I [Expletive Deleted] Up The End Game

Rockwell's idealized Nixon

In his eulogy at Richard Nixon's Yorba Linda funeral in April 1994, Sen. Bob Dole (R-KA) called America's post-World War II epoch "the age of Nixon." Historian Richard Norton Smith, who wrote Dole's speech, had warrant for his ambitious claim. Nixon ran successfully for vice president twice and was elected president two out of three tries. He epitomized fierce anti-communism as well as constructive and world-changing engagement with the communist regimes in Moscow and Beijing. He ended the Vietnam war and made diplomatic inroads in the Middle East that set the stage for the Camp David Accords.

At home, in many respects Nixon governed to the left of Barack Obama. His domestic and monetary policies -- establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, enacting wage and price controls, desegregating public schools in the deep south, adopting an anti-drug policy that stressed treating addicts, and trying twice to enact national health insurance reform -- neither impressed his more progressive contemporaries nor endeared him to his fellow conservatives. Only later, during the Reagan years, did he begin to attract plaudits from scholars ranging from Joan Hoff to Noam Chomsky, who each called Nixon the last liberal president. When he resigned, his biographer Stephen Ambrose wrote in the 1980s, "we lost more than we gained."

Nixon's centrist policies, draped in the disgrace of Watergate, made him an outlier among today's more conservative Republicans, who routinely exclude him from the honor roll of GOP presidents at their nominating conventions. And yet pundits still repeat, and Republican candidates usually obey, his famous dictum about running to the right in the primaries and back to the center in the general election. Party elites and their dutiful cable TV and talk radio amanuenses make our country look more divided than it is. Polls still show that we are a pragmatic, center-leaning, essentially Nixonian people. One recent example is a New York Times article revealing that Republicans who have opposed gay marriage for decades are now relieved that the Supreme Court may save them from having to continue to do so so stridently, since up to 60% of the American people now favor it. (Nixon predicted it would be legal by 2000.)

If being outlived by the salience of his governing principles is a measure of a leader's greatness, then Nixon's smudged legacy could be in for a few coats of polish. It may yet be possible for a tough-minded foreign policy realist and domestic pragmatist to figure out how to be nominated and win -- someone in Nixon's mold such the late Sen. Henry Jackson (D-WA), Nixon's first presidential mentor, Dwight Eisenhower, or the subject of Richard Norton Smith's new book, the late Nelson Rockefeller, New York governor and then vice president under Nixon's equally pragmatic successor, Gerald Ford. Should that moment come, Nixon's political and policy playbooks will be waiting.

Three heavyweights, and I

During the 11 years I worked for Nixon directly and the 19 I spent running his presidential library and foundation, I came to the conclusion that his most under-appreciated virtues were the steely substantiveness at the core of his being and the continued vitality of his non-ideological pragmatism. Speaking of men of substance, Nixon dubbed leaders he respected the most (they were usually men) as heavyweights, which meant they shared his qualities, or had qualities he wished he did. Sometimes he would use the expression homme sérieux. In Nixon's book, Dole and Ronald Reagan (more for his style than his substance, which Nixon considered to be scarce, especially when it came to foreign relations), oui; Ford and George H.W. Bush, non. In fairness to the latter two, Nixon's attitudes were colored by complicated personal considerations.

For whatever reason he bestowed it, Nixon's heavyweight merit badge was a matter of its taking one to know one. I knew him only as a former president. I was a research assistant from 1979-84 and his chief of staff until 1990, when he sent me to the library. (His family was surprised and hurt to learn that he also made me one of two co-executors of his estate.) While the stakes and dimensions of his work were smaller in retirement, his horizons never narrowed. After leaving office, Nixon wrote nine books and hundreds of memoranda to his successors. Rather than giving 100 speeches a year for money and getting rich, he gave one or two for free, always before prestigious audiences, labored for weeks over the content, delivered them without notes, and had them transcribed and distributed to the media, policymakers, and friends. Whatever he did, his laser-beam of a brain was always fixed on influencing his successors' policies, especially relations with the Russians and Chinese.

Deng and Nixon, Beijing, 1989

Undertaking frequent trips to Beijing, Moscow, and dozens of other countries, he did his best to facilitate communications between their leaders and the incumbent president, usually briefing the White House privately instead of calling attention to himself with public pronouncements (which was not always easy, because Nixon loved being paid attention to, as long as he was being taken seriously). During his visit to Beijing in October 1989, a few months after the regime's Saddam Hussein-like slaughter of its own people in Tienanmen Square, I watched as Nixon put what remained of his reputation at risk to keep U.S.-China relations from going off the skids. In 1991, after we went to the Soviet Union, he goaded the George H. W. Bush administration into paying more attention to Boris Yeltsin as a potential successor to the last of the communist bosses, Mikhail Gorbachev.

No matter what his critics said during those post-presidential years, he wasn't battling for his place in history, and he knew it. Nixon's historical legacy is inescapably subject to what scholars have found and will find in the vast record he left behind, including millions of pages of letters and memoranda and thousands of hours of tapes recorded in the White House between 1971-73. Because of the tapes, which if fully transcribed would fill hundreds of thousands of pages, he is probably the most copiously documented leader in human history. As almost everyone knows, he often sounds awful on the tapes. Sometimes his bigotry, anger, and desire for revenge are to blame, other times his painfully introverted temperament, still others his tendency to tease or provoke aides by suggesting outlandish schemes or maneuvers, some of which he wanted carried out, others not. He's frequently not at his best in his dictated memoranda, either.

And yet the sheer intensity of his focus on the substance of policy,  especially internationally, can't be denied, nor can his impact on politics, society, and culture. What other president has been the subject both of a Grateful Dead radio commercial and a grand opera performed at the Met? All in all, one can argue that he accomplished more under adverse political conditions (the Democrats held Congress for his entire five and a half years) than any other modern president.

So when the centennial of his birth rolled around beginning in January 2013, you would think that his presidential library and foundation would have used the opportunity for a comprehensive look at Nixon's consequential times and legacy -- conferences, publications, speakers series, you name it. Nixon's foundation is well funded, with an endowment that should still stand at around $40 million based on its value when I left as executive director in 2009. As it planned a fitting Nixon centennial, the foundation had the capacity to throw open its doors to his friends and critics, to his policy partners and political operatives, and to scholars and journalists for a thoroughgoing assessment of his presidency.

Christopher and Andrea, Beijing, 2013

The capacity, but as yet, not the will. Instead of any meaningful programming, the Nixon foundation held a cocktail reception and dinner for his colleagues and staffers at a Washington, D.C. hotel, sent Tricia and Ed Cox's son, Christopher, and his then-wife, Andrea Catsimatidis, to China with a retinue of ex-aides and library docents, and installed another museum exhibit about his life. For the single-minded, endlessly fascinating, paradigm-shifting architect of the age of Nixon, this was pretty much the extent of his centennial year.

