Not An Enemy. They Just Wanted To Beat Him.

In a "60 Minutes" profile of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, correspondent Steve Kroft said that Goodell's father, Sen. Charles Goodell (R-NY), was on the Nixon White House enemies list. Not true. The list is here; a longer list of political opponents is here. Neither contains Goodell's name.

Nor, however, was he on the White House secret Valentine list. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller appointed Goodell, a congressman, to finish Sen. Robert Kennedy's term after his 1968 assassination. Because of his opposition to the Vietnam war, in the 1970 midterms Goodell lost the support of the state's powerful Conservative Party, which nominated James Buckley, who won -- and later made history by calling for Nixon's resignation during Watergate.

Goodell may have concluded that he was on somebody's list after Vice President Spiro Agnew called him "the Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party" for waxing from a conservative congressman to a liberal, anti-war senator (and therefore, presumably, less of a man, according to the mentality of Agnew, the proto-Newt Gingrich of the Republican Party). Jorgensen, who'd had gender reassignment surgery, asked Agnew for an apology; he refused.

So Goodell wasn't an official enemy. Nixon just wanted him out of the Senate. I can well understand why his family might consider this a distinction without a difference. But we fight for every yard in a cloud of dust at The Episconixonian.

Max Kennedy And The Cone Of Silence

My predecessor as Nixon library director, Hugh Hewitt, attracted intense and undesirable national attention for saying that journalist Bob Woodward wouldn't be welcome to consult our archival materials because he wasn't a "legitimate researcher." I was then Richard Nixon's chief of staff. Nixon had me call and say that while he appreciated the thought behind the anathema Hewitt had pronounced, he should lift it pronto.

Now we learn that the Kennedy library and one of Robert F. Kennedy's sons, Max, is blocking access to the late attorney general's papers. Among other things, scholars are eager to learn what Kennedy knew and when he knew it about plans to try to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro. According to John Tierney, writing at James Fallows' blog*, when a Boston Globe reporter contacted Max Kennedy to find out why this rich cache of materials is still in Steven Spielberg's federal warehouse with the Ark of the Covenant, here's what resulted:

[C]lassic stonewalling -- some blather about scholars with "poorly conceived projects" who fail to follow "correct procedures" to seek permission to consult the papers.

We'll see if the Kennedys have more luck with that line than we did. Of course in this case there may be nothing anyone can do, since all the Kennedy records were considered private property according to pre-Watergate archival practice. Still, Tierney writes:

The Kennedys don't deserve this attention and adulation if they're not willing to be open with the truth, if they remain intent on having the public see only the attractive side of Robert Kennedy's legacy. They don't deserve the unstinting praise and the undying devotion if they're not willing to come clean. If they were to do so, they might deserve the attention that comes their way now by constant management and manipulation of the family image.

*I originally erred in writing that James Fallows was the author.

Bobby Kennedy Sought Vietnam Peace Mission

A peek at Sen. Kennedy's soon-to-be-published memoirs:

Mr. Kennedy tells of a secret meeting in the spring of 1967 between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Kennedy, whose increasingly outspoken criticism of the war in Southeast Asia was becoming a political threat to Mr. Johnson. According to the book, Robert Kennedy proposed that Mr. Johnson gave him authority to personally negotiate a peace treaty in Vietnam. This, implicitly, would have kept Mr. Kennedy out of the 1968 race for the Democratic nomination, a prospect that Mr. Johnson had come to worry greatly about.

“If the president had accepted his offer,” the book says, “Bobby certainly would have been too immersed in the peace process to become involved in presidential primary.” Mr. Johnson could not take the offer at face value, concerned that Robert Kennedy had ulterior motives.