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Tag: Richard Nixon

  • Running Against Hooverville–The Presidential Blame Game

    In the immediate aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, President John F. Kennedy stood before the nation accepting the total blame for what had happened. He referred to an old saying about victory having a thousand fathers, but defeat being an orphan, and identified himself as the responsible officer in the government. Even though the whole initiative had been first devised and planned by the Eisenhower administration.

    JFK’s poll numbers moved dramatically—up. There is something refreshing—though sadly rare—about a political leader saying “My bad.”

    In the 19th century, a British politician stood in Parliament and remarked that trying to get his particular point across was akin to flogging a dead horse to make it pull a load. We call this beating a dead horse today. And every time President Obama or a member of his administration plays the blame Bush card, he is beating that proverbial dead horse. It is also getting really old.

    Everyone on Facebook has an information page and there is an entry labeled “relationship status.” Some mark “married” or “in a relationship,” others say “single.” Then there are those who put: “It’s complicated.” When it comes to Presidents and those who come before or after, it’s really complicated. Some chief executives have managed to rise above the propensity for personal paltriness—others, not so much.

    And it goes way back.

    Thomas Jefferson, who ran a particularly aggressive campaign against former-and-would-be-again-much-later friend, John Adams, in the 1800 race, continued the attack on his predecessor well into his own presidency. He regularly smeared Mr. Adams for maladministration of presidential powers, though apparently willing to benefit from things Adams had done that he had opposed at the time. The anti-military, anti-big government Jefferson, had no qualms about using navy Adams had built (opposed by TJ) to deal with the Barbary Pirates; nor did he hesitate to use broad executive powers in the whole matter of the Louisiana Purchase—the kind of action candidate Jefferson would have likely decried as tyrannical.

    Democrat Andrew Jackson wouldn’t even pay a courtesy call on outgoing President John Quincy Adams. Mr. Adams then refused to attend his successor’s inauguration. Jackson spent significant time in office tearing down his predecessor—blaming Adams and the whole fierce campaign for his wife’s death after the election. That one was very complicated.

    Speaking of Presidents and courtesy calls, Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, sat famously in the car under the White House portico, snubbing the Trumans. But when it came to blaming his predecessor for the mess he inherited, he chose the path of just ignoring and dismissing Mr. Truman like the junior military officer he saw him to be.

    Abraham Lincoln had great reasons and resonant issues to use to place blame for the country on the verge of disintegration he inherited in 1861 because his predecessor, James Buchanan, did virtually nothing to deal with the brewing national disaster. But Mr. Lincoln seemed to have a capacity to rise above cheap politics—dealings with his own Cabinet-made-of-would-be-rivals also demonstrated the 16th President’s ego tempering skills.

    Of course, many times Presidents have succeeded men from the same party and, though they might have wanted to really make the guy before look bad, they realized that it was political suicide. Martin Van Buren could certainly have blamed the panic of 1837 on Andrew Jackson, who destroyed the National Bank, but party realities forbade it.

    Warren Harding didn’t spend a lot of time or energy blaming Woodrow Wilson for the nation’s woes in the early 1920s. Ronald Reagan used Jimmy Carter as a punching bag for a short while, but quickly moved on. Even Richard Nixon didn’t waste time passing the buck back to LBJ. In fact, their relationship was remarkably good, considering their history.

    Now, Franklin Roosevelt—well that’s another story. He used predecessor Herbert Hoover as his whipping boy for at least a decade—and one wonders if this example is the one that resonates with the current administration.

    FDR ran a skillful campaign against Hoover in 1932, allied with the forces of economics and history in play at the time. Hoover was an unpopular president as a result of the onset of the Great Depression. Once hailed for his genius at organization and engineering, his name was even part of the vocabulary signifying good economy, as in the popular 1920 Valentine’s Day card:

    “I’ll Hooverize on dinner,
    On fuel and tires too,
    But I’ll never learn to Hooverize
    When it comes to loving you.”

    By 1932, however, his star had fallen and shantytowns across America were dubbed, “Hoovervilles.” However, today’s prevalent narrative that Hoover was a do-nothing president and then the great activist Roosevelt rode to the White House on a white horse, is at best an apocryphal exaggeration—at worst, it’s a lie.

    In fact, Mr. Roosevelt, famous smile and all, was simply an effective and cynical politician who knew how to practice demagoguery with the best of them. He was also a very petty man. One example is in the naming—better, renaming—of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. It had been named for Herbert Hoover in 1931 not just because he was the President at the time (there were already dams named for Calvin Coolidge and Theodore Roosevelt extant), but also because he had been a major driving force in the project since the early 1920s during his highly successful tenure as Secretary of Commerce. He, being an engineer by training and trade, even played a crucial role in how it would work and be constructed—effectuating something called the Hoover Compromise allowing the project to go forward at a critical juncture.

    After his humiliating defeat by the Roosevelt juggernaut in November of 1932, Mr. Hoover stopped at the construction site of the dam and remarked for the press:

    “It does give me extraordinary pleasure to see the great dream I have so long held taking form in actual reality of stone and cement. It is now ten years since I became chairman of the Colorado River Commission—This dam is the greatest engineering work of its character ever attempted by the hand of man—I hope to be present at its final completion as a bystander. Even so, I shall feel a special personal satisfaction.”

    But by the time the project was completed in 1936, it had been renamed by the Roosevelt administration as the Boulder Dam and Hoover was never invited to be part of any festivities. Of course, by that time Mr. Roosevelt was running for reelection against Republican nominee Alf Landon of Kansas.

    But FDR was really running against Hoover one more time.

    The other day, during that good-for-nothing White House meeting on health care, there was a telling exchange between President Obama and Senator John McCain. He told McCain that the campaign was over. He meant their campaign.

    The battle against all things George W. Bush, however, still rages. And most likely this will continue through the 2012 campaign. After all, if you can’t run on a record of accomplishment—find a dead horse to beat and hope the people are dumb enough not to notice the abuse and absurdity.

    The big question is: Will George W. Bush be as durable a whipping boy as was Herbert Hoover—or better yet—is Barack Obama as arrogant, cynically petty, or politically cunning as was Franklin D. Roosevelt?

  • The Little Church In The East Room

    As the first streaks of dawn quietly announced the arrival of morning on Sunday, November 16, 1969, a 35-year old preacher from Ohio named Harold Rawlings had already been awake for a while after a fitful night of what-could-barely-be-called sleep in a room at Washington, D.C.’s storied Mayflower Hotel. He would in a few hours face a crowd punctuated by the most powerful men and women in America, assembled in the most unusual of venues for any clergyman – the East Room of the White House.

    These days, most Americans have moved on from wondering about Barack Obama’s church attendance habits now nearly a year into his presidency. Some of this inattention is due, no doubt, to the swirl of events, but a measure of it is likely because Mr. Obama is demonstrating a kind of ambivalence to church attendance that has become par for the presidential course over the years (though with some exception, e.g., Jimmy Carter).

    Most presidents have likely never read Theodore Roosevelt’s “Nine Reasons A Man Should Go To Church.” Among the things TR said was this gem: “Yes, I know all the excuses. I know that one can worship the Creator in a grove of trees, or by a running brook, or in a man’s own house as well as in church. But I also know, as a matter of cold fact, that the average man does not thus worship.”

    Richard Nixon decided in the first days of his presidency to reconcile the ethic of church attendance with the realities of security and logistics during his time in the White House, by having regular Sunday services in the East Room. Of course, he was criticized for it. Some saw it as political grandstanding and others (many in the clergy) feared Nixon might be setting a trend for “stay at home” worship. Billy Graham noted, though, that in the early days of Christianity churches met almost exclusively in houses. So, on Nixon’s first Sunday in the White House, Graham shared a sermon, beginning a long run of non-sectarian religious services at 11 o’clock most Sunday mornings.

    Rev. Rawlings had received an invitation, via the recommendation of his congressman, Donald “Buzz” Lukens, to bring the message during one of those services. But the preacher had to pay his own expenses to the nation’s capital, something gladly accomplished by his church, Landmark Baptist in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the lanky clergyman shared pastoral duties with his father, the senior minister of the church.

    The preacher also had no idea when he accepted the White House invitation that he would be performing his prelatic duties against the backdrop of a city in turmoil.

    Pastor Rawlings and his wife Sylvia made their way to Washington, D.C., on Saturday, November 15, while 250,000 protestors were in virtual control of the city’s streets and parks. The Washington Post headline the next day said, “Largest Rally in Washington History Demands End to Vietnam War.” There was a lingering hint of tear gas in the air and the remnants of torn and burned flags littering the ground. Other flags were prominent and not burned, but they bore only one star and just two stripes – the banner of the Viet Cong (National Liberation Front or “NLF”). The night before, 76 nearby buildings had been damaged, and nearly that many more would experience the same fate that day.

    The swarm on Washington had been organized by an outfit called the New Mobilization Committee. This group was the successor to the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which had been part of the infamous Chicago riots at the Democratic Convention in 1968. Basically, it was a leftist mosaic made up of people from Students For A Democratic Society (“SDS”), the Youth International Party (“Yippies”), and assorted fellow travelers.