These days, the sleepy Nixon library's caretakers are Nixon's private foundation and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The foundation's top executive, named last year, is former CEO of an investment firm and of a wholesale wine distributor. The new federal director, Michael Ellzey, is a former executive director of the Golden Gate Park Concourse Authority in San Francisco, where he oversaw the renovation of the park's arts and cultural district. Most recently, he ran the Great Park, a controversial municipal project in Orange County, California. According to recent reports, Great Park auditors give Ellzey credit for cleaning up some of the mess he inherited when he came on board in 2008. As the federal Nixon director, Ellzey is paid by taxpayers and reports to the archivist of the U.S., David Ferriero. But his appointment was blessed by Nixon's family and operatives.

Fred Malek

While they may be able managers, neither the foundation nor library chief has any archival, curatorial, or national public policy experience. Especially with a non-historian running the library, some worry that a White House aide's-eye view of Richard Nixon will continue to predominate. One example among many should suffice. In 2011, Nixon's foundation tried to stop NARA from exhibiting excerpts of oral history interviews with Nixon White House operatives. In one of these, Fred Malek talks about following Nixon's order to count the number of Jews who worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one of the most notorious of the catalog of abuses of power known collectively as Watergate. (Reports of Malek's Jew-counting drove him from George H.W. Bush's campaign in 1988.) Two years after it tried to keep Malek's reflections out of the Watergate exhibit, the foundation announced that it planned to raise $25 million to redo the library's museum exhibits. The lead fundraiser? None other than Fred Malek, now a rich businessman.

It's worrisome when a political operative with a personal stake in what the public sees is helping pay for the exhibit cases and the fees of the consultants and scribes who will compose the museum's new narrative. In his new book, The Last Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History, Run For Posterity, And Enshrine Their Legacies, Anthony J. Clark explores how money influences content at all 13 presidential libraries. Soon after Ellzey's appointment, Clark told the Orange County Register:

To have appointed someone with no experience or training as an archivist or a historian creates serious questions as to how the Nixon library will fulfill its duties. To have chosen a director without such credentials but apparently with the strong support of the private Nixon Foundation is very troubling and raises additional concerns.

Ellzey's predecessor, Tim Naftali, whom I'd recommended to the archivist of the U.S. for appointment as the Nixon library's first federal director, had the opposite problem. A respected Cold War scholar and expert on secret presidential tapes, his academic credentials were impeccable. Nixon's Watergate-era factotums, who seized control of Nixon's foundation after I left in 2009, despised him -- proof, as far as I'm concerned, that he was the right choice.

I suggested that NARA name an independent-minded scholar and tapes aficionado because I had a conception of the Nixon library's potential as a focal point for reassessing Nixon's life and times that, as it turned out, only a few colleagues and friends ended up sharing. After 37 died in April 1994, and I had overseen his funeral, I had what amounted to an epiphany. It didn't matter what we, his advocates, believed and said about him. The massive record Nixon had left couldn't be denied. It would smother all sycophancy. Since we couldn't keep the records closed, we obviously had to get them open as quickly as possible so historians could see Nixon at his worst and best and finally go to work on a truly balanced and complete view of this more complex of presidents.

And yet from the perspective of the scholarly community, I probably appeared to be an unreliable advocate of an all-in view of Richard Nixon. As his aide and library director, I spent the better of two decades arguing with journalists and historians.

When author Raymond Bonner accused Nixon of giving President Ferdinand Marcos the green light to declare martial law in the Philippines in 1972, for instance, I demonstrated that there was no proof, compelling Bonner to print a grudging footnote in the paperback edition of his book.

Romanian uniforms

In 1984, two of Nixon's former colleagues, ex-attorney general and campaign chief John Mitchell and former military aide Jack Brennan, asked him to endorse a bizarre deal in which the regime of Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu (later executed for crimes against humanity) sold military uniforms to Iraq's Saddam Hussein (ditto). It would make a good plot for "The Interview II." When U.S. News found out, I persuaded them to print a letter stressing that Nixon had no financial stake in the deal and that he had just signed bread-and-butter letters for old friends. I continued to defend the boss when the New York Times covered the story again in 1990, after Brennan and Mitchell sued for $3 million each in lost commissions. Court records included Nixon's letters and revealed that his corrupt ex-vice president, Spiro Agnew, had also been involved.

I also got letters defending Nixon into the Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, and other publications. Writing unctuously to anchorman Brian Williams, I persuaded NBC News to retract an erroneous Vietnam story. I protested ABC's 1989 film adaption of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's The Final Days and Oliver Stone's 1995 movie "Nixon." I chided scholar Stanley Kutler (who died this month) for publishing an unreliable Watergate tape transcript, Rick Perlstein for slipshod use of a secondary source, Don Fulsom for claiming that Nixon had beaten his wife and conducted an affair with his best friend, Bebe Rebozo, and Robert Dallek for accusing Nixon's men of being behind a 1960 break-in at John F. Kennedy's doctor's office. Operative Jeb Magruder's claims notwithstanding, I argued that Nixon hadn't known about the Watergate break-in in advance. I tried to argue away Nixon's antisemitic comments and defended him and Henry Kissinger when a newly-released White House tape made it appear that they would have tolerated the Soviet Union massacring all its Jews.

Because of all that, and more, I earned the reputation of being blind to Nixon's faults. In November 1999, OC Weekly published an article containing the tortured explanations it imagined "chief Nixon apologist John Taylor" would manufacture if asked about Nixon's most outrageous taped comments. One example from the Weekly's full-page article, now framed on the wall of my study: "Nixon says: 'You know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags.' What John Taylor should say: 'The president was a learned man, and like all learned men, he knew that the first definition of "fag" in the dictionary is someone who works himself to exhaustion. The president had great admiration for hard workers.'" A considerable and unexpected blessing is that OC Weekly and I are experiencing what one of its veteran investigative reporters, R. Scott Moxley, called a detente.

While I usually based my arguments on the facts as I knew them, I regret the times I questioned people's motives without evidence, especially the archival professionals working faithfully with Nixon's records at NARA. On occasion, my assertions were rendered inoperative, as Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler might've said. In an article in the American Spectator, I insisted that Nixon had never used an obscenity also known as the first word of the title of an unreleased Rolling Stones documentary. It was true he'd never said it in thousands of hours of conversation with me. But when newly released White House tape showed that he had used the word in the White House, I made sure to include it in a subsequent piece, requiring the Spectator's copy editors to expend what probably amounted to a month's supply of expletive-obscuring hyphens.

