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.

Notes On A President's Notes

By Kathy O'Connor

Tomorrow is the 19th anniversary of the death of Richard Nixon, whom I served for 14 years as his personal secretary and last chief of staff. I can hardly believe it has been almost two decades since I held his hand and kissed him on the forehead while saying goodbye in a small, dark room in the ICU at New York Hospital. Those private moments remain fresh in my mind because of the sacred separation of his spirit from his body that I felt as his heart monitor went flat.

Because of the passions of the Cold War, Vietnam, and Watergate, and especially the secret White House tapes, history’s assessment of him will always be complicated. Some of his worst moments and those of felonious assistants such as Bob Haldeman are on display in tonight’s documentary on the Discovery Channel. But there was another side of our former president that I was privileged to see as he traveled the world, wrote many books and articles, and advised all of his successor presidents.

The days before his devastating stroke were full and joyful. He worked on his final book, Beyond Peace. Two days before he was stricken, he was among friends and family at the wedding of a family friend in Westchester County. The day before, his younger daughter Julie Eisenhower spent the day at his home in Park Ridge, New Jersey, which had felt empty indeed since Mrs. Nixon’s death in June 1993.

On Monday, April 18, he decided to work at home weighing book promotion options and answering correspondence. We were on the phone all day. He had his stroke just before dinnertime, about an hour after our last conversation. He was rushed to the hospital, where he died on April 22.

I’ve thought of him each day since. To focus his own thoughts, President Nixon wrote notes to himself constantly, including daily Kathy-dos. Here are the two from April 18. When we’d covered a matter, he crossed it off the list. On the shorter list are a couple of items he never had a chance to ask me about. Maybe later, Mr. President!

Wooden You Know It

My St. John's friend Tom Tierney, formerly of Detroit and the U.S. Air Force, forwarded a compendium of Bernard Zee's photos from the 2009 air show and open house at Edwards Air Force Base. This is a Lockheed YO-3 Quiet Star, used for battlefield reconnaissance during the Vietnam war. Elements of its design, especially the wooden propeller, enabled it to fly at altitudes as low as 200 feet without being heard by the enemy.

It Feels Drafty

My cousin and fellow Episcopalian and blogger, Bebe Bahnsen, believes it's time for rich and poor to share the burden of defending our country. For one thing, she thinks we'd all pay more attention to decisions about where, when, and how military force is used:

And I believe it should be a universal draft—men and women. The new draft I envision would require one or two years of service from all young Americans. Many would probably be in the military but there might be other ways to perform required service—teaching or assisting in substandard schools where children are destined for failure without special attention, for instance. Or volunteering in crime prevention programs in high-crime areas. Spending a year or two helping to rebuild this country’s crumbling infrastructure might be a possibility.

It might be necessary to stipulate a certain number of draftees for military service. In that case, the draft would have to be a system such as the lottery during the Vietnam War.

Obama Is The New Nixon

Reflecting on the politics and finances of presidential libraries, historian Maarja Krusten raises the question of whether the next one (probably either in Honolulu or Chicago) could end up being as controversial as the one in Yorba Linda:

Having come of age during the Vietnam war era, which saw some extraordinarily heated rhetoric used by some on the left against Richard Nixon, I never thought I would see so much vitriol again, with equally awful rhetoric now being used against Barack Obama by some on the right. The hatred, the reliance on lies or hyperbole, the disregard for the harm being done to the nation and to their side, seems much the same to me, it’s just coming from the other end of the political spectrum.

Steve Coll Didn't Get The Memo

In the Feb. 28 "New Yorker," Steve Coll reveals that the Obama administration has begun secret talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan:

The discussions are continuing; they are of an exploratory nature and do not yet amount to a peace negotiation. That may take some time: the first secret talks between the United States and representatives of North Vietnam took place in 1968; the Paris Peace Accords, intended to end direct U.S. military involvement in the war, were not agreed on until 1973.

I'm pretty sure the magazine's position all these years has been that Richard Nixon could've gotten the same deal in 1969 that he got in 1973 and that tens of thousands of Americans died as a result. It's not true. I'm not complaining. But I'll bet someone else will, in the letters column next week.

Bring On The Nixon Psychobiographers!

