"Jackson Place," Ch. 1: Just Watch

Painting of 716 Jackson Place by Robin Rogers Cloud

People sometimes tried to sneak into the White House. Tonight, Emily was sneaking out.

As she opened the door of the northwest gate, the one closest to the West Wing, she smiled guiltily at Carl, the handsome uniformed Secret Service agent who always flirted with her. She only had trouble with high heels when she was nervous, and she had never been more nervous in her life. Stepping over the threshold of the little guardhouse, she tripped and almost fell flat on her face.

“Are you okay, Miss Weissman?” he said, jumping to his feet and peering over the reception desk. As she recovered her balance, he looked at her calves and ankles with an expression of deep concern.

Photo by Paul Matulic

“Eyes front, officer,” she said, smoothing her pleated skirt down the front of her thighs. Carl studied this maneuver as well. “I’m just going out for a second. Be right back.” She opened the door facing Pennsylvania Ave.

He called after her. “Strange night to go out,” he said.

“Strange night, period,” she said, waving so Carl could see she had her wallet and ID. The door clicked shut behind her. The sidewalk was crowded with protestors and tourists, who were all dappled with long summer sunset shadows. The mood was momentous and festive at the same time. She felt dozens of eyes glance at her for a minute. Nobody recognized the short redhead in the navy blue dress.

She smiled to herself. Maybe they wondered if she was the secret love child of the president and his notorious redheaded secretary, Rose Mary Woods.

Then she realized that in two and a half hours, they would know exactly who she was.

It was 7 p.m. on Thursday, August 8, 1974, the day the White House had reliably informed its press corps and the world that President Richard Nixon would announce his resignation.

She turned east, crossed 15th St., walked half a block south, and entered the Old Ebbitt Grill, inhaling air conditioning and the smells of cigar smoke and frying cheeseburgers. She walked quickly along the bar, hoping she didn’t run into anyone from the office. A flight of stairs at the back led down to the rest rooms and a small row of phone booths.

She entered one of the booths, closed the folding door, and took a deep breath. Then she dialed home, reversing the charges. Her father answered, which he only did when he was expecting a call or was worried about something. Otherwise it would ring until Elijah came back or her mother finally picked up. He told the operator he would pay for the call.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call for your anniversary on Tuesday,” she said.

“Your mother was a little disappointed,” he said in his kind voice. Emily could picture him in his plaid sweater and corduroy slacks as he sat at the kitchen table with the Detroit News. Her mother was probably still at the sink, washing the dinner dishes. “I told her you were busy, getting ready for tonight.”

She closed her eyes. Busy didn’t quite capture it. She had been conspiring fiendishly to shatter her colleagues’ lives and plunge the nation into chaos. She wondered if her parents would ever speak to her again. She said, “Did you guys have fun? I hope you took mom out.”

“Top of the Pontch, after work,” he said proudly. They couldn’t quite afford it, but Emily’s mother loved the view of the Detroit River from the restaurant in the Pontchartrain Hotel.

“Well done, dad,” she said. When he didn’t respond right away, she said, “I wish I could tell you more about what I’ve been up to.”

They had gotten used to Emily not being able to talk about work. “We trust you,” he said. “At least it will be over soon.” Sidney and Marian Weissman had despised Richard Nixon for their entire adult lives. They’d voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and George McGovern in 1972. In 1969, they’d even gone to a demonstration against the Vietnam war at Wayne State University, during the October Moratorium. She had been in college in Ann Arbor and had called her father and asked if the Revolution offered a senior citizen discount.

She’d always been more conservative than her parents. They had raised her with a heart for justice and those in need. She’d just drifted toward the political center. They’d finally come to terms with it. But they couldn’t hide their disappointment when she told them she was going to work in the Nixon White House at the beginning of the Watergate summer of 1974.

Emily heard Marian say something. Her father said, “Your mother asked about Irwin. When does he plan to take the bar? You still seeing him?”

