Why Does This Book Exist?

I'm trying to figure out why this book exists.

I should say this: I'm only 90 pages into it, so a little less than half. But still I wonder: Who is this book for?

Old farts like me recognize the name of Tom Brokaw. He was a mainstay of the news in the 80s and longer, when I was growing up and going to school. And as Brokaw was a rookie television reporter assigned to Washington during the Nixon impeachment years, it's natural that Brokaw would write a book about it.

But why does this book exist?

There's been little of the story sofar, and what is there is stuff you could probably find in a Wikipedia article on the Watergate scandal. Outside of that, there's a lot of name-dropping. Lots of name-dropping. So this is more of a memoir, I suppose, with the "fall of Richard Nixon," -- one of the book's two subtitles -- playing in the background.

I'll give it a fair shake and finish it, of course. But it's thusfar the least informative Nixon book I've ever read.

Donald "Ham-Handed" Trump, Biff at Large

Regular readers of this blog may know, and people who know me personally should know that I am a Richard Nixon freak.

I’ve lost count how many Nixon books I’ve read, how many Nixon documentaries I’ve watched. I’ve read the Woodward and Bernstein. And I’ve read the japes by those who saw Nixon as no conservative and Watergate as only a minor blip to the man’s many sins. I even got a real big kick out of Elvis and Nixon which, if you have not seen, you should. It’s hilarious.

And fictional, like what I’m about to talk about.

Yes, Nixon had his dark side and yes-men who enabled that dark side to come out. And as the Watergate crisis continue to evolve, he listened more and more to that dark side and to those yes-men, to the point he destroyed his presidency.

In one hour, President Donald Trump, rambling accusations at the Georgia Secretary of State, presented a new low in American presidential politics, because in the eyes of this amateur Nixon scholar, not even Nixon and all the president’s men were as ham-handed as what I heard and read in that call.

But as in Nixon’s time, he has his supporters, both in government and out. I hold no illusions that no matter how Congress handled the ill-conceived approach to decertify the election, nor even after Joe Biden is sworn in as president later this month, the ham-handedness of Trump and his enablers and supporters will continue to believe the election was stolen. God and Jebus themselves could descend from above and say the election was above board, and they would not be believed.

There’s a thread in Mormonism that believes the Constitution will dangle by a thread, meaning it will be brought to the point that those in power or those who want to stay in power will spit on it and wipe their poxy bottoms on it. Mostly they tend to believe it’ll be done on liberal watch. I’m not so sure. Because the only ones I see approaching the Constitution with a boogery nose now are coming from the right.

Here’s what I find most telling in the hour-long call to Georgia: Trump does, by far, the majority of the talking. He had some of his legal team on the call. They said little. If there were any legal merit to the accusations flung in this call, the lawyers would be the ones talking. Instead, they sit there very much like Mr. Slant, the head of the Guild of Lawyers in Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork, satisfied to let his client make a fool of himself because they were not in front of judge and jury and they were secure in the fact they were getting paid $400 an hour. There was no legal merit to the 60 plus court cases brought before the call, some to the Supreme Court, where Trump pretty much thought he’d emerge victor, as three of the nine there were appointed by him and conservatives enjoy a majority. But even there, among friends, there was no legal merit. No standing.

More straws, ladies and gentlemen. And the strong-men in the Middle East, Russia, China, they’re laughing at our political mess. As they should be. Because a wannabe dictator is throwing a fit that the election he was sure he’d win didn’t go his way. But more dastardly, they’re laughing at us. At the fact that some of us can see the facts of the election, know who won, but insist on throwing stupid fits because our guy isn’t the one who won it.

(And yes, there are those who crow that they don’t care if it’s Trump or Biden; all they want is a free and fair election. Nevermind that they fall into the same logical fallacies and blindness the Trumpers fall into.)

Just leave, Mr. Trump. Your time is over. And if you get the Republican nomination in 2024, God help the Republican Party. The price of loyalty is coming in high.

"This ifs Fine."

I have not made it a secret that I screw up.

I screw up all the time. And 99 percent of the times I screw up, I confess, I fix the problem as quickly as possible, move on, and work to make sure that particular screw-up doesn’t happen again.
Then there’s that other one percent.

