Golden Throat, Harsh Tongue

This icon of St. John Chrysostom (c. 347-407), namesake of the church I serve, was painted and given to me by church historian Charles Frazee. As archbishop of Constantinople, John defied corrupt rulers and uplifted his people with magnificent preaching. He's also remembered for bloodcurdling denunciations of Jews. More ambiguity!

Cold War Over? Not Quite.

Christopher Hitchens is the second Obama critic of the day to criticize a Cabinet pick by invoking the name of Henry Kissinger.

Saddle River Calling

Bob Ellsworth, RN's ambassador to NATO and a former Republican congressman from Kansas, endorsed Sen. Obama. We learn this morning from the Wall Street Journal that former Ford and G.H.W. Bush NSC adviser Brent Scowcroft, though he didn't endorse a candidate this year, has been in regular touch with Obama and that a number of his acolytes are being eyed for administration posts. GOP Sen. Richard Lugar, known as RN's favorite mayor in the 1970s, was thought to be a contender for secretary of state and has pledged to help the Obama administration fashion a foreign policy based on the principles of realism and enlightened national interest long endorsed by The Nixon Center and its journal, "The National Interest."

And "The American Spectator," not pleased with Obama's likely Treasury pick, Timothy Geithner, notes his links with the "pragmatic" Dr. Kissinger.

It's beginning to look a lot like Nixon.

Schemes Of Rivals

Dick Morris (coming to the Nixon Library next week) and Eileen McGann are appalled by the idea of Sen. Clinton at State:

Hillary will be a loose cannon as Secretary of State, vindicating her own agenda rather than that of the president and burnishing her own image at every turn. Not since Cordell Hull in the 30s have we had a Secretary so interested in running for president. Not since William Jennings Bryan in the 1910s have we had a defeated nominee named as Secretary. Obama will not be able to control Hillary nor will he be able to control his own administration with Emanuel as Chief of Staff. He will find that his appointees will march to the beat of their own drummer - if he is lucky - and Hillary's if he is not.

In other words, Morris and McGann believe, Hillary Clinton would be the new Salmon Chase.

Perfect Songs: "Thunder Road" (1975)

Bruce Springsteen and Melissa Etheridge

Plus Middle-Of-The-Roadhouse Music

Kathleen Edwards

Moderate, equivocal Republicanism, unsatisfactory to progressives and Reagan conservatives alike. Via media theology, appalling to Rome and most evangelical Protestants. The third leg of the Episconixonian stool is American roots music, sometimes called alt.-country.

Think "No Depression" and "Paste" (God love 'em both). Think Ryan Adams and other caught-in-the-middle artists. I share a love of the stuff with a far more knowledgeable aficionado, The New Nixon's Frank Gannon.

My musical bit on TNN is a weekly "perfect song." Ear of the behearer, I realize. Ottawa's Kathleen Edwards, a classical violinist-turned-troubadour, first released "In State," about a woman who decides that she doesn't like bad boys after all, in 2005. If that opening progression doesn't get in your head, this isn't the music for you. But I'll bet it is!

Prop. 8, Gay Marriage, And God's Blessing

As an example of how I'll persistently fail to take a definitive stand on any issue, an item I posted at The New Nixon a couple of weeks ago. If you like, go to TNN and read the critique that a self-described papist posted in response:

On Saturday, over 20,000 demonstrated against California’s Prop. 8. Melissa Etheridge says she’s keeping her $500,000 a year in state taxes now that her second-class citizenship has been affirmed.

Protesters may be hoping to influence the courts that will rule on lawsuits claiming that Prop. 8, which amends the constitution to ban gay marriage, is invalid. President Nixon used to say that judges read the papers and feel the political heat just like ordinary people, so we shall see. (He also predicted we’d have gay marriage by 2000.)

Opponents of gay marriage, including the President-elect, often say that they support civil union and domestic partnership laws instead. This primer shows how these expedients aim for but don’t match the sturdiness of the marriage contract. One can understand the frustration of those who object to society making that contract not impossible for them to get — just considerably more complicated and expensive. What is the point of giving a couple 60%, or 75%, or whatever percentage of a thing but then withholding the last bit on the basis of some immutable principle, especially when we’ve already ceded the principle by establishing civil unions in some states, including California?

The explanation for a paradox is usually in the heart, wrapped in people’s ideals and fears as well their foundational experiences. The mom-dad paradigm, dominant since the beginning of time, is at the root of most people’s definition of family. Pin me to the wall, and I’ll say it’s best for a child to have a mom and dad. The irony is that my father was almost never around, and my mother had to go back to work when I was three weeks old. I might have done better with two attentive moms or two dads. As it was, I went searching for replacement dads, not extra moms (though some men do that when they choose their wives). I needed a father in my life — because of my conception of the godhead, because I was male, or for some other reason.