Sitting in the darkness, twirling the phone cord with her free hand, she smiled. Sidney’s Irish Catholic bride had become a card-carrying Jewish mother, always wondering about her boyfriends and their professional prospects. Her last year of law school in Cambridge was a breeze. Irwin Fried had been a pleasant distraction. But he was too serious and not sexy, and he didn’t like the Rolling Stones or baseball. “Tell mom sorry,” she said.

“I didn’t like him, either,” he said. “So we’ll see you soon? I assume you’ll get some time off.”

Emily said, “Dad, I need you and mom to watch tonight.”

“Like we’d miss it? Your mother and I have been waiting to see Nixon get what he deserves ever since Alger Hiss.”

Emily and her father had been having this argument since she was in high school. Hiss was a New Deal-era diplomat whom a friend, Whittaker Chambers, had accused of being a Soviet spy. As a young congressman from California, Nixon had ridden the case to political superstardom. “Nixon was right,” she said. “Hiss was guilty. Besides, you were grateful for Vietnam. Remember we said a prayer for the president because of the draft, because Bennie didn’t have to go.” Benjamin was her little brother, now in his last year of college.

“He should’ve ended it four years ago,” he said.

She pressed. “He ended it.”

He relented. “Blessings on him for that. Blessings on you, too. You’ll come see us soon?”

“Please, dad. Just watch.”

Jackson Place, a novel, will be published on July 21 in print and e-book at Amazon.com.

Two Crises

Noting that the Romney campaign has not yet disseminated a "crisis narrative" as part of the process of humanizing its somewhat mysterious candidate, Sheryl Gay Stolberg obliges with an article describing his reaction to an auto accident in France in 1968, when he was serving as an LDS missionary, and Ann Romney's MS diagnosis 14 yeas ago. Age 21 at the time of the accident, in which a friend was killed, Romney was already cultivating cool:

“Mitt was deeply enmeshed in thinking about leadership,” said Douglas D. Anderson, a friend who is dean of the business school at Utah State University. “He developed a very early set of core beliefs and values that had to do with being cool under pressure, that had to do with looking for opportunities where others saw threats, that had to do with being analytical and somewhat detached in order to look at reality the way it is, rather than how it is being perceived by people who are driven by the hysteria of the moment.

“And out of that,” Dr. Anderson went on, “came a pattern of living that was reinforced by events like that critical accident in France.”

How Nixonian. Otherwise uninterested in introspection, 37 eagerly plumbed his crisis narrative and even wrote a book about it, Six Crises. He was acutely aware of his reactions to political and even mortal emergencies, bragging that he stayed calm and rational when others panicked. He applied the same discipline to a president's loneliest work -- making life-and-death decisions when his smartest advisers wildly disagreed with one another. Long before George W. Bush called himself "the decider," Nixon talked about "the April 30 decision" and "the May 8 decision," when he announced that he was sending troops into Cambodia in 1970 and B-52s to attack Hanoi and Haiphong in 1972.

Once he'd given himself enough time to decide, undecide, and redecide, as his aide and friend Ray Price called it, he rarely second-guessed himself. Soon after I'd joined Nixon's former president's staff, one morning in 1981 he wandered down the hall from his office in 26 Federal Plaza in New York, without a word handed me a copy of his memoirs with one of his business cards marking the May 8 section, and disappeared again. Media reports suggest that while making decisions about how to battle al-Qaeda and whether to send a team to find and kill Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama has brought the same steely qualities to bear.

Nixon didn't always keep his passions under control. He often felt far more deeply than he let on, and he came to regret some of the decisions he made when he was feeling angry or resentful. It would have been better if he'd occasionally delved deeper, according to the theory that the feelings we fully own are less apt to control us. But in addition to his severe introversion and shyness, Nixon had that World War II-Great Depression generation reticence going on.

Stolberg describes Romney as rarely bringing up personal matters and as having a charitable if not an empathetic temperament. "Mitt Romney will never disgrace the office," Anderson told her. "He will set an example of moral rectitude. But don't expect him to sit down and feel your pain." People do want a president who cares, especially in a country where everyone isn't white, male, straight, and rich. But a leader's inner process, including the ability to be unemotional and occasionally ruthless, is even more important.

Nixon's Still The One?