    And though the “festivities” had ended late Saturday night, thousands remained in the streets overnight continuing to shout things like, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is Going to Win!” This made sleep that much more difficult for Rev. and Mrs. Rawlings.

    The couple enjoyed breakfast in the Mayflower’s restaurant, their waitress discreetly pointing out the famous “psychic”, Jeanne Dixon, who was sitting across the room near the booth where J. Edgar Hoover regularly ate lunch. This brush with celebrity would be nothing compared to the experience awaiting Harold and Sylvia when they arrived at the White House.

    They climbed a stairway to the second floor and were immediately met by the First Lady, Mrs. Pat Nixon, who invited them into the beautiful Yellow Oval Room, where they sat in Louis XVI style chairs. Tricia Nixon soon joined them, followed a few minutes later by President Nixon, who took Pastor Rawlings on a personal tour of the adjacent rooms, sharing details about their history. Nixon was in a great mood, no doubt bolstered some by the latest Gallup Poll showing that around 70% of Americans gave him high marks, this in the wake of his already famous “Silent Majority” speech a few days earlier.

    They then made their way to the East Room, with Sylvia taking her seat next to Mrs. Nixon and Tricia. President Nixon, as was the custom, opened the service, “After a very awesome display yesterday,” pausing briefly for effect, knowing that some would think he was referring to the demonstrations, he continued, “of football, we thought it would be proper to have someone here from Ohio.” Ever the football fan, he was referring to the Buckeyes’ 42-14 win over Purdue.

    Pastor Rawlings had been asked to suggest two hymns for the service and did so several weeks in advance, only to be called back by the White House and told, “President Nixon doesn’t know those – could you choose two others?” He did, and the service that day included the majestic strains of “All Hail The Power Of Jesus’ Name,” a song Nixon knew well. A choir from New York Avenue Presbyterian Church sang.

    The President then introduced Rawlings, who chose as his theme that day, “The World’s Most Amazing Book.” Many notables were in the crowd of about 350, including Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, Secretary of State William P. Rogers, Treasury Secretary David M. Kennedy, Labor Secretary George P. Schultz, and United States Senators Claiborne Pell, Mark Hatfield, John Sherman Cooper, Gale McGee, John Williams, and Charles Percy. And the service was broadcast live across the country via the Mutual Broadcasting System.

    “If men and women would spend more time in the serious study of the word of God,” said Rev. Rawlings, “earth’s questions would seem far less significant and heaven’s questions far more real.” He then quoted former President Eisenhower, among others. The great man had died eight months earlier and his life and career had intersected with Nixon’s so significantly.

    Rawlings affirmed that, “The Bible is not only good for the soul, but also for the body.” He illustrated this point with a moving story about a soldier in Vietnam, Army Private Roger Boe, who after being ambushed found an enemy bullet “lodged in his Bible, just short of the ammunition clip.” The preacher, describing America as “a haven for freedom and peace,” urged prayer, “to make us morally worthy of protection against outward aggression.” He also issued a reminder about praying for the men of Apollo12, at that moment racing through space, “our three astronauts that they might be blessed with safety and good health on their voyage to the moon.”

    During a recent conversation with Harold Rawlings, who is a long-time friend, he told me that following the service Chief Justice Burger told him that his sermon was “the kind of message America needed to hear.”

    A reception followed, with President and Mrs. Nixon personally introducing Rev. and Mrs. Rawlings to those filing by. Nixon, though, was at least a little bit in a hurry. He was going out to Robert F. Kennedy stadium that afternoon to see the Redskins play the Cowboys. In fact, this would itself be historic – the first time a sitting President of the United States attended a National Football League game. He was pulling for the home team, but conceded to a reporter that the Cowboys would come out on top, “I think they’ll win because of their running attack.”

    But it turned out that the Redskins lost because Sonny Jurgenson threw 4 interceptions – three of them in the fourth quarter. The one bright spot of the game for Nixon was the play of Ricky Harris, who returned a punt 83-yards for a touchdown – only to have it called back because of a penalty. Harris then intercepted a pass at a crucial moment – only to have Jurgensen then quickly proceed to throw his own interception (Harris these days sits every Sunday on the front row of the church I pastor.)

    Possibly, the fate of the Redskins that day was a harbinger of things to come that week for Mr. Nixon. The very next day, American newspapers first mentioned something about a massacre in Vietnam at a place called My Lai. And later that week, the President’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Clement Furman Haynsworth, was rejected by the Senate, 55-45.

    This just reinforces something else Teddy Roosevelt said about why people should go to church: “In this actual world, a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoffed at or ignored their religious needs, is a community on the rapid down grade.”

  • President Obama’s Vocal Minority Speech

    1 December 2009 and 3 November 1969: the desire to contain a vocal minority and the determination to mobilize a silent majority.

    I’ve looked at a lot of the coverage of the President’s speech at West Point last night, and, so far at least, no one seems to have noticed the precedent and example that is hiding in plain sight: Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” speech of 3 November 1969.

    Nixon was eleven months into his presidency forty years ago —just as Mr. Obama is eleven months and a week into his— when he went to the people to explain his plans for the war the nation was fighting in Vietnam.

    Both leaders used a highly-publicized and much-anticipated speech to explain the conduct of a war started by their predecessor(s); to separate themselves from that history; and to announce their new policies for ending the war and bringing peace.

    Both speeches were about the same length —4500 words. And both, based on the knowledge that the nation was divided and confused, and that there was a widespread feeling that the leaders hadn’t been leveling with the people, began with straightforward narratives of the story to that point.

    Nixon even listed the questions he would answer:

    How and why did America get involved in Vietnam in the first place?

    How has this administration changed the policy of the previous administration?

    What has really happened in the negotiations in Paris and on the battlefront in Vietnam?

    What choices do we have if we are to end the war?

    What are the prospects for peace?

    Obama recalled the brutal provocation of 9/11, the decisions that followed, the developments in Iraq, and the current situation in Afghanistan:

    Over the last several years, the Taliban has maintained common cause with al Qaeda, as they both seek an overthrow of the Afghan government.  Gradually, the Taliban has begun to control additional swaths of territory in Afghanistan, while engaging in increasingly brazen and devastating attacks of terrorism against the Pakistani people.

    Nixon mentioned his reservations about the way the war had been conducted:

    Now, many believe that President Johnson’s decision to send American combat forces to South Vietnam was wrong. And many others —I among them— have been strongly critical of the way the war has been conducted.

    Obama recalled his outright opposition:

    I opposed the war in Iraq precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force, and always consider the long-term consequences of our actions.

    Nixon mentioned the possibility —and acknowledged the temptation— of simply ending the war by blaming the administration that began it.

    From a political standpoint this would have been a popular and easy course to follow. After all, we became involved in the war while my predecessor was in office. I could blame the defeat which would be the result of my action on him and come out as the Peacemaker. Some put it to me quite bluntly: This was the only way to avoid allowing Johnson’s war to become Nixon’s war.

    But I had a greater obligation than to think only of the years of my administration and of the next election.

    Obama examined and refuted the arguments —within his own party— that he should wash his hands of the wars his predecessor started.  Indeed, he cited Vietnam in this regard:

    I recognize there are a range of concerns about our approach.  So let me briefly address a few of the more prominent arguments that I’ve heard, and which I take very seriously.

    First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam.  They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we’re better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing.  I believe this argument depends on a false reading of history.

    Both Nixon and Obama quoted Eisenhower — Nixon albeit indirectly and Obama to make the opposite point.  Nixon said:

    In 1963, President Kennedy, with his characteristic eloquence and clarity, said: “. . . we want to see a stable government there, carrying on a struggle to maintain its national independence.

    “We believe strongly in that. We are not going to withdraw from that effort. In my opinion, for us to withdraw from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Viet-Nam, but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there.”

    President Eisenhower and President Johnson expressed the same conclusion during their terms of office.

    Obama said:

    I’m mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who — in discussing our national security — said, “Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration:  the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.”

    The thirty-seventh President spoke of the great weight of his decisions as Commander in Chief:

    There are powerful personal reasons I want to end this war. This week I will have to sign 83 letters to mothers, fathers, wives, and loved ones of men who have given their lives for America in Vietnam. It is very little satisfaction to me that this is only one-third as many letters as I signed the first week in office. There is nothing I want more than to see the day come when I do not have to write any of those letters.

    I want to end the war to save the lives of those brave young men in Vietnam.

    As did the forty-fourth:

    As President, I have signed a letter of condolence to the family of each American who gives their life in these wars.  I have read the letters from the parents and spouses of those who deployed.  I visited our courageous wounded warriors at Walter Reed.  I’ve traveled to Dover to meet the flag-draped caskets of 18 Americans returning home to their final resting place.  I see firsthand the terrible wages of war.  If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow.

    So, no, I do not make this decision lightly.

