You Can Always Count On The Nixon Guy

In her latest Huffington Post column, my Diocese of Los Angeles colleague the Rev. Susan Russell (shown photographing me in 2011) writes that she was a registered (although not always a voting) Republican until 1992, when she heard Nixon ex-aide Pat Buchanan's notorious cultural war speech at the George H. W. Bush convention:

I listened with increasing horror as his narrow, exclusivist, fear-mongering rhetoric laid out a vision for what this country needed -- a vision that bore absolutely NO resemblance to the values my parents had raised me to understand were core to the "Grand Old Party" of my Republican roots.

I turned the stove down under the simmering green beans, told the boys to finish their homework and that I'd be right back. I drove the six blocks down to the grocery store where earlier in the day I'd noticed the card table out front with the "Register to Vote" sign. And I changed my party affiliation that day -- explaining to the woman at the card table that if I got hit by a bus tomorrow I was NOT going to die a Republican. And I've never looked back.

This is one Huffington post GOP elites must read, mark, and inwardly digest. Susan's wasn't the only vote Buchanan lost for Bush in 1992. It could lose millions more socially tolerant, fiscally conservative voters this year, too. With the Paul Ryan pick, Mitt Romney pinned his hopes on the theory that enough former Obama voters will abandon him over the economy that Republicans will win despite tea party selfishness and a platform that envisions women in chains. With Romney's minions having massively out-raised Obama's in super-PAC funds, look for this Karl Rove-inspired script in more and more gauzy, minor-keyed TV spots: Obama meant well. He did the best he could! But it's time to give him a break and try something new for America. Romney and Rove had better hope that no more moments such as Todd Akin's unintended spasm of authenticity will make it as easy as Buchanan did for centrists to glimpse the true heart of today's Republican Party.

Bush Needed Bucking Up

Since I buy almost all my text digitally, visiting the Barnes & Noble along Baltimore's inner harbor this evening was a nostalgia trip, like going to a museum. Whoa. A newsstand. Out of sheer guilt I bought a commemorative issue about my favorite band, R.E.M., published by the British music magazine "Uncut," in which I was astonished to read this quote in a May 1988 interview with guitarist and band co-founder Peter Buck:

I recommend anyone reading this who's a psycho and can buy a gun to shoot George Bush. I'm serious. I would consider it myself. I live in a country that I hate! I live in a country where I wanna shoot politicians, where the only way you can make a real dent is not voting, it's murder.

As you might imagine, Buck and vocalist Michael Stipe supported Michael Dukakis that year. A Google search reveals nothing about Buck being questioned by the Secret Service or denounced by talk show hosts. Nor does Dukakis appear to have been forced to return any campaign contributions because of these repugnant comments. Imagine if someone of Buck's stature said this today about the president. Maybe nobody was reading "Uncut."

Good thing I'm learning it after R.E.M.'s breakup. As for the 20 CDs I already own, I don't care what they about it, I'm gonna keep 'em.

Hissing And Moaning

As reported last week, the anger of former aides of Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, toward Nixon library director Tim Naftali (left) reached a fever pitch in mid-2009 when he invited former White House counsel John Dean to give a speech. They consider Dean a rat for testifying against Nixon and helping send their friends to jail for their Watergate crimes.

Like Barack Obama's least successful critics, Nixon's men and their fellow travelers used Cold War rhetoric against the apostate. Historian Maarja Krusten writes at NixoNARA:

Susan Naulty, who used to work as an archivist at the private Nixon library, wrote critically in The Washington Times in 2009 of Tim’s decision to invite...Dean to speak at the library. In what seemed to me to be a fundamental misunderstanding of Naftali’s actions, she complained, “The question, though, nags: Why promote John Dean? Why does hostility toward Mr. Nixon continue unabated on the left?” My reaction was very different. I didn’t see the invitation to Dean as promoting him but merely one of providing an opportunity for one of many players in historical events to speak at the library. And of course, having once been mistaken for a liberal by Nixon’s side, I shook my head at the use of terms such as hostility and “the left.”

I'm the one who publicly lodged that accusation against Krusten, who campaigned for Nixon in 1968, when she was 17, and voted for him four years later. I've since apologized.

Another Naftali critic, writing on the foundation's blog, called on him to go run a museum honoring Alger Hiss (above), who was a Soviet communist agent. Crude as it was, the comment helped clarify the factors that rendered Naftali's critics impotent in the last battle of Watergate.