I also made a point to come clean, so to speak, in my 2014 novel, Jackson Place, in which a fictional 37 refuses to resign. When an aide (a fictional Ron Ziegler, as a matter of fact) suggests that "Nixon" solve a delicate PR problem by going to church, "Nixon" says, "So that I can sit there while some sanctimonious c--------- preaches at me about reconciliation and peace and justice and all that crap?"

What might have been

As I said, it's a novel. He never said that, but he sometimes talked that way. Thousands of hours of tapes prove it. His former associates can pretend the record doesn't exist. But before long, we'll be silent and gone, while Nixon, on tape and paper, will be talking forever.

So while I kept tilting at Nixon's critics, I became an equally persistent advocate of opening records. Under my watch at the private Nixon library, we launched an archive of pre-presidential materials that won some praise from scholars. In negotiations that began soon after Nixon died, I participated, as co-executor of his estate, in an agreement with NARA and the late Stanley Kutler, who had sued the agency, that was designed to enable the opening of all of Nixon's non-classified tapes by 2000. (It took NARA until 2013.) While some who were understandably cynical about Nixon and Nixonites were accusing us of covering up, we were actually preserving and protecting. The Supreme Court had ordered NARA to return to Nixon, and later his estate, all papers and hundreds of hours of tapes related to his political, as opposed to policy-making, work as president. The court said such records were his private property thanks to his constitutional right to private political associations. When we had the right to seal them forever and even destroy them, in the late 1990s I vowed that we would preserve them. When we handed the library over to the government in 2007, we deeded the whole collection to NARA.

As library director Tim Naftali was starting work on his new Watergate exhibit, I gave him access to the briefing books Nixon had used to prepare for his 1977 TV interviews with British personality David Frost, which gave Tim insights into how 37 had prepared to talk about the scandal for the first time as well as structure the massive Watergate sections of his 1978 memoir. In a January 2015 Facebook exchange with historian David Greenberg, Tim wrote, "Although complicated at the time, and a friendship now, my relationship with John from the start in 2006 produced agreements that led to more archival releases."

As I've already written, after we handed library operations over to NARA and Tim in 2007, our relationship suffered as a consequence of him taking such decisive steps to show that there was a new sheriff in town and of me having trouble letting go after running the library for 17 years. During the two years I continued as foundation chief, we had a series of wearying procedural skirmishes over consultation on programming, space, and budgets. Our disagreements never became public, and as Tim made clear in his comment to Greenberg, they didn't keep us from cooperating.

Tim Naftali and Kathy O'Connor

In February 2009, I left the Nixon foundation to work full time as priest in charge of a church and school in south Orange County, where I'd been serving on an ostensibly part-time basis since 2004. My successor, Kathy O'Connor, was one of Nixon's most loyal and competent aides. She was his confidential secretary for ten years before becoming his last chief of staff in 1990. She had been my friend since 1980 and my wife since 2002. No one outside his family knew or had served Nixon better. She saw him at his noblest and pettiest. She traveled around the world with him, assisted with seven books, stood up to him when necessary, and held his hand as he died. As a Nixon foundation executive since 1995, she had spearheaded a $14 million expansion and helped maneuver the library into federal hands.

In Kathy's first weeks heading the foundation, while she lost no ground in negotiations with the federal library, she developed a friendlier relationship with Tim than I had managed and began to solve the relatively trivial first world problems that had plagued us. On her watch, prospects began to improve for making the library the focal point for lively debate and inquiry about Nixon's life and times that Kathy and I had worked toward for years and that, we believe, Nixon himself would have wanted.

But that Nixon library wasn't to be. The late Rep. Charlie Wilson (D-TX) is famous for helping arm the Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. After Moscow withdrew, Congress ignored his pleas to rebuild the shattered country, which soon became al-Qaeda's home base. "These things happened," Wilson said about defeating the Soviets. "They were glorious, and they changed the world. And then we f----- up the end game." And so it was with Kathy and me.

Remember that we only knew Nixon as a former president, Kathy beginning in 1980, I a year before. It's true we hadn't been with the old man in the White House when it really counted, as some of his family members and White House aides would grumble. By the same token, we hadn't organized any dirty tricks, ordered any burglaries, participated in any coverups, counted the number of men and women with Jewish surnames in any federal agencies, tried to have the taxes of any political enemies audited, had any anti-Nixon demonstrators roughed up, or sicced the FBI on any journalists.

Members of Nixon's White House cohort sometimes seemed more focused on themselves and their personal interests than on Nixon's legacy. Some were hungry to be in charge, settle scores, or receive the payoff they felt they'd been denied because of Watergate. A few of Nixon's lower-level associates had been maneuvering for years to get close to the library safe. One asked in on our security business. Another wanted to be hired to invest our endowment. Still another, with the support of some in Nixon's family, pressured us to contribute to a secret fund to help pay the personal expenses of a pro-Nixon scholar.

As a post-presidential johnny-come-lately, which is what Nixon son-in-law Ed Cox dubbed me in an angry e-mail to Tricia's uncle Ed Nixon, I was naturally less concerned with the agendas of resentful former operatives than with the old man's peacemaking legacy and ongoing elder statesmanship. When running the Nixon foundation and after helping found the Nixon Center, Kathy and I and our colleagues cultivated excellent institutional relationships with such high-level Nixon policy partners as Henry Kissinger, Jim Schlesinger, George Shultz, and Brent Scowcroft. Seeing Nixon and them at work, and coming to appreciate the liveliness of his pragmatic policy and political principles, made it easy for us to think that his reputation would withstand Watergate. We even permitted ourselves to believe that Nixon's historical standing would rebound as historians weighed the good against the bad and the ugly in the massive record we had helped open and bring to his library in Yorba Linda. If it took 50 years, or even more, that was okay. It wasn't so much about us, we had realized. It was about Nixon and what history would decide.

Patron saint of Haldeman foundation

But Nixon and ex-chief of staff Bob Haldeman's non-policy campaign and political aides, some of them associated with Watergate or Watergate-related abuses, took a different view. These revanchists finally had a chance to mass in Yorba Linda in mid-2009 after Naftali invited former White House counsel and famed Watergate plea-copper and whistle-blower John Dean to give a speech on the 37th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. While Dean is a significant historical figure, the Haldeman tribe hated him for helping send their friends to jail for their Watergate crimes. "Don’t rub it in my face by inviting John Dean on the anniversary of Watergate," complained one, as though public history were a matter of not hurting his feelings. They would no doubt have preferred keynote remarks by one of their own -- perhaps Dwight Chapin, organizer of Nixon's 1972 campaign dirty tricks -- or no speech at all. That summer and fall, in the wake of the Dean invitation, they seized control of Nixon's foundation and launched a full-scale war against Naftali, questioning his professionalism and ethics, using a Nixon-staffer-turned-U.S. senator, Lamar Alexander (R-TN), to try to get him fired, and making disparaging remarks about his sexual orientation.

