"Whatever Nixon Has"

As reported by the New York Times, newly released transcripts reveal the panicked discussions among Israeli leaders at the beginning of 1973's Yom Kippur war as well as the Nixon administration's role in turning the tide:

The transcripts of the meetings show [Moshe] Dayan, the unflappable eye-patch-wearing defense minister, at the edge of desperation. As Syrian tanks rolled toward the Galilee unimpeded, he understood that he had misread the signals.

“I underestimated the enemy’s strength, I overestimated our own forces,” he is quoted as saying in an early meeting with Prime Minister Golda Meir and others. “The Arabs are much better soldiers than they used to be.” Then: “Many people will be killed.”

Seeking a means of salvation, he urged recruiting older men and Jews from abroad.

Ms. Meir considered a clandestine trip to Washington to persuade President Nixon to help.

A colleague asked what she hoped to get.

“Let him give whatever he has,” she replied. “Does he have tanks in Europe? Let him give them. You want Phantoms? Let him give. Let him see this as his front and not let our guts spill until he gives us one missile.”

In the end, Ms. Meir did not go. But after appealing to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, she did get Mr. Nixon to send an airlift of matériel that made all the difference in Israel’s favor in the 20-day war. Although Israel won, it was the surprise attack and near victory that Egypt and Syria have focused on, and that led Egypt to make peace with Israel five years later in exchange for a return of the Sinai.

Print Media's Enduring Shoe Leather Monopoly

David Carr argues that the divide between print and digital journalism is vanishing. Maybe, but I'll really believe it when 100% non-print organizations set up expensive bureaus in Beijing, Moscow, and London and start covering (rather than opining about) the Supreme Court, Wall Street, and city hall (where Orange County, at least, has got a great thing going on-line, Voice Of OC).

Chrome Heart Shining In The Sun

For Richard Nixon in the deep forest of Watergate, there were several roads not taken. According to official Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally, the band was working hard on his problem at their headquarters in San Rafael, California:

[T]he Dead's best political statement came in a 1974 letter from Ron Rakow, then president of the Grateful Dead Record Company, to President Richard Nixon. Rakow offered the threatened officeholder an idea on how to continue his administration. "We pass our solution along to you with only the remotest expectation that you will carry it out. Since, while it is brilliant, it is not extremely logical. We have concluded that the problems referred to above would disappear, as if by magic, were you to chrome the entire White House."

Social (D-Santa Ana)

Mike Ness's politics. Cool.

The Shortest Distance To The Altar Isn't Always Through The Church

An "Economist" chart showing changing attitudes toward gay marriage based on religious affiliation. The largest shifts in favorable thinking between 2008-09 and this year were among mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics. Oddly, the Pew Research Center polled Christians, Jews, and atheists but not Muslims.

Still Bluish In California

In California, Republican Meg Whitman, running for governor, has glided to the center, while Carly Fiorina, running for the U.S. Senate, is knee-deep in tea. The LA Times:

"If Meg wins, that's not a big shock. She's kind of like Arnold [Schwarzenegger], and we've had mainly Republican governors" in recent decades, said Bruce Cain, a political science professor at UC Berkeley. "If Carly wins, that's a big deal.... We're going to have to stop and really think when we say California is a light blue state."

Speaking of which, polls show they're both running behind their Democratic opponents.

Real Zzzzzzzz

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg might not have really resented the cool kids at Harvard, but I'll bet the director and writer of "The Social Network," David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, have some snob issues. Real Z denies being obsessed with getting into one of Harvard's social clubs. But members of the Porcellian, especially twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer), come off as pious fops right out of P. G. Wodehouse. A key scene occurs after the duo narrowly loses to a Dutch team at the Henley Rowing Regatta. At a reception afterward, the athletes are wearing sport coats with white piping and look like they're about to sing "He Is An Englishman." I'd guess the filmmakers chose the location mainly so they could flash "Henley-on-Thames" on the screen.