    Although the two speeches —separated by forty years— shared many similarities, there were major differences between them in terms of substance, technique, and intention.

    At the core of both speeches, both Presidents presented essentially similar policies in radically different ways.  Nixon expounded on the Vietnamization that he had initiated earlier in the year:

    We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable. This withdrawal will be made from strength and not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.

    And Obama set out what amounted to a policy of Afghanization:

    The 30,000 additional troops that I’m announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 —the fastest possible pace— so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers.  They’ll increase our ability to train competent Afghan security forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight.  And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans.

    But Nixon was adamant about staying until the job was done and about keeping his counsel in the meantime:

    I have not and do not intend to announce the timetable for our program. And there are obvious reasons for this decision which I am sure you will understand. As I have indicated on several occasions, the rate of withdrawal will depend on developments on three fronts.

    While Obama was definitive about his timetable for disengagement.

    And as Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.  After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

    Nixon had written his speech entirely by himself at Camp David over the weekend before the Monday night on which he delivered it.  He did this partly because he considered the content so important, and partly because he was determined that none of it would leak in advance.  He took considerable satisfaction from the fact that what he said completely confounded the widespread speculations and predictions about what he would have to say.

    Obama’s speech was parceled out in leaks over the preceding several days; and the text was accurately reported twenty-four hours before the speech was delivered.  In the event, the delivery confirmed the expectations.

    Nixon read his speech in the Oval Office in the White House at 9.30 PM.  The glass-top desk was covered with a piece of brown baize and the only backdrop was the closed gold silk window curtains.  The Obama address, delivered using TelePrompter at 8.30 PM, was a highly staged and choreographed event in Eisenhower Hall at the United States Military Academy at West Point —the second largest auditorium east of the Mississippi (only Radio City Music Hall is bigger).  The event was opened with introductions and concluded with a crowd bath.

    The Nixon speech was intended to speak directly to the American people by going above the large and growing anti-war movement while going around its sympathizers and supporters in the media.  Nixon was convinced that “the great silent majority” of Americans would support his plan to end the war the way he proposed if only he could reach them and explain himself to them.

    His belief was justified by the phenomenal results of that single speech.  Overnight his poll ratings jumped from the high thirties to the high sixties, and the wind was at least temporarily sucked from the sails of the anti-war movement.

    The Obama speech, on one very important level, was a finely calibrated exercise at mollifying, or at least containing, the vocal minority of leaders and activists inside the president’s own party who want nothing to do with this or any war.

    Whether President Obama’s speech is as successful at containing the vocal minority as President Nixon’s was at mobilizing the silent majority will take at least a few more days to begin to figure out.

  • What does “Nixonian” mean?

    It seems to me that we are hearing the term “Nixonian” used more often these days. Most recently when TV pundits were talking about the Obama Administrations criticism of Fox News. They talked a great deal about the Obama folks having an enemies list and how they were acting very “Nixonian.” I know they weren’t being complimentary when they said it.

    I asked our in-house expert about this, the wonderful and wise Frank Gannon, and he had some interesting historic facts about the “enemies list.” It was originally a September 9, 1971 memo to John Dean, from Chuck Colson. It contained only 20 names. Mostly the reason they were on the list is because they were very, vocally, anti-Nixon. Dean took that original list and expanded it to over 200 names, mostly made up of people who were against the Vietnam war. He, Dean, has said publicly that he didn’t think President Nixon knew about the list. Then it surfaced during the “Watergate” hearings. Today, we are lead to believe the President wrote it himself. That is unfair and wrong.

    I have often referred to myself as a “Nixonian Republican” and I never considered that I was being unkind to myself when I used that description. My parents were life-long Republicans and my mother was proud to describe herself as a “Civil Righter.” Then, President Nixon’s leadership also shaped me and how I think. I AM a more moderate Republican than many of our party members today and using the term just meant exactly that. My more conservative friends don’t seem to hold it against me. There should be room for both mind-sets in our party. Wise counsel told us that we should agree to disagree agreeably!

    I went on Wikipedia to see what their description of “Nixonian” might be. What I read was very interesting. First of all, “one never self-identifies as a Nixonian.”

    Oh my, what about me? I even have a button that my daughter Marja made for me that says, “Proud Nixonian Republican.” I must admit that when I wore it at the 1988 RNC convention, certain folks looked at me like I had a communicable disease!

    The description goes on to say, “The term is most frequently used by Republicans to attack self-described moderates; when used by Democrats it is more apt to be used in the context of the Watergate scandal and the suggestion of Republican corruption.“

    OK, we already knew about that and live with it everyday here at the Richard Nixon Presidential Foundation.

    More from Wikipedia: “This moniker is based upon the administration of Richard Nixon, who ran in 1968 and 1972 as a conservative, only to enact unprecedented amounts of new regulations and government agencies, and expand federally provided social services. Among those were the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, implementation of price and wage controls to try to reduce inflation, and an unsuccessful attempt to provide a guaranteed minimum income to taxpayers.”

    Hey! Isn’t this the Legacy we want everyone to know about? Now that’s NIXONIAN, and it’s a good thing.

    I’ve been spending some time as a volunteer in the Museum Shop at the Library. It is fun and a great opportunity to chat with visitors and find out why they chose to visit. Their reasons are overwhelmingly positive and that’s heartwarming to hear. Last week I looked up from the cash register to see John and Marilyn Wilbur walking toward me. We were classmates at the University of Arizona and Marilyn and I were Delta Gamma Pledge sisters in the spring of 1956. What could be more fun than that? After they toured the Library, they said they “had forgotten what a great President he was.” So, it seems, have a heck of a lot of other people. That’s the mission ahead as I see it: remind the people and focus on the Legacy of the 37th President of the United States.

    Tell me what you think. How should we work to take back the Nixonian label? Maybe the RN Foundation web-site could have a “Nixonian Moment,” or “Nixonianisms of Note” posted now and then. I for one would love to see it become a description to be proud of again.

  • Healthcare Reform, Then And Now

    Jason Schafrin, a young economist trained at UCSD, breaks down RN’s 1974 message to Congress and proposal for a comprehensive health insurance plan, and compares it to President Obama’s current plan:

    • “Today the need [for reform] is even more pressing because of the higher costs of medical care.”  Obama echoes this sentiment.
    • “…the 25 million Americans who remain uninsured.”  Nixon hoped to expand coverage for the 25 million Americans who, in 1974 who did not have health insurance.  He planned to do this using with the creation of “Assisted Health Insurance, covering low-income persons.”  In 2009, there are 46 million uninsured Americans.  Obama also proposes using tax credits to help poor and middle class individuals afford private insurance.  Obama also proposes a public option.
    • “Americans who do carry health insurance often lack coverage which is balanced, comprehensive and fully protective.”  Health insurance was originally created as protection against serious illnesses and hospital stays.  Routine physician visits were not covered.  This often meant that check-up and preventive care was not covered and Nixon wanted to expand the scope of insurance coverage.  In the present day, most individuals who have insurance have relatively comprehensive health insurance.  In fact, as a reaction to the expanding scope of present day health insurance, Republicans support HSAs which use high deductibles to transfer more of the cost of care towards the individual patient.
    • Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan (CHIP).  This was Nixon’s solution to the problem that many individuals who had insurance had only partial insurance.  It basically expands the scope of insurance coverage. In the present day, most individuals who do have insurance have relatively comprehensive coverage.
    • “Third, it builds on the strength and diversity of our existing public and private systems of health financing and harmonizes them into an overall system.”  Nixon’s CHIP plan aims to provide subsidies for health insurance and aims to reform health care, but will not overhaul the system (à la a single payer system or the elimination of Medicare in exchange for all private insurance).  Obama’s currently proposes reforms to the current system that also builds on the existing healthcare infrastructure.
    • “Fourth, it uses public funds only where needed and requires no new Federal taxes.”  Nixon claims that his plan will not use any new taxes.  Obama did not claim he would not raise taxes, but did assert that “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits.”  However, the government’s spending on health care as a share of GDP has accelerated over time.  This was true in Nixon’s time, is true now, and most expert believe it will continue into the future.
    • “Sixth, it encourages more effective use of our health care resources.”  Obama wants to “eliminate is the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud” as well as “create an independent commission of doctors and medical experts charged with identifying more waste in the years ahead.”  More effective use of health care resources was, is and will continue to be a laudable goal; actually realizing these efficiency gains in practice, however, is more difficult.
    • “No family would ever have annual out-of-pocket expenses for covered health services in excess of $1,500, and low-income families would face substantially smaller expenses.”  Nixon planned a cap on patient annual out-of-pocket costs.  Currently, Nixon’s proposal has become commonplace.  Most group health insurance plans offer an out-of-pocket cap as does Medicare and Medicaid.  However, for non-group health insurance, these caps are often not available.  Obama proposed that health insurance companies “…will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime.”
    • “Medicare, however, does not cover outpatient drugs, nor does it limit total out-of-pocket costs.”  Nixon believed that Medicare should cover drug costs and limit out-of-pocket costs.  Medicare does limit out-of-pocket costs and, with the creation of Medicare Part D, most prescription drug costs are covered for seniors.
    • COST: “the total new costs…would be about $6.9 billion.” Obama’s plan would cost “$900 billion over ten years.”
    • Nixon wanted to “increase the supply of physicians.” Nixon believed that increasing the supply of physicians will drive down costs as competition increases.  With patient paying less and less money out of pocket, this may no longer hold.  If supplier-induced demand exists, an increase in the supply of physicians will increase demand and costs and not necessarily decrease prices.  Obama did not discuss physician shortages in his speech.
    • “On December 29, 1973, I signed into law legislation designed to stimulate, through Federal aid, the establishment of prepaid comprehensive care organizations.”  HMOs now control a significant portion of the health insurance market.
    • “I also contemplate in my proposal a provision that would place health services provided under CHIP under the review of Professional Standards Review Organizations. These PSRO’s would be charged with maintaining high standards of care and reducing needless hospitalization.“ This is similar to Obama’s “independent commission of doctors and medical experts charged with identifying more waste in the years ahead.”