First up is the sheer injustice of the smear. Naftali is an empiricist and a civil libertarian who loves his country and would despise a traitor like Hiss. Author of a respectful biography of George H.W. Bush, Naftali presents, as Nixon usually did, as a non-ideological moderate and foreign policy realist. He and Nixon would probably have found relatively little to disagree about in either domestic or international affairs.

The Hiss smear did have one obvious salutary outcome. It motivated Krusten, a knowledgeable insider with strong ties in the archival community, especially at the National Archives, to start her blog to provide Naftali with rearguard support in Washington as he researched, wrote, and defended the library's new Watergate exhibit.

Another irony of the ideology-based campaign of Naftali's critics is that most writers in the first wave of Nixon revisionism in the 1980s, especially when it came to his domestic policies, were moderates or liberals. When I first recommended Naftali to the then-archivist of the U.S., Allen Weinstein, as the first federal library director, it wasn't because of his views about Nixon but because, as one of the brightest Cold War experts of his generation, he would take Nixon seriously, no matter where the massive record he left behind led scholars. The case is often made that a presidential library director should like or love the president in question. I'd say it's the job of the president's family and friends to care about him. It's the federal director's job to care about history.

Historical inquiry certainly hasn't been the strong suit of the lower-echelon, non-policy White House aides now controlling Nixon's foundation. Instead, they've devoted much of their energy to trying to rehabilitate their mentor Haldeman, muzzle their enemy Dean, and keep the museum-going public from seeing brand-new videos in which their friends Fred Malek and Dwight Chapin discuss counting Jews in the federal government and Nixon's alleged involvement in dirty tricks. But the restoration of Nixon's legacy will ask something more of his advocates than tending 40-year-old grudges and alliances. Too bad Nixon's foundation has just apparently cut itself off from the one institution, the former Nixon Center, which devoted itself not to refighting old wars but applying Nixon's principles to help keep the U.S. from becoming overextended in new ones.

Third, Nixon operatives with ties and interests in the Reagan and Bush-Cheney camps may not grasp how far the GOP has drifted from 37's centrist moorings. If few Republicans outside the pressure cooker of the Haldeman alums' mutual admiration society were willing to join them in denouncing Naftali as a leftist, it may be because some of them have decided that Nixon was one, too.

Fourth, while Nixon's red-baiting was generally rooted in substance, the Naftali critics' left-baiting was just the result of his allegedly not being devoted to Nixon. And yet it's easy even for his friends to admire Nixon's qualities of mind and heart and his peacemaking achievements and still be disappointed by his failures and errors. There's not much resonance anywhere, left, right, or center, for a purist position on our most controversial modern president.

Instead, Nixon legacy building will be generational, arc-of-history stuff, the work of many decades, as he himself understood. It will grow out of careful study of his times, policies, and temperament by scholars rather than maneuvers by operatives whose reputations may be just as weighted down by Watergate as his without being buoyed by anything like his brilliance and dogged vision.

Finally, Haldeman's men claimed to be fighting a battle for Nixon's reputation that was actually lost years ago. Ask the average fifth grader what she knows about Nixon (I have, many times), and she'll usually say Watergate. Like it or not, he's taken that hit. If his library tried to cover it up with a whitewashed museum, most visitors would know it. When they see Naftali's all-in exhibit, most of them will say, "I already knew about that." Why spend months battling an exhibit that does nothing to worsen Nixon's reputation? If we're confident about how history will ultimately view him, we needn't fear people knowing the truth about the trip to China, the break-in at the Watergate, or anything in between.

Naftali's foes may have thought they could end the left-wing threat by bringing what they took to be their political savvy and insider contacts to bear. But for all these reasons and perhaps others, they didn't get much if any traction. So John Dean gave his speech. Tim Naftali opened his Watergate exhibit. And now it's pretty clear who's in charge at the Nixon library.

Naftali Is Not The New Graboske

Tomorrow's opening of a new Watergate exhibit at the Nixon library in Yorba Linda should bring to an end a generation of courtroom and backroom wrangling over the residue of modern history's most comprehensive political scandal. In the 1980s, the argument was about what scholars and researchers would see in the archives instead of what the public would see in presidential museums. But in both cases, the same principle may well hold. Full disclosure for Nixon might end up facilitating full disclosure for his successors, and what prudent president would want that?

