The Nebulous Baker Boys

Russ Baker is a conspiracy-minded writer whose 2008 book about the Bush family stepped outside the bounds of believability and indeed propriety by hinting that George H.W. Bush had a role in President Kennedy's assassination.

But Baker also poses questions about the military and intelligence communities' actions during the Nixon administration that deserve more attention that they've gotten from mainstream scholars. This piece of the Watergate puzzle doesn't have to be the whole picture, but it deserves to be part of it.

Yet anyone who writes about it at all, such as Baker, Len Colodny, and James Rosen (who's still waiting for a New York Times review of his painstakingly researched study of John Mitchell, John Dean, and Watergate), runs the risk of being called a noncanonical outlier. Former Sen. Gary Hart reprimanded the late Peter Rodman, a respected Kissinger aide, for even raising the issue of detentenik Nixon's hawkish institutional foes.

So in the vein of a beggar not being too choosy, here's an excerpt from a Russ Baker blog entry about the cozy relationship between Watergate reporter Bob Woodward (shown here) and the military establishment:

Bob, top secret Naval officer, gets sent to work in the Nixon White House while still on military duty. Then, with no journalistic credentials to speak of, and with a boost from White House staffers, he lands a job at the Washington Post. Not long thereafter he starts to take down Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, Woodward’s military bosses are running a spy ring inside the White House that is monitoring Nixon and Kissinger’s secret negotiations with America’s enemies (China, Soviet Union, etc), stealing documents and funneling them back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

That’s not the iconic Woodward of legend, of course — so it takes a while for this notion to settle in the mind. But there’s more — and it’s even more troubling. Did you know there was really no Deep Throat, that the Mark Felt story was conjured up as yet another layer of cover in what became a daisy chain of disinformation? Did you know that Richard Nixon was loathed and feared by the military brass, that they and their allies were desperate to get Nixon out and halt his rapprochement with the Communists? That a bunch of operatives with direct or indirect CIA/military connections, from E. Howard Hunt to Alexander Butterfield to John Dean — wormed their way into key White House posts, and started up the Keystone Kops operations that would be laid at Nixon’s office door?

Hat tip to Len Colodny

Baker's Half-Baked?

In its "Secrecy News" e-newsletter, the Society of American Archivists engages with Russ Baker, whose conspiracy-minded Family Of Secrets has significant content on the Nixon Administration:

The Central Intelligence Agency did provide a copy of intelligence files relating to the Bay of Pigs to President Nixon in response to his request, an official of the National Archives and Records Administration said yesterday. He said that the statement to the contrary in Secrecy News on January 5, citing the new book "Family of Secrets," was in error.

"The CIA did not refuse the Nixon administration's request for records on the Bay of Pigs and other topics," John Powers of the National Archives said. What happened, rather, is that "[Director of Central Intelligence Richard M.] Helms insisted that if the President wanted these records, he would only give them to the President himself."

"There is a fascinating Oval Office taped conversation of this meeting in October 1971 that is publicly available. You can hear Helms putting the papers down on Nixon's desk," Mr. Powers said.

He identified the conversation as tape number 587-7 dated October 8, 1971. "Helms enters during [Ehrlichman's] briefing and they quickly change the topic, then get down to the issue of the papers."

Mr. Powers added that the CIA papers provided by Mr. Helms to President Nixon are contained in Boxes 36 and 37 of the John D. Ehrlichman files at the Nixon Presidential Library.

Mr. Powers said that some of the material may have been declassified and released since he departed from the Nixon Project nearly two years ago. "But my recollection is that most of the two [Ehrlichman] boxes were still classified. They are awaiting a researcher to file a Mandatory Declassification Review request."

***

Historian Maarja Krusten writes:

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) — of which I am a member — is not the publisher of Secrecy News. Secrecy News is published by the Federation of American Scientists (Steve Aftergood puts it out). Last week, I posted the item you mentioned to the Archives & Archivists Listserv (which *is* administered by SAA). Perhaps someone forwarded the item to you from that posting, making it appear there is an SAA connection? But SAA is not involved in discussing Baker’s book, to my knowledge.

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?

"Frost/Nixon" Defrosts The Historical Nixon

The most riveting scene in "Frost/Nixon" is completely fabricated, as playwright and screenwriter Peter Morgan has candidly admitted. A tipsy former President (Frank Langella) calls David Frost (Michael Sheen) and describes them as a pair of overachievers out to show the world that they were good enough. He says that by "our success" in their televised interviews, they'll prove their critics wrong.