Richard Nixon, who strenuously resisted introspection, despised nothing more than so-called psychobiography, which combined the traditional historical method with speculation about subjects' hidden (even to themselves) motivations. As far as I can tell, that kind of history has gone mainstream, as it probably should have. Leaders are far more than the sum of their memoranda, especially ones as emotionally reserved and complicated as Nixon. Politics probably couldn't have been an unhappier choice for someone of his driven but painfully introverted temperament. Yet he felt called to make a difference, and his powers of solitary concentration and focus enabled him to envision foreign policy moves that made the world safer for billions of people.

Some insiders' insights from historian and former Nixon tapes archivist Maarja Krusten's new blog, NixoNARA. First, from one of Maarja's latest posts:

[I]n Nixon’s approach to issues as a student, a candidate, a president, and a creator of government records, we see...what has become an all-too-familiar refrain, “they’re against us, we won’t be treated fairly, try to out maneuver or crush them.” Ironically, more openness to reflection, and a willingness to consider data rather than relying so heavily on emotivism—a sense that archivists as civil servants would not treat his records fairly–would have made it much easier for him and for the National Archives.

Was his suspicion of civil servants -- not just archivists but members of the diplomatic and intelligence services -- a function of temperament or philosophy? Probably a little of both. Like many during the Cold War, Nixon had a Manichean view of the struggle between freedom and communism. At home, in the political and policy arenas, he saw everything (literally) as a matter of right vs. left. Since civil servants tended to be liberal, it seems not to have been much a stretch for Nixon to conclude that, knowingly or unknowingly, they were participating, if only in a tangential or a symbolic way, in the global communist project. A natural consequence of their ideological bias, in his view, was their hostility to him, the hated persecutor of Alger Hiss.

Getting to know them better would've enabled a more accurate view, but Nixon's introversion ruled that out. I take exception with those such as Rick Perlstein who focus on Nixon's alleged class resentments. Like many introverts, he resented those who were more socially adept than he, which, in politics, was just about everyone, no matter what side of the tracks they came from. He'd always tell us that socializing was a waste of time, but the real issue was that he didn't enjoy it, because it was exhausting. Instead, he spent a considerable amount of time alone, reading, thinking, planning, deciding, and accomplishing.

And yet there's no question about the unfortunate consequences of Nixon's corrosive assumptions about civil servants. In a comment at Maarja's blog, the former head of the Nixon tape processing unit, Fred Graboske, writes:

Our tapes processing staff held widely-ranging political views. Some, such as Maarja and I, were Republicans. Others were Democrats, some Independent, some agnostic, and one was a Socialist. I saw no evidence that anyone’s personal views of Nixon, or general political views, affected their archival work. President Nixon believed that the civil service was predominantly Democrat in its views (probably correct) and that it consequently attempted to sabotage his programs (not correct). If Nixon had understood this, he could have spared himself some grief during his Presidency...

The nadir of Nixon's cold war against federal bureaucrats was his asking one of his aides, Fred Malek, to count the number of Jews working in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where, Nixon had decided, liberal officials were purposely skewing data to hurt the administration. First he had another aide, Larry Higby, make sure Malek wasn't Jewish. The unsavory episode is described in the upcoming Nixon library Watergate exhibit that's been opposed by Nixon's White House aides.

About the worst excesses of Nixon and his men, another NixonNARA commentator, historian and blogger Jeremy C. Young (shown here), says this:

To be fair, had Nixon possessed “more openness to reflection, and a willingness to consider data rather than relying so heavily on emotivism,” he probably wouldn’t have done the things that make his aides so sensitive to the publicizing of his papers. Gerald Ford, a man possessed of a very similar political worldview to Nixon’s, committed none of Nixon’s sins and was accordingly unconcerned with the publication of his official papers.

Ford also committed none of Nixon's political and policy breakthroughs. He would probably have finished his career as House minority leader if Nixon hadn't turned to him in 1973 as the choice for vice president that would be least offensive to the most U.S. senators. Also thanks to his inoffensiveness, he ended up as the right president for the aftermath of Watergate. But it's hard to imagine him (or Ronald Reagan for that matter) functioning as effectively as Nixon did in the first four years of his presidency -- for starters, transforming relations with the Soviets and the Chinese and the conduct of the Vietnam war.

