Tweet Emotion

Thanks to sister blogger Maarja Krusten at NixoNARA for tweeting about my post on the handover of the Nixon library, which was picked up by Kate Theimer's Archivists-On-Twitter Daily.

Don't Mind The Gap

Eighteen-and-a-half has a powerful resonance for Americans who are at least two score and 18, since it's the length, in minutes, of a mysterious deletion in a Nixon White House tape that became part of the Watergate story. The volunteer sound technician at St. John's Episcopal Church, Dale Griffith, tells me my sermons average about that length -- a bit long for a highly liturgical service such as ours. While their political affiliations are naturally varied, the people of God at St. John's are gracious about my Nixon antecedents. But they probably sometimes wish that I would perform a deliberate erasure of a portion of these long, one-sided conversations, and do it beforehand.

The magic number came up again this week when historian and former Nixon archivist Maarja Krusten, a member of the National Archives foundation, attended an event at NARA in Washington featuring historical novelist Max Byrd and Cokie Roberts, the ABC News commentator who gave a talk about First Of Hearts: Selected Letters Of Mrs. Henry Adams, for which she wrote the introduction. As Krusten wrote at her blog NixoNARA:

As Bruce Guthrie’s photo shows, I was thrilled at the chance to tell Ms. Roberts that I was a member of the Foundation and how much I enjoyed and appreciated the wonderful work it does in partnership with the National Archives. Max Byrd and I exchanged some joking comments. When I told him I was a former NARA archivist who once worked with the Nixon tapes, he asked if he should tear out 18-1/2 pages from the book. I laughed and said, “No, no, we at the National Archives are all about preservation and disclosure. Gotta have the whole book!”

Bending Notes And The Constitution

Before I was a frustrated pianist, I came to George Gershwin's thrilling jazz concerto, "Rhapsody in Blue," as an underachieving 11-year-old clarinetist. The piece begins with an almost impossible to believe two and a half-octave clarinet glissando blasting off from the F below middle C and bending slowly, in an aching blue note, toward a high B-flat. I can bend notes on an harmonica, but I never developed the embouchure of iron required to do it on the clarinet. I wish I'd practiced more.

I also wish I could say I'd heard it performed by my teacher, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's first-chair clarinetist, Vincent Melidon, a buddy of my father the music critic. I still have the old B-flat Selmer Mr. Melidon sold my mother, but unfortunately the only thing that rubbed off on me was cork grease. Besides, if he ever played the Gershwin run during his DSO years, it probably wasn't on my instrument, since he would've used an A clarinet for his orchestral work.

Instead, I listened over and over again to the 1959 recording by the Columbia Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein, who also played piano. And of course "Rhapsody" is all about the ivories, not the licorice stick. The story goes that Gershwin hadn't finished writing portions of the piece for its first performance, with a jazz band, in Boston in 1924, so he improvised. It's now a staple of the classical repertoire.

While the Bernstein performance will be in my head forever, I also love the two associated with Woody Allen's 1979 film "Manhattan," Gary Graffman's on the soundtrack album and Paul Jacobs' in the film itself. The movie's titles, featuring Jacobs' and conductor Zubin Mehta's "Rhapsody" plus black and white images of the streets of the city, Central Park, Yankee Stadium, and fireworks over the East River, are exquisite; pretty much the high point of the movie. You can also get performances of the piece for solo piano, including this one by French pianist Vera Tsybakov.

Gershwin said the work's rhythms were inspired by the clickety-clack of New York's subways and ELs. Thanks to a church friend, I had the chance to rhapsodize about "Rhapsody" to my Bronx-born wife, Kathy, before, during, and after a June performance by Orange County's Pacific Symphony and pianist Orion Weiss, whose rendering was as lyrical and modern as Bernstein's was muscularly classical.

Thumbing through the program before the concert, I was startled by another contrast, not between an old pianist and a young one but an old Nixon hand and his younger self. The program contained an interview with Nixon operative Larry Higby (above), now chairman of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, which includes the Pacific Symphony's home, the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. The article, which didn't mention Higby's Nixon service, contained this statement by the impresario:

The arts are for all of us. They enrich our lives and add meaning and dimension to our daily experiences.