Here's where the Charlie Wilson analogy comes into play. Haldeman's loyalists wouldn't have been squatting so securely on their nine acres of Nixon purity in Yorba Linda without insider help. Their apparently unwitting accomplice, Orange County printer Kris Elftmann, was an institutional creature of Kathy's and my own making. On the advice of the late Mary Muth, a longtime supporter of Richard Nixon and the Nixon foundation, we had cultivated Elftmann for membership on the foundation board and soon elevated him to chairman.

In early 2009, after I said I was quitting after 19 years as executive director, the foundation's executive committee offered Kathy two years as my replacement. Though she was reluctant, two longtime board members, foundation chairman Don Bendetti and treasurer John Barr, persuaded her to accept the offer. But Elftmann had another plan. When the full board met, he proposed making Kathy a one-year caretaker and called for a national search for the best-possible candidate. He and the foundation hired headhunters at Korn/Ferry to perform the search. Korn/Ferry is popular in Nixon circles because former Nixon advance man and National Park Service director Ron Walker is one of its former executives. (Walker will also be remembered for telling muckraking Nixon biographer Anthony Summers that he had enlisted off-duty police officers and firefighters to rough up anti-Nixon demonstrators and for bragging about having protest signs ripped from free citizens' hands.) In a conversation during the summer of 2009 at La Casa Pacifica, the Nixons' old home in San Clemente, Walker told me he was keeping close tabs on the search and promised to pass on any concerns I had. (Kathy had already opted out.) When Korn/Ferry presented their candidates that fall, Elftmann proposed giving the job to Walker. The Nixon board agreed.

To attract the quality candidates that Elftmann had said he was looking for, he and the board had changed the job title from executive director to president and increased the salary. An additional possible motive for these enhancements emerged in the fall of 2010. First Walker stepped up to foundation chairman. Then according to a board member who was present, Elftmann, the volunteer chairman, had his own name put forward for president. It had all the hallmarks of a Putin-Medvedev job swap. Unfortunately for Elftmann, it didn't go down that way. He had helped all the president's men to seize power in Yorba Linda. Now that they were in charge, they essentially showed him the door.

With Kathy in Hangzhou, 1993

The year before, Elftmann had leveraged a small group of foundation trustees associated with the Washington-based Nixon Center against Kathy. During that abysmal spring and summer, she was repaid for 30 years of confidential service to Nixon and his family with acts of savagery and sadism. Worst of all was when her antagonists pressured her to sign a multimillion-dollar lease for new Nixon Center offices in Washington and embroiled her in a Kafkaesque nightmare of bogus job reviews when she refused to do so without consulting the foundation board.

You read that right. Kathy's unyielding insistence on taking the Nixon Center's proposed lease contract to the Nixon foundation board, which was legally responsible for Nixon Center finances, was actually construed as evidence of poor performance. Imagine the irony of someone affiliated with a Nixon operation being punished for insisting on fiduciary probity. During those hellish months, Bendetti, Barr, and our other erstwhile friends on the board fretted and stewed but did nothing to stop the abuse. Finally Kathy and I acted to extract her.

The long knives were now wielded against the backstabber. Elftmann must have assumed that the Beltway insiders at the Nixon Center, including former NATO Ambassador Bob Ellsworth, who had helped Elftmann batter Kathy over the Center's lease, had enough clout in Yorba Linda to make him foundation president. But they'd never had much influence on the board, and now they had none. Walker and the board spurned Elftmann and gave the job to one of their own. After he lost, a board member told me, Elftmann quit and stormed out, later muttering darkly, and ironically, to a reporter about the foundation's questionable management practices.

Within a year, the Haldeman tribe had cut the Nixon Center loose, too. News reports suggest that it got millions from the foundation endowment for agreeing to stop using Nixon's name. Now called the Center for the National Interest, it will be lucky to outlive its current management and contributors. I suspect Nixon would have been gravely disappointed. He had said explicitly that he wanted his foundation to operate a nonpartisan center in Washington that would address ongoing foreign policy challenges. He understood that any president or his heirs and aides could get rich friends to pay for a high-tech museum celebrating themselves and their achievements for the sake of a few thousand weekly tourist visits. Nixon always thought bigger than that. As a disgraced former president, he never stopped wanting to have what he called "an impact on the course of events." He hoped for no less when it came to the foundation bearing his name.

After settling scores with the Nixon Center, the foundation's operatives were in a position to turn their full fire on Tim Naftali, the federal library director. Their goal was no less than the final coverup: Blocking the warts-and-all Watergate exhibit that the archivist of the U.S. had assigned him to install and that the Nixon foundation, when Kathy and I were running it, had agreed was the price of admission to the federal library system. This time, all their spirit-of-Watergate moves were impotent. Withstanding one of the most systematic assaults ever mounted against a public historian, Naftali thwarted them at every turn, successfully installing the exhibit in March 2011.

Haldeman's loyalists will tell you their enemy was Naftali. But they also shrink from the uncompromising judgement of history -- about Nixon, but also about themselves. Otherwise they wouldn't have tried to keep Naftali from using their own oral history interviews, called on him and NARA to be kinder to Bob Haldeman, and tried to narrow the definition of Watergate in the new museum exhibit so that the principal villains would have appeared to be their bete noire Dean, political counselor Chuck Colson (never a Haldeman insider), and, of course and always, Nixon himself. Otherwise a heavyweight's centennial wouldn't have been lighter than air. Otherwise they wouldn't have held out for a successor to Naftali whose resume is empty of curatorial, archival, or public policy substance. Otherwise, to paraphrase Nixon's so-called last press conference in 1962, they'd invite one lonely professor onto the campus from time to time, just to report what people were thinking, feeling, and saying about Richard Nixon in arenas other than panel discussions and cocktail parties for former aides.

Not in Yorba Linda

It was over three years between Tim Naftali's resignation and the appointment late last year of the Great Park's Michael Ellzey. The feds had trouble finding someone who matched the Nixon foundation's particular standards. It had effectively vetoed NARA's preferred candidate, University of Texas scholar Mark Atwood Lawrence. Lawrence's 2010 book, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History, is a balanced if blunt study by a younger scholar who seems unburdened by the intestinal biases of those who lived through the Vietnam years. Lawrence is reasonably fair to Nixon's policies in Indochina, though he doesn't shrink from highlighting 37's temperamental shortcomings. How could he? Remember those tapes, playing forever, never to be silenced. Lawrence earned the operatives' particular ire for this passage, describing Nixon's attitude toward the antiwar movement: "Exhausted and often alcohol-fogged, Nixon lashed back furiously at his critics." It isn't what I would've written. But by and large Lawrence accepts the proposition that it was American politics -- Watergate plus massive congressional cutbacks in U.S. aid to its ally in Saigon -- that doomed South Vietnam, not the superior ability or moral standing of communist North Vietnam. As a matter of fact, that was Nixon's view as well.