  • Mass Appeal

    Unguided Missal? Mass composer Leonard Bernstein in 1971.

    Last week on The New Yorker’s website, music critic Alex Ross wrote three articles based on newly released Freedom of Information Act-obtained government documents regarding inquiries into composer-conductor-polymath Leonard Bernstein’s politics. They include an 800-page FBI file, memos from the Nixon White House Special Investigation Unit (aka Plumbers), and several taped conversations between RN and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman regarding the impending premiere of Bernstein’s Mass at the opening of the Kennedy Center in September 1971.

    Alex Ross is to music what Pauline Kael was to movies. Both New Yorker critics share a commuunicable enthusiasm for their subject, an unintimidating expertise, and a ravishing prose style. In his New Yorker columns, on his blog, and in The Rest Is Noise, his recent best selling history of modern music, Mr. Ross renders the uncompromisingly unlistenable relentlessly readable.

    And the Bernstein material he has uncovered is fascinating enough in itself.

    The inquiries into the young conductor’s politics began with the Truman White House’s request to the FBI for an ideological vetting:

    Although Hoover’s operatives began tracking Bernstein’s left-wing activities as early as the mid-nineteen-forties, the first serious inquiry came in March, 1949, when David Niles, President Truman’s administrative assistant, asked the Bureau to look into the young musician’s background. Niles wanted the information because Truman and Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel, were scheduled to attend an event at which Bernstein was slated to perform. A memo from D. M. Ladd to Hoover states that Bernstein was “connected, affiliated, or in some manner associated” with various organizations described as Communist fronts…

    Director Hoover found the file’s contents insufficient to merit his endorsement (“This phraseology means nothing + most certainly I can’t send to W. H. [the White House] such ambiguous + sweeping statements.”), so Mr. Niles was back at square one.  In the event, Bernstein conducted and Truman sent his regrets.

    In 1951, Bernstein’s name turned up on the Prominent Individuals Section of the Security Index — apparently a list of people who would be rounded up in the event of war with the USSR. In 1953, in order for the State Department to renew his passport, Bernstein had to submit an 11-page affidavit swearing that he had never been a member of the Communist Party or knowingly engaged in any communist-friendly activities.

     

    From the Ross Bernstein documents: Leonard Bernstein’s Truman era Security Index Card.

    A thorough FBI investigation, in 1954-55, yielded no hard evidence to contradict Bernstein’s affidavit—only “hearsay,” according to a memo dated August, 1955. Yet the FBI continued to collect accusations and insinuations. In 1958, one informant stated: “I know that Bernstein is a card-carrying Communist but I have no proof of it but I can tell by the way he talks.”

    The thin record —ranging from soulless bureaucratese to squirrely handwritten denunciations— was typical of the times; today it makes dispiriting, albeit fascinating, reading. Looking back at his long life, nineteen years after the Maestro’s death, it’s easy to see that the prodigiously talented Bernstein, when it came to politics, was an enthusiastic idealist; and, for all his great sophistication, an idealistic naïf.

    After flying under the FBI’s radar for several years, Bernstein re-emerged in 1968 —with LBJ now in the White House— as a result of his ardent flirtation with the Black Panthers.

    Although at first only those on the FBI’s need-to-know distribution list were kept abreast of the Bernsteins’ Panthermania, before long —on 8 June 1970 to be exact— the world would read about it in Tom Wolfe’s devastating New York Magazine piece “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.”  Thanks to Wolfe’s kandy-kolored prose, the Bernsteins’ unironic earnestness was soon common knowledge and the subject of national mockery.

     

    The Kennedy Center: The Wall Street Journal’s review of its 1971 opening said: “Unfortunately, a perfect opening may be one of the few things the Kennedy Center will have going for it.  Its monumental building which has been described by one well-known critic as “gemutlich Speer,” is, not to put too fine a point on it, awesome but cold.  It is in the style of the Soviet palaces of science and culture, and the dizzying halls of states and nations convey a distinct feeling of the Moscow underground.”

    After the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy decided that the only monument in Washington to her late husband’s memory would be the cultural center —the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts— to be built on the banks of the Potomac.

    She commissioned Bernstein —a longtime Kennedy friend and unquestionably the nation’s preeminent conductor and composer— to write a major original work, to be paid for by the late President’s family, for the opening of the Center.   His initial idea was to compose a traditional Requiem mass in the tradition of Mozart, Verdi, and Faure.

    But, being Bernstein, he soon fastened on a less conventional approach. The result, very accurately titled Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers, was a hybrid of the concert hall and the Broadway stage, with a thick gloss of ‘60s Greening of America schmalz.

    As the Alex Ross New Yorker articles show, there was some concern in the Nixon White House about the advisability of RN’s attending the Kennedy Center’s opening.

    The press and TV, not surprisingly, were obsessed with the long-anticipated event.   Although Mrs. Kennedy had become Mrs. Onassis in the meantime, this would represent the refurling of Camelot’s flag in the heart of Nixonian Washington.  There was serious speculation devoted to whether Mrs. Onassis and/or President Nixon would attend; and, if they both did, about how that would be choreographed. There was also considerable grousing in the predictable circles that RN, by attending, would be intruding where he certainly wasn’t wanted and arguably didn’t belong.

    Further, Bernstein and “sources close to Mass” had been hinting and leaking stories about the work in progress (which continued to be in progress right up to the premiere) that the event would be as much political as artistic.  There was speculation that the composer would use this Mass —with its likely captive audience of national leaders— as his means of speaking antiwar truth to power.

     

    “Nixon + Jackie and Joe Blow”:  Bernstein made notes about Mass at the McDowell Colony in 1970.  Regarding The Communion (the Kiss of Peace) he wrote: “Something should happen that turns the militancy to love.  For me the Communion and the Kiss of Peace are not two things, but one: the kiss is the communion and should pass through the whole company in a ritual way, + be somehow transmitted on through the house, to Nixon + Jackie and Joe Blow — What music?  Quiet chorale, or big gay sound?”

    The upshot was an FBI memo —dated 16 August 1971, roughly three weeks before opening night— on the subject: “PROPOSED PLANS OF ANTIWAR ELEMENTS TO EMBARRASS THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.”  The memo’s purpose was set out in the first paragraph:

    To advise that information regarding a previously reported plot by Leonard Bernstein, conductor and composer, to embarrass the President and other Government official through an antiwar and anti-Government musical composition to be played at the dedication of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has been reported by the press.

    The report in question was from Human Events that “rumors are sweeping Washington” that Bernstein would embarrass RN with an anti-administration bombshell.  It was noted that he had met in jail with the anti-war Jesuit Daniel Berrigan, who was serving a three year sentence for destroying draft files, and who was rumored to be a collaborator on the Mass’s Latin libretto.

    As Bernstein’s working notes show, he had, indeed, received advice from Fr. Berrigan, and had originally considered writing “4 Lullabies for Martyrs” (JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X).  The “Epistle” —the produced Mass’s most explicitly political section— intersperses quotations from Second Timothy with letters from an imprisoned draft resister.

    So the fact that this highly public and potentially politically sensitive event was the subject of discussion among RN and his staff isn’t surprising.

    Robert Mardian, then head of the DOJ’s Internal Security Division, wrote a memo summarizing the situation as the premiere approached.  He paid particular attention to the Bernstein-Berrigan visit at the Danbury Correctional Institution on 25 May 1971.

    One could surmise that this visit by Bernstein was in connection with his “Mass,” particularly when considered in the light of information circulation within the pro-Berrigan camp to the effect that Bernstein has requested Father Berrigan to compose words for the “Mass” in Latin and it would follow an antiwar theme.  If this is true, consider the implications and the publicity which would accrue to the antiwar movement if this “Mass” were to be politely applauded by high ranking Government officials who undoubtedly will attend the dedication ceremonies at the Kennedy Center and who probably are not conversant in Latin.

