect joy as he turned to leave. But then it was back to business. Taking Marin and me aside, he handed us a yellow legal pad with a handwritten outline he'd completed the day before. We would spend the rest of the summer turning it into prose. Nixon self-published it that fall as Real Peace, a diplomatically worded but unmistakeable repudiation of Ronald Reagan's ideologically inflexible policy toward the Soviet Union and on arms control. Soon after that project, Marin went to work for Jimmy Carter's NSC chief, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and then with the mujaheddin. During the second Bush's administration, Donald Rumsfeld asked Marin to reassess and realign the Pentagon's Afghanistan tactics and strategy.

Arthur and Honey

My gifts being humbler, I remained on the fan-in-chief's squad many more years, as did his last chief of staff and my future wife and co-author, Kathy O'Connor. Our brushes with baseball greatness continued. Kathy became friends with Steinbrenner's affable associate, former sportswriter Arthur Richman ("Do you need any money, honey? Can I send you some money?"). They're shown in Anaheim in 1997, when the Yankees were visiting for one of their periodic drubbings by the Angels. A few years later, Richman invited Kathy and me to dinner, when he told us about being on the road with the Mets' Darryl Strawberry as he battled addiction.

Back in 1983, just a few weeks after Righetti's no-hitter, Billy Martin accused Kansas City Royals slugger George Brett of having too much pine tar on the handle of his bat. No, we weren't there for that one. But when umpires sided with Martin and gave the Yankees the game, Nixon sent Brett a letter bucking him up. Notoriety gave Nixon deep reserves of empathy for the notorious, and in this case, his instincts were sound. The AL brass sided with Brett.

Nixon wrote hundreds of letters to athletes. He didn't mind that they often didn't write back. What young man constantly on the road without a social secretary actually knew how to? A couple of months after the pine tar incident, I answered the phone while working late in Nixon's Manhattan office. "President Nixon sent George a nice letter, and I don't think he replied," said Ethel Brett, his mother. "Would you please tell him thank you?"

A Tale Of Two Translators

David Barboza profiles Zhou Enlai's translator, Ji Chaozhu, whom I met in 2002 when visiting Beijing with Julie and David Eisenhower. Ji and his family fled to New York City in the late 1930s after the Japanese invasion of China. When he returned after the revolution with a U.S. education and peerless command of English, he began what Barboza calls a Zelig-like career:

[H]e joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and over the next 30 years served as a translator for China’s leaders, including Mao (“He complained I spoke too loudly when I translated.”); Mr. Zhou (“He was like a father.”); Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and a member of the infamous Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution (“She was the horror of all horrors!”); and Mr. Deng (“He was so short, I had to spread my legs to get lower when I interpreted.”)

IN those years of isolation from the West, Mr. Ji bicycled to work, earned about $10 a month and had but one blue Mao suit.

He was also one of only a handful of trustworthy and competent English-speaking interpreters in China. Another was his younger colleague Tang Wensheng, or Nancy Tang, Mao’s primary interpreter during the Nixon and Kissinger visits.

Mr. Ji said he had recommended Ms. Tang, who had been a family friend in New York. In the 1940s, their fathers had started a Chinese-language newspaper together.

When Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Nixon visited in the early 1970s, Mr. Ji and Ms. Tang served as the chief interpreters. The United States delegation usually came without its own interpreters.

“Nixon really didn’t trust the State Department to keep a secret, so we didn’t really have anyone of our own,” Winston Lord, an aide who traveled with Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Nixon to Beijing, said in an interview.

But shortly after that historic moment, Mr. Ji and Ms. Tang were drawn into the power struggles of the Cultural Revolution, which spanned the years from 1966 to 1976. Mao, in his latter years, grew suspicious of everyone around him, including Zhou Enlai. Historians say Mao’s close advisers, including Ms. Tang, struggled with Mr. Zhou and his associates.