The brothers claim Zuckerberg got the Facebook idea from them (they got a massive settlement in real life) but hesitate to sue at first because it's not what Harvard men do. The real Winklevosses rowed for the U.S. in 2008 in Beijing. Did they deserve their portrayal? Does real Zuckerberg deserve being portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg as an angry, misogynist oddball? Was Napster co-founder and Facebook consultant Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) really the devilish manipulator (in a San Francisco nightclub, his face is actually lit like a grinning jack-o'-lantern) who persuaded Zuckerberg to betray his best friend and founding CFO?

Sorkin, creator of "The West Wing" and writer of "Charlie Wilson's War," doesn't care. A good story, not accuracy, is the thing, he says. His dialog, including Eisenberg's byte-o-babble, is as dazzling as ever. Close your eyes when Zuckerberg's hectoring his girlfriend, and you can almost hear Mary Louse Parker telling Bradley Whitford, "Dating you is like dating a Stairmaster." The ending is poignant, but again, you don't know what it has to do with Zuckerberg and Facebook. What if your problem is that real Z, who after all is only 26, is nowhere near as interesting as 500 million members and $24 billion? Call Aaron Sorkin.

The Great Reconciler

What a blessing to contemplate the life of the great Nelson Mandela. "60 Minutes" did so tonight.

Richard Nixon, Christian Fundamentalist?

On NPR's "Fresh Air" on Sept. 30 and in a Christian Science Monitor interview last Friday, Mark Feldstein, author of Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture, incorrectly describes Nixon's religious life. For instance, he tells the Monitor:

[Anderson's mentor] Drew Pearson was a liberal, very ideological and, like Nixon, was a Quaker. But he was a pacifist compared to the fundamentalist, almost evangelical strain of Quakerism that Nixon was raised in. He was very much of what we'd call a born-again Christian today.

This book review by Chuck Fager includes accurate surveys of Nixon's faith journey and the struggle between fundamentalist and modernist Quakers in the early years of the 20th century. There's no question about the side of the divide on which Nixon ended up. His discipleship at Whittier College under one of the leading modernists, J. Herschel Coffin, swept away all Sunday School notions:

[A]s a result of Coffin's tutelage, ...college senior [Nixon] wrote, "My beliefs are shattered....My religious thinking has been revolutionized...." Vanished, he noted, was biblical literalism, even faith in the physical resurrection of Jesus. In their place was--what? Nixon's essays point toward a mid-thirties Protestant liberalism, focussed on "God as creator of all things," and the vaguely described "religion of Jesus" as a model for personal and social uplift, a model which included a commitment to a strengthened League of Nations.

Feldstein would have done well to study the intersection of politics with conservative Protestantism as carefully as Sam Tanenhaus has done. As Whittaker Chambers' biographer recently showed, Nixon's liberal Republicanism made him the target of the conservative Protestants who moved to take over the GOP in the 1970s.

On "Fresh Air," Feldstein made other questionable assertions, including by saying that while he was in the White House Nixon "pocketed" the $100,000 than industrialist Howard Hughes gave Nixon buddy Bebe Rebozo. I don't believe the money made it out of Rebozo's safe, but maybe Feldstein's learned something new. I've just Kindled the book. When I was running the Nixon library, Tricia Nixon Cox's lawyers falsely claimed that Rebozo had said he didn't trust me with his money, so the least I can do is try to keep the facts straight about what he did with Hughes's wad.

Aw, Their First Schism!

As 300 hundred atheists gather for a conference at the Biltmore in Los Angeles, there's already blood in the water, just like in the Church, which means that the movement is experiencing a vital moment of denominational maturity.

The largest tactical question the no-faith faith faces is how aggressively to challenge and confront believers. Books, articles, and conferences? Wearing sandwich boards on street corners? Throwing Gideon Bibles into the hotel pool? More cartoons of Mohammad (let's not and say we did)? The chairman of the Center for Inquiry, dedicated to fostering a secular society, has already been ousted in part because he was considered too mellow. Purges are good; they've definitely worked for us over the centuries, as has the public denunciation of apostates. When a second member of the accommodationist clique, author Chris Mooney, said that you didn't have to believe in God to be spiritual, biologist P.Z. Myers responded:

Whenever we start talking about spirituality, I just want to puke.

No worries. You guys are doing just fine!