True enough, now and in 1971, when Higby was adjutant to Richard Nixon's soon-to-be-disgraced chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. But back then, in the midst of the Vietnam war, the only artistic meaning and dimension the White House cared about was whether the artist in question was pro or con. As documented in the Nixon library's new Watergate gallery and the on-line background available at the library's web site, Higby asked the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover to provide dirt about CBS's Daniel Schorr, participated in the notorious Jew-counting scandal, and facilitated the process by which counsel John Dean's enemies list made its way to a desk within a few feet of the Oval Office. Among other great and decent Americans enriching and adding meaning to our lives in that era and yet ending up on the enemies list assembled for the president of the United States was none other than Leonard Bernstein.

In a thoughtful post earlier this summer at NixoNARA, historian Maarja Krusten reflected on Nixon and Haldeman's practice of hiring young men as aides. It was true that they were energetic and eager to please, and they looked good. Haldeman's acolytes have often made a fetish of looking well-dressed and clean cut (though the last time I met the desperately ailing Haldeman, on the streets of Santa Barbara, he told me cheerfully that he'd never wear a tie again). But as Krusten relates, they lacked wisdom, as younger people sometimes do. That was probably the way Nixon and Haldeman wanted it. You tell an ambitious young man in a free nation to sic a federal police agency on a journalist, and he may actually do it. Nixon knew that older advisers were more likely to push back. Nixon's advocates often say that the enemies list was de minimis because no one on the list had his taxes audited, as Nixon vowed to do. That may be because when Nixon's boys tried to line up the IRS to harass his enemies, they encountered a man, Treasury secretary George Shultz (shown with Nixon), who told them to pound sand.

I served former President Nixon and, at his direction, his estate and presidential library for nearly 30 years; Kathy equaled that, for a total of 60 between us. I was his chief of staff from 1984-90. I admired him for his peacemaking achievements and relentless diligence as an elder statesman. But even in those quieter years, he had his weaker moments. One morning, sitting opposite me in his office in 26 Federal Plaza in New York City, he ordered a little dirty trick. Angry at a prominent journalist, he told me to send the person an anonymous note saying that "we" knew something embarrassing. I didn't do it, and I hoped he wouldn't mention it again, which he didn't. If he had, I pray that I would've done the right thing.

Kathy, who succeeded me as Nixon's chief aide and was holding his hand when he died in 1994, also saved him from a humiliating crisis or two by saying no. It wasn't easy. Once, she reports, he was speechless with anger. She was afraid he was about to fire her. She's tougher than I am, and she held her ground. I can imagine it was a lot harder when Nixon was powerful and his young men wanted to keep their West Wing offices.

My apologies to Vincent Melidon for calling him "the late" in an earlier iteration of this post, and my thanks to his nurse, who corrected my error in a gracious comment.

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.

President Nixon And Gen. Chang

When they were working together on Richard Nixon's secretly recorded White House tapes in the 1980s, Fred Graboske and Maarja Krusten had a Star Trek thing going on. Now a government historian, Krusten is shown here in Vulcan makeup during her NARA days.

As Nixon's chief of staff from 1984-90, I wasn't a Trekkie, but I was definitely Trek friendly. That might've been the basis for some dialog with Fred, Maarja, and their colleagues. But as I reflected tonight, in a comment on a Krusten post about the tension between Nixon and the archivists, I'm not sure we would've been interested in detente:

I’m sure we all remember the old Vulcan proverb: Only Nixon could go to China.

And yet I fear we Nixonians failed the test Kirk ultimately passed in “The Undiscovered Country.” (I labored for a while over a Gorkon vs. Chang paragraph but, you’ll be relieved to to read, abandoned it.) The idea that two Nixon voters (at least) were laboring, without any guidance from agency lawyers, to do the best they could to apply the law and regs to the unique reality of the Nixon records would have been completely alien (think Romulan!) to us on Nixon’s team. I obviously can’t say to what extent the NARA side appreciated Nixon’s overpowering frustration at being a class of one when it came to the processing of a collection over which he and his family had had no oversight whatsoever before the countdown to massive and potentially humiliating openings began.