Richard Nixon's friend R. Emmett Tyrrell, founder of the American Spectator, was in the middle of Robert Caro's latest volume on Lyndon Johnson when he came across Woodstein's latest on Nixon and Watergate. Tyrrell writes:

[H]ow would Woodward, or for that matter Caro, compare Nixon and Johnson? Nixon labored to end the war that John Kennedy created and Lyndon Johnson bungled at massive expense in lives and treasure. Nixon was on track to save South Vietnam before he was driven from office. Nixon did save the state of Israel even as he was fighting off impeachment. He and Kissinger played the Soviet Union and China like a Stradivarius, ending the performance with China as a virtual ally. All and all, it was not a bad record.

Then there is Johnson. Among Caro's many infelicities, lazy research is not one of them. He faithfully records how President Johnson turned the purchase of a $17,500 radio station into a vast media fortune through the manipulation of such federal agencies as the FCC. By middle age, he, a lifelong government employee, was a millionaire. He stole his first election -- in high school! -- his Senate seat in 1948, and the state of Texas for his running mate in 1960. That last race was against Nixon, who would not contest the contest. Then there is his psychological makeup. He was insecure, unstable, often a wreck. As vice president, he was an emotional ruin from run-ins with the Kennedys until that sad day in Dallas, when in a car ahead of him, John Kennedy was shot.

Almost eerily within minutes of the president's death, Johnson underwent a kind of emotional epiphany, rising to his former bluff, albeit phony, self. Very rudely, within a half hour of Bob Kennedy's discovery of his brother's death, President Johnson called to conduct business. The insensitivity is shocking.

Yet ever since Nixon was driven from office, we have been led to believe Nixon was squirrely and a threat to our democratic ways, and Johnson was...well, what was Johnson? We are on the road to national bankruptcy because of his poorly funded policies today. I say, wherever he is, bring back Nixon. Nixon's the one.

Alone Again, Unnaturally

In mid-May, Kathy and I were in New York to see her daughter, Meaghan, and over 400 classmates receive masters degrees in social work from Columbia University. Those we met were bright, idealistic, and deeply committed to helping suffering and marginalized people. To pay for their studies, many took on a six-figure debt, all to prepare for a vocation that isn’t especially remunerative.

But at the graduation ceremony (at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side, graduates trod where Stones had rolled) and a party afterward, nobody was fretting about the future. Their devotion to mission, and the gracious community they’d built in their two years together, made me think of a class of seminarians. Commencement was a secular event, so no one said a public prayer. I imagine I joined thousands in the audience in quietly thanking God for the class of 2012 and the support they’d received from family members and friends.

Meg feels a calling to serve older people, which is a growth industry for social workers. We all know about the coming baby-boomer retirement bubble. By 2017, in the global population people over 65 will outnumber those under five for the first time in history.

This explosion of longevity is stalked by what some health experts call an epidemic of loneliness. Stephen Marche surveys the research in a recent Atlantic article. A 2010 AARP study found that over a third of Americans over 45 are chronically lonely, compared to a fifth of the same cohort ten years before. Another study reveals that about 60 million in the U.S. say they’re unhappy because of loneliness.

Marche’s article, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”, is one of many these days plotting the correlation between social media and social isolation. Marche doesn’t buy it, and I don’t, either. Our temperaments aren’t formed by our online interactions anymore than they are by cocktail parties and family reunions. We come fully formed to all settings of intense personal interaction, whether on-line or en masse, when we quickly display (and, if we’re lucky, learn) how we are with others – reticent or revved up, other- or self-directed, good listeners or relentless talkers.

But if Facebook isn’t making us lonely, what is? Why do naturally social organisms become unsociable? As a baby-boomer, I have a post-Vietnam, post–Watergate answer that has to do people’s skepticism about the focal points of authority that used to bind us together, especially governments, political parties, and religious organizations. Add a dose of western individualism, whose worst expression is selfishness, and you’re tending toward a society of mutually suspicious, self-sustaining loners who are (Marche also reveals) just as likely to share their troubles with a therapist – or social worker – as with a friend.