    Mardian concluded:

    The fact that two such controversial figures as Bernstein and Father Berrigan are collaborating on the dedication program should appear to offer sufficient reason for inquiries as to just what mischief they are up to.  It would also be interesting to know just how Father Berrigan’s contribution to this “Mass” is to be furnished to Bernstein — openly through regular channels, or clandestinely.

    The Mardian memo reached Pat Buchanan, who sent it to the Domestic Council’s Bud Krogh.  Buchanan wrote: “My view is that we ought to find someone who can definitely translate that Latin Mass Bernstein is working on — to make sure this is accurate.”  And he had someone in mind: “”get us a good Jesuit to translate, maybe Father McLaughlin…”  This was John McLaughlin, a friend of Buchanan’s, who had recently joined the White House speechwriting staff.

    Coincidentally, two weeks before, Krogh had been tasked with tracking down information regarding the leak of the Pentagon Papers (which had first appeared on the front page of The New York Times on 13 June).  Mr. Ross, understandably but incorrectly, assumes that this was common knowledge and explains why Krogh was given this assignment — an assumption supported by the fact that Krogh in turn tasked his new aide G. Gordon Liddy with obtaining a copy of the Mass’s libretto.  What Buchanan more likely had in mind when he wrote “we should be able to get a copy of what he is preparing — there will have to be rehearsals,” was Krogh’s Domestic Council responsibility for matters involving the District of Columbia.

    Mr. Ross writes —correctly— that “Several personalities involved in this exchange of memos had ties to the White House’s Special Investigations Unit, better known as the Plumbers, and later to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CREEP, which” —incorrectly— “organized the Watergate break-in of 1972.”  (The break-in emerged full-blown from the pervervid brain of G. Gordon Liddy, under the patronage of John Dean, and with the acquiescence of Jeb Magruder and, alas at least temporarily, John Mitchell; its only —tangential— CREEP connection was the presence of CRP employee James McCord among the burglars.)

    Liddy, on 6 August, reported that he had met with White House Counsel John Dean —the spider at the center of so many webs—who “stated that his office had had the matter for more than a week and obtained a copy of the Mass.  Dean stated that it is definitely anti-war and anti-establishment, etc.”

    On 9 August Haldeman told RN that Fr. McLaughlin’s opinion, rather than reflecting Dean’s dire judgment, was simply that Mass would be “very depressing.”   Reporting on a preview performance of Mass on 7 September, Haldeman answered RN’s question “Is it an opera?” by simply saying that it was “weird.”  The next day Haldeman reported that, while some passages were spectacular, others were “atonal-type music.”

    As is clear from the several tapes Mr. Ross excerpts in his third post (”Bernstein in the Nixon Tapes“), RN’s conversations with Haldeman have mostly to do with the media minefields involved in attending —and thereby imposing Presidential protocol on— what would clearly otherwise be a Kennedy celebration.  (As it turned out to be.  Following the performance, Rose Kennedy presented Bernstein with a commemorative medal.)

    The Solomonic solution they worked out was that RN would give the Presidential Box to Mrs. Onassis for Wednesday night’s opening of the Opera House with the Mass she had commissioned for the occasion.

    And on the following, Thursday, night, RN would attend the National Symphony’s opening of the Center’s Concert Hall.

    On 9 September, Haldeman informed RN that The New York Times’ review of Mass, by the paper’s chief music critic Harold Schonberg, would apparently “kick it around,” calling the work superficial and overplayed.  In fact, Schoenberg —who had been no friend of Bernstein’s for some time— pulled out all the stops when it came to Mass.  In the Sunday paper he called it “A combination of superficiality and pretentiousness, and the greatest mélange of styles since the ladies’ magazine recipe for steak fried in peanut butter and marshmallow sauce.”

    Haldeman reported Len Garment’s opinion that it is “quite spectacular theater” but, as a combination of West Side Story, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Hair, “it’s got a lot of lousy stuff in it.”

    Most of Mass’s reviews ranged from lukewarm to underwhelmed; many were downright hostile.  Among the major national publications, the only glowing review appeared in The Wall Street Journal. And that review was written by, of all people, a new member of the Nixon White House staff —only on board since 2 August— who was working in the small room he shared with Dick Cheney in Don Rumsfeld’s second floor West Wing suite.

    On the night of Wednesday, 8 September, this newly-minted aide was in the Kennedy Center’s Opera House for the premiere of Mass.  And on the 10th, his fulsome review appeared in the Journal.

    And that fellow was…..me.

    I had been reviewing books for the Journal for a couple of years, and had contributed a few theater reviews before moving to Washington to begin a White House Fellowship.  I had suggested the Mass reviewing gig, and the paper, which hadn’t planned to  note the occasion, had been able to make last minute arrangements for a single ticket.

    I opened my review noting that Mrs. Onassis, by deciding not to turn up for the opening, had succeeded in making herself the center of attention.

    The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts should have achieved its apotheosis at its opening on Wednesday night.

    Everything was right for a unique and moving moment in American history.  The opening piece was Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” which was commissioned by Mrs. Kennedy soon after the President’s death.  It was the right choice of music from the right composer.

    So for the opening of this center, the late President’s memorial in Washington, the sole, but crucial, missing element was Mrs. Onassis herself.  By suddenly deciding not to attend, she did exactly what she said she was trying to avoid, and for many people turned the opening night into yet another Jackie-watch.  Would she or wouldn’t she?  She didn’t, and “Mass” was thus robbed of the real presence it needed to consecrate the hall.

    Because for all its musical interest and worth, “Mass” was of necessity a piece d’occasion.  This center is the memorial by which John F. Kennedy will be remembered.  Now, short years later, when historians are already placing him in a troubled and critical perspective is the time to recall and commemorate that vision and spirit which he represented and embodied.

    Then I plunged right in praising Mass:

    Mr. Bernstein’s work…is a complex, convoluted, striking, rollicking, stunning work of art.  It is also very beautiful, both to hear and to look at.  The concept itself is not perhaps as original as it must have been when he first began work on it.  Indeed, it is now almost a genre piece, and as such it will undoubtedly be weighed and found wanting by many.  Hard rockers will find it inferior to the Electric Prune’s “Mass in F Minor”; the general public will find it less appealing and catchy than “Jesus Christ Superstar”; and theater-goers will find it far less stimulating than “Hair.”

    And yet it is the mixed-media masterpiece toward which Mr. Bernstein’s theatrical and musical careers have been pointing.  Echoes of all the best that have gone before are here fulfilled; his broad and deep theological vision, already indicated in his first (Jeremiah) and third (Kaddish) symphonies; his exquisite solo settings in the lamentation and kaddish of the symphonies and in the stunning “Chichester Psalms”; his popular melodic and rhythmic command in “West Side Story.”

    Mass opens simply, with the Celebrant strumming a guitar and singing “A Simple Song.”  This clip is from a staged concert performance in August 2007 in Riga, Latvia.  The Celebrant is Douglas Webster; the conductor is Maris Sirmais.

    At least to my ears, the Latin text turned out to be mostly in Broadway ballad-friendly English.

    The texts of the “Mass” are from the Roman liturgy with additions by the composer and the young author of “Godspell,” Stephen Schwartz.  But Mr. Bernstein’s hand is the most heavily present; the same kind of almost embarrassingly naïve and obvious lyrics which marked his opera “Trouble in Tahiti” are here, but here they are serving a vision so grand and towering that they seem to give it both an impetus of sincerity and a comforting human touch.

    Gordon Davidson impressively and theatrically marshaled the cast of two hundred — including Alvin Ailey’s dancers, a brass band, and a massed choir — and kept the almost two hour intermissionless production from ever being “depressing.”  But there was no doubt that it was —as befits a requiem— serious bordering on sombre.

    This “Mass” is in fact an anguished cry about our loss of faith.  The Gloria is a quiet little song regretting that the girl doesn’t ever seem to say Gloria any more; and the Credo is a driving lament that the man can no longer say “I believe.”  The Agnus Dei becomes a fierce, almost revolutionary red-lit surging, stopping demand for the peace promised: dona nobis pacem.  At the end a Mahleresque flute birdsong and the plainsung voice of a child restore the hope if not the faith for the final whispered Pax Tecum and the moving choral communion.  The text is full of word-plays in Latin, English, Greek and Hebrew.  “Accidents Do Happen,” sung during the consecration after the host and wine have been dropped, is perhaps the most obvious if not the best.

    There are, to be sure, moments of excess and even a few of pure hoke, but in a work of this size and scale these are inevitable and piddling.  The insight Mr. Bernstein has shown into the mass and our times is uncanny and overwhelming; it is also very sophisticated and can hardly be justly judged on the basis of one viewing of this really razzmatazz theater show.

