Perfect Songs: "Do You Hear What I Hear" (1962)

Perry Como. The song was written by Noel Regney and his wife, Gloria Shayne Baker, during the Cuban missile crisis.

Richard's Dinner With Richard

Richard Holbrooke recounts the normalization of relations between the United States and China 30 years ago this week — and reveals how he asked for RN’s autograph.

The Shocking Challenge Of Jesus Christ

From the Archbishiop of Canterbury at Christmas:

Human beings, left to themselves, have imagined God in all sorts of shapes; but - although there were one or two instances, in Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt, of gods being pictured as boys - it took Christianity to introduce the world to the idea of God in the form of a baby: in the form of complete dependence and fragility, without power or control. If you stop to think about it, it is still shocking. And it is also deeply challenging.

Click here for the whole message.

How Does Nixon Make You Feel?

Daniel Frick faces up to the emotional need liberals of a certain age have to despise Richard Nixon:

After the Frost interviews, Richard Nixon went on to write nine bestselling books and serve as a private counselor to Ronald Reagan and other Republican politicians. Truth is, we're scared that he hasn't really gone away. We're more comfortable when we demonize him, keeping him in his place.

Give Them Bush And Circuses

Long a critic of the Bush Administration’s use of extreme interrogation techniques — some call them torture — Andrew Sullivan throws down the gauntlet in the great Bush v. Nixon divide. Assessing the Senate’s recent bipartisan report, he writes:

The report itself is not that long and I highly recommend reading it all closely. It is the most sobering indictment of high government officials in the U.S. since Watergate. And, in the gravity of crimes, it is a far more profound violation of the law and the constitution and the security of the United States than Watergate ever was. Bush’s crimes are far greater than Nixon’s - because war crimes are far graver than burglaries. And there is no statute of limitations for war crimes.

Those of a certain political bent would enjoy contemplating a vision of hell in which Bush and Nixon factotums vie eternally for second-worse. An even more thankless task: Keeping a light lit for them both in history’s window.

The Vietnam war, the central event of the Nixon administration, needs more study and scholarship. Emotions run too high among those who lived through those events. Beside herself that “Frost/Nixon” is too friendly to /Nixon, Elizabeth Drew still waxes sarcastic about the invasion of Cambodia.

As for the war on terrorism, as Sullivan notes, President Bush’s directive exempting interrogators from the restrictions in the Geneva Conventions was signed in early 2002. Back then I remember feeling the United States faced an existential threat. One can only imagine how it looked from the White House, and how it may look today. To say the President may have known more bloodcurdling things than we doesn’t excuse unlawfulness nor the descent into practices and policies that are intrinsically un-American. But we can learn what we need to know through the usual means: Journalism, history-writing, and congressional hearings.

And yet many seem to crave criminal proceedings. It’s possible that President Obama, should progressives complain that they aren’t getting what they expected on the policy front, will be tempted to try to distract them with the bread and circuses of indictments and trials. That handing over a predecessor for pillory would weaken the Presidency ought to go without saying. In any event, Obama may be less interested in such an approach now that he’s getting the same briefings as Bush.

Nixon Critic Calls Ron Howard "Dishonorable"

Elizabeth Drew, so appalled by Richard Nixon that she couldn't bring herself to give a speech about him in Yorba Linda (our federal colleagues arranged for her to appear at the LA public library instead), calls Ron Howard's "Frost/Nixon" "dishonorable." Drew says Nixon was not funny, not likeable, not redeemable, and not worthy of the prodigious talents of Frank Langella (we're beginning to detect a theme that could silence Oscar buzz). She is still waxing sarcastic about the invasion of Cambodia. Hey, Ron: Welcome to our world!

Read my New Nixon colleague Robert Nedelkoff's thoughts here.

The Awful Aughts And The Hungry Forties

It may be a lean Christmas for the 1.3 million who have lost their jobs in the last six months as well as for their families and all who depend on them in our interdependent time (including tax revenue-strapped states that can't cover everyone's unemployment checks).

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, which we're enjoying in our reading circle at St. John's, was the product of bad times in England -- the so-called Hungry Forties. Working-class and poor families were hammered by a ferocious downturn. Many elites concluded that such suffering was just the way of the world in a heartless new age.

As Scrooge himself notes early in the narrative, the Poor Law was in full vigor, but compared to the provisions we make today for those in need, it was weak gruel. In 1834, in the spirit of the times, Parliament had passed reforms designed to make assistance even harder for poor people to get. (That's Alastair Sim above in the 1951 film "Scrooge," which follows the text pretty faithfully.)

Scholar Michael Slater shows that in his simple story, Dickens accomplished two missions. He capitalized on a nostalgic re-embrace of pre-Victorian Christmas traditions which had lagged in the industrial age. He almost single-handedly reconceptionalized Christmas as a magnifying glass for people's better angels, whether they were faithful or not. Scrooge's nephew gives the key speech:

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it, can be apart from that -- as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

Our Awful Aughts don't quite compare to England's Hungry Forties. Scrooge complained that Bob Cratchit picked his pocket every Dec. 25, whereas Uncle Sam and a variety of entities pick most of ours every third day. Hundreds of billions are given to charity (though less this year, with most foundation and individual portfolios down by a third or more). At least in the U.S., few suffer as horrendously as 160 years ago.

But one thing hasn't changed since Scrooge's time. The cry is still heard, as in Victoria's day, that Christmas isn't what it used to be. Neither politically radical nor exceptionally pious, Dickens probably wouldn't bemoan the commercialism or even the occasional Christlessness. But the occasional heartlessness? The periodic selfishness? These things he would recognize as enduring human traits. This year, we really need a good Christmas.