In the late 1980s, historian Maarja Krusten (shown below) was part of a team at the National Archives headed by Fred Graboske that prepared Nixon's White House tapes to be opened to the public. As they finished their work, NARA was under pressure from President Nixon and his lawyers (I was then his chief of staff) to slow down the process. Our argument was that, new laws and regulations notwithstanding, Nixon had a moral right to expect his materials to be handled more or less like those of predecessors such as Kennedy and Johnson, whose more controversial records, including tapes, remained under tight family control.

We were fighting a losing battle. Most in the federal government, the media, and academe seemed to believe that Watergate, Nixon's resignation, and congressional action had made him sui generis when it came to how his records would be processed.

That all changed in 1989 in the George H. W. Bush administration under archivist of the U.S. Don Wilson and his presidential libraries deputy, John Fawcett, a veteran of the LBJ library in Austin. We were assured that Nixon did deserve some grace after all, that the new laws and regulations actually did permit him to have something approximating the latitude that pre-reform presidents and their families enjoyed when it came to his most sensitive and controversial records.

To say that we were pleased is an understatement. And yet in politics, good news for one person is almost always bad news for someone else. The government's policy change had come at an awkward time, since Graboske's team had completed its work on the tapes, the most explosive records of all. You can study the nuances at Krusten's blog, NixoNARA, but the upshot seems to be that rather than saying to the award-winning Graboske and his colleagues that they'd done well but that the brass had decided to put the tapes back on a shelf for a decent interval, NARA officials decided the tapes needed to be re-reviewed. In other words, the tape review team, it was suggested, had done an inadequate job.

A few years later, after University of Wisconsin professor Stanley Kutler had sued Nixon and NARA to pry loose additional so-called abuse of power tapes that processors had identified, court proceedings as analyzed by Krusten show that the government wasn't entirely on the government's side:

Not only did the government not admit in 1992 that it had considered the Graobske-era processing final, despite contemporaneous documents showing it repeatedly used that term, lawyers working for the George H. W. Bush Department of Justice (DOJ) made selective use in their pleadings of information gathered in the discovery phase of the litigation. They rarely if ever quoted witnesses such as I, who had stated under oath that Graboske displayed no prejudice or bias against Nixon and never had said the president “has no privacy.”

Looking back, I've found it astonishing how solicitous the first Bush administration was toward 37, who had almost no policy or political leverage outside of his trademark issue of foreign policy. I doubt that it was an act of friendship by an incumbent to a former, since the Nixon-Bush relationship struck me as cordial but cool. Another possibility -- and here is where journalists and historians must go where bloggers rarely tread -- is whether the Bush administration had come to the natural-enough conclusion that slowing down the train delivering former President Nixon's records to scholars might have been a helpful precedent for future formers.

If so, the records battle was finally lost (or won, depending on one's perspective). We settled the Kutler lawsuit after Nixon's death in 1994, paving the way for the tapes to be opened by the early 2000s (they'll finally be entirely open in 2012). Presidential records are now managed according to congressional and agency mandates, and while there will always be judgment calls and controversies, the process has been largely regularized for presidents both Republican and Democratic.

But that still leaves the curatorial side of presidential libraries' work and the possible perceived precedent of the no-holds-barred Watergate exhibit that former archivist of the U.S. Allen Weinstein commissioned from the first federal director of the Nixon library, Cold War scholar Tim Naftali. In 2009, the Nixon foundation approached the other private library foundations and tried to get them to criticize Nixon's federal director for inviting Watergate figure John Dean to give a speech. The obvious intent was to panic friends of other formers into thinking that Uncle Sam's John Dean event in Yorba Linda presaged a keynote by special prosecutor Ken Starr in Little Rock and other post-White House horrors. As Naftali proceeded with planning the Watergate exhibit, did those controlling Nixon's foundation try yet again to rally the post-presidential faithful by raising fearful specters of worst-case museum cases: Displays featuring Monica's dress at Clinton, even more room for Iran-contra (a worse scandal than Watergate, some believe) at Reagan, and alleged Bush-Cheney torture policies at Texas's newest presidential library?

If so, then one can imagine that considerable pressure may have been brought to bear on Naftali over the last couple of years. But at least we can say that he's not the new Graboske, because the exhibit's opening tomorrow.