    My review appeared on Friday, so I was able to include the Thursday night Concert Hall opening (which I hadn’t attended):

    In the concert hall, which opened last night, President and Mrs. Nixon were treated to a program that would have been solid midweek subscription concert series fare for a good municipal orchestra.  Like “La Grande Scene,” the center’s expensive restaurant, whose menu is entirely in French, the National Symphony under Antal Dorati chose a wholly non-American program.  Is it parochial or foolish patriotic to have preferred hearing Leontyne Price singing Samuel Barber, Gershwin’s “Concerto in F”, and, say, and Ives symphony, to hearing “the Rite of Spring” for the Nth time, however well played?  Some of the center’s future fare is similarly prosaic or unaccountably exotic, and whether the center will be a viable economic proposition at the box-office will remain, anxiously, to be seen.  Be that as it may, it is now well and truly opened.

     

    Before the kissing had to start: Leonard Bernstein, flanked (left) by director Gordon Davidson and co-lyricist Stephen Schwartz, takes a curtain call following the premiere of Mass at the Kennedy Center on 8 September 1971.

    Bernstein’s notes for Mass reflect some of the advice given by Daniel Berrigan: “Father Dan said today: Leave them with the militant mood. You yell at them and turn off the lights.”  In fact, the ending Bernstein chose for Mass was exactly the opposite: a serenely moving, all but unaccompanied, choral hymn.

    Almighty Father, incline thine ear.
    Bless us and all those who have gathered here.
    They angels send us,
    Who shall defend us all:
    And fill with grace
    All who dwell in this place.
    Amen.

    A dozen years later —in 1984— the overture had already begun at a preview of a Broadway musical when three people arrived, late, to take the adjacent seats.  As I stood to let them pass I summoned up my best “if looks could kill” look — and found that I was bestowing it upon Adolph Comden, Betty Green, and Leonard Bernstein, who took the seat next to me.

    At the intermission I introduced myself to him as a long-time admirer.  To set myself apart in that vast category, I said that, although I doubted he would remember it, I had written The Wall Street Journal’s review of Mass.  He smiled warmly, claimed to remember it, and said “Let me buy you a drink.”  (Reading my review last week, a friend said, “For that review he should have bought you a car.”)

    Despite its critical drubbing —with the one noted notable exception— Mass found an immediate popular audience; in fact, it remains the best-selling multi-disc classical recording of all time.  Of the three currently available recordings, my favorite is the contemporaneous studio recording conducted by the composer and featuring the original cast. In 2004 Kent Nagano, and earlier this year Kristjan Jarvi released their versions.  On 25 August, Marin Alsop’s much-awaited Baltimore Symphony recording will be available; she prepared it as part of her 2008 Bernstein season celebrating what would have been her mentor’s 90th birthday.

    There is also a DVD of a 1999 performance at Vatican City.

  • Palin, Nixon, And The “Secret Plan”

    At CQ Politics, Jonathan Allen contrasts Sarah Palin and Richard Nixon.  “Palin doesn’t have Nixon’s interest in, or knowledge of, foreign affairs,” he writes. “Imagine the reaction if Palin suggested she had a “secret plan” to win the war in Afghanistan.”  He is undoubtedly right on his major point, but I must nitpick the second sentence. As Frank Gannon and yours truly have noted on this site, RN never said that he had a secret plan to win the war in Vietnam.  That urban legend started with a wire report that inaccurately paraphrased his comments at a town meeting.

    The CQ article links to a piece that acknowledges this point, while suggesting that RN let the myth stand during the 1968 campaign because it worked to his advantage.  Actually, as Nixon speechwriter Raymond Price has written:  “We on the Nixon staff immediately pointed out, to all who would listen, that he had not claimed a `plan.’ Nixon himself told reporters that if he had one, he would have given it to President Johnson.”  Nelson Rockefeller kept the canard alive as a way of attacking Nixon.  Richard Reeves reported in the New York Times on March 19, 1968:

    When he has been alone with friends, Mr. Rockefeller has scornfully mocked Mr. Nixon by patting his suit pocket and saying that he keeps a peace plan there while hundreds of Americans die each week in Vietnam. The Governor has said that he will ‘pound away’ at Mr. Nixon’s secret plan during the Oregon campaign.

  • Helen Gahagan Douglas Redux

    I apologize in advance for the shameless bit of name dropping that is about to take place…..but I remember asking Henry Fonda why he so disliked RN — was it because of Vietnam (the conversation took place the spring of 1972) or the economy or something else?

    I was prepared for almost any answer other than the one I received.

    He thought for a moment and said: “No, I think he’s trying to end the war as fast as he can, and I don’t think the President has that much impact on the economy. But I would go anywhere and do anything I could to stop Richard Nixon because I will never forget or forgive what he did to Helen Gahagan Douglas.”

    The bitterness of that 1950 Senate campaign lived on —indeed, lives on— and tonight, at the Landmark Theatre in Los Angeles, a screening of the Palin-Biden debate will be followed by a staged reading of the play Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Helen Gahagan Douglas, written by Michele Willens and Wendy Kout.

    The production will feature Wendie Malick as Mrs. Douglas, Charles Shaughnessy as Mr. (actor Melvyn) Douglas, Patrick Breen as RN, and Michael Dutra as everyone else (in this case including HST, LBJ, and JFK).

    It’s a benefit sponsored by, among others, John Cusask, Robert Redford, Tim Daly, Gore Vidal, and Mike Farrell.  The event will also honor Paul Newman, and the proceeds from the $100 ducats will go to The Nation magazine.

    I can’t say that the description of the work on the Landmark Theatre’s website exactly bodes well for accuracy or objectivity:

    Historians say that politics as we know it changed as a result of a California Senate race in 1950. That’s when a young Richard Nixon falsely accused his opponent, the beautiful, three term liberal congresswoman and ex-Broadway and opera star, Helen Gahagan Douglas, of being a Communist. Nixon earned the name “Tricky Dick,” Helen was dubbed the “Pink Lady.” He ascended to the Presidency… until Watergate. She was forgotten… until now. This four actor (one plays multiple roles) play, set in Hollywood and Washington D.C., builds to that dirty, dramatic race while telling the cautionary personal tale of Helen, a flawed and remarkable heroine.

    I understand that this is hype.  But, even so…..

    • I’m sure that there have been a few —or even, given the numbers of historians, many— historians who say that politics as we know it changed as a result of the Nixon-Douglas race.  But they would be very myopic (and, frankly, very poor) historans indeed.   It was a colorful and, in terms of RN’s subsequent career, a consequential race — but not much more than that.
    • It is simply not true on any reading of the facts that RN accused Mrs. Douglas “of being a Communist”.
    • Nor is it really true that she has been forgotten until now.  She was quite active and vocal and lionized for many years until her death in 1980 and her memory has lived on as one of the earliest victims of Nixonian mendacity.

    However, there’s no question that it’s a highly dramatic story with lots of vivid characters and flashpoints, so there’s no reason that it shouldn’t make a smashing play — and maybe that’s just what will unfold on stage at the Landmark tonight.  We’ll have to wait for the reviews to find out.

     

    Helen Douglas was born in New Jersey in 1900.  She was a major star of Broadway musicals in the 1920s.  In 1931 she married actor Melvyn Douglas and moved to California.  She only made one movie —1935’s adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s exotic story She (as in “she who must be obeyed”).

    Her liberal political activism in Hollywood brought her to the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt who introduced her to the President.  In 1943 she was elected to the House of Representatives and from her earliest days in Washington she was welcome at the White House.  As Robert Caro has chronicled, during those years she carried on an open affair with Lyndon Johnson; indeed, they lived together while their respective spouses remained at home.

    In 1948 she was elected to her third House term, and in 1950 she decided to challenge the incumbent two term Democrat, Sheridan Downey, for his seat in the U.S. Senate.  This was a no less bold or even shocking move in those days than it would be now.  The aggressiveness of her attacks led to conflict within the Democratic party and put steel in Downey’s back (he had been suffering from an ulcer and had considered not standing for re-election).

    Helen Gahagan Douglas was a quintessential unreconstructed left-liberal New Dealer who was instinctively anti-communist but who felt equally strongly that communism represented no meaningful threat to American security or interests.  Her votes (for the Marshall Plan but against Truman Plan aid to Greece or Turkey) reflected this kind of dichotomy.  Within the context of the times it made her vulnerable to criticism and attack from the center and right of her own party as well as from the Republicans.  It also placed her clearly outside the mainstream of public opinion in California and the nation.

     

    She was one of only twenty congresspersons of either party to vote against the McCarran-Wood bill requiring registration of communists.  This may be viewed as a highly principled act — but principles can’t logically be adduced post facto as reasons for contemporary immunity from political consequences.

    She also took sides on State-related issues that, while undoubtedly also principled, were unquestionably also controversial.  She was, for example, the only member of the California delegation opposed to the return of the offshore oil-rich tidelands to the State.  And she was one of a small minority on the highly-charged issues involving land ownership and water rights.

    Perhaps it was her show business temperament —where she was used to being a star and receiving star treatment— or perhaps too much of her “she who must be obeyed” role had rubbed off, but whatever the reasons she was not known for her collegial approach to an institution that was, above all else, intensely collegial.