I'm doubting Thomas will return

Vietnam, Watergate, and Nixon's complex temperament also received the attention they deserved late last year at an excellent Nixon library program on Nixon's 1974 resignation featuring journalist and historian Evan Thomas, who is at work on a Nixon biography. Invited by federal library executive Greg Cumming, whom I lured to Yorba Linda from the Reagan library many years ago, the panelists were respectful of Nixon without being uncritical. I left thinking that Thomas would write a fair and important book about Nixon. It's just the kind of program the library should offer all the time. But the Nixon-Haldeman foundation publicly ignored it. What remains to be seen is whether, under the library and foundation's new management, Greg's event ends up being the high water mark of true inquiry in the public programs of the Nixon library, which has become a thoroughly uninteresting place dedicated in the name of one of the most interesting people ever.

He Cheers For Washington

Kathy's and my buddy Steve Clemons, the founding executive director of the Nixon Center (shown here with the ambassador of Singapore at the last Center dinner we attended, in early 2009), is one of Washington's most influential foreign policy bloggers and commentators. He's interviewed in the Dec. 30 Washington Blade, which asked him why he lives and works in Washington:

Because Washington is the sun around which politicos here and around the world orbit. D.C. is a free trade zone for pursuing any cause — and to get a better world, whether through ending LGBT discrimination or improving America’s foreign policy course, one has to compete effectively in the game here.

Nixon Would Be Reading But Maybe Not Blogging

"RealClearWorld," the international news web site, just named The National Interest, published by the Nixon Center, as one of its top world news web sites. Other winners: The Wall Street Journal and Der Spiegel.

No Strategic Sense

At "The National Interest," the Nixon Center's foreign policy journal, Jacob Heilbrunn says opponents of the U.S.-Russian arms treaty were either neocons or missile defense fantasists. And then there's this theoretically possible president of the U.S.:

Sarah Palin...chirped that the treaty makes "no strategic sense." How would she know?

248,500 Secrets To Go

Cautioning that WikiLeaks has so far released only a tiny fraction of its purloined national security documents, the Nixon Center's Paul Saunders hints that President Obama's plumbers should consider the nuclear option:

Bluntly, Washington must make an example out of WikiLeaks and its enablers, whether companies or private citizens in the United States or other countries. This should not be limited to law enforcement alone, though that may be the only option in some cases. Foreign governments’ cooperation in these efforts should be a talking point in every conversation the United States has with them about WikiLeaks.

She's Still Waiting

Steve Clemons, my former Nixon Center colleague, says Barack Obama should press reset on the Middle East and grasp for a comprehensive settlement and greatness:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, and other very wise foreign policy practitioners from America's higher stakes Cold War past recommended to President Obama that he lay out his own parameters and vision for what the outlines of a final deal should look like. They strongly encouraged him to "make his own weather" and to provide this outline of his views before the February 2009 Israeli elections.

Barack Obama failed to heed their advice. Big mistake. And ever since, Obama has been responding to the weather that Bibi Netanyahu has created.

Obama's Biggest Foreign Policy Gamble

One of my former Nixon Center colleagues on President Obama's decision to force a vote on the strategic nuclear arms control treaty with the Russians, which Senate Republicans are opposing just because they can:

“It’s really high stakes,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a former national security aide to President Ronald Reagan and a scholar at the Nixon Center, a research group in Washington. “I would say it’s the biggest gamble he’s taken so far, certainly on foreign policy.”

Roger That, For Pete's Sake

Over on Facebook, a St. John's buddy, Jim Leach, thinking about the just-concluded silly season, posted this stunning performance (from the 1979 documentary "The Kids Are Alright") of Pete Townshend's ambiguous political anthem, "Won't Get Fooled Again," which famously ends, "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss." To hear Townshend tell it, he wasn't decrying political change as mush as warning us not to put too much faith in its agents -- advice which, as I age, I find I have less and less difficulty heeding.

No three-piece (not counting Roger Daltrey's powerful vocals) has ever rocked like the Who. I regret not introducing myself to bassist John Entwistle when we were both having a drink with colleagues (his were musicians from his tour, mine were tacticians from the Nixon Center, who were helping me gird for a brewing assault by Nixon family members) in the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown in 1996. His thundering, peripatetic runs (listen especially to what he plays during the chorus) and Keith Moon's exquisitely musical drumming have been quieted. What would I have said to the bassist forever known as the Bear? Probably the only thing you can say to an artist who's given you years of joy: Thanks.

Lighting A Safire Under The Foundationiks

Foundationiks Simes and Taylor consult with former President Nixon en route home from his last visit to Moscow in March 1994. He died a few weeks later. The photo was taken by our fellow foundationik Kathy O'Connor, Nixon's chief of staff. Now that we're married, I never give her crabby looks.

My first work for Richard Nixon, whom I began to serve in 1979, was research and editorial assistance on his 1982 book Leaders, a study of great men (plus Israel's Golda Meir) he'd known. To his rule that all his subjects had to be dead, he made one exception, for Lee Kuan Yew, then the prime minister of Singapore, whom he ranked with Churchill, Disraeli, and Gladstone in ability and vision and of whom he wrote:

[Lee] believed that discipline and firm guidance were necessary to diminish the hostility among Singapore's three racial groups and to think of themselves as Singaporean rather than as Chinese, Malays, and Indians. To a large extent he has succeeded, making Singapore the envy of many other multiracial societies.

Now 86, Lee serves as "minister mentor" in a government headed by his son. On Saturday, he was the subject of a profile by Seth Mydans in the New York Times that was at least as affectionate as Nixon's. As with every article about this wise, self-aware, and vastly influential statesman, it makes readers wish they could meet him (which I did in Singapore in 1985, at a dinner he held in Nixon's honor five years before he stepped down as prime minister, and then again at a dinner we held in his honor in Washington in 1996, as I shall relate). Mydans writes:

“I can feel the gradual decline of energy and vitality,” said Mr. Lee, whose “Singapore model” of economic growth and tight social control made him one of the most influential political figures of Asia. “And I mean generally, every year, when you know you are not on the same level as last year. But that’s life.”

In a long, unusually reflective interview last week, he talked about the aches and pains of age and the solace of meditation, about his struggle to build a thriving nation on this resource-poor island, and his concern that the next generation might take his achievements for granted and let them slip away.

And even more movingly, this:

“I’m reaching 87, trying to keep fit, presenting a vigorous figure, and it’s an effort, and is it worth the effort?” he said. “I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It’s become my habit. I just carry on.”

His most difficult moments come at the end of each day, he said, as he sits by the bedside of his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, 89, who has been unable to move or speak for more than two years. She had been by his side, a confidante and counselor, since they were law students in London.