During the same trip, I sat next to Nancy Tang at a banquet. When the conversation turned to the Sept. 11 attacks the year before, she looked at me with a steely smile on her face and in her ex-New Yorker's English berated Americans for not paying "enough attention to what's going on in the world."

The Refiner's Fire

Fifteen years ago this Christmas, during my toughest professional crisis, the soundtrack was Handel's "Messiah," inevitably. I've been listening to the king of oratorios through and through over and over in the car during Advent and Christmas for years. (Trevor Pinnock's recording this year. Wow!) But its triumphal choruses and sweet arias will always resonate with the lessons I learned that life-changing Christmas about the preciousness of true friendship and the abundance of grace.

To start with, it was President Nixon's doing. After his death in April 1994, I was surprised to learn that he'd named me co-executor of his estate, along with his personal attorney, Bill Griffin. His daughters were also surprised. That spring, Julie Eisenhower invited me to her late parents' Bergen County townhouse. As we sat in the sun room, she said how angry she and Tricia Cox were that their father hadn't picked them.

Over time, and naturally enough, it proved easier for them to get angrier at me than stay angry at him. For the next two and a half years, I kept running Nixon's private library while trying to settle two presidential records-related lawsuits the estate had inherited. In our periodic conversations, Nixon's attorney son-in-law, Ed Cox, did everything possible to inflame the wound Nixon had inflicted on his family by putting Griffin and me in charge of his estate. I can only speculate (and speculate I do) about why Nixon made the choices he did. Whatever his motives, as the reality of the situation settled in, Eisenhower (who had been friendly for years) was painstakingly and methodically brought around to the view that I wasn't "responsive enough to the family."

In the fall of 1996, Ed Cox blocked a deal I'd worked out with the Justice Department and National Archives that would have federalized and endowed the Nixon library. At issue were the tens of millions that would flow through the estate as compensation for the value of Nixon's White House documents, tapes, and other materials, which Congress had seized after his resignation. As executor, I had to protect both the family's interests and the library's, which Nixon had made his largest beneficiary. David Eisenhower told me that Cox, whose firm was representing him and Julie, had promised a substantial sum over the amounts specified in Nixon's will.

Why do the nations so furiously rage together? For a while it looked like it would be paid over my dead body. Cox cut off direct negotiations in early October 1996 after I insisted on including a Nixon foundation attorney. Before long, I began to hear that I had "problems with the family." Tricia called some of my colleagues at the library and promised that, once I was gone, they would be "protected."

Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. Cox had already tried to get me to resign as executor. Now the family called in a resentful consultant and ex-speechwriter, Ken Khachigian, to fire me at the library. I got the impression that he told everybody else in Orange County first. Herb Kalmbach, Nixon's White House-era attorney, drove to Yorba Linda to warn me. "The long knives are out," he said. Khachigian had a chance to plunge them in at Wheelspinners, a holiday party for politicians and journalists at the Biltmore in LA. Instead, after eying me sullenly from a redoubt hard by the appetizer bar, he asked about a pending Watergate-era project of his. He had been wondering how often his name came up in a new batch of tapes and asked if I could get a report to him by Friday. "I want to know why my political enemies might use against me," he said.

On Friday, I got a call from a friend on the library board, who said that Khachigian had asked him to tell me the Nixon family wanted my resignation. I wondered later what they had needed Khachigian for, since he hadn't even been up to the job of lowering the boom. Instead, I had to place the call to my own evidently timorous executioner, waiting by the phone at his San Clemente office. "I'll be overseeing the transition," he said optimistically. He told me that Nixon had let him go from his ex-president's staff in the late 1970s. Now it was my turn. I replied that Nixon had given me both my jobs and that if he had wanted a Cox, an Eisenhower, or Khachigian to handle his affairs, they would have been. In a lengthy fax over the weekend, I said I wouldn't resign. I also suggested that he make an appointment with the library's archivist to listen to the Watergate tapes himself.