If you think my closing pitch will be that more active participation at St. John’s and in all our wonderful ministries is a sure-fire cure for loneliness, you’re only half right. Marche had a statistic for that, too: “Active believers who [see] God as abstract and helpful rather than a wrathful, immediate presence [are] less lonely.” Are we coming to church to have our worst suspicions, whether about ourselves or others, confirmed by a God of judgment? Or do we come with eyes, ears, minds, and hearts open to the unpredictable movement of the Holy Spirit, which promises to bind us closer to God and one another?

Sometimes when we log onto Facebook, we want to convince the world that our lives are in better shape that they really are. We’re also tempted to put on our game faces before we come face to face with God – which is ironic, since God “friended” us and “liked” us at the beginning of all things, has read all our data, and will never relinquish the copyright.

This post originally appeared in the St. John's Church newsletter, the Vaya Con Dios.

No Buildings Burned At Occupy Wall Street

Some survivors of the Kent State shootings in May 1970 believe there's evidence that the Ohio National Guard was ordered to fire on the unarmed antiwar demonstrators. Four people were killed and nine injured. Richard Nixon called it the worst day of his presidency.

Providing historical context in the Los Angeles Times, David Zucchino sounds an odd note:

For many Baby Boomers now in their late 50s and 60s, the so-called Kent State Massacre was a searing and, for some, life-altering event. It came at the height of the antiwar movement and set off a renewed spasm of opposition not only to the Vietnam War but also to the Nixon administration, the Pentagon and other symbols of authority.

The shootings hold far less resonance for today’s college-age Americans. For them, the 42-year-old event might best be described as a particularly demonstrative Occupy rally featuring extreme violence.

No, it mightn't. The shootings were an inexcusable tragedy. But "particularly demonstrative" doesn't accurately describe the protests. Here's Wikipedia's account of events at Kent State two days before:

The decision to call in the National Guard was made at 5:00 p.m., but the guard did not arrive into town that evening until around 10 p.m. A large demonstration was already under way on the campus, and the campus Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) building was burning. The arsonists were never apprehended and no one was injured in the fire. More than a thousand protesters surrounded the building and cheered its burning. Several Kent firemen and police officers were struck by rocks and other objects while attempting to extinguish the blaze. Several fire engine companies had to be called in because protesters carried the fire hose into the Commons and slashed it. The National Guard made numerous arrests and used tear gas; at least one student was slightly wounded with a bayonet.

Hoover Reconsidered And Redressed

On Feb. 14's "Fresh Air," Terry Gross interviewed Tim Weiner, author of the newly published Enemies: A History of the FBI. Weiner's extensive research and measured analysis make it impossible to dismiss J. Edgar Hoover, despite his bigotry and systematic abuses of power, as the monstrous cartoon figure to which we're becoming increasingly accustomed. Weiner describes him instead as the quintessential Cold War national security zealot. Some excerpts from the fascinating conversation (all quotations are Weiner's words):

The roots of the national security state:

Hoover had a terrible premonition after World War II, that the United States was going to be attacked, that New York or Washington was going to be attacked by suicidal, kamikaze airplanes, by dirty bombs of cobalt-60 or another radioactive material. And he never lost this fear. It stayed with him for 25 years, 'til his death. It was a premonition, if you will, of the 9/11 attacks. He never forgot Pearl Harbor....Hoover is the inventor of the modern American national security state. Every fingerprint file, every DNA record, every iris recorded through biometrics, every government dossier on every citizen and every alien in this country owes its life to him. And we live in his shadow, though he's been gone for 40 years....

Hoover did not want any limits on him. He wanted no charter. He wanted no rules imposed by outsiders. He wanted the FBI to, as the secretary of state had said under Roosevelt, investigate the so-and-so's. And he believed that the Soviet Union was trying to steal America's atomic secrets, to burrow into the State Department, the Pentagon, the FBI and the White House, and he was right.

