These Two Stories Are Not In Concorde

Trying to find something to illustrate my post below about Maarja's Washington Home story, I ran across this photo of President Nixon with the Concorde. According to alternatehistory.com, it shows Nixon arriving in England in August 1970 after a brief hop from Paris.

That didn't seem right, since 1) I don't think the Secret Service would've let him ride on the Concorde in 1970 (though I accompanied him on it once many years later), 2) the guy meeting Nixon doesn't look like Prime Minister Edward Health, and 3) U.S. presidents and British prime ministers usually don't need translators (more about him in a moment).

It didn't take long to learn the real story at UPI.com, which displays the same photo with this caption:

President Nixon leaves after taking a five-minute tour on Dec. 14, 1971, of the Concorde, the British-French supersonic jet, and said: "I wish we had built it." Nixon looked through the sleek SST (background) at Lajes Field, the U.S. operated air base outside the capital of the Azores. Walking with Nixon (at right) is Portuguese Prime Minister Marcello Geatana. Man in center is unidentified. The Concorde brought French President George Pompidou to the Azores for the meeting with pres. Nixon. (UPI Photo/John Full/Files)

The man at center is the late diplomat and CIA official Gen. Vernon Walters, Nixon's friend, legendary language savant, and one of God's great gentlemen. You can also see Henry Kissinger at Nixon's left.

Troubles, And Troubles

In a fascinating analysis of a 1992 Seymour Hersh article about the struggle between Richard Nixon and the National Archives over his White House records, Maarja Krusten tells the kind of Nixon story we don't often read:

Since ‘tis the season, I’ll mention an example from Christmas time. Hersh’s portrait of Nixon does not take into account stories such as the one in Haldeman’s diary (which we at NARA processed during the early 1980s) about Nixon’s quiet Christmas Eve visit to the Washington Home for the Incurables. The president told Haldeman, “Boy, we think we’ve got troubles.” The chief of staff noted in his diary, “It’s just amazing to watch him in this kind of situation because he handled it so well.”

Snowe Job

Tongue in cheek, a little, Matthew Yglesias disputes those who say the wildly successful lame duck session was a win for President Obama:

You could just as easily describe [it] as a huge win for Olympia Snowe. After all, unlike Obama she got her way on START and DADT but also got her way on DREAM and one way to describe the tax cut compromise is really that she got Obama to shift to her position on taxes and got Mitch McConnell to give her cover on her right flank on unemployment insurance and ARRA extensions. But nobody is talking about how Olympia Snowe is the “comeback Senator” who, after 12 months of ineffectual moderation, succeeded in making the world turn on her pivotal status.

A Jerusalem Christmas

Jeffrey Goldberg (who's Jewish) describes Christmas Eve in multicultural Jerusalem. With Israeli friends, he went to services at the Church of the Redeemer (Lutheran) in the Old City and heard a German pastor read Luke's gospel in Hebrew. But that's not the half of it. Earlier in the day, he took one of his kids to see a doctor:

The clinic, called Terem, is well-known in Jerusalem in part because it was started by a physician named David Applebaum, who was killed in the September 9, 2003 terrorist bombing of a cafe in the Germany Colony neighborhood, along with his daughter Naava, who was scheduled to get married the next day. The physician who saw my son at Terem, like many of the clinic's physicians, is an Arab from East Jerusalem. In Terem, and at Hadassah Hospital, and the other hospitals in town, Jews treat Arabs, Arabs treat Jews, and no one thinks twice about it. No one who lives here, I mean. For visitors (even one, like myself, who once lived in Jerusalem), these sorts of commonplace facts of life -- Germans praying in Hebrew, Arab physicians treating Jews in a clinic founded by a terror victim, and on, and on -- can be astonishing.

It's hard to see clearly, but this photo, which I took in the Old City during a 2007 pilgrimage, shows a minaret on the left, a cross on the right (station #3 on the Via Dolorosa, "Jesus falls for the first time"), and (in the middle of the image, in the distance) a menorah.