Five Presidents and Henry

In his next book, Bob Woodward will probably tell us everything we need to know about the deliberations leading to the U.S. intervention in Libya that President Obama announced this morning. I have no insider sources. I do get the feeling that he's been dancing in the corner since the Arab revolution became a global story in January and that he decided this week that Muammar Qaddafi had finally rung the bell.

I'm sure it's not that he's been itching to go to war. No president in his right mind has such impulses. But unlike the risings in Tunisia and Egypt, Libya offers the opportunity for what may seem to Obama to be a relatively low-risk move in a region where the U.S. has profound interests and therefore historic obligations.

I actually heard five presidents during his forceful if awkwardly written statement this morning. George H.W. Bush must admire Obama's stress on acting as the leading member of a broad coalition and on the basis of the UN Security Council's authorization. One can imagine the intense diplomacy -- conducted while Sean Hannity joked that Obama was wasting his time playing golf and filling out his brackets -- by which Russia and China were persuaded to abstain rather than exercise their vetoes.

Obama echoed Bush 43's freedom agenda when he said he feared "the democratic values we stand for would be overrun" unless Qaddafi was stopped. Where and when our values have ever stood tall in Libya, Obama didn't say.

His stress on protecting civilians, which defined the limited scope of intervention, also made me think of Bill Clinton's regret that he didn't try to stop the Rwandan genocide.

Then there was Obama's own doctrine, putting his action in the larger context of the year's unprecedented uprisings against authoritarian Arab regimes. After two months in which the U.S. stood by while historic events unfolded, we've finally got a chance to throw our weight behind the good guys (whoever they are). As for outcomes, Obama said, they're "the right and responsibility" of Arabs, not us.

The weakest part of Obama's statement was its claim that Qaddafi threatens "global peace and security." He doesn't. Some talking heads said they heard no reference from Obama to U.S.-driven regime change, but I did, when he spoke of holding Qaddafi's regime "accountable" for its brutality.

That's the kind of language Henry Kissinger (and maybe Richard Nixon) might've suggested leaving out. In a phoner with Fox News' Megyn Kelly a half-hour before Obama spoke, Kissinger warned against trying to bring down Qaddafi. "If you engage in regime change," Kissinger said, "you then assume some responsibility for the successor regime and how to bring it about." Obama promised to keep U.S. troops out. But one thing that doesn't change, no matter the president, is the law of unintended consequences during military interventions, especially when the dynamics and personalities are as murky as in tribal Libya. Good first round for Obama against the ruthless and wily veteran of the north African desert. Eleven to go.

They're Our Valentines

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A teary 41 and his tough cookie of a first lady, interviewed by their granddaughter

A Bush, Not A Clinton

It's fashionable to say that President Obama has borrowed Bill Clinton's post-1994 playbook. Jon Meacham says Obama's playing a much riskier, gutsier game:

It was in 1990 that Mr. Bush broke one of the most celebrated promises in modern American politics —“Read my lips: no new taxes,” as he put it in 1988 — in order to control federal spending. In the same way that Mr. Obama struck his deal to secure lower tax rates for the middle-class and win an extension of unemployment benefits, Mr. Bush gave on tax rates to get “pay as you go” rules — meaning that no further spending could be approved without compensating budget cuts or revenue increases. It was the beginning of the fiscal discipline that helped create the budget surpluses of the 1990s.

While Mr. Obama’s immediate concern is stimulus and Mr. Bush’s was deficit-reduction, both gave way on issues critical to the true believers within their parties. For Mr. Bush, it was political death. He had never been fully trusted by a Reaganite Republican base. Like Mr. Obama — who is unhappy with his “sanctimonious” left wing — Mr. Bush was no ideologue.

Tamin' Palin

Joe Scarborough:

[T]his is one Republican who would prefer that the former half-term governor promote her reality shows and hawk her books without demeaning the reputations of Presidents Reagan and Bush. These great men dedicated their lives to public service and are too good to be fodder for her gaudy circus sideshow.

If Republicans want to embrace Palin as a cultural icon whose anti-intellectualism fulfills a base political need, then have at it. I suppose it’s cheaper than therapy.

But if the party of Ronald Reagan, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio wants to return to the White House anytime soon, it’s time that Republican leaders started standing up and speaking the truth to Palin.