The source of Hoover's suspicions about Martin Luther King:

Hoover saw the civil rights movement from the 1950s onward and the anti-war movement from the '60s onward, as presenting the greatest threats to the stability of the American government since the Civil War. These people were enemies of the state, and in particular, Martin Luther King was an enemy of the state. And Hoover aimed to watch over them. And if they twitched in the wrong direction, the hammer would come down.... The fact -- and it is a fact, although it's an uncomfortable fact -- that Martin Luther King's most prominent white adviser, ghostwriter of books, writer of speeches, legal counselor, confidante, was a man named Stanley Levison, who had been, at least up until the time he joined ranks with Martin Luther King in 1957, a secret member of the communist underground in the United States.

Hoover and homosexuality:

[Hoover] conflated -- and he was not alone -- communism with homosexuality. Both communists and homosexuals had secret, coded language that they spoke to each other in. They had clandestine lives. They met in clandestine places. They had secrets. And in, you know, certain cases, such as the British spy ring that penetrated the Pentagon and the CIA in the '40s and early '50s, they were both communists and homosexuals. Hoover didn't see a dime's worth of difference there. They were one and the same. This was hammered into him when the FBI dealt with one of the most famous informants in the history of American government, Whittaker Chambers (right), who helped bring down secret Soviet espionage rings in this country. He was a well-known writer at Time magazine - writer and editor. Chambers was a secret homosexual and a secret communist. Hoover saw a nexus there, and he never let that thought go....

Now, of course, the $64,000 question was: Did Hoover do this because he was a repressed homosexual closet case, and he was using his rage to destroy homosexuals?...This is a myth. It's been around since 1937, since Hoover went after homosexuals and government. It was - gasoline was poured on the embers of this by Bill Donovan, Hoover's mortal enemy in government. It's been around forever. Now, what do we know that this? Hoover never married. He never had an adult relationship with a woman, other than his mother, whom he lived with until he was 43, the day she died. Hoover was also inseparable from his number two man at the FBI, Clyde Tolson. Now, the evidence -- if you can call it that -- that Hoover was a secret homosexual rests almost entirely with an account by a British journalist who's only witness is a convicted perjurer. The evidence on the other side is strong. Hoover never loved anyone, except his dogs. He was married to the FBI. And the idea that he was a secret homosexual who, you know, wore tutus for fun is a myth. Unfortunately, that's the only thing anybody seems to know about him today....

If you look at the man and you listen to people who knew him and worked with him, it's almost inconceivable for this man to have had a secret life. His entire life was devoted to the uncovering and collection of secrets on other people, including their sex lives. Could he have carried off a double life like that? When you read his work, when you listen to his tapes, when you investigate the great investigator, there's no there there.

Hoover and the roots of Watergate:

The Pentagon Papers, as your listeners of a certain age will remember, was the secret history of the Vietnam War that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned in the Johnson years. It ran to 17 volumes, and it essentially said that, you know, we kept pushing on into the big muddy, even though we weren't going to win the war. It was a political war, not a military battle. These papers walk out of the Pentagon, out of probably the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. Nixon knows within days that it's a former Pentagon officer named Daniel Ellsberg who's done it, and by God, he wants Ellsberg destroyed and tried, and he wants the evidence. You know, he wants to break into the Brookings Institution, firebomb it, send a fake, you know, fire team in there and blow the safe, as he said.

Hoover doesn't want to do this for a lot of reasons, one of which they're going to get caught. Second is that Ellsberg's father-in-law is a friend of his who gives a lot of toys to the FBI,... Louis Marx. And Hoover won't do it. Nixon goes ballistic, and that's when the Plumbers are created to do the work that J. Edgar Hoover wouldn't do.

And two generations after Hoover's death, George W. Bush with "chalk on his spikes":

There is an incredibly dramatic moment in 2004 where the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller...confronts the president of the United States in the Oval Office over the White House's secret eavesdropping program that has transgressed its boundaries and overstepped the law and the Constitution. Through its data mining tactics, through its eavesdropping technologies, they've gone beyond what even the secret court that oversees eavesdropping will authorize....And Mueller tells the president, in the Oval Office, face to face, with a handwritten letter of resignation in his breast pocket that either the program is curtailed and brought within the law or he, the head of the FBI, will resign, as will the entire command structure of the Justice Department, from the attorney general down.