Nixon Karma

Historian and former Nixon tapes archivist Maarja Krusten on the controversies, both archival and curatorial, swirling around Richard Nixon's federal library:

[T]he Nixon foundation actually had a choice. It need not have entered into a library partnership with NARA. It had established its own library in 1990, one which held Nixon’s pre- and post-presidential records. It could have continued to maintain a privately administered library and museum, with full control of exhibits and public programs. It chose to partner with NARA in the federal library that opened in 2007. Second thoughts? Perhaps. NARA’s fault. No.

Sometimes, it seems to me as someone who once voted for him that an incredible amount of bad karma surrounds the Nixon records. Nixon made the mistake of recording his conversations, then seeking to suppress them or limit disclosures from them. His successors are required to turn over to the National Archives the records of high level governance. A lawsuit which could have been avoided forced into the open all sorts of details about NARA's handling of Nixon’s materials which otherwise might never have been exposed. The decision of an official associated with the Nixon foundation this year to refer to NARA’s Nixon library director as a candidate for administering an Alger Hiss library raised red flags and led me to decide to blog about my past experiences. Sometimes it seems like a never-ending story.

Second thoughts? An interesting question. As Nixon's chief of staff, library director, and legal co-executor, I was promoting the library's federalization within a year or two of his death in 1994. Members of the Nixon family opposed a 1997 settlement that would've accomplished the handover smoothly, with some money left over for an endowment. After that fiasco, finally consummating a less advantageous marriage took another ten years and around $1 million in lobbyist fees.

Our motives for wanting to nestle under the wing of Mother NARA? It depended. Not everyone had an opinion about federalization. I and others believed it was vital to Nixon's historical legacy. Some family members and foundation board members who actively favored the handover were being practical. They were tired of raising money to run the private library, or they feared that donations would dry up when their generation was gone.

I can only remember one person who actively opposed the 2007 handover, an arch-conservative Nixon White House staffer who believed that federal employees, now and for all time, would be unable to treat Nixon fairly. Kathy O'Connor and I spent a long lunch pleading with him not to write a newspaper column calling on the library's supporters to join him in ending charitable contributions to the Nixon foundation. When we went ahead with the handover, which both Nixons' daughters favored, he took back his records for fear that they would some day fall into federal hands. As other former White House operatives have become more actively involved at Nixon's foundation, perhaps his is now the prevailing view. They've taken the lead role in opposing the government's new Watergate exhibit, for instance.

But although Nixon's restored birthplace seems frozen in 1913, the year of Nixon's birth, time passes as inexorably in Yorba Linda as anywhere else. Before long, the aides won't be there anymore, but the papers, tapes, and other historical materials will be. They are the Nixon library. If there is to be a restoration of Nixon's historical standing, which has been battered down even more by reaction to the latest tapes opening, it will be rooted in the work of scholars and researchers whose outlooks weren't molded by Vietnam and Watergate and all the bad karma (to use MK's apt language) that attended them. They will little note the rearguard scuffles that have occurred since his presidency and death. Instead, they'll consult the records, remember what Nixon did as well as what he said, and write their articles and books.

Nixon himself was a long-ball player when it came to his legacy. He knew it was in the hands of students and scholars as yet untrained or even unborn. Yes, we who knew him, and invested much of ourselves in him and his works for good or ill, may wish we could hurry up that long restorative process. We can't, though it's understandable if we try. But for whose sake are we trying, exactly -- his, or ours?

Hiss Or History? Part II

Richard Nixon's defenders (0f which I've been one lo! these many years) are wont to say that his tape-recorded comments shouldn't always be taken as official policy, or even a perfectly accurate expression of his real views, since he was prone to let off steam in conversations with trusted aides. The theory is that just because he said, in the heat of his rage over the leak of the Pentagon Papers, that he wanted his men to burglarize the Brookings Institution didn't mean they really should. Just because he kibbutzes with Kissinger about hypothetical Soviet pogroms doesn't mean he'd stand by and let another holocaust occur.

Such defenses of Nixon's blaring taped outbursts often -- usually -- fall on deaf ears. Some are understandably reluctant to accept that the most powerful man in the world didn't usually mean what he said.