(They, too, get fixed, rest assured. But sometimes that one percent just kind of . . . lingers.)

What I remember most is the feeling: It’s like I’m on fire inside. I’m sure it’s a combination of things like adrenaline and other stress chemicals zooming around the body and the brain just thinking and ticking away at the mistake. I’m sure many have felt that feeling. Many, too, feel the little respites that come with sleep, exercise, and other tasks or methods that help a fella temporarily forget that the Big Mistake still lies there, unresolved.

But the feeling always comes back; that fire within. And the respites seem futile, few and far between. Because all you know is the burning.

That’s what I imagine Richard Nixon and his compatriots going through, day after painful day, as I read John Dean’s “The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It.” I can practically feel that burning – and this was a burning that amped up and then remained for two years – coming out of every page, out of every conversation. It’s no wonder, during the fight and after the resignation, that his health was shot and he almost died.

If this sounds like sympathy for the man, so be it. He dug his own grave and buried himself to be sure, but it’s inhuman to look and not feel a bit sorry.

Because, to varying degrees, we’ve all been there. Maybe not at the impeachable offense level, but at some level, where we try to bury the burning or escape it, only to feel it coming back.

I wonder to what degree they suffered, though – they had their partners in misery, where they could commiserate and try mightily to explain away the mistakes they made, compounded by the mistakes they made afterward to try to cover up the first mistakes. Still. They had to have their quiet moments, when the only voice in their head was their own, screaming to be heard above the bubbling burning within.

There are days I feel I could write a dissertation on mistakes.

And on that sweet relief that comes when we emerge from the cauldron of burning and know, after all, things are going to be okay.

I have lived my life like this. A strong conscience, one might say. A commitment to self and God that I will be a better person by the end of the day. That I will recognize and fix the mistakes I make as soon as I’m able. Though I am human and let that one percent slip through and give the slow, painful burn for a time to remind me, maybe, what I “miss” the other times I work to make things right.

If anyone tells you they are not familiar with this phenomenon, that they have not felt the burn, that they have not let slip through that one percent, even for a little while, they are lying. We’ve all been in that self-created hell. We’ve all heard the alarms going off. We’ve all been in that spot of doing nothing, or doing only those things that will do all but fix the problem, all but put out the fire.



There are temporary solutions, and the Nixon team seemed to try them all. There was action – lots of it meant to create the illusion for both the public and the self that the problem was being worked and was eventually going to go away.

There was blame and paranoia – the thought that the problem wasn’t really all that much of a problem but was a problem because “the enemies” wanted it to be a problem.

And, on occasion, there was alcohol.

Only one thing fixes the burning permanently: Confession. And the inevitable repercussions, which we are all familiar with based on the burning sins we have committed.

“Wait A Minute, is it Right or Wrong?”

WARNING: Richard Milhous Nixon ponderings to follow.

The most significant thing ever said about politics in the last century comes from Ted White’s book “Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon”:

In a campaign there is no conflict between ends and means. The end is to win victory, and, as in war, the means do not matter -- deception, lying, intelligence operations are common in all campaigns; a campaign is no place for squeamish men. But what happens, said one of Richard Nixon's advance men of 1960 long afterward in 1974, what happens when the advance men become government? "What happens when they all sit in the same room in Washington and the President trusts them and nobody is squeamish, nobody is there to say, Wait a minute, is it right or wrong?"

I talk about that a bit here.

This quote has come to the fore again as I read John W. Dean’s “The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It,” wherein Dean (I’m just in the opening chapters) is laying the groundwork that to show Nixon’s loyalty to his men was chief among his flaws that led to his doomed presidency.
Whom do we have right now in government saying “Wait a minute, is it right or wrong?”

While individual members of either dominant political party in the United States might be saying it, the parties themselves are not. The parties are interested in promulgating the party, and look at any sense of right or wrong through the lens of party loyalty. Some of the individual platform planks of each party might be in the right, but on the whole, the parties are not saying “Wait a minute, is it right or wrong?”

Nixon’s loyalty to his men met up with his paranoia to lead him to believe his men above the cost of everything else. That loyalty combined with paranoia, I believe, led him to consider other paths to protect his men when he saw their guilt, at the cost of his presidency.