Everyone else has their own set of experiences, beliefs, and sometimes pathologies. On Nov. 4, it added up to 52% of Californians being against same-gender marriage. You can blame it on funding from the Mormons if you like, but my guess is that relatively few voters needed help making up their minds. These were votes that came from the gut.

As for mine, I tried to think about being deprived of the right to marry the person I loved because I’d been born gay. Besides, as ex-Nixon speechwriter William Safire wrote several years ago, the gays are bound to do better with marriage than the straights. We may yet get back to the ideal of the traditional family, but in the meantime — and it will be a long time — men and women who beget children, both mindfully and not, will need significant help from nontraditional families to raise them.

In the end, I voted against Prop. 8, especially for the sake of the gay and lesbian people I care about, including mentors and partners in Christian ministry. I did so without being eager for the ban to fail. “Marriage” is a culturally defined term, and the best way a free people has to define their terms is at the ballot box. If the Holy Spirit was moving across the surface of the deep on this issue, I didn’t want my vote to be the one standing in her way. But as I voted, my heart and head were still tugging at one another.

Now that the measure has passed, gay and lesbian people are heartbroken and angry. Comparing their cause to civil rights for African-Americans and Hispanics, they criticize blacks for voting in favor of Prop. 8. It’s a harsh political reality that people’s visceral feelings about homosexuality run deeper than culturally and economically conditioned biases against ethnic groups. Instead of blaming those who voted yes, marriage equity advocates might look for new political and social partners. Those who oppose abortion also feel marginalized and unheard, not only by the majority of voters but the MSM, which at least is giving the anti-Prop. 8 demonstrators a fair hearing. Gay people and the unborn and their advocates — the last second-class citizens — may have the makings of an effective coalition.

As for how marriage is ultimately defined by secular society, my guess is that gay and lesbian people will soon be granted that last 40% or 25% of a durable legal contract. At that point, the debate will shift back to where the really difficult work is being done — the church and other faith communities.

Reformation scholars will tell you that the early Protestants didn’t think the church had any business solemnizing legal contracts between men and women or anyone else. The deed was done on the church steps, after which the couple came inside for the main event — the church’s mediation of God’s blessing, which God had envisioned for the couple at the beginning of all things. The church understands that the two people were meant for each other in the mind of God. In the marriage rites contained in the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer, the emphasis is not on the marriage itself, which the priest or bishop does as an agent of the state, but on God’s preexisting blessing.

That’s why the divisive debate in the Episcopal Church is over whether same-sex unions should be blessed. That debate won’t be any easier for churches, dioceses, or provinces just because polities decide to give all people access to the same durable legal contract.

For unchurched Californians, overturning Prop. 8, should that happen, will be the end of the drama. For the faithful, more scenes have yet to be played out, and on their stage, legislation, demonstrations, and court cases aren’t as helpful. The church won’t be of one mind on the subject until the preponderance of those in the pews have the epiphany experience of looking across the aisle at Fred and Ed or Alice and Grace (or perhaps across the table at the family Thanksgiving feast) and saying to themselves, “You know, I’m not wild about this whole gay marriage thing, but those two were meant to be together.” For the faithful, meant-to-be is in the mind of God, the source of all blessing.

This Pretty Much Sums Up RN's Problem

Richard Nixon and Jackie Robinson were friends, though their relationship cooled in the 1960s when Robinson decided Republicans weren't serious about civil rights. RN was, throughout his career. And yet not long ago CBS's Bob Schieffer, describing the time Sammy Davis Jr. hugged President Nixon, got a cheap laugh by saying, "I don't think he had ever been touched by a black person before."

Respected journalist, cheap shot at Nixon. Par for the course. That's why Nixonians must blog on.

And the Episcopal bit? Isn't the U.S. arm of the worldwide Anglican Communion similarly maligned and misunderstood?

RN and TEC: A match made in...Well, here.

I'll mainly be blogging at The New Nixon for the time being, but I wanted to get a toe in the water in my own little backwater as well.

Tales Of Two Break-Ins

This post originally appeared on "The New Nixon" on February 22, 2008.

Though the Nixon Presidency foundered on two famous break-ins, President Nixon denied that he knew about either in advance. Scholars and journalists have been trying to prove him wrong ever since. As the Nixon Foundation first charged, in his 1997 book of Watergate tape transcripts Stanley Kutler edited the transcript of one conversation misleadingly, so that it suggested that the President had had foreknowledge of the 1971 break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Kutler seemed to make his intentions clear when he insisted to an Orange County Register reporter that he’d proven that Mr. Nixon knew about the break-in. According to Max Holland’s “Washington Decoded” website, scholar Joan Hoff seconded our criticism. Kutler fixed the problem in the paperback edition of his book Abuse of Power.