What I do know (with the useless wisdom of hindsight) is that if we’d all sat down in a room together, we at least could’ve understood one another better — though NARA’s legal and regulatory strictures might not have enabled much of a change in the release schedule. And that might be the rub. Maybe the Nixon side didn’t want understanding. We wanted our shot at the timing of a donor library, and we could only get that by unleashing Gen. Chang and Shakespeare’s dogs of war, which is to say legal maneuvers and political pressure.

The empathetic hearing we got from NARA management beginning in 1989 came as as big a surprise to us as to you. I especially regret the impact on individual careers and lives. As I’ve discussed with Maarja off-line, Kathy O’Connor (Nixon’s last chief of staff; she was holding his hand when he died) and I now have a personal understanding of how painful it can be to be pawns on a hidden chessboard (three-dimensional!).

When "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" was released in 1991, I faxed Nixon a memo from the Nixon library, which I was then running, telling him that he'd been mentioned, and by Mr. Spock, no less. I don't believe he was any more impressed by this news than by my report on "Nixon In China" a few years before.

The Conscience Of An Archivist

Historian Maarja Krusten, who stopped working at the National Archives in 1990, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for materials about a fateful 1989 meeting she attended to discuss Richard Nixon's White House records. The file contained a memo describing an interview that an agent of the agency's inspector general's office had conducted with a top NARA official to learn more about the meeting. NARA's FOIA team had blacked out the official's name. But Krusten noticed an error:

[T]hey overlooked the initials of the interviewee on the last page. I redacted it myself and informed NARA of the oversight. I’m probably one of the few, perhaps the only, recipient of FOIA released material who went in and further redacted the item.

All The President's Felons

From a wide-ranging post at NixoNARA by historian Maarja Krusten, two reflections on Nixonian management. First up is an insight from one of Nixon's budget chiefs, industrialist Roy Ash, that should be noted by every tycoon who thinks she can use her CEO chops to make government work at last. It's excerpted from a 1988 oral interview with Ash conducted by Maarja's former National Archives colleague Fred Graboske:

After leaving government, I went out and talked to business groups. . . . many of whom thought, and still think, "Why doesn’t the Government run like business?” . . . I said, "Imagine your board of directors comprising your customers, your suppliers, your employees, and your competitors. Now, how are you going to run your business?"

And then this important reflection on CEO Nixon himself:

Nixon was an intelligent and well-read man, someone who might have made a good history professor, as David Gergen once observed. I can’t speak to what led to his darker side, the side that made him ask Fred Malek to undertake Jew counting at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I don’t know if in different circumstances, and absent the Vietnam war, he might have kept that part in check or not. As to his downfall, we may never know everything about Watergate. (A new book offers some startling allegations about the “third rate burglary” at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.) What matters is that he need not have covered up the portion of the Watergate story of which he was aware. It’s important to remember that it was a different age, when executives clung more tightly to managerial infallibility than they do now.

It's absolutely true that Nixon trusted his management system, and it helped destroy him. As one of our most profoundly introverted presidents, he organized his White House to make it easy to limit the number of people he would see. To get the information he so desperately needed about Watergate, he naturally turned to his coterie of aides, people such Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Dean, Chuck Colson, and Dwight Chapin -- all bound for federal prison.

Nixon wasn't blameless. Many of his aides thought they were doing what he wanted. But as Maarja suggests, he might've been more attentive to his own accountability and thereby saved his presidency if he hadn't been surrounded by men who were principally concerned with protecting themselves.

Building Community, 1 Hollinger Box At A Time

At NixoNARA, historian Maarja Krusten reflects on her and others' efforts to build and nurture an on-line community for archival professionals. As for getting to know one another by talking about contentious issues, that sounds a little like church:

U.S. Archivist David Ferriero recently posted a link to a NARA reorganization effort which is aimed at creating "an open door culture, creating a safe environment for differing views." Not every history or records forum has those attributes. It takes hard work and good will and some sensitivity to those different from oneself to create such a forum. You may not fit in everywhere but it’s the same as making friends and working with colleagues in real life. By trial and error and gauging people and studying how they handle different situations, you can find the forum that fits you best. There’s no better way to get to know people than to talk to them about difficult issues of national import.

