Bruce's New Single: "Life Itself"

Hat tip to "No Depression"

China Blossoms Among The Bushes

The LA Times says that President Bush is still boffo in Beijing:

Many Chinese credit the Bush administration's free-trade policies with helping the Chinese economy to blossom over the last eight years. They appreciate the administration's efforts to rein in the fiery anti-Beijing rhetoric of former Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian. And Bush's attendance of the opening ceremony of last summer's Olympics in Beijing at a time when many world leaders were urging a boycott over China's human rights record is viewed with deep gratitude.

A Monday In An Expectant Washington

They say five million people are coming to Washington to see Barack Obama inaugurated next Tuesday, but this week, it felt empty and expectant. On Monday morning, the bookstores and sidewalk vendors had plenty of Obama merchandise ready, but shoppers were few. The chairs were in place for the VIPs on the west side of the Capitol. To accommodate the rest of the audience, Porta Sans are arrayed along the Mall all the way back to the Lincoln Memorial.

My Nixon Foundation colleagues Kris Elftmann and Kathy O'Connor and I felt as if we had the town to ourselves as we walked from our hotel in Georgetown to the Capitol -- until we saw a smiling friend standing next to us at a stoplight on Pennsylvania Avenue. Even though Tim Mead, legendary communications VP for our home town Angels, was on the way to the White House for a meeting with the President, he graciously paused to let Kris experience the heft of a World Series ring.

Our destination was the lavish new Captiol Visitor Center, the $621 million installation you access from an underground entrance halfway to the Supreme Court in order to protect Sen. Harry Reid from smelly tourists. Again, we expected to be battling crowds, but it was pretty much we and the statue of Po'pay from New Mexico. Perhaps 20 others were along for a breathtaking new film about the Congress and a guided tour of the Capitol.

Naturally, I looked for Christian highlights among the artworks in our greatest secular temple. In John Gadsby Chapman's 1840 painting "The Baptism of Pocahontas," on display in the rotunda, that's her brother turned away in protest as one of my fellow Anglicans, the Rev. John Whiteaker, does the deed, evidently a prerequisite for her marriage to John Rolfe. (Our gracious young guide said the protester was her father, but the Architect of the Capitol sets him straight.)

Wandering around the Obama-fixated capital, I remembered Garrison Keillor's rueful "We're all Republicans now" from the early years of the Bush Administration. These days the rue is on the other foot. As I walked up 12th Street, I passed the headquarters of the Republican Committee of the District of Columbia, where the party's pervasive dysfunction was appropriately expressed by a word-processed sign announcing that the doorbell was out of order.

Republicans associated with The Nixon Center, the Nixon Foundation's nonpartisan foreign policy think tank, were feeling somewhat more au courant Monday evening at the Four Seasons in Georgetown. After all, we were honoring the exceedingly relevant Admiral Mike Mullen, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs will be President Obama's chief military adviser at least until late 2009. The smart money says he'll be reappointed for a second two-year term. Besides, The Center's foreign policy realism, halfway between isolationism and neoconservatism, corresponds neatly with the Obamian Zeitgeist. Recall that realist prophet Brent Scowcroft remained pointedly neutral during the fall campaign while staying in touch with Obama.

During the reception, I spotted the peripatetic Steve Clemons, whose influential "Washington Note" blog is also known for its humane, realistic perspective on international affairs. I asked him to pose with Singapore's ambassador to the U.S., scholar Chan Heng Chee, a loyal friend of The Center for many years. Steve graciously stooped to be photographed, since he's 6'5", and Ambassador Chan is not. Later Steve was seen giving my wife and colleague Kathy a foot rub at her table, which is a long story.

After paying tribute to President Nixon's foreign policy vision, Admiral Mullen called on the U.S. to make better use of its diplomatic and economic clout in addition to its military power. Good intelligence also plays a vital role in the war on terror, which meant that Orange County's Julia Argyros, wife of Nixon Center founding chairman George Argyros, was in a unique position to get up to date during her dinner conversation with Michael V. Hayden, director of Central Intelligence.