Frost gulps and agrees with RN's analysis. You get the feeling that he'd never voiced his own fears and motivations or even admitted them to himself. Imagine that: A fun-loving child of the 1960s bowing to the superior introspection of the most introverted and outwardly stoic of Depression-bred public figures. He then warns Nixon, "Only one of us can win."

About that, the fictional Frost is wrong. Thanks to the original Frost-Nixon interviews, the British TV personality won the fame and riches he craved. Thanks in part to Ron Howard's "Frost/Nixon," the historical Nixon is beginning to win the measure of redemption he never dared hope for in life.

As my New Nixon colleague Frank Gannon has noted, Langella's gripping Nixon, like the statesman's milieu he occupied and the world he changed for the better, is large and consequential. He dominates almost every scene in which he appears. (One exception is his awkward, imaginary appearance before something called the Orthodontists Society of Houston, the kind of speaker's circuit event that he never did.) When Nixon passes through a room in the movie, the factotums and crew members part like the Red Sea. It's obvious why alarmed Nixon critic Elizabeth Drew called Howard "dishonorable." His Nixon shatters the confines of marginalization, one-dimensionality, and caricature thrust upon the historical Nixon as the result of Vietnam-era passions. It's the first film Nixon worthy of the real thing, the first that will help younger audiences begin to understand him and his tumultuous era.

Not surprisingly, the film doesn't convey much Watergate understanding. Its main conflict, between TV lightweight and political heavyweight, depends on fudges. Morgan and Howard misconstrued RN's famous "if the President does it, that's means it's not illegal" as being about Watergate rather than a plan to increase surveillance of domestic militants during wartime. As for Watergate itself, the movie Frost accuses Nixon of having claimed he didn't know about the break-in until June 23, which is obviously untrue. He read about it in the paper on June 18, along with the rest of the world.

All in all, "Frost/Nixon" is conventional in its failure to communicate that Watergate and Vietnam were inextricable. Whether Mr. Nixon ever intended a criminal cover-up of the June 17 burglary is doubtful. The preponderance of the White House tapes from 1972 show that he believed that anyone involved in the burglary itself (as opposed to previous national security matters) should own up. Russ Baker's intriguing if highly speculative new book, Family of Secrets, asserts that President Nixon correctly assumed from the beginning that the botched burglary was a CIA setup, but that's a blog for another day.

At the film's climax, Langella's Nixon owns up by saying he let the American people down, a moment that occurs after adjutant Jack Brennan (portrayed by the less-entertaining-than-the-real-McBrennan Kevin Bacon) panics and interrupts the final taping. Afterward, James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell), the most anti-Nixon of Frost's team members, exults at seeing the former President's face "ravaged by self-loathing and defeat."

It's a deceptive denouement, since it was actually Frost who interrupted the taping after misunderstanding a sign the real Brennan was holding up that said "let him talk." Mr. Nixon had chosen to make a statement of accountability. Neither Frost nor Reston maneuvered him into it.

Besides, self-loathing wasn't in Mr. Nixon's nature. By his death in 1994, he was at peace with what he had achieved in the nearly 20 years since his resignation, both personally and publicly. What mattered most, besides his family, was having the ears of his successors, and at that he succeeded, advising each one from Ford to Clinton and even playing a decisive role in U.S. relations with Russia and China.

Contrary to most conventional wisdom, he never expected broader rehabilitation during his lifetime. He said it would take at least 30 years before he began to get a fair shake. Yet again, he called it about right.

The Non-Smoking Gun Club

Promoting his theory that the Bushes are the Texas devils of American politics, Russ Baker writes:

One of the fastest ways to raise eyebrows in politically savvy company is to suggest that Richard Nixon was not the villain of Watergate. Everyone knows that Nixon himself set loose the Watergate burglars and then oversaw the attempted cover-up that followed. We know this because the most famous journalists of the last fifty years—Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—made their careers on that story. I thought I knew it too.

If "everybody knows" RN ordered the Watergate burglary, then everybody's been listening to historians and journalists who have said or implied as much, and without evidence. Here's more detail. Rick Perlstein joined the Non-Smoking Gun Club when, in Nixonland, he misconstrued a secondary source and made it appear as though the President had known in advance about the September 1971 break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist.

Poppycock?

Old conventional wisdom: Nixon worse than Bush. New CW: Bush worse than Nixon. New Russ Baker book: Bushes destroyed Nixon.