Matt Yglesias Links To "The Episconixonian"

Here. And thanks to NixoNARA's Maarja Krusten for sharing the same post on the archivists' message board.

Bob Woodward, Me, And Nixon's "Nonsense"

As she writes this morning at NixoNARA, historian Maarja Krusten was still working at the National Archives' Washington-area Nixon Project in 1988 when journalist Bob Woodward came looking for details about the investigation President Richard Nixon had ordered years before into how many Jews were working for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It was the last year of the Reagan administration. The Nixon aide who received and followed the order, Fred Malek (above), was up for a top GOP job. I was then Nixon's post-presidential chief of staff. After the story by Woodward and his Washington Post colleague, Walter Pincus, was published, I wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Times accusing the Post of recycling a story that Woodward and Carl Bernstein had first reported many years before in their book The Final Days.

The afternoon my article appeared, Woodward called me. While he said that he hadn't recalled the reference to White House Jew-counting in The Final Days until he read my article, he insisted that Malek's prominence in party circles made it news once again. He also questioned my labored contention that Nixon's obsession with Jews could be entirely accounted for by his obsession with liberals.

When I asked Woodward if he thought Nixon was anti-Semitic, he said, "I don't know." As for Malek, he told the Post in 1988 that Nixon's fears about a cabal of Jews manipulating economic statistics to his detriment were "ridiculous" and "nonsense." But more recently, as Krusten notes, Nixon library director Tim Naftali couldn't get Malek to repeat his criticisms on camera:

Malek comes across better to me in what he told Woodward in 1988 than in Ben Stein’s “Leave Fred Malek alone” column in 2010 (shades of “Leave Britney Alone”) or in the oral history interview he later gave [to Naftali] on the BLS matter. (I’ve described Malek’s stance in the latter as “no harm, no foul.”) Yet Malek had more at stake, as he was being considered in 1988 for chairman of the Republican National Committee.

According to an on-line catalog at nixonlibrary.gov, Malek's interview with Naftali is among those to be included the new Nixon library Watergate exhibit. It also features convicted perjurer Dwight Chapin's dramatic charge that Nixon was present when Chapin (right) was ordered to set up a dirty tricks operation for the 1972 presidential campaign.

So far, the new exhibit at the federal Nixon library has evidently been blocked by friends and former White House colleagues of Malek and Chapin who now control Nixon's foundation.

Stanley Schemer

Making a careful study of hardening, harsher, and sometimes more paranoid attitudes among conservatives compared with those of a generation or two ago, historian Maarja Krusten writes that she's disappointed conservative pundit Stanley Kurtz really thinks he has to conceal his true identity lest perfidious (in his view) liberal archivists withhold the juicy stuff. She also finds it ironic that Kurtz complained about this to my Nixon buddy Hugh Hewitt:

That Kurtz chose to describe his research as if he saw a need to skulk about and disguise who he was baffled me. Especially since he was speaking to Hewitt, who once served as director of the private Nixon library. Hewitt stated in 1990 that he would bar Bob Woodward from doing research at the Nixon library (then controlled by the Nixon foundation) “because he is an irresponsible journalist.” John Taylor, who succeeded Hewitt as director, announced in 1990 while Hewitt still was in charge that Nixon didn’t want that and researchers would be admitted “without regard to their opinions on any subject.” Why Kurtz presented himself to Hewitt, of all people, as someone who might be interfered with in his research due to his ideology or goals comes across to me as comical as well as mind boggling.

When writing about this incident a week ago, I'd forgotten that as Nixon's chief of staff I'd publicly repudiated Hewitt's Woodward ban. Thinking back, I'm pretty sure that I warned Hewitt about it and that he said he understood why we needed to climb down.

After all that, so as far as I know Woodward's never done research at either the private or public Nixon library. He and I did have an exchange of e-mails in January 2007, when he was trying to confirm a claim by one of his and Carl Bernstein's sources many years ago that former Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell had briefed President Nixon about the roots of Watergate over dinner on June 19, 1972, just two days after the break-in. He asked me to consult the White House daily diary, which disclosed that Nixon actually had dinner in Key Biscayne with buddy Bebe Rebozo that night before flying back to Washington. I never did find out what Woodward was working on.