Meanwhile, Kathy (left) was getting caught up with Sharon Fawcett, deputy archivist of the U.S. in charge of all the Presidential libraries. We've been working with Sharon for many years on Nixon records matters in general and, most recently, the complex process of adding the Nixon Library to the Federal system, which culminated last year in the handover of the library and museum to the National Archives.

Sharon was having a little breather before returning to the gargantuan task of preparing President Bush's records for the long ride down to Texas and the soon-to-be-built Bush Library at SMU. She and her Archives colleagues face unprecedented technological challenges. She told us, for instance, that all the electronic records created by previous Presidents equal 2% of W.'s e-records. Among Sharon's most vital responsibilities: Making sure scholars can still read all those e-mails and attachments in 50 or 100 years without making hard copies of everything. Try getting an old file from a five and a quarter-inch floppy, for instance.

By the time all that's done, there'll be an Obama Library to plan -- in four or eight years, depending on whom you ask. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Godspeed on Tuesday, 44!

Best Ambassadors Are Civilians, Says Top Soldier

Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, believes the U.S.'s greatest persuasive power isn't its military. The 40-year Navy veteran was honored tonight by the Nixon Center at the Four Seasons in Washington. The AP covered:

Mullen said civilian agencies including the State Department deserve more money and support, because they can often do a better job of projecting American policy and ideas. It's tempting to turn first to the can-do military when problems arise, but Mullen said that the experience of the Vietnam War gives him "an acute understanding of the finite application of force abroad, as well as its impact at home."

Mullen did not mention more recent conflicts, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, although top military leaders have said both will be resolved mostly through political settlements.

"When called, our military has served the role of ambassador extremely well," Mullen told a Nixon Center audience.

"But our most effective ambassadors of peace in the future will not be those who wear uniforms, or bear arms. They will be our civilians."

Sanctified Harry

The magic in “Gran Torino” begins when you realize you’ve been tricked into thinking that retired auto worker Walt Kowalski (magnificently played by Clint Eastwood, who also directed) is an ignorant racist. Eventually the story discloses that he’s actually on a quest for decency and civility in a vulgar, narcissistic time. We start off amazed that his standards are so low. We end up thinking they may be higher than ours.

A Korean war vet, Kowalski talks crudely about his former enemies, the gooks and chinks. He also calls his barber a dego. The barber calls him a polack. They obviously adore each other nonetheless. Holding onto his house in a changing Detroit neighborhood after the death of his wife, Walt thinks the family next door are either gooks or chinks, one, until he learns from the charming, crackling Sue (Ahney Her), one of the neighbors, that they’re Hmong, an ethnic minority from Laos who fought on the U.S. side in Indochina.

The movie doesn’t milk this irony as much as it might have. Walt’s heart is softened not by the sweet chords of interracial harmony but his belief about the promise and vulnerability of Sue and her gang-threatened brother Thao (Bee Vang). The breakthrough begins when Thao walks across the street to help a woman who's dropped her groceries. Though she was a gook or chink, Walt had been about to do it. When Thao rises to the occasion, you see the gears begin to whir behind Dirty Harry’s .44 magnum blue eyes. A father figure is born, and a fatherless young man is saved.

Walt’s relations with his own materialistic sons and their families are cool at best, a la the old Harry Chapin song "Cat's In the Cradle." It's his greatest regret, we learn, thanks to the persistence of a young parish priest who's trying to keep his promise to Walt’s dying wife to get him to come to confession. At their mom’s funeral, one of his sons, offended because Walt has scowled at the ring in a granddaughter’s navel, whispers to his brother that their dad’s stuck in the 1950s. That moment comes early in the movie, when you think it’s supposed to be an insult. Another of “Gran Torino”’s magic tricks.

Grace finally abounds when Walt (whose garage workshop, with every tool in its place, was just like my godfather Louis’s) rescues Theo and Sue in what seems to him, and maybe even to us, to be the only way out. Memo to pastors: “Gran Torino,” like “Doubt,” is a great Bible study movie. It takes the church, faith, ambiguity, and the Cross seriously. Scores of grown men and women left the theater with watery eyes and quiet, composed faces -- and not just because jazz hound Eastwood, his voice so ravaged that it’s sometimes just a whisper, decided to sing the movie’s title song over the closing credits.