And his men did him few favors. Something from Dean’s book:

“I told him about the Liddy thing,” Haldeman explained,” because he’s going to find it out right away anyway, and it was better to let him know there was a guy.” But Haldeman also had new information to tell Nixon dealing with Liddy’s involvement in Watergate. “What we’re talking about is, we’re going to write a scenario – in fact, we’re going to have Liddy write it – which bring all of the loose ends that might lead anywhere at all to him. He’s going to say that, yeah, he was doing this, he wasn’t authorized.” Haldeman, of course, and not only been told by Gordon Strachan, his aide and liaison to the reelection committee, that Liddys’ intelligence operation budget had been approved, by the had also given Strachan instructions in ear4ly April 1972 to have Liddy change his focus from Muskie to McGovern. It was still not clear form these conversations whether Haldeman knew if Mitchell had authorized an illegal break-in and bugging at the DNC, but he clearly suspected it. Haldeman was certainly aware, however, that Jeb Magruder would not have authorized such an action without Mitchell’s blessing, and that Magruder was directly involved in the Watergate operation.

“Well, what else?” Nixon pressed for more of the scenario.

Haldeman obliged by spinning out the story he had discussed with Mitchell. “He thought it was an honorable thing to do. He thought it was important. Obviously, it was wrong. He didn’t think he should ask for authorization, because he knew it was something he didn’t want to put anybody else in a position of authorizing. How did he get the money? See, we’ve got that one problem, the check from Dahlberg. What happened is, and that works out nicely, because the check came in after the spending limit thing [on April 7]. So it was given to him with the instruction to return it to the Dahlberg. Instead he subverted it to this other purpose, deposited it in the bank. That explains where the money came from. That explains everything. And they’re [Mitchell and his aides] working on writing out a scenario.” I think that’s the answer to this, and admit that, by God, there was campaign involvement.”

But without Michell’s knowledge,’ the president qualified, and Haldeman repeated “But without Mitchell’s knowledge.”

“Or authorization,” Nixon further confirmed. Haldeman echoed, “Or authorization.”

“He’s fired.”

“And he’s fired,” Haldeman assured the president.

“What does he get out of it? What’s his penalty?” the president asked.

“Oh, not too much. They don’t think it will be any big problem,” Haldeman said. Then he added, “Whatever it is, we’ll take care of him.”

Nixon could not imagine this having taking place without Mitchell’s authority, but then, he told Haldeman, he was still not sure. Haldeman speculated, “I can’t imagine that he knew specifically that this is what they were doing. I think he said, for God’s sake, get out and get this [expletive deleted] information, don’t pussyfoot around.”

The president wanted to know about the money. “How’d he [Liddy] get the check?”

“He was processing the checks. It was an illegal check,” Haldeman concluded, incorrectly placing a worst-case potential on it by blending fact with the fiction of the scenario; when all the facts were gathered, it turned out to be a legal contribution. Haldeman guessed, “You know, he was going to run it down to Mexico and put it into cash or something.”

“The what did we do, return the money to the guy? What, what happened?” the president asked, confused about what was the true story and the bogus scenario.

The thing is about telling lies, and mixing lies with truth, is pretty soon you don’t remember what the truth is, and what the lies are, and how you mixed them together.

And those depending on you, well, they often don’t know you’re lying to them. Until it’s too late.
What do we have in Washington now, but politicians on both sides of the fence who value loyalty to individual or party above everything else – where compromise is a dirtier word than partisanship?

Far be it from a naif like me to suggest something: Maybe the people our politicians employ in their campaigns should have the kind of integrity that would make their candidate call on their better self, not their baser self. We’ve seen both parties succumb to wanting to win so badly they throw integrity out the window. And then keep the windows locked.

More Things Found in Books

Scored seriously when I found these three books at the Rexburg DI this morning:

First on the Moon, by Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin Aldrin, Jr. (which explains why he went by "Buzz";

Overlord, by Max Hastings;

Nixon" The Man Behind the Mask, by Gary Allen.