The Kobayashi Maru Test In Simi Valley

Writing at NixoNARA about a public radio documentary on presidential libraries, Maarja Krusten wonders about the appropriateness of an exhibit at the Reagan library that invites students to pretend they're participating in policy-making but blows a raspberry when they diverge from greatness:

[T]roubling on the audio clip is the Reagan library’s blaring, buzzing answer of WRONG!!! when a role-playing student decides in the "Oval Office" not to use large forces against Grenada and to abort the mission after news reports of an imminent invasion surface. The U.S. public largely supported the invasion and even some Democrats who initially opposed it later changed their minds. Yet the lesson at the Reagan presidential library should not be that deviating from the choice Reagan made was wrong. Instead, it should be a more neutral, "you chose this, here’s what Reagan chose under the same circumstances."

What Lies Behind Love And Hate

Being on pilgrimage in Jerusalem -- God's city 0f peace, his people's city of war -- kept me from commenting much on politicians' differing reactions to the Jan. 8 Tucson attacks. But I've read nothing more apropos that Maarja Krusten's reflections at NixonNARA about the president's eloquent speech on Jan. 12:

Love, friendship, pride in mission, many positive elements bond people. And sometimes, unfortunately, so do hate and resentment and grievance. I’ve often wondered about people who exude a sense of "I can only be somebody if I consider you to be nobody." The President of the United States reminded us yesterday that that is not the only way to roll. The thing to do is to think about what lies behind both love and hate and to remember that there are many ways to show love of family, friends, colleagues, and country.

Bring On The Nixon Psychobiographers!

Richard Nixon, who strenuously resisted introspection, despised nothing more than so-called psychobiography, which combined the traditional historical method with speculation about subjects' hidden (even to themselves) motivations. As far as I can tell, that kind of history has gone mainstream, as it probably should have. Leaders are far more than the sum of their memoranda, especially ones as emotionally reserved and complicated as Nixon. Politics probably couldn't have been an unhappier choice for someone of his driven but painfully introverted temperament. Yet he felt called to make a difference, and his powers of solitary concentration and focus enabled him to envision foreign policy moves that made the world safer for billions of people.

Some insiders' insights from historian and former Nixon tapes archivist Maarja Krusten's new blog, NixoNARA. First, from one of Maarja's latest posts:

[I]n Nixon’s approach to issues as a student, a candidate, a president, and a creator of government records, we see...what has become an all-too-familiar refrain, “they’re against us, we won’t be treated fairly, try to out maneuver or crush them.” Ironically, more openness to reflection, and a willingness to consider data rather than relying so heavily on emotivism—a sense that archivists as civil servants would not treat his records fairly–would have made it much easier for him and for the National Archives.

Was his suspicion of civil servants -- not just archivists but members of the diplomatic and intelligence services -- a function of temperament or philosophy? Probably a little of both. Like many during the Cold War, Nixon had a Manichean view of the struggle between freedom and communism. At home, in the political and policy arenas, he saw everything (literally) as a matter of right vs. left. Since civil servants tended to be liberal, it seems not to have been much a stretch for Nixon to conclude that, knowingly or unknowingly, they were participating, if only in a tangential or a symbolic way, in the global communist project. A natural consequence of their ideological bias, in his view, was their hostility to him, the hated persecutor of Alger Hiss.

Getting to know them better would've enabled a more accurate view, but Nixon's introversion ruled that out. I take exception with those such as Rick Perlstein who focus on Nixon's alleged class resentments. Like many introverts, he resented those who were more socially adept than he, which, in politics, was just about everyone, no matter what side of the tracks they came from. He'd always tell us that socializing was a waste of time, but the real issue was that he didn't enjoy it, because it was exhausting. Instead, he spent a considerable amount of time alone, reading, thinking, planning, deciding, and accomplishing.