“She understands when I talk to her, which I do every night,” he said. “She keeps awake for me; I tell her about my day’s work, read her favorite poems.” He opened a big spreadsheet to show his reading list, books by Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling and Lewis Carroll as well as the sonnets of Shakespeare.

Lately, he said, he had been looking at Christian marriage vows and was drawn to the words: “To love, to hold and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse till death do us part.”

“I told her, ‘I would try and keep you company for as long as I can.’ That’s life. She understood.” But he also said: “I’m not sure who’s going first, whether she or me.”

At night, hearing the sounds of his wife’s discomfort in the next room, he said, he calms himself with 20 minutes of meditation, reciting a mantra he was taught by a Christian friend: “Ma-Ra-Na-Tha.”

The phrase, which is Aramaic, comes at the end of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, and can be translated in several ways. Mr. Lee said that he was told it means “Come to me, O Lord Jesus,” and that although he is not a believer, he finds the sounds soothing.

“The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts,” he said. “A certain tranquillity settles over you. The day’s pressures and worries are pushed out. Then there’s less problem sleeping.”

He brushed aside the words of a prominent Singaporean writer and social critic, Catherine Lim, who described him as having “an authoritarian, no-nonsense manner that has little use for sentiment.”

“She’s a novelist!” he cried. “Therefore, she simplifies a person’s character,” making what he called a “graphic caricature of me.” “But is anybody that simple or simplistic?”

Or, indeed, is anything? One day in 1996, the president of the Nixon Center, Dimitri Simes, called me at the Nixon library, where thanks to 37 I served 19 years as executive director, and said that the Center wanted to honor Lee at a gala banquet in Washington. I instantly agreed. Two years after Nixon's death, I couldn't imagine anything that would have pleased him more than our giving an award in his name to the living foreign leader he had most respected.

And yet as Mydans suggests, Lee isn't universally admired. Among his angriest critics was the late Bill Safire, Nixon's speechwriter and later a Times columnist. If Safire had read Nixon's measured assessment of the former prime minister, it hadn't made much of an impression. When he learned of our plans, he used his column to lash out at us for making money by licking the boots of a tinpot tyrant. He called on Nixon's friends to boycott the event.

His criticism was absurdly hyperbolic. Lee isn't perfect, but he's no Castro, Noriega, or Pinochet. Why Safire wouldn't defer to what the late president's wishes would have been in the matter, no one can say.

Besides all that, it wasn't ideal for a nonprofit organization to have a big foot columnist kick its major annual fundraising event around. By and large we depended on naturally cautious corporate contributors. Simes was never one to shrink from a fight, and I still wasn't all that far along in the turn-the-other-cheek department. He suggested that we co-sign a letter to the Times which he wrote and which was published on Oct. 23:

It is ironic that William Safire in his Oct. 21 column should call on ''all good Nixonites'' to abstain from participation in an event in honor of Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, whom President Richard M. Nixon called a man of greatness.

The Nixon Center's directors, when they chose Mr. Lee for the 1996 Architect of the New Century Award, were aware that Singapore is run differently from the United States. But they also knew that under Mr. Lee's leadership, Singapore became, next to Japan, the most prosperous nation in Asia and has remained a staunch ally of the United States.

Contrary to Mr. Safire, there is nothing ''tinpot'' about Mr. Lee. He is not a ''tyrant''; Singapore is ruled by law. Singapore's formula for prosperity and harmony is not right for the United States, but there is something bigoted in Mr. Safire's suggestion that anyone who does not walk in lockstep with American political and social fashion should be denied our respect.

In response, Safire denounced Simes and me twice more in the Times. He called us "foundationiks." The Russian-born Simes, whose parents defended Soviet refuseniks in Moscow courts, got the sneering hint. Safire also lined up Nixon's daughters to co-sign a letter to the editor repudiating us, which made a total of four times our apostasy made news in the paper of record.

Lee's $1,000-a-plate dinner was a runaway success notwithstanding. He gave the finest tribute to Nixon I ever heard from a library or Center speaker, calling him "one of America’s ablest presidents after World War II, one whose vision and global grasp matched America's global reach."

Soon enough, the foundationiks were wishing the able Nixon were still around to advise them on strategy and tactics. That Christmas and into the following spring, we survived an attempted putsch by the Nixon family, which occurred because my reading of Nixon's will (he had also selected me as co-executor of his estate) differed from theirs when it came to the sums of money they would receive. The family controlled the library at that point, which made the situation especially awkward. With the help of the pivoting Eisenhowers, in May 1997 we created an independent board in Yorba Linda that enabled us to operate the private presidential library and museum in a somewhat less chaotic environment.

The family split became public in 2002 during another struggle over the millions Nixon's friend Bebe Rebozo had left to the Nixon foundation, where the Cox family saw an opportunity to modify or reverse our governance reforms. That March, the Times was heard from again in an article in which I also featured as villain. The reporter, James Sterngold, seemed to take special pains to accommodate the views and interests of two former Nixon White House staffers, certain Nixon family members, and a scholar who had good cause to be hostile to Nixon library management.

The foundationiks withstood all that, too, including the widely publicized lie that Rebozo had said he didn't trust me with his money. We completed our work of expanding the facility with a new $13.5 million wing, securing the foundation endowment, and, in 2007, handing the library over to the federal government.

I never spoke to Safire, nor felt his ire, again. We were, however, in church together in 2003 at historic Christ Church in Alexandria. Ron Ziegler's widow, Nancy, asked me to be one of the late White House press secretary's eulogists. Ziegler, whose diligent service to Nixon has so far been underrated by history, never fully recovered from the trauma of Watergate (although he was never accused of any wrongdoing). I traced Nixon's and his own achievements and said:

Despite all that, the years that followed were not easy for the president and Ron, for Pat and Nancy, for their colleagues and their families.

It wasn't just the accusations of scandal and the threat of impeachment. More recent events have shown that presidents can survive these things without seeming to sacrifice any respectability.

In 1974, our nation needed scapegoats for the trauma of Vietnam. The legacies of President Nixon and his colleagues will be hostages of history as long as that war is debated, as long as its wounds sting us.

Such encomiums notwithstanding -- as a churchnik in training, I eulogized several other distinguished Nixon alums as well -- Watergate's walking wounded nursed resentments and ambitions that I didn't always fully appreciate. At the Nixon foundation and Center, former Nixon chief of staff Kathy O'Connor (who was holding his hand when he died), Simes, and I assumed our job was to tell Nixon's story as best we could, promoting the peacemaking positive, contextualizing the Watergate negative, and identifying a set of pragmatic policy and political principles that had worked for him, might work for others, and might thus comprise a vital aspect of his legacy.

