National Archives Implicated In Nixon Coverup

In the fall of 2009, after a search conducted by a company he used to work for, Nixon-Haldeman operative Ron Walker was awarded a jumbo-salary "president" job at the Nixon foundation, which declared war on the director of the federalized Nixon library, Tim Naftali. Walker's former White House colleague, Sen. Lamar Alexander, provided secret if unavailing assistance.

That December, the revanchists also tried to rewrite the history of Nixon's difficult relationship with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which was now running the library. Walker's wife, Anne, claimed:

It is estimated that President Obama's presidential papers will be 80 percent electronic, something that the Nixon Presidential papers-people did not have to worry about. But, one can not help but wonder if we would have had more access to them in that format, instead of them being secreted away in College Park, guarded and hidden from the president and the other people who created them. The only access to papers was when the archives were about to release some of them. At that time, the archives would notify members of the administration whose names were about to be made public.

The truth is that after Nixon White House records were seized by the federal government following his resignation, they were never hidden or kept from the former president. He and his editorial assistants and agents (including me and anyone else he chose to designate) had access whenever they wished. As for opening Nixon's records to the public, NARA would have been pleased to do so within a few years after Nixon's resignation. But he devoted 19 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to delaying it. To claim that this was the government's doing is a war-is-peace statement. Maybe there's a George Orwell foundation somewhere they should be running.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Brand niXon

The Washington Post calls the decision by Richard Nixon's think tank to abandon his name an "extreme makeover." The writer of the "Reliable Source" item also asks if the new name doesn't "sound like all those other generic, earnest D.C. institutes/think tanks/NGOs." Yep: Even Woodward and Bernstein's paper thinks dissing Nixon was a bad idea.

In reply to the Post's question, the Center said that it "felt strongly that the new name conveyed what we were about." But if Nixon's name was making the Center's work more difficult, it hasn't said so. If the Center has now adopted a policy perspective that differs from his, its recent statements say otherwise.

Though the Center implied earlier this week that the name change was an automatic consequence of the Center's independence from Nixon's Yorba Linda foundation, I know that to be untrue, and the Center's Post comments about its choice of a new name confirm it.

That leaves the possible and possibly related factors of money (the Center itself has mentioned its "new resources") and the hostility of the former White House operatives now controlling Nixon's foundation.

The Center also says this: "We believe that our new name unifies our existing 'brands' while avoiding confusion with the other two entities." It pains me that my former colleagues, thoughtful experts when it comes to matters of global significance, have been reduced to channeling "Mad Men" and George Orwell. Whatever's going on here, I'm definitely not feeling the unification. As for brand confusion, it doesn't seem to be vexing the proprietors of the many institutions and landmarks bearing Ronald Reagan's name. What the Center Formerly Known As Nixon has done is burn out its brand, and the aroma's not very pleasant.

The Inconvenience Of "Rough Men"

Pat Buchanan makes the case against torture prosecutions of CIA personnel:

"Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

George Orwell's truth comes to mind as one reads that Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to go after the "rough men" who, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night, went too far in frightening Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the engineer of the September massacres....

[Obama] and Holder may not like what was done...but who does? And where is the criminal intent? These agents are not sadists. They were trying to get intel to abort plots and apprehend terrorists to prevent them from killing us. And they succeeded. Not a single terrorist attack on the United States in eight years.

Do we the people, some of whom may be alive because of what those CIA men did, want them disgraced, prosecuted and punished for not going strictly by the book in protecting us from terrorists?