Bashing Nixon To Build Up Reagan

On Tuesday, Michael Gerson used the distasteful Nixon-Kissinger conversation about a hypothetical Soviet holocaust against Jews to promote the ideology that Ronald Reagan brought about the fall of the Soviet Union. He goes so far as to imply, outrageously, that Nixon really would've let Soviet Jews be gassed:

[F]rom this historical episode, it is clear that repeated doses of foreign policy realism can deaden the conscience. In President Nixon's office, a lack of human sentiment was viewed as proof of mental toughness - an atmosphere that diminished the office itself. Realists are often dismissive of Manichean distinctions between good and evil, light and darkness. But in the world beyond good and evil, some may be lightly consigned to the gas chambers.

Gerson's comment is especially appalling in view of an historical reality which he neglects to mention, namely that Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union reached its Cold War apogee as the direct result of Nixon's policies. That means Russia's Jews were safer because of Nixon, and yet Gerson claims to have gotten a whiff of gas. While the taped Nix-Kiss exchange is impossible to defend on its merits, it's nothing but hot air.

Since the tape was opened earlier this month, Kissinger's friends have defended him strenuously. No word yet from Nixon's men -- except, now, Kissinger himself. Knowing him, I'd say his response became inevitable after Gerson used the opportunity of the tapes opening to suggest that the Jackson-Vanik amendment (which tied U.S.-Soviet trade relations to rates of emigration and ended up making it far harder for Jews to get out than it had been under Nixon) somehow helped end the Cold War. In response, Kissinger took to the Washington Post op-ed page on Christmas Eve. He began by apologizing for his loose talk in the White House and then took aim at his Reagan-boosting critic:

Gerson ascribes the collapse of the Soviet Union in part to the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The amendment played no significant role in what resulted from imperial overstretch, incompetent economic management and the determined resistance of a succession of presidents from both parties, culminating in the Reagan period.

Gerson sneers at detente as if it were a kind of moral abdication. Memories are short. The conversation under discussion occurred on March 1, 1973. The Vietnam War had just ended; prisoners had not yet returned.

An effective global strategy was in place with the opening to China, a broad dialogue with the Soviet Union, and major progress in Egypt and on emigration. It was to preserve that policy that the conversation in the Oval Office took place, and it is in that context that it must be viewed.

Too Good For Washington?

From reporting by Sheryl Gay Stolberg about President Obama's vacation habits, more evidence that Barack Obama isn't yet completely comfortable in the presidency:

Mr. Obama is not a politician who uses circumstances and relationships to cajole. He is not one to say, “Let’s have a couple of drinks and hash this out.” He does not confuse his work friends with his real friends. He jealously guards his time with his wife and daughters and the tight circle of intimates like Eric Whitaker and Martin Nesbitt from Chicago, who are with him [on vacation in Hawaii]. And he is perfectly content to leave his public persona at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and slip, however briefly, into private life.

Two issues here, it seems to me. Protecting time with his family and being intentional about vacations make obvious sense. But it's naive and even reckless to act as though political friendships aren't "real" or that policy and political solutions aren't sometimes, indeed often, encountered in the crucible of relationships. There seems to be some evidence here for his critics' contention that Obama still thinks he can persuade people to his point of view by sheer logic, by his impossible-to-resist rightness -- just like the last president who was too good for Washington, the one-term Jimmy Carter.

Jesus Weeps

Terrorists murder 38 during Christmas worship in the Philippines and Nigeria.

Those Who Claim To Know God

In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge delicately asks the ghost of Christmas present why, purportedly by his command, the authorities had ordered restaurants and public houses closed on Sundays, denying their comforts to working people on their one day off. Taking umbrage, the ghost seems to speak for the whole household of heaven, where, I suspect, there's still considerable impatience and anger about much of what we do in God's name:

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all out kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us."

Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent, Pal

AP photographer Alexander F. Yuan caught this image on Christmas Eve in Beijing's South Cathedral (formerly known as the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception), one of China's official Roman Catholic parishes. China doesn't permit its Catholic churches to recognize the external authority of the Vatican. At least the little guy at right knows who's boss.

Pray For The Peace Of Bethlehem

Christmas Eve in Manger Square, near the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Photo by Reuters.