The Nixon book should prove interesting, as it's written for the crowd who felt Tricky Dick was too much of a squashy liberal, rather than the stone-squeezing conservative they wanted him to be. To wit, note the two bits of paper being used as bookmarks in this book:

Clearly, this book was being read by a patriot.

Note a few interesting things:

1. State government took a bite of a whopping nineteen cents in 1972, from wages earned for 41.5 hours of work.
2. This person earned $1.85 an hour (minimum wage then was $1.60 an hour). The wage represents just under $10 an hour in 2017 dollars.
3. Rogers Brothers was a seed company that operated in Idaho Falls from 1911 to 1986 and was rather a mover and shaker in seed research nationally. I vaguely remember seeings signs for this company around town when I was a kid.

A Conversation, But Not Much Communication

"A conversation, but not much communication."

So who is worse off: The president disconnected from reality or the protester tripping on LSD?

The answer is C: The country. The country is worse off.

Afraid of Nixon? Wait for Jaworski.

Nixonian.

It’s a popular adjective these days.

Many of the talking heads I’m listening to and many of the schooled and amateur commenters are missing the point, however, when they spew the Nixonian epithet in the wake of President Donald Trump firing FBI Director James Comey over what I’m not exactly sure:

The redress to Nixonianism is Jaworskianism.

Remember your history: Richard Nixon wanted Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox fired for daring to subpoena recordings of Nixon’s conversations with his staff. Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused to fire Cox and resigned – followed by Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus refusal and resignation, the new Attorney General, Robert Bork (who, later would see his own last name used to coin a popular political phrase) fired Cox. Classic Saturday Night Massacre.

Enter Leon Jaworski.

Jaworski came in as the second special prosecutor in the growing Watergate scandal, and contrary to fears (even those expressed by Bork) Jaworski didn’t toe any line except that of justice.

Jaworski immediately subpoenaed the same tapes Cox wanted to listen to, and the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, saying the “generalized assertion of [executive] privilege must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial.”

Nixon, I suppose, could have fired Jaworski, and kept on firing attorneys general until he found on who would not subpoena the tapes, but not even Nixon is that Nixonian.

What I’m driving at is this: The truth will out, no matter what presidents may or may not do. We’ve seen sufficient checks and balances in our government since January 20, and we will continue to see them. I suppose I’m one of the naïve few who still believes government functions as the Founders intended, even if that functionality is as creaky and slow as it is. In hindsight, it’s also important to remember that the Nixonian epithet didn’t develop overnight, nor did the white hats triumph over the black hats immediately. It took time.  Have faith that government will work, albeit not at the pace you might expect.

As for that investigation, I have my doubts (amateurish as they may be) that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and/or Russian hackers (I don’t dispute the hacking and disinformation campaign took place). The Democrats were going to be split between Clinton and Sanders with or without Russian hacking or disinformation, and the rise of Trump can only be explained by the rise of Trump. Until any investigation can prove collusion that led to victory (despite, remember, Clinton winning the popular vote) I have to question whether the Russian Connection is merely the Democrats’ Benghazi.

Politics, Poker, and Access

As a piece of journalism, Theodore White’s “The Making of the President 1960” is good. I will admit I much prefer his “The Making of the President 1968,” but that’s probably due to the drama that surrounded the campaign in that year, what with Vietnam and the turmoil in the Democratic Party.

What I find striking in White’s first iteration is how much it speaks of access.

Today, that access – under a Trump presidency – likes to scream of a strangled First Amendment, when it’s clear that access, which Trump and his minions are denying certain members of the press corps, is much more about access, congeniality, conviviality, and butt-smooching than it is the First Amendment.

I base this claim on the near absence of Richard Nixon’s campaign from this book. Oh, it’s there – I did say the book represents a good piece of journalism, which presents both sides – but the book oozes access to the Kennedy campaign, either through design, accident, or malice that might make washed-up journalists like me blush.

It’s hard to tell whether the absent conviviality when White writes about Nixon is due to that candidate’s and, subsequently, that campaign’s rough relationship with the press, or whether it’s merely that White preferred to hang with the Kennedy crowd because of the access that campaign offered.

And I may be completely wrong and biased and ready to be ridden out of town on a rail. That’s just my impression, Nixon fanatic that I am. (Note: I call myself a fanatic because I’m fascinated by Nixon, not that I think he did everything right. Which obviously he did not.)

