"Seven Days In May"? No Way. Transparency!

When is it okay with a liberal-leaning scholar and former White House official that the hawks at the Pentagon were spying on and stealing documents from aides to a President who was trying to end a war and improve relations with Beijing and Moscow? When the scholar is Roger Morris and the erred-against President was Richard Nixon:

[P]olicy power grew so concentrated in a secretive White House that the Joint Chiefs of Staff began their own espionage program against [Henry] Kissinger, the so-called admirals’ spy ring of 1971.

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.

Baker's Not So Fabulous Bush Boys

It's not surprising that "The Huffington Post" would run a long expose on George W. Bush's National Guard service. What's surprising is that it's an excerpt from Russ Baker's new book, Family of Secrets. I've read about half of it, including all the Nixon chapters. It's a massive exercise in conjecture which hints that George H. W. Bush had something to do with JFK's assassination (Kennedy wouldn't do the bidding of Texas oligarchs, who were fiercely protective of the oil depletion allowance) and also oiled the skids for President Nixon's downfall because of his independent-mindedness on economic and foreign policy. Here's an example of Baker's style:

Maureen Dean, before meeting John during his White House residency, had been a Dallas-based flight attendant. She had been married to George Owen, who worked for Clint Murchison Jr. -- a central figure in the oil depletion-[Oswald associate] George de Mohrenschildt circle. At minimum, it certainly is a small world.

In part by drawing lines such as that between mid-century elites -- Baker must've had a thousand yellow stickies on his dining room wall -- he asserts that the CIA's behind almost everything in Washington's recent history, including John Dean. Even Watergate historian Stanley Kutler, who calls Dean a personal friend, is drawn into the fray. The tentacles, Baker hints, reach even that far.

We Nixonians are instinctively drawn to anything which exonerates our man, as Family of Secrets largely does. Baker draws on under-appreciated Watergate findings by Jim Hougan, Colodny-Gettlin, and most recently James Rosen. His book was praised by Nixon biographer Roger Morris and also carries an endorsement of the author (though not, it appears, of the book itself) by Bill Moyers. It's not that more scholarship about the Vietnam-Watergate era isn't needed, particularly since the corrupt FBI's self-protective machinations against an elected President have been cast in sharp relief by W. Mark Felt's death.

And yet time after time, Baker makes fateful implications and suppositions without quite closing the deal. Conviction by connection isn't the same as history. Which brings us back to "The Huffington Post"'s seeming opportunism in running a Baker excerpt. If it's in your political or ideological interests to promote Family of Secrets on W.'s Guard service (as Huffington does) or indeed on the alleged CIA frame-up of RN during Watergate, aren't you endorsing his whole enterprise, including, especially, the dark hints about the Bush family and the events of November 1963?