It Goes By Awfully Fast

From Charles McGrath's elegant obituary of Gore Vidal (he's shown with George McGovern at the Nixon library in 2009), an always-timely warning:

In 2003 Mr. Vidal and his companion, [Howard] Austen, who was ill, left their cliffside Italian villa La Rondinaia (the Swallow’s Nest) on the Gulf of Salerno and moved to the Hollywood Hills to be closer to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Mr. Austen died that year, and in “Point to Point Navigation,” his second volume of memoirs, Mr. Vidal recalled that Mr. Austen asked from his deathbed, “Didn’t it go by awfully fast?”

“Of course it had,” Mr. Vidal wrote. “We had been too happy and the gods cannot bear the happiness of mortals.” Mr. Austen was buried in Washington in a plot Mr. Vidal had purchased in Rock Creek Cemetery. The gravestone was already inscribed with their names side by side.

Nixon's Support In The Form Of Deeds

Chemi Shalev on the time the Washington Post blasted Israel for its shout-out to Richard Nixon:

Forty years ago, at the height of the 1972 presidential campaign, ambassador Yitzhak Rabin [Abba Eban is shown between him and Nixon] lavishly praised the Nixon administration’s steadfast support for Israel and then told his Israeli interviewer: “While we appreciate support in the form of words from one camp, we must prefer support in the form of deeds that we are getting from the other camp.”

The next day, in an editorial entitled “Israel’s Undiplomatic Diplomat," the Washington Post blasted Rabin for intervening in the U.S. elections on behalf of President Richard Nixon and against Democratic candidate George McGovern. But Prime Minister Golda Meir stood by her man in Washington, and Rabin himself was unrepentant. In fact, the minor brouhaha that followed his remark may have actually contributed a few percentage points to the respectable 35 percent of the Jewish vote that Nixon garnered in the November elections. And Nixon’s gratitude, for all we know, may have played some subconscious role in his 1973 decision to send an emergency airlift of supplies and ammunition during the Yom Kippur War.

Sioux Falls Tea Party

Robert Slayton teaches history at Chapman University in Orange County, where he holds the Henry Salvatori chair, named for a famous conservative activist and philanthropist. Yet Slayton is still carrying a torch for George McGovern's true believer's campaign against Richard Nixon in 1972 -- and warning tea partiers against make the same mistakes:

The senator from South Dakota may have been true to the values I and others shared, but he was out of step with what the majority of Americans believed, and what they wanted the future to look like. Not just our faction, but fifty-one percent or more. He extolled our principles powerfully, but did not match up with those held by the bulk of American voters. McGovern could win primaries where a minority held sway, but not a general election.

The Tea Party segment of the Republican Party may be heading in the same direction, to a similar result of short-term victory and larger defeat.

Suspicious George

When Sen. George McGovern visited the Nixon Library last month, director Tim Naftali gave him copies of recently opened records suggesting strongly that Nixon aides Pat Buchanan and Chuck Colson were behind revelations that McGovern's running mate in his 1972 campaign against President Nixon, Sen. Thomas Eagleton, had been treated for depression. Outraged though McGovern may have been, it's hard to imagine that his campaign wouldn't have used intelligence about, for instance, Vice President Agnew's corruption. Saying that he hadn't known before that the White House was involved, McGovern (mild-mannered and gracious though he is said to be) speculated recklessly to "Vanity Fair" that President Nixon might have been behind the attempt to assassinate Gov. George Wallace:

McGovern pointed out that if you look at elections in a certain way, you could say that Ross Perot elected Bill Clinton and Ralph Nader put George W. Bush over the top. “In 1968, George Wallace had garnered 10 million votes and we figured that, running again in 1972, he might pick up as many as 20 million votes,” McGovern said. The segregationist Alabama governor had been campaigning with the slogan “Send Them a Message,” and it was assumed that his votes would almost all come from Nixon’s base, but on May 15, 1972, an assassination attempt left Wallace paralyzed from the waist down and he was forced to withdraw from the race. I was still wondering where McGovern was going with this when he came to a shocking supposition: “You know, Wallace went to his grave thinking Nixon’s people were behind the shooting. I thought at the time, ‘Well, George is a little gaga.’ But now … you have to wonder … ”

George On Their Mind

Sen. George McGovern, RN's Democratic opponent in 1972, is coming to the Nixon Library on Aug. 26.