But now the family of a disgraced Vietnam-era officer, Maj. Gen. John D. Lavelle, is marshaling evidence from the tapes, namely yet more Nixonian outbursts, to show that the general was carrying out his commander-in-chief's orders. Charles A. Stevenson, a Johns Hopkins University lecturer who used to be a U.S. Senate staffer, opposes the restoration of Lavelle's honor -- and sure enough, he too has discovered that, with 37, presidential commentary doesn't always add up to presidential action or culpability:

Stevenson...noted that Nixon blew a lot of hot air in his Oval Office meetings, rants that shouldn't be mistaken as official policy.

"Nixon said an awful lot of things to his staff, that his staff wisely did not implement," Stevenson said. "Nixon had a practice of saying outrageous things as if they were orders."

Hat tip Maarja Krusten

The Pink Lady And I

Writing about the efforts that Richard Nixon made to keep his presidential records under wraps as long as possible, Maarja Krusten reviews the fascinating role played by a future chief justice, John Roberts, when he was a member of the Reagan White House staff. She concludes:

Nixon’s big mistake was recording the conversations in the first place. As Haldeman [shown here, with Nixon] put it in his memoirs,”Imagine your own feeling if you were to open your Monday morning paper and find someone had taped all the conversations in your home over the weekend—then selected the very worst segments and printed them in the paper. That’s just about what happened to us.” Haldeman nevertheless believed as early as 1979 that it would be good to open more tapes beyond those played at the Watergate trials: “I know that there is also some very great material. And I feel sure the ‘good’ outweighs the ‘bad.’ Thus Nixon has everything to gain and little more to lose from release of additional tapes.”

Some day scholars will benefit from all the hard-won disclosure decisions, which give a unique glimpse in the recorded conversations at governance and at Nixon as man and as president, information which the fair minded can put to good use. Historians will have to judge for themselves when Nixon was venting and when what he stated constituted action items. And when his private comments matched his public policy positions and when, as often occurred, they did not. I dare say journalists will continue to report on the most sensational items—and there are plenty of those, as well.

Actually, it's surprising that all the tapes aren't open by now. In an earlier essay, Krusten reported that they were ready to be opened in 1988. After Nixon died in 1994, as his legal co-executor I began to negotiate almost immediately to settle a lawsuit that historian Stanley Kutler (below right) had brought against the National Archives to compel the opening of tapes that archivists believed related to abuses of power. We reached a deal in 1996. As I recall, we envisioned having all the tapes opened by 2000.

The Nixon library has now promised to have the last 400 hours opened by 2012, meaning that, in time for the next presidential election, there'll likely be another round of headlines about the subject that seems to be of greatest interest to journalists: Nixon's views about Jews, African-Americans, Italians, Lithuanians, and, if we're really lucky, little green men. Good thing he won't be running. The sooner all that's over, the sooner writers will get to work on the less salacious, most substantive materials housed in Yorba Linda.

It may seem odd to Maarja to hear the likes of me press to get everything open ASAP. My attitude about these matters actually changed beginning in 1990, when I became director of the private Nixon library. Nixon-like, my conversion was sparked by crisis. Before the library's July 1990 grand opening, my predecessor as director, Hugh Hewitt, made the impolitic announcement, in response to a reporter's question, that the most famous and respected journalist in the U.S., Bob Woodward, wouldn't be welcome to do research at the library. That pretty much destroyed any credibility we might otherwise have had with the scholarly community (though I didn't help matters myself many years later by canceling a conference we'd planned with Whittier College on the Vietnam war, which I briefly feared might delay our handover to the feds in 2007).

Soon after arriving at the library in September 1990, I grasped for a measure of redemption by recruiting an archivist and promising that I’d never interfere with her dealings with scholars and researchers. Eventually we even had something to show them, since we’d taken custody of a significant cache of Nixon’s congressional and vice presidential papers from the National Archives. The collection, which he’d never deeded to the government, had valuable documents about his early campaigns, the Alger Hiss case, and Nixon's international missions for President Eisenhower during the 1950s.