And yet there's no question about the unfortunate consequences of Nixon's corrosive assumptions about civil servants. In a comment at Maarja's blog, the former head of the Nixon tape processing unit, Fred Graboske, writes:

Our tapes processing staff held widely-ranging political views. Some, such as Maarja and I, were Republicans. Others were Democrats, some Independent, some agnostic, and one was a Socialist. I saw no evidence that anyone’s personal views of Nixon, or general political views, affected their archival work. President Nixon believed that the civil service was predominantly Democrat in its views (probably correct) and that it consequently attempted to sabotage his programs (not correct). If Nixon had understood this, he could have spared himself some grief during his Presidency...

The nadir of Nixon's cold war against federal bureaucrats was his asking one of his aides, Fred Malek, to count the number of Jews working in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where, Nixon had decided, liberal officials were purposely skewing data to hurt the administration. First he had another aide, Larry Higby, make sure Malek wasn't Jewish. The unsavory episode is described in the upcoming Nixon library Watergate exhibit that's been opposed by Nixon's White House aides.

About the worst excesses of Nixon and his men, another NixonNARA commentator, historian and blogger Jeremy C. Young (shown here), says this:

To be fair, had Nixon possessed “more openness to reflection, and a willingness to consider data rather than relying so heavily on emotivism,” he probably wouldn’t have done the things that make his aides so sensitive to the publicizing of his papers. Gerald Ford, a man possessed of a very similar political worldview to Nixon’s, committed none of Nixon’s sins and was accordingly unconcerned with the publication of his official papers.

Ford also committed none of Nixon's political and policy breakthroughs. He would probably have finished his career as House minority leader if Nixon hadn't turned to him in 1973 as the choice for vice president that would be least offensive to the most U.S. senators. Also thanks to his inoffensiveness, he ended up as the right president for the aftermath of Watergate. But it's hard to imagine him (or Ronald Reagan for that matter) functioning as effectively as Nixon did in the first four years of his presidency -- for starters, transforming relations with the Soviets and the Chinese and the conduct of the Vietnam war.

Troubles, And Troubles

In a fascinating analysis of a 1992 Seymour Hersh article about the struggle between Richard Nixon and the National Archives over his White House records, Maarja Krusten tells the kind of Nixon story we don't often read:

Since ‘tis the season, I’ll mention an example from Christmas time. Hersh’s portrait of Nixon does not take into account stories such as the one in Haldeman’s diary (which we at NARA processed during the early 1980s) about Nixon’s quiet Christmas Eve visit to the Washington Home for the Incurables. The president told Haldeman, “Boy, we think we’ve got troubles.” The chief of staff noted in his diary, “It’s just amazing to watch him in this kind of situation because he handled it so well.”

The Public's Agency And Private Agents

As the National Archives prepared to release a batch of Watergate tapes in the late 1980s, former President Nixon's team (of which I was a member) gave NARA a list of 70 tape segments that we thought should remain closed on privacy grounds. Maarja Krusten, who helped prepare the tapes for release, wonders why NARA officials didn't disclose at first that Nixon had made the objections. Instead, they claimed that the 70 segments had been identified internally by the agency itself.

The larger question is how a public agency ends up doing the bidding of former presidents and private presidential foundations when it comes to handling records and running museums. Stay tuned!

Who Really Bottled Up The Nixon Tapes?

A comment I left tonight at NixoNARA:

Ironic that while Nixon’s interest while alive may have been to delay the opening of tapes, now that he’s dead, it would be better to get them out ASAP so balanced assessments might begin. Further irony: Nixon legal pressure, political pressure, or a combination of both delayed tape openings from 1987 until [Stanley] Kutler’s lawsuit in, what, 1992? With no apparent external pressure whatsoever, NARA will have taken from 1996 (when the Kutler suit was settled) until 2012 (est.) to open the entire collection of non-Watergate tapes.

In Need Of One Good Book

It's easy to understand people's revulsion at the racial and ethnic commentary on the newly opened Nixon White House tapes, especially the exchange between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger about a hypothetical Soviet holocaust against Jews. As his chief of staff, library director, and legal co-executor, I cringe myself.

That being said, during thousands of hours of conversations with me over a 15-year association, he rarely if ever talked this way. Even as a former president, he devoted most of his time and energy to substance -- articles, books, and speeches, as well as his voracious consumption of and commentary about political and policy news.