And President Bush says, according to his memoirs: What are you talking about? What program? What problems? What legal issues? And Mueller looks at him with a very steely gaze and says: I think you know what we're talking about, Mr. President. And at that point, it's a crime to lie to the FBI. It's punishable by five years in prison. And that's where we were.

[T]he president had chalks on his spikes at that moment. He was at the line, and about to cross it. And he says, Bush says in his memoir: Visions of the Saturday night massacre during Watergate dance in his head when, you know, two attorneys general and the command structure of the FBI resigned rather than cover up for the president. Mueller wins. Bush eventually backs down, and that is a triumph of the rule of law.

Richard And Bebe: The Inside Story

A salacious new book is ringing in a happy new year for Nixon haters. Ranking the imputations by former UPI reporter Donald Fulsom beginning with the worst, the 37th president is alleged to have beaten his wife, had Mafia ties, and roughhoused in the pool and maybe engaged in adulterous sex with his best friend, Bebe Rebozo. All this comes from a Daily Mail article that's setting the blogs ablaze. "Huffington Post" covers it here.

Fulsom's book, Nixon's Darkest Secrets: The Inside Story of America's Most Troubled President, comes out at the end of January. You can get a flavor using Amazon's preview feature. He begins his narrative with one of Nixon's weakest moments, his rage at Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers during wartime and his unconsummated order to aides to stage a break-in at a think tank affiliated with the former Defense Department analyst. Break-ins are wrong. But imagine what FDR would've said if someone had told him during World War II that a disaffected former War Department aide had a safe full of pilfered cables he was planning to give to the Japanese.

In his early pages, Fulsom also provides an overheated account of Nixon sending a message to South Vietnam before the 1968 election to the effect that it could get a better deal with North Vietnam under a Nixon administration. As stinky as that sounds, in politics there's usually something just as noxious bubbling in the other kitchen. If there's anything more outrageous than a presidential candidate playing politics with war, it's when a commander-in-chief does it. The weekend before the election, President Johnson ordered a bombing halt and intimated that a peace agreement was at hand, giving Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's vice president, a desperately needed if unavailing boost. In this 1991 letter to the New York Times, Johnson administration official William P. Bundy takes a similar tack, though in more moderate language, focusing on Nixon's perfidy but doing nothing to allay suspicions that Johnson was trying to help Humphrey. This William Safire column, to which Bundy was replying, argues persuasively that Johnson was colluding with Moscow to try to defeat Nixon.

Fulsom says Nixon "erroneously" thought that Johnson's move was political and leaves the momentous question at that. By ignoring the ambiguities surrounding October-November 1968, Fulsom signals that his is a get-Nixon project not unlike Anthony Summers' 2000 book The Arrogance of Power. Indeed Fulsom, according to an Amazon search of his text, cites or mentions Summers nearly 50 times, which is a lot for an author the Washington Post accused of "slipshod use of evidence." For instance, Summers preposterously accused Nixon of self-medicating with an anti-inflammatory medication, Dilantin, which was obsessively promoted as a cure-all by a political friend.

Far more outrageously, Summers said Nixon beat his beloved wife of 53 years. Is Summers the principal source for Fulsom's wife-beating charges? Here's what the Daily Mail says about the new book:

[Fulsom] claims Nixon's relationship with Pat...was little more than a sham. A heavy drinker whom his own staff dubbed 'Our Drunk', Nixon used to call his First Lady a 'f***ing bitch' and beat her before, during and after his presidency, says Fulsom.

No one close to Nixon has ever said or intimated that they saw or heard anything remotely like this. Summers' principal source was a former uniformed Secret Service agent who would rarely if ever have been in the White House family quarters. I learned about him after one of Nixon's former pilots overheard the man bragging in a bar about his coming star turn with a British TV crew that was promoting the Summers book. The man's allegations were probably known to Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, who had a family connection with the source, and Pulitzer Prize winner (and thoroughgoing Nixon critic) Seymour Hersh. Neither reporter published the charge. Hersh mentioned it at a Harvard seminar in 1998, claiming he had seen hospital records that proved Mr. Nixon had harmed Mrs. Nixon. Hersh didn't adequately explain why he'd chosen not to publish what he says he knew. His somewhat weaselly move seems to have helped Summers find the source and get his story into print at long last. Lacking Woodward and Hersh's reticence about the source's bona fides, Summers made alleged Nixonian battering a centerpiece of Arrogance of Power.