Six years later, hoping to demonstrate that Mr. Nixon had known about the June 1972 Watergate break-in in advance, public television documentary producers exploited the confusion of a troubled Watergate figure, Jeb Magruder. Contradicting his earlier testimony and statements, Magruder told the TV team that on March 30, 1972 he’d heard Mr. Nixon’s voice (coming over a phone reciever held by John Mitchell) approving the fateful break-in at the Democratic National Committee. Since Mr. Nixon was in the White House that day, such a conversation would have been caught on tape. It wasn’t. The White House Daily Diary would have disclosed that he spoke with Mitchell. It didn’t. Mitchell aide Fred LaRue was in the meeting with Magruder; he said the Nixon-Mitchell conversation never took place and that PBS never contacted him. PBS disclosed none of this evidence in its broadcast. In a July 2007 Associated Press article detailing Magruder’s personal setbacks, historian Kutler dismissed the charge. “There is just no evidence that Richard Nixon directly ordered the Watergate break-in,” Kutler said. “Did Magruder hear otherwise? I doubt it.”

Veteran journalist and historian Ron Rosenbaum isn’t so sure. Writing in “Slate” on Valentine’s Day about correlations he sees between Mr. Nixon and Sen. Clinton — an unlikely couple indeed — he again raised what he calls “Nixon’s last lie.” His “Slate” post contains a link to a 2005 New York Observer article in which he claims to have discovered the proof that RN had known about the June 17, 1972 break-in in advance. His argument hinges on an exchange between Mr. Nixon and his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, three days after the break-in. (Our criticism of Stanley Kutler notwithstanding, the exchange below comes from a transcript in his Abuse of Power, the only book available with a broad range of Watergate chatter, rushed out by Kutler and his team after his successful effort to force the National Archives to open the recordings.) Here’s what Rosenbaum identifies as the key exchange:

NIXON: My God, the committee isn’t worth bugging, in my opinion. That’s my public line.

HALDEMAN: Except for this financial thing. They thought they had something going on that.

NIXON: Yes, I suppose.

Rosenbaum argues that Haldeman means that “they,” the burglars, had been after financial intelligence on the activities of DNC chairman Larry O’Brien. Mr. Nixon’s off-handed acquiescence would show that he must’ve known why the burglars had gone in all along. But it’s hard to argue that Haldeman is talking about the burglars or O’Brien when we look at the whole conversation as well as Haldeman’s next comment, which Rosenbaum doesn’t address:

HALDEMAN: But I asked the question: If we were going to all that trouble, why in the world would we pick the Democratic National Committee to do it to? It’s the least fruitful source–

A few moments before, Haldeman had been talking about what “they,” meaning reporters, had been saying about burglar E. Howard Hunt and his check for $690 found in the possession of another burglar. So Mr. Nixon and Haldeman were actually talking about what “they,” the press, were saying about Hunt’s finances. When Mr. Nixon says his public line is going to be that the Watergate wasn’t worth bugging, Haldeman gently implies that the President’s line is bit too absolutist since “they,” the reporters, “thought they had something going on [this financial thing]” — that is, the seeming financial link between the burglars and Hunt, whose association with the White House had already been established. Bugging the Watergate was obviously worth Hunt’s money. Then Haldeman alludes to conversations he’s been having with others about the silliness of bugging the Watergate. Spinning gears? Certainly. Smoking gun? Seemingly not. And yet the Nixon tapes, with their undefined demonstrative articles, endless inside baseball, and sometimes indecipherable mumbling, can be a canvas on which a Nixon critic sees collusion, an advocate confusion. Telling the Watergate story on a strictly factual basis, as the federal Nixon Library has pledged to do, won’t be as easy as it sounds.

Rosenbaum’s “Slate” article principally concerns Sen. Clinton’s Watergate days, not Mr. Nixon’s. He revisits charges by Jerome Zeifman, Clinton’s boss on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, that she was carrying water for the Kennedy family by participating in efforts to keep Mr. Nixon in office until the end of his term in the hope that another Camelot President would move back into the White House as the man from Yorba Linda moved out. Rosenbaum suggests that the senator hasn’t talked much during the campaign about her true political initiation — helping prepare to impeach a President — for fear that Zeiftman’s charges will receive wider play. Returning to Mr. Nixon, Rosenbaum writes that the 37th President “never recovered from being — as it turned out — right about [Soviet spy] Alger Hiss…I believe this incident — in which he was pilloried when he knew he was right — probably helped endanger the paranoia that we have come to call ‘Nixonian’ and that ultimately led Nixon to believe he needed to pre-empt his enemies through the schemes that have come to be grouped under the term Watergate.”