A Question The Times Shouldn't Have Asked

The New York Times devotes considerable effort to asking Iraqis what they think about the President of the United States being attacked by an operative of an anti-Maliki TV network. So low has the President sunk in the media's (and indeed the American people's) estimation that it evidently doesn't occur to the Times that attacking Mr. Bush in a crowded room actually falls below the threshold of legitimate expression.

According to the Times, some Iraqis think the attack was just fine. A way to go, I guess, in establishing a mature polity in their country.

I wonder if the reporters and stringers collecting the quotations followed up with these questions: How would you feel if either President had been hurt or killed? If security agents had opened fire and hurt or killed others in the room? If the President's press secretary had been more severely injured than she was in the scuffle? And if any of them ever saw a "reporter" throw a shoe at Saddam Hussein?

A Child's Christmas In Whittier

Richard Nixon wasn't always a master diplomat. Thankfully, no one ever went to war over mincemeat pie.

RN himself would tell the story of the festive holiday dinner in Whittier, perhaps at Christmas, when as a little boy he proclaimed to his aunt Rose Olive, Hannah's youngest sister, that she made the best pie in the world. "You should never say that," Rose Olive said gently, "because your mother's is always the best pie in the world."

Diplomacy aside, Rose Olive's view probably had the additional advantage of being true. Visitors to the President's restored birthplace in Yorba Linda learn from our volunteer docents that Hannah Milhous Nixon was a master baker. As expenses mounted from the illness of RN's elder brother Harold, Hannah would get up at four in the morning to make all the pies and cakes for the family market, and they always sold out early.

At Christmastime, after services at Yorba Linda Friends Church she and her husband Frank would load up pies and sons and presents for the ride from Yorba Linda to the Whittier home of her parents, Franklin and Almira Milhous. (The Nixons moved to Whittier themselves in 1922.) Some of Hannah's siblings, and later their children, still lived at home. They got to open their stockings Christmas morning, but Mrs. Milhous insisted that gifts not be exchanged until family members arrived from Yorba Linda, Riverside, and Lindsay, a Quaker community in central California.

Richard looked forward to hearing voices from his Quaker heritage during these family reunions. Hannah and her sisters didn't use the plain speech in their own homes -- "Is thee going today?"; "Is this thine?" -- but their mother did. At Christmas, she and her daughters would slip back into the plain speech, which Richard loved.

Rose Olive, who raised her own family in her parents' house, liked to open gifts only after someone had played "Joy to the World" and everyone had sung along. Perhaps the pianist was RN's Aunt Jane Beeson, just in from Lindsay, or in later years her pupil Richard. At least two other aunts were pianists as well. RN remembered that "Joy to the World" was the first song he picked out by ear on the family's Crown piano, still on display in the birthplace.

Writing in the late 1970s, President Nixon recalled that his grandmother, wearing her best red velvet dress, would sit in the parlor near the Christmas tree, which was festooned with tinsel, garlands, paper chains, and glass figurines, while her grandchildren brought their modest presents to her. "She praised them all equally," RN wrote, "remarking that each was something she had particularly wanted."

Ham or turkey dinner was served in the dining room, with kids at a separate table. It was family style at first; as the family grew, the food was set out in a buffet. After some of that great pie, as neighborhood fires scented the chill evening air, the grandchildren were sometimes called upon to read verses of Scripture in turn. One wonders if anyone in that jovial and peace-worshiping Quaker family, even Richard himself, was ever asked to read Isaiah 2:4, God's great call to beat swords into plowshares and make war no more.

The Bible they probably used those evenings is also in the Nixon museum, a powerful link to successions of California Christmases and sturdy forebears. It was given to Richard's grandfather Franklin and his wife Emily in the 1870s, as they started their life together in Jennings County, Indiana. Emily died when her husband was 28. Eighteen years later, in 1897, he brought his second wife Almira, their nine children (including Hannah), most of the wood from their farmhouse, and the Bible to Whittier. Those Indiana planks are thought to buttress the Whittier house, which stands to this day. And when Richard Nixon was inaugurated in January 1969 during a time of war and violent dissent, Pat Nixon held Franklin and Emily's Bible, opened to Isaiah 2:4, as he took the oath of office.

Whatever passages Richard may have read in long-ago Whittier with his family gathered around, Almira Milhous must have sensed something fateful about him. On his 13th birthday she gave him a present he treasured all his life and that is still in the birthplace, over his parents' bed. It was a framed picture of Abraham Lincoln, whom she revered for his abolitionist views, with a passage from Longfellow:

Lives of great men oft remind us
We can make our lives sublime
And departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.

President Nixon's restored birthplace is open to visitors every day this season, and all seasons, except Christmas, New Year's, and Thanksgiving days.

First published on the Nixon Foundation web site in December 2000.

This Tosser Should've Gotten The Boot

The Iraqi journalist who attacked President Bush works for a Egypt-based network that supports Sunni insurgents (the word people use when for some reason they decide not to use "terrorists") working to destroy the Iraqi government, according to Juan Cole via Andrew Sullivan. What was he doing in the same room with the President? Why didn't agents remove Mr. Bush from the room immediately? How did they know it wasn't part of an organized effort to kill our President?

As for the bogus journalist, he's lucky he's not dead, and the Secret Service is lucky Mr. Bush wasn't hurt. It should do a better job next time -- checking out those who are going to be in the President's presence, and acting less tentatively in an emergency.