Back in Saddle River, Nixon monitored this process with considerable unease. It was one thing to open a chest-thumping museum using his rich friends’ money, another thing entirely to dish the contents of his personal files to liberal professors. He indulged me, but warily. He couldn’t have cared less about my conviction that a functioning, independent archive was vital for institutional credibility. “Institutional credibility” was the kind of formulation that could render him almost asphyxiated with helpless rage. Didn’t I understand, he would say, that all that mattered was his credibility? I actually did understand, and yet I was tempted by the idea that we could have both.

It helped a little that our first archivist was a rock-ribbed Republican. It helped far more that she was astonishingly slow. Our reading room wasn’t ready to open to the public until a few months after Nixon died. As he would’ve said, I had dodged a bullet.

Before long we began to receive visits from scholars and researchers who were interested in Nixon’s early years in politics. I was pleased in 1998 when Greg Mitchell, a left-leaning editor and journalist who writes a media blog at “The Nation,” published a book about Nixon’s 1950 senatorial campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas that relied heavily on documents housed at the library. Like most historians, Mitchell was critical of Nixon’s campaign tactics, and yet I reckoned it as a win because he praised the Nixon library in his acknowledgments.

It wouldn’t have pleased Nixon, I don’t think, though by now, four years after his death, it was hard to be so sure what was best. Because of my roles at the library and in his estate, I had a considerable amount of discretion about how we were going to position ourselves in relation to the scholarly community. He wasn’t around to consult, obviously, though I often found myself imitating his gravelly voice and, I sometimes supposed, even channeling his instincts.

By the time Mitchell’s book came out, we were fully committed to getting the library into the National Archives and thus consigning Nixon’s legacy to generations of historians as yet untrained or unborn. Was it what he would have wanted? I assumed so, if only because he was smart enough to realize that his retainers and immediate family members wouldn’t be around forever to stand guard and dust the exhibits in the lavish pro-Nixon museum we’d built upstairs.

Besides, as a lifelong student of history and biography, he knew he would be judged according to what appeared between hard covers, not within the walls of a museum. If historians – even those whose outlooks and temperaments hadn’t been molded by the passions and agonies of Vietnam and Watergate -- never took a fresh look at the Cold War’s greatest pragmatist, if they ultimately decided that he quit outweighed he went to China, then it didn’t matter what we did. As I looked without a trace of angst at our brand-new copy of the Nixon-ravaging Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon Vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas -- Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, I realized that I’d taken a leap of faith. Like it or not, Richard Nixon now belonged to Greg Mitchell (founding editor of “Crawdaddy,” a trailblazing 1960s rock and roll magazine, which is cool) and his colleagues and heirs.

French Tries

From records opened today by the Nixon library, an example of how quickly loose talk can get to the president's desk. On Aug. 11, 1970, Rose Mary Woods, President Nixon's secretary, sent him a memo describing a dinner attended a few days before by, among others, Wiley Buchanan, President Eisenhower's chief of protocol; Herve Alphand, the former French ambassador; and Winston Guest, famous for being Churchill's second cousin, playing polo, and marrying socialite C.Z. Guest. Woods continued:

Alphand said some of the French wonder why nobody has ever done anything about the fact that Haiphong is seven feet below sea level and exists on a series of dikes. If those dikes were bombed there is nothing they could do.

Nixon underlined the idea and put one of his trademark exclamation points next to it, adding a note to Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor: "K -- Give me a report on this." Whatever Kissinger's response was, nothing happened. The Johnson and Nixon administration considered various schemes for trying to destroy the extensive system of dikes and related structures along North Vietnam's Red River delta, but they never did it.

No More Afghanistans

Robert Wright argues that Afghanistan is worse than Vietnam because our involvement actually manufactures new enemies, whereas non-interventionist tactics in combating terrorism would have resulted in al-Qaeda just fading away:

Al Qaeda’s ideology offers nothing that many of the world’s Muslims actually want — except, perhaps, when they feel threatened by the West, a feeling that isn’t exactly dulled by the presence of American troops in Muslim countries.