Rosenbaum’s armchair lay diagnosis aside, Mr. Nixon offered a measured critique of his adversarial mind-set in his 1990 book, In the Arena:

In retrospect…I should have set a higher standard for the conduct of the people who participated in my campaign and administration. I should have established a moral tone that would have made such actions unthinkable. I did not. I played by the rules of politics as I found them. Not taking the higher road than my predecessors and my adversaries was my central mistake.

Mr. Nixon atoned for his errors. If Rosenbaum is right — that many journalists and politicians got Hiss wrong and therefore Nixon wrong, contributing to his lifelong assumptions about how to conduct politics — when will they be atoning?

Scorseses' Amazing Stones

This post was originally published at The New Nixon on April 8, 2008.

They say the Democrats take African-Americans for granted. They also get rock and roll. The high water mark of GOP musical hipness was Lee Atwater and Delbert McClinton at Bush 41’s January 1989 Inaugural — also attended, as I recall, by the Rolling Stones’ Ron Wood. But for Wood, Jagger, Richards, and Watts in their astonishingly good concert film “Shine A Light,” it’s all about the Clintons. Martin Scorsese filmed two shows in late 2006 at New York’s Beacon Theater. They were fundraisers for the Clinton foundation, so an immaculately coiffed Sen. Clinton got to bring her mom to meet the band, and 42 kicked off the show. Not fair!

Before they and he die, every great rock and roll band should get Scorsese to film them. No one who doesn’t love music could make such succulent movies about it, beginning with “The Last Waltz” in the late 1970s. “Shine A Light” tilts to my middle-period Stones, as opposed to the mid-1960s “Between the Buttons” and “Aftermath” favored by one of the friends my wife and I went with. Seven of the songs were from either 1972’s “Exile on Main Street” or 1978’s “Some Girls,” including the title song of the latter, Jagger’s personal romantic history, which he discerningly edited, thank goodness. Who wants to go to an NC-17 concert movie?

Many years ago I read in a review of “Exile” that “Tumbling Dice” proved why Keith Richards was indispensable. And so he is — so they all are. Helping keep them on center stage is their, and especially Mick Jagger’s, cheerful self-confidence. After torturing Scorsese for days over the set list, which he just wanted so he could set up his shots properly and make the aging rockers look good, Jagger has a minion present it to him a moment before they roar into “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” with relentless power. They sound like they’re 18, not 60.

The fans closest to the stage actually were 18. Most were singing the lyrics, so maybe they weren’t total ringers. Still, I’ll bet either Scorsese or Jagger decided to make sure the audience didn’t look like an AARP convention. The Stones had up-to-the-minute guests, too, including Christina Aguilera for a hot “Live With Me” and, on “Loving Cup,” the White Stripes’ Jack White, who was born exactly nine months after the Stones album “It’s Only Rock and Roll” was released (coincidence? Ask his parents). Singing with Jagger, Aguilera and White look awed. The Stones and bluesman Buddy Guy are a mutual admiration society on “Champagne & Reefer.” You want to talk about politically incorrect? Richards talks to the audience through billowing cigarette smoke. Is that still allowed? You want to try to tell him otherwise?

Interplay between Scorsese and an aide disclosed some concern about a back-lit Jagger also catching fire as he entered from the lobby for “Sympathy For The Devil,” in which Jagger, in one of his best lyrics, beats President Reagan to identifying the evil empire by nearly 20 years:

I stuck around St. Petersburg

When I saw it was a time for a change

Killed the czar and his ministers

Anastasia screamed in vain

Another great city’s agony was a subtext of “Shine A Light.” The second song in the movie, “Shattered,” about bankruptcy-era New York City, seemed an odd choice, as beautifully performed as it was. For a shot of Ron Wood, Scorsese boosts the guitarist’s audio track so you can hear every note as his fingers dance up the fretboard. Still, it’s not my favorite song. But I remembered it at the end, when the camera seems to swoop out the door of the Beacon Theater and pull dizzyingly back to a spot about 1000 feet above Governors Island, looking uptown at a city alive with light. You still want to cry, seeing those towers gone. Then your eye is drawn from the dark place on the screen to the full moon — which, just then, morphs into the Stones’ trademark red lips and tongue. Shine a light indeed. Keep rocking, guys. But would you play McCain’s big gig next January?