The Democratic campaign in the year 1960 has some interesting parallels to the campaign of 2016, wherein there was a core constituency of Democrats who preferred another candidate – Adlai Stevenson – over the establishment candidate, John Kennedy. Though Stevenson’s supporters were the minority, they tried mightily to get their man the nomination, viz (page 198):

The packing of the galleries by the [Adlai] Stevensonians was the result of sharp, well-planned organization. They had been allotted, prior to the Convention, only thirty-five tickets for all their cohorts. They had proceeded thus: first they solicited all members of the 750 Club (a Democratic money-raising device which promised two tickets to each contributor of $1,000) for their unwanted tickets and thus collected 1,000 free tickets; next, they pressed their friends on the host committee of the California Democratic Party to turn over most of their 1,000 tickets to them; finally, learning that the Kennedy organization expected to draw 2,500 tickets from the regular machinery of the Convention, they had lined their own people up at the special distribution lines for these tickets, pinned on them large KENNEDY buttons, and claimed from the earmarked Kennedy supply an estimated 1,500 tickets as their own. The Stevenson people thus, on the right of the Convention’s nomination, were in possession of almost 4,000 tickets to pack the galleries, which they did with lusty delight.

So yeah. Politics and poker, folks . . . 

And it ain’t getting’ any better today. The Democrats certainly saw what happened when the establishment candidate was picked over the one surging in popularity. And the whole country is witnessing what happens when the guy surging in popularity wins over the establishment candidate.

"Yes . . . But it is Very Neat"

If nobody has done this yet, it should be done:

A cross-reference of books written by and about Richard Milhous Nixon, also tied in with official records, transcripts, notes on the bathroom wall, etc., indicating which claims in the various sources are true, false, in dispute, or otherwise occupied. Throw in films and documentaries, oral histories, etc. Everything Richard Milhous Nixon.

Creating such a database would be a massive undertaking. I’m not near smart enough to accomplish such a thing.

But it would be neat.

Why is this coming up now? Because of a number of factors:

1.      I’m a rather naïve soul who typically believes anything he is told or reads. I’d like some help filtering the truth from the truthiness. 
2.      I’m reading L. Patrick Gray II’s “In Nixon’s Web” right now, and he takes Woodward, Bernstein, Jack Anderson, and TIME magazine to task for their inaccuracies (he’s yet to mention Seymour Hirsch* of the New York Times). 
3.      Mark Felt, aka “Deep Throat” comes out not as a hero, but as a skunk who tried to sink Gray for his own purposes. Don’t know whether that’s factual or not, but it’s certainly interesting to read. 
4.      Who trusts the CIA on ANYTHING? Not me, after reading this book. 
5.      It would be neat.

      I could also keep track of the players, and how each source brings new dimension to their character. (Pat Gray’s book certainly adds to the deflowering, for example, of John Dean, and certainly to a diminution of my opinion of AP columnist Jack Anderson and Mark "Deep Throat" Felt.)

If anyone out there is aware of something like this, please point me in its direction. I’d love to see it.

Thinking about this also makes me want to finish editing Doleful Creatures so I can get back to The Hermit of Iapetus, which features Nixon as a hallucinatory character.

*Gray never does mention Hirsch. Whether that means he was correct all along or Gray had bigger axes to grind with other characters involved isn’t clear.

Russians Smrussians

I have become an amateur dabbler into the history and minutae of Watergate. Every time I find a book on Watergate, Richard Nixon, or the politics of the 1960s, I read it. I drive my wife nuts with it. “Look!” I’ll shout. “Another Nixon book!” And she’ll roll her eyes and that’s about it.

So when I read Franklin Foer’s piece at Slate.com, “The DNCHack is Watergate, but Worse,” I just had to laugh. Then I read it further. And I had to laugh out loud.

Foer does little more than clutch his pearls and call for the fainting couch to be brought out as he compares the hack and subsequent leak of Democratic National Committee emails showing favoritism to Hillary Clinton over rival Bernie Sanders. And while he does compare it fairly to the seriousness of Watergate, he slips into the same arguments Nixon used to keep his tapes private in decrying the leak of these emails to the world.