    There was also, no doubt, an element of outright chauvinism at work.  At best she would have been less than welcome as a woman in what was resolutely a man’s world.  That she wasn’t even a compliant or retiring woman would have been further held against her.

    As RN recorded in RN:

    Mrs. Douglas was a handsome woman with a dramatic presence.  She had many fans among the public and many admirers in the press and in the entertainment industry, but she was not, to put it mildly, the most popular member of the House of Representatives.  Generally, when two members of the House run against each other for another office their fellow congressmen maintain a friendly attitude and wish both of them well.  But in our case, even many of the House Democrats let me know that they hoped I could defeat Helen Douglas.

    One afternoon in 1950, I was working in my office when Dorothy Cox, my personal secretary, came in and said, “Congressman Kennedy is here and would like to talk to you.”

    Jack Kennedy was ushered in and I motioned him into a chair.  He took an envelope from his breast pocket and handed it to me.   “Dick, I know you’re in for a pretty rough campaign,” he said, “and my father wanted to help out.”

    We talked for a while about the campaign.  As he rose to leave, he said, “I obviously can’t endorse you, but it isn’t going to break my heart if you can turn the Senate’s loss into Hollywood’s gain.”

    After he left I opened the envelope and found it contained a $1,000 contribution.   Three days after I won in November, Kennedy told an informal gathering of professors and students at Harvard that he was personally very happy that I had defeated Mrs. Douglas.

    President Truman had his reservations about Mrs. Douglas, and although he sent many representatives and Cabinet members to campaign for her, he canceled his own scheduled appearances.

     

    When Sheridan Downey’s ulcer finally forced him to withdraw from the campaign in March, he was immediately replaced by the maverick Los Angeles newspaper publisher Manchester Boddy.  Downey was so bitter about what he referred to as the “vicious and unethical propaganda” Mrs. Douglas had used against him that he said she was unqualified to be a Senator and remained uninvolved in the campaign (despite Truman’s requests for reconciliation).

    Boddy, who had supported her congressional campaigns, called her an extremist and issued a detailed comparison of her voting record with that of New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio, who was considered to be the gold standard of sympathy with socialist and communist causes.

    The primary was held in June and RN received one million votes; Mrs. Douglas 890,000; and Manchester Boddy 535,000.  Twenty-two percent of Democratic voters crossed over and voted for RN, compared with thirteen percent of Republican crossovers who voted for her.

    After Mrs. Douglas won the primary, the Nixon campaign adopted the Boddy campaign’s Marcantonio ad in toto and reprinted it on pink stock.  It became known as “the pink sheet” and was widely seen (and, in liberal quarters, disparaged) as an example of a Nixon smear.  The fact that the substance of the charges had emerged from the Democratic Party’s own primary fight was ignored as an inconvenient truth in the high dudgeon over the color of the paper.

    It has also conveniently been forgotten that Mrs. Douglas, presumably intending to frame the issue in her favor with a preemptive strike, fired the first mud salvo.  Before the Nixon campaign had even powered up, she called him a “demagogue” who was selling “fear and…..nice, unadulterated fascism.”  Her literature denigrated him as a “Peewee trying to frighten people so that they are too afraid to turn out the lights.”  She referred to “the backwash of Republican young men in dark shirts” at a time when such words were still recent and potent references to Hitler’s brown and Mussolini’s black shirted thugs.  Her campaign put out rumors that Pat Nixon was a lapsed Catholic.

    And Mrs. Douglas even had her own rather bizarre version of the “pink sheet”.   The “yellow sheet” was a handbill printed on yellow stock in which she claimed that it was Nixon whose record actually matched the controversial Marcantonio’s.  There were some instances in which this was literally true; but, as a campaign ploy, this was, not to put too fine a point on it, just plain weird.

    The decision to attack —and to attack first— turned out to be a major miscalculation.  It seemed to prevent her own campaign from defining itself, and it undoubtedly shaped the Nixon camp’s response.  Whatever excesses RN may (or may not) have committed, it should at least be remembered who first crossed that muddy Rubicon.

     

    Most of these have been largely forgotten. But there is one still-lingering legacy of the 1950 Senate campaign: Mrs. Douglas’s memorable labeling of RN as “Tricky Dick”.

    There is no doubt that the campaign included heated, intense, and, occasionally, distasteful levels of excess on both sides.  Even the judicious Herbert Parmet concludes that Mrs. Douglas’ “campaign operators operated with the élan of apprentice butchers and the tactics of desperation.”  But because (a) RN won and (b) RN was RN, the parity of blame has been all but universally overlooked.

    The nature of public discourse at the time —and particularly where questions of New Deal liberalism and communist influence in Washington were concerned— was generally hyperbolic and often extreme.  But a lot of the phrases and epithets that are cringe-making by today’s standards were pretty much par for the course back in the day, and should be analyzed in that context.

    I remember being invited to dinner one night at La Casa Pacifica in 1977 when the Nixons were entertaining James and Mary Roosevelt.  James —“Jimmy”— was FDR’s eldest son; he had run unsuccessfully for Governor against the two-term incumbent Earl Warren in 1950; and he had stood in for Mrs. Douglas when she decided to stay in Washington rather than face RN in the first of their three scheduled public debates.

    Jimmy Roosevelt laughed as he remembered how he had been pressed into service at the last minute, and how typical that had been of Mrs. Douglas’s high handed personal manner and generally badly run campaign.  He said that he hadn’t had enough time to prepare, but that even if he had, his heart wasn’t really in it.

    Mrs. Douglas walked out of the third debate after she had made her own speech, so she only faced off with RN once — in a debate that he handily won. Another Roosevelt figured in that second (the only face-to-face) debate, when RN created quite a stir and achieved something of a coup by holding up a letter and announcing that it was an endorsement of him by Mrs. Roosevelt.  He read it all through before he reached the punchline — the signature was “Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.”.

    I later had the opportunity to interview the legendary lawyer, civic leader, and Democratic power broker Paul Ziffren, who had been one of the managers of Mrs. Douglas’s ’50 campaign.  He reminisced in fascinating detail about the whole exercise.  He laughed —fondly— about the candidate’s highly impolitic way of conducting politics and said that the campaign had been very dirty on both sides.  Newspaper endorsements ran twenty-to-one in RN’s favor.

    In the end, RN won by 19% — almost 700,000 votes.  The results were: 2,183,454 to 1,502,507.   His victory was part of the usual off-year trend in which the opposition party picks up seats.  In this case, there were five new Republicans in the Senate and 28 in the House.  Aside from her own problems and her poorly run campaign, it can’t have helped Mrs. Douglas that the Korean War had begun in June; or that, two days before the election, Chinese communist troops escalated the conflict by crossing the Yalu River.

    I think that Conrad Black’s judgment is informed and balanced:

    It is hard not to like and admire Helen Douglas at a distance; glamorous, courageous, and principled, she fought gamely against lengthening odds, and was soundly defeated by a politician who has received little subsequent approbation.  But she had made herself vulnerable, did nothing to reunite her party behind her, opened the floodgates of negative campaigning, was thoroughly disorganized, and ran a sophomoric campaign.  She also had a number of rather prissy, soft-left views that were unsound in themselves and wildly out of concert with the place and times.

     

    This brings up another —and I think underestimated— aspect of RN’s career.  Sometimes the luck of the draw means that a politician will have to run against someone who, in purely physical terms, embodies the public’s and the media’s idea of what the ideal candidate should look and sound like.  But untll he was paired with Hubert Humphrey in 1968, RN had the truly extraordinary bad luck of having to run every time against candidates who would have been sent from central casting in response to requests for a “perfect” candidate.

    When RN challenged him in 1946, the press corps had just named the tweedy suave Jerry Voorhis as the most popular congressman in Washington.  Mrs. Douglas was, literally, a star; and JFK carried himself lke one.   Adlai Stevenson was the media’s beau ideal of the enlightened liberal politician.  And Pat Brown was an immensely likable and appealing fellow.

    It was easy for RN —the serious, striving, somewhat stiff young man with the heavy brow and the five o’clock shadow— to be unfavorably contrasted with the actual or invested star quality of his opponents.

    In the case of Mrs. Douglas, RN also became an ongoing lightning rod for a lot of the enmity that her candidacy occasioned within her own professional community.  Although she was well and widely liked in Hollywood, there were some who found her air of Broadway superiority annoying; and there were many who found her politics personally uncongenial and even considered them embarrassing for the industry.  Many of the studio heads and major stars supported RN, and long after the election was over, the strong and divisive emotions it had engendered lingered on.

    There’s some fascinating footage of the 1950 campaign —along with some tendentious narrative portentously delivered— in this documentary excerpt.

    There is one widespread canard —at least I’m convinced it’s a canard— that I would like to challenge.  It is generally accepted that during the 1950 campaign, RN referred to Mrs. Douglas as being “pink right down to her underwear”.

    Although many of the accounts make it sound as if this were a recurring punchline of his campaign rhetoric, there is no record of his having said it in public.  The actual claim —such as it is— is only that he said it once at a closed meeting of campaign contributors.