But that wasn’t the view of all in Nixon's Watergate-era cohort nor some members of Nixon's family. “The legacy is the family,” Ed Cox, Tricia's husband, liked to say. Others have been forceful in enunciating the view that Nixon's legacy resides with the disgraced Bob Haldeman's proteges. Kathy and I, who served Nixon and his library for a combined total of 60 years, were just johnnies-come-lately, as one family member called us, who had hijacked their birthright.

The Nixon family's special deference to ex-aide Safire was understandable, since he was one of their few media friends. Not long before the Lee dinner, Tricia had pressured me to get his approval about the theme and speaker list for a conference we were contemplating about Sino-U.S. relations. When I said that his views on China, as on Lee Kuan Yew, were contrary to her father’s, she said, “My father’s dead.” I wish Safire, who died a year ago, had lived to see tomorrow's New York state primary. Tricia's son, Christopher, is running for the House. I would like to have seen what he would have written about it.

Whether or not the seemingly amiable younger Cox prevails in his contentious race in the first congressional district, Nixon has already had a remarkable impact on New York politics this year, especially for someone who's been gone since 1994. As state GOP chairman, Ed Cox has repeatedly applied and invoked Nixon's hard-learned doctrine of political life as a fiery trial. Because Cox's father-in-law was not as tough as he sometimes acted, he made a fetish of crisis to steel himself for survival and success in a harsh vocation to which he was intellectually but not temperamentally suited.

Poignantly and knowingly, when Julie Eisenhower wrote to him on Aug. 6, 1974 to urge him to delay his resignation, she said, "Go through the fire a little bit longer." And so as New York's leading Republican gubernatorial candidate, Rick Lazio, struggled against a Tea Party insurgent in recent weeks, Cox vouched for him by saying that he had "gone through the fire." Cox should know. He ignited it himself by recruiting and backing yet another Lazio rival earlier in the year. When Cox's plan failed and reporters asked if he would resign, he said, "I am not going to resign. We are now battle hardened." We singed ex-foundationiks are, too, thanks in large part to Cox and his family, for which, in a churchnik kind of way, we owe thanks.

Maybe It's So, Joe

The founding executive director of the Nixon Center in Washington is making big waves with a report that second-guesses the Bush-Obama policy in Afghanistan. The "Economist":

An impressively succinct report published this week by a bipartisan group convened by Steve Clemons, a hyper-networked denizen of the New America Foundation, says simply that the president's counter-insurgency strategy is not working, cannot work, and is based on a flawed understanding of America's interests in the country. In effect, it resurrects the Joe Biden idea that nation-building in Afghanistan is a fool's errand, and that America can take care of its strategic interests in the country at far less risk and cost by stripping down its ambitions there.

It Depends On What The Meaning Of "Faith" Is

Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist -- quoted by my former Nixon Center colleague Steve Clemons -- on why conservatives are making a mistake on the mosque:

Norquist argues that Republicans fought hard to win enhanced legal rights for faith-based organizations when engaged in disputes with local and regional government authorities. And now, he argues, they are undermining one of their most notable accomplishments.

Blooming Statesmanship

As President Obama finally comes out in favor of the mosque and cultural center near the World Trade Center, my former colleague Steve Clemons, founding executive director of the Nixon Center, gets prominent play in a New York Times article when he says that Obama's talking points came from city hall:

Once [New York mayor Michael] Bloomberg spoke out, the president’s course seemed clear, said Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution here.

“Bloomberg’s speech was, I think, the pivotal one, and set the standard for leadership on this issue,” Mr. Clemons said.

We're Gonna Hire Our Political Enemies

Thanks to an NPR retrospective on the death of Daniel Schorr (left), I've belatedly learned about a local angle (besides the man from Yorba Linda himself) on the 1974 articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, namely Orange County businessman Larry Higby, once Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman's aide.

It all started when the White House decided it didn't like Schorr's reporting on the CBS Evening News. As Schorr told NPR's Terry Gross in a 1994 (rebroadcast on July 30, a week after Schorr's death; the transcript is here, and you check it out on iTunes here):

[Nixon] had Haldeman have his assistant Larry Higby call J. Edgar Hoover and simply say the boss, the president, wants to have some background stuff on a correspondent named Daniel Schorr.

But either Higby or the FBI's usually pretty canny director missed the point. Rather than dishing whatever dirt happened to be on hand, Hoover ordered a full field investigation, the kind the FBI does on those in line for high-level government jobs. When agents visited Schorr himself, inadvertently revealing that the White House and a federal police agency had developed a constitutionally unhealthful fixation on him, Nixon aides concocted the story that they were planning to offer one of Washington's most prominent journalists the lofty post of PR man for the Council on Environmental Quality.

This bumptious episode turned deadly serious, Schorr told Gross, when the use of the FBI against a journalist was cited by the House Judiciary Committee in one of the three articles of impeachment it approved in the summer of 1974.

Admiring Nixon for his final comeback, Schorr became a regular guest at Nixon Center events in Washington during the 1990s. At one, the ex-president smiled at him and said, "Damn near hired you once." To Gross's apparent surprise, Schorr chose to take Nixon's remark as a backhanded apology. "[Only] he who is without blemish should be casting stones around," Schorr said. "I consider life too short to have grudges, retain grudges, and furthermore, I find him interesting."

Typical Inside-The-Beltway Good Sense

My friend and former colleague Steve Clemons, founding executive director of the Nixon Center, writes that he's thankful for the Obama administration's openness to debate. Must be nice. Too bad debate is being anathematized on the right, which targets Republican candidates for failing to conform to a conservative covenant which in some of its key elements, such as ceding war policy-making to the military, has nothing to do with conservatism.

The GOP's leading light, Sarah Palin, is as far as I've seen unable or unwilling to make a nuanced comment on any policy or political issue or personality. We'll see if a political movement can be built on the pillars of her anger and sense of entitlement. In the meantime, Steve, better see if you can bottle up some of that inside-the-Beltway good sense and sell it on Amazon!

Obama's War

Via Nixon Center founding executive director Steve Clemons, Katherine Tiedemann's case for a land war in Asia:

[T]he dangers of leaving Afghanistan altogether are great. With Pakistan pushing militants across the border into Afghanistan, security conditions in Afghanistan declining dramatically, and predictions for rising violence in 2009, it is naive to think simply because there are competing priorities on the world's stage that the United States can turn its attention and resources from this strategically critical region.

President Obama has seemingly embraced the Af-Pak struggle as "his" war, much like the Iraq War was President Bush's main foreign policy focus. Now is no time to turn our heads from the conflict, just as the United States appears poised to devote the resources to the country that the Bush administration should have.

And so while it is important...to insist on cost estimates and a strategic rationale, we cannot risk allowing the Taliban and al Qaeda safe haven to return to Afghanistan and Pakistan's wild border regions.

A Perle Of Little Value To Bush?