Foer makes much of the fact that “the Russians” committed this leak as a “strike against our civic infrastructure.”

He goes on to say:

[I]t’s not really even the inner working of the Democrats that have been revealed; the documents don’t suggest new layers of corruption of detail any new conspiracies. They’re something closer to the embarrassing emails that fly across every office in America – griping, the testing of stupid ideas, the banal musings that take place in private correspondence. The emails don’t get us much beyond a fact every sentient political observer could already see: Officials at the DNC, hired to work hand in glove with a seemingly inevitable nominee, were actively making life easier for Hillary Clinton. It didn’t take these leaks to understand that Debbie Wasserman Shultz is a hack and that the DNC should be far more neutral in presidential primaries.

So in other words – this is just the DNC doing workaday spitballing. You know, trying ideas out and such. And we already knew they were corrupt as hell, so we didn’t need this leak, did we?

Or, in other words – and particularly to Bernie Sanders supporters and to those who still maintain faith in our nomination process – they are, to borrow another phrase from the Nixon era, the smoking gun. They are proof that the sneaky allegations of collusion between Clinton and the DNC are, in fact, not allegations, but fact.

That it was the Russians that leaked this – timed at a point to cause “maximum damage,” in Foer’s words – is immaterial. Had they been discovered by two young, intrepid journalists at the Washington Post, say, rather than by a foreign government, and released at the same time, why, put the fainting couch away and release the pearls, right? News organizations, working against politicians they abhor – rightly so, because even if they didn’t order the bugging of the Watergtate they sure as hell colluded to cover up the fact to protect their buddies – can sway elections. And, if not elections, sentiment. And sentiment swayed led to resignation, if I remember my Watergate history correctly.

But there’s more. The American public at the time of Watergate – even its elected representatives in government – were swayed not by the fact that The Washington Post or the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times revealed the truth about Nixon and his malfeasance, but because of the malfeasance revealed about Richard Nixon and his administration. The truth could have been beamed to earth from the Martians, and it still would have been the truth.

There are many who, while aware of the provenance of the leak, seem to think the real damage being done is to the Democratic National Committee, not democracy itself.

And the Nixon tapes – that smoking gun – was there to be seen (except, of course, for that missing 18 ½ minutes, culled by Nixon as Foer accuses the Russians of culling DNC emails). It was there to be read. I’ve got a copy of it on my bookshelf. 

But that’s not the end of Foer’s poor reasoning. He also says this:

We should be appalled at the public broadcast of this minutiae. It will have a chilling effect—campaign staffers will now assume they no longer have the space to communicate honestly. This honest communication—even if it’s often trivial or dumb—is important for the process of arriving at sound strategy and sound ideas. (To be sure, the DNC shouldn’t need privacy to know that attacking a man for his faith is just plain gross.) Open conversation, conducted with the expectation of privacy, is the necessary precondition for the formation of collective wisdom and consensus. If we eviscerate the possibility of privacy in politics, we increase the likelihood of poor decision-making.

Sounds familiar, right? Nixon himself said much of the material subpoenaed by Judge John Sirica should not be made public for just the chilling effect that Foer defends in the DNC. Nixon was eviscerated – and rightly so – for trying to extend the right of spitballing, for honest conversation amongst he and his advisors to avoid the very chilling effect, to avoid the increased “likelihood of poor decision-making” that Foer wants to defend. Would Foer be willing to offer Nixon that loophole? Or Donald Trump*, for that matter, who tends to do his spitballing out loud for the entire world to hear?

*On the record: I support neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton in this election cycle. Nor am I a disgruntled Bernie Bro. My boy John Kasich crashed and burned in the primary, which I can only hope was done honestly; I’d love to see a Wikileaks examination of the Republican side as well.

Foer concludes by saying this leak is a hack job meant to bring down Clinton, a politician Russian President Vladimir Putin “abhors.” Foer conveniently forgets that hackers also released opposition reports from the DNC on Donald Trump. Maybe that’s just a carrot thrown in for the illusion of a balanced attack – but it’s still a carrot many are going to chew on. And chewing is a much better reaction to all of this than clutching at pearls.