There's a reason "When did you stop beating your wife?" is often presented as the definitive no-win scenario. You've lost the argument the moment it's asked. Now we have two books published 11 years apart, with attendant media coverage, alleging monstrous behavior by a U.S. president with no real evidence. Like most that last over a half-century, the Nixon' marriage was sometimes complicated. It probably wasn't easy to be married to politics' greatest introvert. But theirs was a richly nuanced partnership based on love and profound mutual respect. Hundreds of family members, associates, and aides would agree, as would anyone who saw Nixon break down, for the first time ever in public, at Mrs. Nixon's June 1993 funeral in Yorba Linda.

Who disputes that portrait of the Nixons' relationship? So far as we know, no one except bottom-feeding sources used for ammunition by character assassins. We'll have to wait until January to see if Fulsom has found evidence of his own or just recyles Summers' tales. My guess is that if the hospital records Hersh mentions existed, we'd have seen them by now. As I recall, at least one of the incidents is said to have occurred after Nixon's 1974 resignation. The San Clemente hospital is in the phone book. Calling all real reporters!

Summers also labored hard though unsuccessfully to prove that organized crime was behind Nixon's early political success. I don't know what to think about Fulsom's allegations that Rebozo was connected. Getting more attention today is Fulsom's claim that Nixon and Rebozo were connected. Not true -- take it from me, his former chief of staff, executor, and library director, and from Kathy O'Connor, his last chief of staff. We were around him for tens of thousands of hours, and the gaydar registered zero. The needle never flickered. Nixon was heterosexual. He loved smart, attractive women, flirted with them keenly if ineptly, and had no sexual energy whatsoever with men.

Being gay, of course, isn't a scandal. What gives Fulsom's allegations their heft is the automatically accompanying allegation that Nixon, being a Republican, was homophobic. The news is the hypocrisy rather than the homosexuality. But even here, the case is thin. In the 1960s, the Daily Mail reports, he said a prominent gay man was "ill." Appalling as that sounds today, it was the same position taken until 1973 by the American Psychiatric Assn. Nixon's views on homosexuality were relatively mainstream. In the spring of 2009, when a White House tape featuring Nixon and two of his equally square advisers was making the rounds, I wrote:

The three men exhibited assumptions and anxieties about homosexuality -- I understand why they get up to that, but it shouldn't be glorified -- that were typical of their generation. The President, for instance, had been born in 1913. I'm surprised how few commentators and bloggers have pointed out that the chat occurred 38 years ago, just as gay liberation was picking up steam. George Carlin and Monty Python were still getting laughs with routines based on the same cultural stereotypes being indulged in the White House. By the same token, on another occasion President Nixon predicted that we'd have gay marriage by 2000, making him more progressive than the majority of California voters in 2008.

Secretly gay legislators who vote against gay rights and and closeted evangelicals who preach against them are fair game for the hypocrisy argument. Nixon isn't, because he wasn't gay, wasn't, therefore, a hypocrite, and in any event wasn't especially bigoted compared to men of his era.

That leaves Rebozo. When Kathy and I knew him in the 1980s and 1990s, Nixon told endless gags about his premarital conquests. We visited him at his home in Key Biscayne, where he shared a bedroom with his gracious wife, Jane. She cared for him devotedly after he suffered a stroke in the mid-1990s. Beyond that, his sex life was no one's business but his own. Innuendo and gossip from Summers, Fulsom, and the Daily Mail aside, the Nixons had a loving marriage, and Nixon and Rebozo had a strong, affectionate friendship that lasted 40 years. Maybe someone's suggesting that if two men care for each other, they must be gay. Who's homophobic then?

The Twin Pillars Of The New Nixon

This post was originally published at The New Nixon on Dec. 25, 2008:

In the ongoing Bush vs. Nixon debate, Veteran political reporter Jules Witcover draws a distinction:

[T]hrough it all, Nixon’s image has managed to survive the kind of assault on his intellect to which Bush has had to suffer. Nixon continues to be widely regarded as having had a shrewd political mind, sustained perhaps by the books he wrote on foreign policy in his post-resignation years.