Having spent plenty of time with the Nixon tapes, my sense is that their 4,000 hours embody a comparable disproportion between substance and triviality. But today's snarling editorial in the New York Times goes out of its way not to take a balanced view. Again, anger about racism and anti-Semitism is understandable. But I'm sure the Times also realizes that Nixon was a serious person of considerable accomplishment whose legacy of foreign policy innovation and domestic pragmatism can still teach us a lot in our era of terrorist threats from abroad and ideological warfare at home.

But frankly, I really shouldn't be picking on the Times, which has been left a clear field. With the exception of the measured insider's perspective at Maarja Krusten's new NixoNARA, it's astonishing how few people have piped up for 37 since the new tapes were opened. Pleased finally to find some relatively friendly commentary about Nixon on another, unfamiliar blog the other day, I went to the home page and realized it was operated by white nationalists. The Nixon White House aides who have devoted so much effort to trying to block the Nixon library Watergate exhibit in which some of them play starring roles appear to have gone home for Christmas now that the tapes beg for friends and associates to stand up and say, "That's not the totality of the man I knew."

One Nixon family member who was especially prone to defeatism repeatedly expressed a fear to me that Nixon's reputation would never recover from the rancor of his times and racism on the tapes. With each new records opening, I can see why someone could feel that way. The Times notes the devastating irony of tapes Nixon thought would cement his reputation instead having the effect of cement wingtips, dragging his historical standing further down. Having helped negotiate a three-party settlement that envisioned all the tapes being opened by 2000, I regret that the National Archives has taken this long to open the whole collection. The library now says it will take until 2012. Scholars used to blame us Nixonites for holding up the tapes. But we waved the white flag in 1996. Why will historians have had to wait at least more 16 years?

And yet all is not lost. The Nixon Center in Washington continues to promote Nixon's living principles of enlightened national interest as the foundation of the U.S.'s role in a changing world. Not only the thousands of hours of opened tapes but all the records are finally housed or available at the Nixon library -- the richest presidential collection about one of the most momentous eras in modern history. Thanks to my elder daughter Valerie, last Monday I had dinner with a young scholar from Italy who's studying relations between the U.S. and Brazil during 1971-73. She said there were four other readers working at the library last week alone.

If Nixon were still here and I could call to buck him up, I'd actually be the first to mention the Jews. I'd remind him that they wandered in the wilderness for at least 40 years. I'd say, "Mr. President, you've still got a shot at the promised land. All you need is a few historians and biographers who are willing to take the sweet with the bitter. Just one good book from an independent voice: Manna from heaven."

Nixon's Men And Right And Wrong

Maarja Krusten explores the nuances that emerge from the on-line background material Nixon library director Tim Naftali assembled for the library's new Watergate exhibit, which was opposed by his former White House aides:

One of the topics captured in video interviews is Nixon’s effort while president to remove some civil service officials from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). A bureau official had angered the president due to the way his unit released some unemployment statistics. The topic and its handling offer many lessons on multiple levels. For one thing, while Nixon was alive, his representatives blocked NARA in 1987 from opening a White House document which read, “”everyone in BLS is Jewish look at all sensitive areas ck. Jewish involvement . . . esp. uncover Jewish cells & put a non-Jew in chg of each.” Only after Nixon died did NARA release that note to the public. In considering the current controversy over the Watergate exhibit, keep in mind that a key piece of evidence of Nixon’s mindset remained unavailable for consideration by scholars for 10 years, despite being marked by NARA for release in 1987.

And then there is the contrast between two of the former Nixon White House officials whom Naftali interviewed for the BLS section of the proposed Watergate exhibit. (The video clips are available on the Nixon Presidential Library’s site.) The two men – Charles Colson and Fred Malek – provide a contrast between two cultures, one more capable of learning and introspection than the other, in my view. Colson admits that Nixon sometimes issued directives to him that he knew were wrong. Malek largely shrugs and says of Nixon’s request that he identify Jews at the Bureau, no harm, no foul.

Malek is at left, Colson at right.