The Cambodia Surge

Roger Morris, who resigned from Henry Kissinger's NSC staff at the Nixon White House in protest over the 1970 Cambodia incursion that President Nixon ordered, has written two long posts for the New York Times blog comparing Vietnam with the two wars the Obama administration has inherited. At The New Nixon, Robert Nedelkoff analyzes Morris's posts and ends with this observation:

It’s worth mentioning that at one point Morris remarks that the Cambodian invasion of 1970 was “what a later era might call a ’surge.’” That may be more telling than he knows. The “surge,” widely denounced by Democrats (and some Republicans) at the time, was the key to gaining the degree of peace Iraq enjoys now. The Cambodian incursion, hated though it was by antiwar activists, did neutralize the supply lines and gave a breathing space to American and South Vietnamese forces at a time when it was needed.

You Know, If It Had Been Palin...

Robert Nedelkoff on Caroline Kennedy's interview with the New York Times:

In what must have been a conversation lasting about 40 or 45 minutes, she uses “you know” no less than 138 times. Especially impressive are two occasions where she uses the words five different times in one sentence - or what would be a sentence, if it were not, in both cases, a chain of clauses with no grammatical conclusion....

And while it is true that quite a few Senators, past and present, have been as inarticulate as Ms. Kennedy, very few among them have used what facility of speech they had to assert, as Ms Kennedy more or less does in this interview, that they should be in the United States Senate, well, because they want to be there, whether or not there are more qualified candidates for the job.

Cheney Ends Up As The New Nixon, Anyway

The VP was evidently so grateful to Chris Wallace of Fox News for defending the Bush Administration against comparisons to Richard Nixon that he agreed to give Wallace an “exit interview” — ironic, since Mr. Cheney’s interview with Wallace has itself drawn a comparison by Matt Corley to RN’s famous assertion to David Frost about the President’s latitude during a national security crisis.

As TNN’s Robert Nedelkoff has noted, when Frank Langella, portraying RN, says that when the President does something, “it’s not illegal,” the script makes it appear as though he’s talking about the Watergate break-in and cover-up. In real life, Frost and the former President had been talking about the Huston Plan for wartime intelligence-gathering about domestic radicals. The plan was approved and later rescinded by the President.

It’s hard to defend illegal activity by the government under any circumstances. But it would be interesting to know how much latitude the American people would give it in the event of an imminent threat. At his appearance at the Nixon Library on Friday, Bill O’Reilly said that arguments against extreme measures would lose much if not all of their salience if the U.S. is hit again as on Sept. 11.

That doesn’t justify such actions, either. But journalists should not assume that Americans are of one mind on the subject. That’s why, at the start of the new administration, debate and dialogue would be better than the legal scapegoating of Bush Administration officials which is so intensely craved by the President’s and VP’s political opponents.

As for “Frost/Nixon” director Ron Howard and playwright-scriptwriter Peter Morgan, it would be interesting to know why they chose to misconstrue RN’s quote. Without knowing their motives, its likely that most theatergoers are more appalled by the “not illegal” formulation when it’s applied to political shenanigans as opposed to wartime national security policies.

Nixon Critic Calls Ron Howard "Dishonorable"

Elizabeth Drew, so appalled by Richard Nixon that she couldn't bring herself to give a speech about him in Yorba Linda (our federal colleagues arranged for her to appear at the LA public library instead), calls Ron Howard's "Frost/Nixon" "dishonorable." Drew says Nixon was not funny, not likeable, not redeemable, and not worthy of the prodigious talents of Frank Langella (we're beginning to detect a theme that could silence Oscar buzz). She is still waxing sarcastic about the invasion of Cambodia. Hey, Ron: Welcome to our world!

Read my New Nixon colleague Robert Nedelkoff's thoughts here.

Howard And Stone, Between The Buttons

More good stuff from Robert Nedelkoff on "Frost/Nixon."