I’ve long believed that the two pillars of the restoration of Richard Nixon’s reputation in history are the recognition of his seriousness of purpose when it came to the pivotal issue of East-West relations and his effectiveness as a wartime commander-in-chief. More than a keen political mind, Mr. Nixon had a reconciling vision that contributed to a reduction in tensions between Moscow and the U.S. as well as the end of the Cold War. As for Vietnam, he and Gen. Creighton Abrams managed to turn a sure loser into a possible winner, and do so against titanic political odds.

By all accounts, “Frost/Nixon” takes Nixon seriously as an intellectual. One down. A few good books on Vietnam will help with the second pillar.

To Be President: Obama And The War

This post was originally published at The New Nixon on July 5, 2008:

Joe Conason may be right that Sen. McCain learned the wrong lessons from the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. In his speeches and comments, he’s talked about Johnson-era limits placed on commanders’ use of air power against communist North Vietnam. His analysis echoes anguished laments heard in the mid-1960s from Americans who were frustrated that the mighty military conglomeration that had obliterated Hitler was bogged down with Ho Chi Minh in southeast Asia. As quoted by Conason, here’s what he said to the Council on Foreign Relations:

We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal.

But what about the long months of the Vietnam war when it no longer fell to brave Americans to fight at all? Rarely does McCain or anyone else talk about the period beginning in 1973, when South Vietnamese had taken over the war, relying on U.S. promises of continued non-personnel aid and air strikes when the communists violated the Paris Peace Accords.

Creating this completely new, Vietnamized theater was the work of Gen. Creighton Abrams, performed under political cover provided by Commander-in-Chief Nixon. South Vietnamese forces fought well all those months, notwithstanding their being a “joke” (according to Rick Perlstein) commanded by a “corrupt dictatorship” (Joe Conason). Mired in Watergate, we matched their mettle with mush. Neither Presidents Nixon or Ford felt they had the political capital to bomb as North Vietnam tested them with violations of the accords, and Congress slashed the aid budget. In the spring of 1975, Hanoi, which had trouble believing its good fortune, mounted a massive conventional invasion, greatly aided by their friends in Moscow, and squashed an ally we’d permitted to run out of bullets.

Historians, journalists, and bloggers rightly argue about how long Saigon could have held out with or without adequate levels of U.S. aid. But if she lasted 15 months after U.S. forces left, why not 20? 30? 100? In any event, since most Americans want out of Iraq, since Iraqification is almost everyone’s preference, the latter phase of the Vietnam war — the Nixon phase — is the one McCain and the Republicans might want to investigate as they ponder the politics and tactical realities of the situation they hope to inherit next January. Yet President Nixon has even disappeared from the McCain campaign’s version of his homecoming as a POW.

Instead, it’s Sen. Obama who’s displaying Nixonian subtlety in the calibration of his war policy. Like RN with Vietnam in the 1966 and 1968 elections, Obama has enjoyed the benefit of being able to say that the war was started by the other guys. After riding antiwar sentiment to victory in the primaries, he is beginning to give himself some wiggle room. Like Nixon, he would inherit a war that he wouldn’t have started. He would be wise to study how Nixon ended it.

Granted, Obama’s lurch to the center on Iraq and a variety of other issues has been ham-handed. The New York Times denounced his opportunism in an almost-blistering editorial, which no one will remember in November (unless Obama chooses to reproduce it in his swing-state advertising for the sake of right-leaning independents). But at least on Iraq, Obama’s is precisely the move his critics warned he’d make and pragmatic friends such as Andrew Sullivan insisted that he’d have to make.

If he seems changeable, perhaps that resonates with Americans who were opposed to the war in 2003 or ambivalent but now understand that a too-hasty withdrawal, no matter how much his Bush-hating base may wish it, would be bad for America’s position in the region, for the Iraqi people, and for those who volunteered to fight, bleed, and die. On Iraq, Obama’s doing what he must to do be elected President. It’s also what he should do if he’s going to be President.