That same weekend, Julie Eisenhower decided that I could stay. By then the Nixon foundation was awkwardly overseen by a super-board composed of Nixon's daughters, former Treasury secretary Bill Simon, and ALLERGAN chairman Gavin Herbert. Simon and Herbert had complained to me about Cox's pressure for more money. Based on a conversation I'd had with Simon in 1993, I assumed Khachigian wouldn't make much progress if he tried to get Simon to team with Tricia to fire me. Finally the Coxes maneuvered Herbert into quitting, which gave the family a 2-1 governing majority.

Nixon had never said he wanted his family to run his library. They didn't for long. For months Ed Cox had faxed me instructions purportedly issued by both women. He told people I'd been fired but refused to leave the premises. Meanwhile the Eisenhowers kept in touch with Kathy O'Connor, Nixon's last chief of staff, and me, urging us to stay the course. After Nixon's first postmortem crisis hit the newspapers in April 1997 (see here and here), Kathy and I put Simon and Eisenhower together and reorganized the foundation under its first independent fiduciary board. O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion!

No one familiar with families' struggles over money, power, and hurt feelings would be surprised by this story. If there's one thing more awkward than siblings who disagree, it's the third party whom a beloved parent has interposed. I couldn't tell which Cox spouse took it more personally that Nixon had overlooked them as custodians of his estate. Even though I served his father-in-law and family for nearly 30 years, Ed called me a johnny come lately in an e-mail he sent Nixon's brother Edward. Anyone in Yorba Linda who'd dealt much with Cox (currently the New York State Republican chairman) had no difficulty thinking that he was taking the lead oar. But I urged people not to underestimate Tricia. What John Moorman, scholar of the Church of England, wrote about the 16th century’s Mary Tudor applied to Nixon’s elder princess as well – “a tight-lipped, severe woman who had passed through the fire of suffering and is now in the grip of a firm determination."

She shares Henry VIII's pragmatism. Until his death in 2009, Nixon aide-turned-columnist Bill Safire was one of the Nixon family's few media friends. During the awkward months before we reorganized her father's foundation, Tricia pressured me to consult Safire, an anti-Beijing hawk, on the speaker list for a conference we were planning on Sino-U.S. relations. When I said that Safire’s views on China were opposed to her father’s, she didn't even bother to argue that they needed to be taken into account for balance's sake. She just said, “My father’s dead."

The struggle with her and her husband continued for years. I was called out of a final exam at seminary to take phone calls about the suit we filed, with the Eisenhowers' encouragement, to secure the $19 million Bebe Rebozo had left the library upon his death in 1998. He had given Nixon's daughters and another friend, aerosol valve inventor Bob Abplanalp, a voice in its disbursement. Tricia Cox made clear that she wanted to use her leverage to overturn our 1997 governance reforms. We settled the suit, got the money, and kept our independent board, but it wasn't pleasant. She and her legal team, which the dutiful Khachigian helped organize, spread the story that Rebozo, famous for stowing $100,000 from Howard Hughes in his safe, had said he didn't trust me with his money. Abplanalp, who repudiated the Cox tactics in a letter, said that Rebozo had admired me and just wondered during my early years at the library how much experience I had managing large investment accounts. I'd had a similar conversation with Rebozo myself. The Cox spin on Rebozo's question turned it into character assassination.

With all that behind us, when I left the library in 2009 after 19 years to begin full-time ministry, the women joined in a gracious statement:

We will always be grateful to John Taylor for his loyal and creative service to our father. He worked closely with him on his eight post-Presidential books and then provided dynamic leadership at the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda since its opening in 1990. He will be missed and we wish him well in his ministry.

As Ron Ziegler might've said, their statement is now inoperative. I was surprised to find recently that a sinister force had erased it from the Nixon foundation web site, although the press release it which it once appeared remains.