Neoconservative Richard Perle chooses "The National Interest," the Nixon Center's journal, to say that it wasn't his fault. Thomas Frank:

Mr. Perle is one of the best-known neoconservative foreign-policy intellectuals in Washington. He was an assistant secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan and the chairman of the Defense Policy Board in the early years of the Bush administration.

Unfortunately, a neoconservative foreign-policy guru is not exactly a respected calling these days. As early and influential cheerleaders for the Iraq war, neocons occupy a level on par with investment bankers and eviction specialists.

But in a remarkable bit of blame evasion, Mr. Perle steps forward to tell us why neocons like him can in no way be held responsible for the Bush administration's failures. In fact, they had nothing to do with it. He, he writes, has "been widely but wrongly depicted as deeply involved in the making of administration policy."

Cuba Policy "At Odds With National Interest"

Steve Clemons, founding executive director of the Nixon Center, provides an early glimpse at a Senate report honchoed by Nixonian realist and GOP Sen. Richard Lugar, who says the 47-year U.S. economic embargo of Cuba hasn't worked:

I call it the "slippery slope strategy" in which Lugar is shining a big spotlight on the inadequacy and failure of US-Cuba policy that for too long has been held in place by domestic constituencies who were working at odds with the American national interest. Lugar is pushing buttons and nudging Obama's team into put itself forward constructively -- and with these steps, it becomes easier to see the broader embargo as a serious anachronism and a mistake that needs remedy.

President Nixon would be pleased.

Come Home, America?

Predicting that President Obama will oversee a massive retreat from the overcommitment of U.S. forces under President Bush, isolationist Nixonian Pat Buchanan admiringly quotes an article published by the realist Nixonians at the Nixon Center's foreign policy quarterly:

As Robert Pape of the University of Chicago writes in The National Interest: "America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today's world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back at the Bush administration years as the death knell of American hegemony."

It's Rented, But Still.

What a treat to find a transcript of my MC remarks at the Nixon Center's Jan. 12 dinner in Washington in honor of Mike Mullen, chairman of of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After spending 20 minutes getting the assembled elites to take their seats (I do believe this task is the main reason my brilliant but introverted Russian brother Dimitri Simes invites me each year), I find I said this:

We are living in a time of change and tumult. In not too many days, we will celebrate a peaceful change. For many, although not all, a welcome change, but all Americans celebrate a peaceful change. And we've had a whole election year in which change has been the mantra.

But there is another word that begins with "c," and that is continuity. Consistency. We honor today someone who was commissioned in the United States Navy forty years ago last year, in the tumultuous year of 1968, when he graduated from the Naval Academy in Annapolis and received his first commission.

In case you're counting, that means he has already served eight presidents of the United States, eight Commanders-in-Chief, beginning with Lyndon Johnson, and he has experienced the disappointment and, according to many, the tragedy of America's failure in Vietnam, which many say was as much a political failure as any other kind. He has experienced the clarity of the West's victory in the Cold War, and now he is a vital part of the malleable and front-changing war on terrorism.

And throughout that entire era, which encompasses so many different aspects of our lives as Americans, so many different kinds of conflict, he has provided expertise and sanity and consistency and brilliance in his work and service to, soon, nine Commanders-in-Chief and to all of us.

And if you guessed the main reason for this post is to display the photo, you're right. Someone said every man looks great in a tux, and I need all the help I can get.

Obamush In Office

What would RN be doing? Plumbing the foreign policy sections of the President's address. Obama's first comment:

Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.

Good. We do have enemies. He didn't call them evildoers, but he called them haters. Same difference. Regretably, that's the high point.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers ... our found fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

This bit he got backwards. Not only can we imagine the perils our forebears faced, we learn precisely what they were by studying history. In contrast, they couldn't have imagined the perils we face. Obama seems to be saying that because George Washington wouldn't have tortured someone to find out where a British cannon was hidden that could have killed or injured a half-dozen colonial soldiers, we shouldn't do so to find a nuclear weapon hidden in Manhattan that could kill half a million. I'm not advocating torture. I'm just saying that this particular invocation of the founders wasn't persuasive.

And so to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

President Bush probably heard that as a criticism. He may also have wondered why Obama didn't pledge that the U.S. would be a friend not only of those who seek peace and dignity but also those who deserve liberty.

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint. We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort — even greater cooperation and understanding between nations.

Oddly, still no mention of freedom as one of our enduring convictions. It may be that the anti-neoconservative foreign policy realism of Brent Scowcroft and my Nixon Center colleagues is showing. That's not bad in and of itself. Focusing U.S. policy on promoting freedom and democracy is the paramount neocon aim, even if it means we overextend ourselves in reckless adventures. Instead, Obama stresses alliances, prudence, patience, and a Nixonian faith in "the force of our example." Ironically, W. talked about humility in his first inaugural as well. That was of course before Sept. 11.

We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.

Worst split infinitive in inaugural history? I'll leave that to the experts. What does he mean by "responsibly?" Ditto. If he thought he could get out quickly, he'd probably have given Iraq its own sentence. "Forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan" is vague and far inferior to a promise to track Osama bin Laden and his savage, murdering cronies to the ends of the earth until they scream for mercy. During the campaign, he strongly criticized Bush for failing to do so.

With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet.

Is that all we get on Iran's nukes? Half a sentence leading to global warming?

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

Another run-on mess of a sentence, striking fear in the hearts of no one besides Strunk & White.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

What a dispiriting muddle. I wonder if the otherwise gratuitous religious survey was an antidote to Rick Warren's gratuitously exclusionary prayer. The passage also suggests that the world is America writ large, that its sectarian, racial, and regional hatreds will fade because America's have. And yet our common national humanity has been drawn forth methodically and painfully over two centuries against the anvil of the genius of republican government and through the tragedy of civil war. RN too believed that freedom would win out in the end, but he was thinking in terms of generations or more. Obama's utopian vision will take a lot longer than four or eight years to be realized. Will the world's old hatreds pass, for instance, before Iran threatens its neighbors with a nuclear weapon? If not, what do we do in the meantime?

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West — know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

Another letdown. We do care about what oppressed peoples think of their oppressors. We care more about what their oppressors intend to do to Americans and our interests. What will we do if hostile powers and movements don't unclench their fists? He just doesn't say. We're at war, as he said, and yet he doesn't ever manage a direct, stark threat aimed at our enemies.

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

In the economic circumstances we face, there has never been an emptier promise of more foreign aid. And what does he mean by saying that "the world has changed"? First he says that the world will follow our example. Now he's saying we should follow the world's.

As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment — a moment that will define a generation — it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.

What they principally have to tell us is that they have volunteered to fight and risk death for freedom, their families, and their country. I would've preferred if he had left it at that.

And that's all he wrote. Obama's foreign policy vision was mush during the primaries, and mush it remains.