Baker's Half-Baked?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Historian Maarja Krusten writes:

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

Kindles On Kampus

A Kindle-driven reduction in the extortionate cost of textbooks would make a big difference in the lives of cash-strapped undergrads (and their equally strapped parents).

If Mark Felt Does It, That Means It's Not Illegal

The late W. Mark Felt's attorney and co-author, John D. O'Connor, rises to his defense:

In Mr. Felt’s prosecution, five attorneys general and President Richard M. Nixon testified that national security entries need no warrant, and the court eventually agreed.

The only quibble was whether presidential authorization could be implicit (per Mr. Felt and Mr. Nixon) or must be written.

Mr. Felt authorized these entries (or “black bag jobs”) because of concern about activities of members in the Palestine Liberation Organization in the United States after the terrorism at the Munich Olympic Games and about the Weather Underground, which had claimed responsibility for bombing several government buildings and whose predecessor group had in 1970 been preparing antipersonnel nail bombs to kill and maim innocent Fort Dix soldiers.

Mark Felt was a great hero, undeserving of such shabby treatment.

Put Not All Your China In Cabinets

Ben Stein, who wrote speeches for Presidents Nixon and Ford, reflects on the Cabinet meetings he attended early in 38's term:

The Ford cabinet experience was educational. The men and women in the room, high-ranking White House officials and secretaries of cabinet departments, were pleasant and well briefed. But they struck me as similar to small-town Rotary Club members or Junior Chamber of Commerce officials — polite and cordial, but far from rocket scientists. They were just high-average to B+ status, with the exception of some supersmart types like Henry Kissinger....

The Obama people could be wonderful, smart people, an order of magnitude above what I saw at the Ford cabinet meetings. Obviously, many people believe that they are.

But they are just human beings, albeit in some cases human beings with glowing résumés. I do not see the supermen and superwomen. They do not have the gift of foresight. They have never been in a situation like this, at least not exactly. There is simply no good reason to believe they will get it right except by trial and error, turning the tumblers until the safe eventually opens. The problems we face now are so large that they humble the average and the above average and even the very much above average.

High-level bureaucrats, like high-level professors or doctors or investment bankers or baseball pitchers, are just people, whether serving with Bush 43 or Barack Obama or anyone else. I can vividly recall leaving those long-ago cabinet meetings and saying to myself as I walked across West Executive Avenue, “Put not your trust in princes.” It’s a proverb for a good reason — then, now, and always.

Separate And Equal

After a reader accused her of a separate but equal attitude by opposing gay marriage, Laura Harrison McBride replied:

[S]ince marriage and civil union, except for the terminology, are exactly the same thing spiritually and legally speaking, I don't see how one can contend that “it's two different water fountains.” It is not; if it were, then the underlying assumptions concerning civil unions and marriage--the legalities and the spirituality per se--would need to be different in each case. And they are not.

In fact, what I am advocating is that the legality of a civil union be precisely the same as the legality of a marriage; only the terminology should be different to properly describe the unassailable facts. Those are that a marriage is between a man and a woman, and a civil union is between two consenting parties of the same gender.

The terminology, because English is a very precise language, is essential. If most people hear the term marriage, they think of a man and a woman. If they hear the term civil union, they think of two women or two men. Likewise, if they hear the phrase ménage a trois, they think of two members of one gender, and one of the other, engaged in some sort of consenting adult relationship. What would you have us say in that case? If the parties were committed to it, would you call it a marriage? Ludicrous. (If you doubt there are long-standing ménages a trois, see the movie The Duchess, which chronicles one such. Only two members of the ménage were willing parties, but the arrangement lasted for decades and was sanctioned even by the unconsenting member upon her death.)

A thoughtful argument. But in fact, civil unions and marriages don't yet provide exactly the same rights to partners. In most if not all states where civil unions are sanctioned, gay and lesbian people have to work harder and spend more money to get the same protections married people get automatically.