Obama Agonistes

Democrats and journalists are talking hopefully about the ultimately happy outcome in 1994, when that year's disastrous midterm election -- the GOP won both houses of Congress -- spurred Bill Clinton toward the center and a six-year second presidency now considered one of the most successful in recent memory. There's also 1936, when FDR was reelected in spite of the ravages of the Great Depression.

It's a long way to 2012, when we assume Barack Obama will seek reelection. Perhaps by then he'll have transformed himself into the new Roosevelt or Clinton. But I fear not -- and I mean fear, because I don't crave Republican rule. For months, he's evinced no joy about the job he won so effortlessly. Instead, he seems impatient and restive, as he has his whole adult life. He seems like a leading candidate to be the new old Bush.

Obama's proud of what he takes to be world-changing initiatives such as health care reform, perhaps even a little smug about having had the vision to force them through. He still blames his predecessor for the lagging economy. And yet I wonder how different the world would be if he'd decided to spend his first two years on nothing but jobs and GDP growth. Instead of turning the architecture of the 2009 stimulus bill over to congressional leaders who cobbled it together out of every ward-heeling pet project members had been saving up for years, what if he he'd spent the same near-trillion on a coherent jobs, investment, and infrastructure package designed by the best and the brightest among a range of economic experts? Instead of spending a year on health care, what if he'd used every public appearance to promise his worried people that he wouldn't rest until every American who wanted to work was doing so?

Assuming today's obstructionist Republicans would even work with him on those kinds of policies, does he have the talent and heart for a log-rolling, back-scratching, Ronnie-loves-Tip presidency? That would take passion he hasn't demonstrated yet. The patrician Roosevelt learned to love his suffering people. After his '94 drubbing, Clinton learned to master and love the presidency. Remember when George H.W. Bush looked at his watch during one of the 1992 debates, a few months before Clinton beat him? I'm wondering if Obama isn't looking at his and saying to himself: I've got two more years of this?

Obama Is The Old Bush

Cut the president some slack, says Nicholas Kristof:

[M]aybe the best comparison is with President George H. W. Bush, a solid president and admirable man who had stratospheric approval ratings in 1991 at the end of the Persian Gulf war and then was fired by the public a year later when he sought re-election — because of a much milder recession than today’s. Bill Clinton, who was as good a president as we’ve had in modern times, captured Mr. Obama’s challenge: “I’d like to see any of you get behind a locomotive going straight downhill at 200 miles an hour and stop it in 10 seconds,” Mr. Clinton [said.]

The Nebulous Baker Boys

Russ Baker is a conspiracy-minded writer whose 2008 book about the Bush family stepped outside the bounds of believability and indeed propriety by hinting that George H.W. Bush had a role in President Kennedy's assassination.

But Baker also poses questions about the military and intelligence communities' actions during the Nixon administration that deserve more attention that they've gotten from mainstream scholars. This piece of the Watergate puzzle doesn't have to be the whole picture, but it deserves to be part of it.

Yet anyone who writes about it at all, such as Baker, Len Colodny, and James Rosen (who's still waiting for a New York Times review of his painstakingly researched study of John Mitchell, John Dean, and Watergate), runs the risk of being called a noncanonical outlier. Former Sen. Gary Hart reprimanded the late Peter Rodman, a respected Kissinger aide, for even raising the issue of detentenik Nixon's hawkish institutional foes.

So in the vein of a beggar not being too choosy, here's an excerpt from a Russ Baker blog entry about the cozy relationship between Watergate reporter Bob Woodward (shown here) and the military establishment:

Bob, top secret Naval officer, gets sent to work in the Nixon White House while still on military duty. Then, with no journalistic credentials to speak of, and with a boost from White House staffers, he lands a job at the Washington Post. Not long thereafter he starts to take down Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, Woodward’s military bosses are running a spy ring inside the White House that is monitoring Nixon and Kissinger’s secret negotiations with America’s enemies (China, Soviet Union, etc), stealing documents and funneling them back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

That’s not the iconic Woodward of legend, of course — so it takes a while for this notion to settle in the mind. But there’s more — and it’s even more troubling. Did you know there was really no Deep Throat, that the Mark Felt story was conjured up as yet another layer of cover in what became a daisy chain of disinformation? Did you know that Richard Nixon was loathed and feared by the military brass, that they and their allies were desperate to get Nixon out and halt his rapprochement with the Communists? That a bunch of operatives with direct or indirect CIA/military connections, from E. Howard Hunt to Alexander Butterfield to John Dean — wormed their way into key White House posts, and started up the Keystone Kops operations that would be laid at Nixon’s office door?