Good Paranoia

From Glenn Garvin at the Miami Herald (my mother's paper for a few months in 1965, during one of Detroit's periodic newspaper strikes, many of which were called by my genial journalistic Joe Hill of a godfather), a balanced take on Vietnam-era antagonists Richard Nixon and Daniel Ellsberg, subjects of a new public television documentary:

The fundamental problem with The Most Dangerous Man is that it's not really a documentary at all. Narrated by Ellsberg and based largely on his 2002 autobiography, it's more of an illustrated memoir. Though it includes interviews with reporters, Ellsberg colleagues and other figures in the case, virtually all of them treat him as an unalloyed hero.

The exceptions are Richard Nixon and a few henchmen who can be heard on White House tapes cursing Ellsberg and plotting vengeance. ``We've got to get this son of a bitch,'' snarls Nixon in one of the milder excerpts. They tried, filing criminal charges and even burglarizing the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in search of dirty laundry -- an act of over-enthusiasm that would help topple Nixon's presidency.

Nixon and his minions make easy (and, in many ways, appropriate) villains. But The Most Dangerous Man makes no attempt to put the government's side of the story in perspective. Ellsberg had just leaked 7,000 pages of classified documents and not just to reporters: A Russian double agent told the FBI a set had been delivered to the Soviet embassy in Washington.

Nobody knew what else Ellsberg had lifted from Pentagon files or what he might be planning to do with it. His ex-wife, though an anti-war activist, told the FBI she thought he was having a mental breakdown. Some of his accomplices were not merely anti war but pro communist, openly supporting North Vietnam's Stalinist government. If Nixon was paranoid about Ellsberg, he had good reason.

The Most Dangerous Man goes beyond omission to outright falsification in its implication that Nixon was trying to suppress the Pentagon Papers because they showed he was thinking of using nuclear weapons in Vietnam. In fact, the papers contained not a single word about his presidency; their account of the war ended in 1969, before Nixon took office. Nor was he escalating the war, as The Most Dangerous Man implies. When Ellsberg leaked the papers, Nixon had reduced the number of troops from the 536,000 deployed by Lyndon Johnson to 157,000.

For All The Relocated Saints

Here's another of those stories about hallowed ground. In May, according to Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), 82-year-old Mary Tan's funeral in Da Nang, Vietnam turned bloody. On Aug. 18, he told the House's human rights commission:

Vietnamese authorities and riot police disrupted that sad and solemn occasion, shooting tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd, beating mourners with batons and electric rods. More than 100 were injured, dozens were arrested, and several remain in custody and have reportedly been severely beaten and tortured. At least two innocent people have been murdered by the Vietnamese police.

Mary's mourners were trying to bury her in the Roman Catholic parish cemetery in Con Dau village, which the communist government has ordered closed. It denies attacking the funeral procession but doesn't deny preventing Mary's family from burying her. According to one report, 59 people were arrested.

I first learned about the incident from the Aug. 20 Viet Nam News, an English-language daily published by the government. (A St. John's friend travels widely in Asia and always brings newspapers home.) It carries the headline "U.S. Congressman's claims of attacks in Viet Nam refuted" and for good measure pummels Rep. Smith with "totally fabricated," "sheer fabrications," and "smear." It adds:

Da Nang City's Religion Board said extremist elements had taken advantage of Tan's funeral to deliberately cause public disorder and attack police...

The article repeats a Vietnam foreign ministry statement at the time of the incident in May that it all had "nothing to do with religion." What's really happening, you see, is that local Roman Catholics refuse to acknowledge the state's superior insights about the best use of prime real estate. Why worry about those resting below when officials have big ideas for those remaining above? The Viet Nam News reveals:

Con Dau Cemetery is to be relocated as part of Da Nang's widely publicized new residential area development scheme. The city is currently providing compensation for the site clearance work to local residents and the cemetery is no longer available for use.

Obviously the mourners had just failed to keep up with news reports.

That's the way an efficiently-run government with a Religion Board handles these disagreements. It also helps to have a populace whose members are humble enough to admit their errors. The News refers to allegations that people were detained but never quite says they weren't. There do seem to have been some heart-to-hearts among officials and those involved, because the state organ also secretes this:

Some...people admitted repentantly later that they had incited the deceased woman's family to attack the police during her funeral....[A woman] was one of those lured to join the extremist group, but is now sorry for getting involved. She said: "I see I had been doing wrong."

My takeaway: Beware when someone says, "This isn't about freedom of religion."