    The only original citation I have been able to track down is an article printed several years later in The New Republic in which it is reported, at second hand, as having been spoken at the fat cat session.

    So the story is pretty thin —and I would suggest suspect— on purely factual grounds.

    But it also strikes me as improbable given the nature of the man and the nature of the times.  Despite the apparent contrary evidence of the White House tape recordings, RN was, throughout his life, highly circumspect in his use of language both in private and in public — but especially in public.  Many people today think RN cursed like a sailor; but even when he was a sailor, his cursing was situation-based and highly selective.

    In light of today’s coarsened public discourse, it’s hard to imagine that there was ever a time when talk about the color of female undergarments would have been considered inappropriate and even risque.  But there was and that time was 1950.

    And in 1950 RN was still generally seen (and especially by his supporters) as a serious, modest, earnest, clean-cut ex-Naval officer by whose dogged determination the Hiss case had been broken.  RN, at the age of thirty-seven and running for his first statewide office, was not going to stand up in front of a group of older and established business and community leaders, many of whom he hardly knew, and make what would have been considered as an off-color remark.

    I have no doubt that this was a widely quoted quip during the 1950 campaign; and it seems likely to have emerged from RN’s campaign.  The way for its widespread acceptance had already been cleared by the undisputedly official pink sheet.

    But unless and until I can find at least an additional —and dependable— source for RN himself having said it, I’m not buying it.

  • Herman Perry’s Letter to Richard Nixon

    Sixty-three years ago today, businessman Herman Perry wrote a letter to Richard Nixon asking him if he was interested in running for a seat in the House of Representatives. At the time, incumbent Democrat Jerry Voorhis was representing the 12th congressional district of California. Nixon was a young up-and-coming attorney, a graduate of Duke University Law School, and a naval officer during World War II who had returned to his hometown of Whittier to work at an established law firm. “I am writing this short note to ask you if you would like to be a candidate for Congress on the Republican ticket in 1946,” Perry’s letter said. “Jerry Voorhis expects to run—registration is about 50-50. The Republicans are gaining. Please airmail me your reply if you are interested.”

    On October 6, 1945, Nixon drafted a reply. “I feel very strongly that Jerry Voorhis can be beaten and I’d welcome the opportunity to take a crack at him. An aggressive, vigorous campaign on a platform of practical liberalism should be the antidote the people have been looking for to take the place of Voorhis’ particular brand of New Deal idealism. You can be sure that I’ll do everything possible to win if the party gives me the chance to run,” he wrote. “I’m sure that I can hold my own with Voorhis on the speaking platform, and without meaning to toot my own horn, I believe I have the fight, spirit and background which can beat him.”

    In 1946, Nixon defeated Voorhis for his first political victory. The rest, as they say, is history.

  • 24 July 1969: Home From The Moon

    On 24 July 1969, RN was in mid-Pacific welcoming the Apollo 11 crew home from the moon.

    Like the rest of the mission, everything had gone almost flawlessly.

    After traveling 240,000 miles, the capsule —named Columbia— splashed down less than two miles from the target. (RN requested that the band play “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean” as the three Apollo astronauts set foot on the deck of the recovery vessel.)

    A helicopter picked them up an hour later and brought them to a special quarantine unit on the deck of the USS Hornet, where a proud and buoyant POTUS was waiting —along with CINCPAC Commander Admiral John McCain and many other dignitaries— to greet them.


    Here is the text of the not always entirely comfortable exchange (but you try having an easy chat with three men who have just spent a week in space and are behind glass because they may have picked up some ghastly moon bug and with the entire crew of the Hornet not to mention the entire world looking over your shoulder and fastening on every word):

    THE PRESIDENT:

    Neil, Buzz, and Mike:

    I want you to know that I think I am the luckiest man in the world, and I say this not only because I have the honor to be President of the United States, but particularly because I have the privilege of speaking for so many in welcoming you back to earth.

    I can tell you about all the messages we have received in Washington. Over 100 foreign governments, emperors, presidents, prime ministers, and kings, have sent the most warm messages that we have ever received. They represent over 2 billion people on this earth, all of them who have had the opportunity, through television, to see what you have done.

    Then I also bring you messages from members of the Cabinet and Members of the Senate, Members of the House, the space agency, from the streets of San Francisco where people stopped me a few days ago, and you all love that city, I know, as I do.

    But most important, I had a telephone call yesterday. The toll wasn’t, incidentally, as great as the one I made to you fellows on the moon. I made that collect, incidentally, in case you didn’t know. But I called three, in my view, three of the greatest ladies and most courageous ladies in the whole world today–your wives.

    From Jan, Joan, and Pat, I bring their love and their congratulations. We think it is just wonderful that they have participated at least in television in this return. We are only sorry they couldn’t be here.

    Also, I will let you in on a little secret. I made a date with them. I invited them to dinner on the 13th of August, right after you come out of quarantine. It will be a state dinner held in Los Angeles. The Governors of all the 50 States will be there, the Ambassadors, others from around the world and in America. They told me that you would come, too. All I want to know is: Will you come? We want to honor you then.

    MR. NEIL A. ARMSTRONG. We will do anything you say, Mr. President, anytime.

    THE PRESIDENT. One question, I think all of us would like to ask: As we saw you bouncing around in that float out there, I wonder if that wasn’t the hardest part of the journey. Did any of you get seasick?

    MR. ARMSTRONG. No, we didn’t, and it was one of the hardest parts, but it was one of the most pleasant, we can assure you.

    THE PRESIDENT. Well, I just know that you can sense what we all sense. When you get back now incidentally, have you been able to follow some of the things that happened since you have been gone? Did you know about the All-Star Game?

    COL. EDWIN E. ALDRIN, JR. Yes, sir. The capsule communicators have been giving us daily reports.

    THE PRESIDENT. Were you American League or National League?

    Col. ALDRIN. National League.

    MR. ARMSTRONG. Neither one.

    THE PRESIDENT. There is the politician in the group.

    MR. ARMSTRONG. We are sorry you missed that.

    THE PRESIDENT. You knew that, too?

    MR. ARMSTRONG. We heard about the rain. We haven’t learned to control the weather yet, but that is something we can look forward to.

    THE PRESIDENT. Well, I can only summarize it because I don’t want to hold you now. You have so much more to do. You look great. Do you feel as great as you look?

    MR. ARMSTRONG. We feel great.

    THE PRESIDENT. Frank Borman feels you are a little younger by reason of having gone into space. Is that right? Do you feel a little bit younger?

    MR. ARMSTRONG. We are younger than Frank Borman.

    THE PRESIDENT. He is over there. Come on over, Frank, so they can see you. Are you going to take that lying down?

    ASTRONAUTS. It looks like he has aged in the last couple weeks.

    COL. FRANK BORMAN. They look a little heavy.

    Mr. President, the one thing I wanted–you know, we have a poet in Mike Collins. He really gave me a hard time for describing the words “fantastic” and “beautiful.” I counted them. In 4 minutes up there, you used four “fantastics” and three “beautiful.”

    THE PRESIDENT. Well, just let me close off with this one thing: I was thinking, as you know, as you came down, and we knew it was a success, and it had only been 8 days, just a week, a long week, that this is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation, because as a result of what happened in this week, the world is bigger, infinitely, and also, as I am going to find on this trip around the world, and as Secretary Rogers will find as he covers the other countries in Asia, as a result of what you have done, the world has never been closer together before.

    We just thank you for that. I only hope that all of us in Government, all of us in America, that as a result of what you have done, can do our job a little better.

    We can reach for the stars just as you have reached so far for the stars.

    We don’t want to hold you any longer. Anybody have a last–how about promotions? Do you think we can arrange something?

    MR. ARMSTRONG. We are just pleased to be back and very honored that you were so kind as to come out here and welcome us back. We look forward to getting out of this quarantine and talking without having the glass between us.

    THE PRESIDENT. Incidentally, the speeches that you have to make at this dinner can be very short. If you want to say “fantastic” or “beautiful,” that is all right with us. Don’t try to think of new adjectives. They have all been said.

    Now, I think incidentally that all of us, the millions who are seeing us on television now, seeing you, would feel as I do, that, in a sense, our prayers have been answered, and I think it would be very appropriate if Chaplain Piirto, the Chaplain of this ship, were to offer a prayer of thanksgiving. If he would step up now.

    RN was genuinely excited by the mission, the men, and the moment — he was sincere when he said he was the luckiest man in the world. A troublemaking reporter took the President’s hyperbolic assertion about the “greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation” to Billy Graham and elicited a correction; Rev. Graham said that there were greater times, including the first Christmas, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection.

    When RN saw this story in his News Summary, he made a note to Bob Haldeman: “H —- Tell Billy RN referred to a week not a day.”

    In RN, RN noted: “When I talked to Billy Graham a few days later, he said, “Mr. President, I know exactly how you felt, and I understand exactly what you meant, but, even so, I think you may have been a little excessive.”