Hat tip to Len Colodny

Soutering Moderate Republicans Just Fine

Kermit Roosevelt, a former clerk for David Souter, disputes those who say that the retiring associate justice lurched to the left after being appointed by the first President Bush:

Souter's current position on the left wing of the court owes much more to movement by the court and the country than to any lurch on his part. The current court, after all, has seven Republican appointees and has been on a steady rightward drift since the Reagan years. The Republican Party has, too. I think Souter is indeed in many ways a Republican; it's just that his sort of Republican no longer really exists.

Baker's Not So Fabulous Bush Boys

It's not surprising that "The Huffington Post" would run a long expose on George W. Bush's National Guard service. What's surprising is that it's an excerpt from Russ Baker's new book, Family of Secrets. I've read about half of it, including all the Nixon chapters. It's a massive exercise in conjecture which hints that George H. W. Bush had something to do with JFK's assassination (Kennedy wouldn't do the bidding of Texas oligarchs, who were fiercely protective of the oil depletion allowance) and also oiled the skids for President Nixon's downfall because of his independent-mindedness on economic and foreign policy. Here's an example of Baker's style:

Maureen Dean, before meeting John during his White House residency, had been a Dallas-based flight attendant. She had been married to George Owen, who worked for Clint Murchison Jr. -- a central figure in the oil depletion-[Oswald associate] George de Mohrenschildt circle. At minimum, it certainly is a small world.

In part by drawing lines such as that between mid-century elites -- Baker must've had a thousand yellow stickies on his dining room wall -- he asserts that the CIA's behind almost everything in Washington's recent history, including John Dean. Even Watergate historian Stanley Kutler, who calls Dean a personal friend, is drawn into the fray. The tentacles, Baker hints, reach even that far.

We Nixonians are instinctively drawn to anything which exonerates our man, as Family of Secrets largely does. Baker draws on under-appreciated Watergate findings by Jim Hougan, Colodny-Gettlin, and most recently James Rosen. His book was praised by Nixon biographer Roger Morris and also carries an endorsement of the author (though not, it appears, of the book itself) by Bill Moyers. It's not that more scholarship about the Vietnam-Watergate era isn't needed, particularly since the corrupt FBI's self-protective machinations against an elected President have been cast in sharp relief by W. Mark Felt's death.

And yet time after time, Baker makes fateful implications and suppositions without quite closing the deal. Conviction by connection isn't the same as history. Which brings us back to "The Huffington Post"'s seeming opportunism in running a Baker excerpt. If it's in your political or ideological interests to promote Family of Secrets on W.'s Guard service (as Huffington does) or indeed on the alleged CIA frame-up of RN during Watergate, aren't you endorsing his whole enterprise, including, especially, the dark hints about the Bush family and the events of November 1963?

Poppycock?

Old conventional wisdom: Nixon worse than Bush. New CW: Bush worse than Nixon. New Russ Baker book: Bushes destroyed Nixon.

The Magical Scowcroft Effect

Under the tutelage of an acolyte of Henry Kissinger, the foreign policy realists and idealists are switching parties. E. J. Dionne, Jr.:

What's most striking about Obama's approach to foreign policy is that he is less an idealist than a realist who would advance American interests by diplomacy, by working to improve the country's image abroad, and by using military force prudently and cautiously.

This sounds a lot like the foreign policy of George H.W. Bush, and it makes perfect sense that Obama has had conversations with the senior Bush's closest foreign policy adviser, Brent Scowcroft. Obama has drawn counsel from many in Scowcroft's circle, and [Defense chief Robert] Gates himself was deputy national security adviser under Scowcroft.

It Takes A President

Great secretaries of states work for strong Presidents, says the CBC's Henry Champ:

It is hard to find a truly successful secretary of state who served a president weak in international affairs. Certainly in the modern era, two generally regarded as successful — Henry Kissinger and James Baker — served tough, experienced leaders.

Whatever you think of Richard Nixon or George H.W. Bush, both were skilled in foreign policy. Their pairings were built on loyalty and consensus, at least in public.

It's true these matches were also based on close personal relationships not apparent between Obama and Clinton. But then again, the closeness between current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush did not improve a State Department legacy that is likely to be rated by historians as below average.

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