Recent reports make clear that the Coxes now have considerable influence at what former Nixon library director Tim Naftali calls the Haldeman foundation. Its current attorney, CREEP administrator and Cox buddy Rob Odle, helped stop the Nixon Center from using Nixon's name. Tricia disliked the center's president, Dimitri Simes. So did Khachigian, who called me once to say he'd been surfing the web to see how many (or how few) media hits Simes was getting. He was despised, rejected! As the Nixon foundation conducts its programs while promoting the agendas of family members and John Dean-hating aides of disgraced White House chief of staff Bob Haldeman, at least the Nixon library is now safely under federal government control. When Ed Cox blocked our 1997 National Archives deal, it cost the foundation millions and the public a ten-year delay in taking control of the Nixon library. In 2007, thanks to our independent board and $1 million in lobbyist fees, Kathy and I, having expanded the library, finally handed it over to the National Archives. Hallelujah!

Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory. Being on the Nixon family's enemies list wasn't as bad as health and other setbacks experienced just last week by members of the church I serve. But after working hard for Nixon from 1979 until his death and investing so much of my heart in the process, being the object of Borgia-like secret maneuvers and ice-hard ruthlessness might have crushed me. At least it felt like it would at the time, as all one's own emergencies usually do. Instead, the experience sparked a call to ordained ministry and taught me some important lessons besides -- and not just how to survive in the Church, which these last 20 centuries has perfected the art of institutional bloodletting. In a gut fight, if you're in someone's way you don't get credit for past service or having your heart in the right place. I also discerned the decisive difference between a friendship and an alliance and came to believe that truth-telling can stimulate understanding, growth, and forgiveness. One may even discover, as did the Jews returning from Babylon with Isaiah's redemptive prophecy ringing in their ears, that all things really do work together ineffably. Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplish'd, that her Iniquity is pardoned.

The Simple-Minded Genius

Christopher Hitchens goes a little squishy on his one-time nemesis Ronald Reagan:

In a bizarre way...his simple-mindedness turns out to have had a touch of genius to it. His grasp of physics was on a level with Hollywood beam-weapon B-movies, and how we all laughed when he told Mikhail Gorbachev that, in the event of a Martian invasion of Earth, the United States and the Soviet Union would combine to sink their differences. But he had an insight that was denied to the adherents of Mutual Assured Destruction, whose theory was rapidly coming up against diminishing returns.

David Eisenhower, Nixon's son-in-law, told me that Reagan had indeed gotten the Strategic Defense Initiative from an old movie and that his self-confidence during negotiations with the Soviets stemmed from his mistaken belief that the strategic missile-killing system had actually been designed and deployed. This kind of thing can make us goofy with wonderment about that Reagan magic. Or it could help us appreciate the extent to which, during the Reagan years, the Soviet Union was actually crumbling of its own accord, in part because of a reckless expenditure on weaponry that was the consequence of all that MAD thinking and, thus, the effective policies of Reagan's predecessors.

"Fortunate Son," Fogerty and Springsteen

Two great American rockers rock David Eisenhower

Fortunate Ones

I guess I'm the last Creedence Clearwater Revival fan in the world to know that John Forgerty's song "Fortunate Son" was written about a member of the Nixon family:

Some folks inherit star spangled eyes,
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord,
And when you ask them, "How much should we give?"
Ooh, they only answer More! more! more!

It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no military son, son.
It ain't me, it ain't me; I ain't no fortunate one, one.

Dan Reilly writes at "Spinner":

The song was inspired by President Dwight D. Eisenhower's grandson, David, who married then-President Richard Nixon's daughter, David (sic).

Mr. Reilly meant Julie. As for Eisenhower, he served in the Naval Reserve during the Vietnam war. I naturally assumed that Fogerty had served in a riskier capacity. But it turns out he was pretty fortunate, too. To avoid being drafted, he joined the Army Reserve and never left U.S. soil during his stint.