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A review by mkesten
Richard Nixon: The Life by John A. Farrell
5.0
In John Farrell’s compelling biography of Richard Nixon we are reminded that the US Supreme court ruled that Executive Privilege allowed the President to conceal documents for national security purposes unless the intent was to conceal illegal acts.
Over the next few days we will learn if the Senate considers extortion of a foreign leader rises to the threshold of an impeachable act, but this Senate will not subpoena either witnesses or executive documents to convict or exonerate President Donald J. Trump.
What would Richard Nixon have thought of Trump’s activities? He very likely he would have done the same thing and considered himself above the law. And it very well could be where Trump got the idea.
And Richard Nixon would have considered both himself and Trump more casualties in the long and sordid history of presidential dirty tricks, including the theft of the 1960 election by John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and the more recent theft of the 2000 election by the Republican-dominated Florida Supreme Court.
“They” are out to get me, Nixon believed. But then again, in Washington “getting” people is a time-honored sport.
Nixon, as you may recall, was forced out of the Presidency by his own party after investigators got their hands on “the smoking gun,” transcripts of Oval Office tapes in which Nixon made it clear he was part of the coverup of the Watergate break-ins. And obstructed justice. And tried to get the CIA to interfere in FBI investigations.
Nixon maintained that he was fingered because he was a bastard — the only thing he owned up to. That if he was part of the establishment he would have gotten a pass.
Of course, Nixon had a long history of being a bastard. It helped him get elected to the House of Representatives and later the Senate. And it really helped him become Eisenhower’s running-mate in the 1952 presidential election.
He was a red-baiter and later on as President initiated bombing campaigns in North Vietnam and Cambodia. And he kiboshed talks to end the war in Vietnam to secure his Presidential bid in 1968. He also did little to halt the murder and displacement of millions of East Pakistanis in what would eventually become Bangladesh.
And as dirty as American national politics could get, that didn’t compare with the dirty tricks in foreign policy like (Nixon and Kissinger)toppling a duly elected Chilean President, (Kennedy) engineering the murder of a S. Vietnamese leader and coup in that country, (Truman) dropping A-bombs on two Japanese cities, (Eisenhower) deposing the elected leader of Iran, (Kennedy) hiring Mafia assassins to poison Fidel Castro, and the (Eisenhower) ousting of Guatemala’s democratically-elected President Jacobo Arbenz.
Donald Trump’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani hearkens back to the good ole days when the ends always justified the means. It’s as if the 1975 Senate Select (Church) Committee on abuses perpetrated by US intelligence agencies never existed.
And, as we know from the Edward Snowden revelations, the tradition established by J. Edgar Hoover and others surveillance of American citizens (yes, it was the Kennedys who ordered the bugging of ML King’s boudoir) continues with massive surveillance of American citizens through social media, cellphone tower pings, and facebook.
Ironically, Nixon didn’t need the dirty tricks in his re-election campaign in 1972 any more than George W. needed the Patriot Act to subdue Al-Qaeda. (Or takedown Saddam Husain for that matter). The Democrats fumbled their own campaign, and one can wonder if they aren’t doing it again.
But Nixon wasn’t all villain. As Vice-President he worked hard to help integrate the schools after Brown v. Board of Education and the stand-off at Little Rock. And as President he worked to implement the now discredited program of bussing minorities to schools.
He created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviet Union, and stymied his Soviet adversaries by opening up US relations with Communist China.
Fifty years after the “China Opening” might be a good time to reflect on its impact. For one thing, it reduced the likelihood of a nuclear holocaust. But it also eventually resulted in China joining the World Trade Organization and a massive transfer of wealth from the West to the East.
Good for poverty-stricken Chinese.
Not so good for Rust Belt America.
Like Lyndon Johnson, Nixon came from nothing. He was a colleague of the red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and at the outset a friend of John Kennedy.
In spite of a deep inferiority complex (or maybe because of it) he married a beautiful woman and scraped his way to the top of the pile.
They all hated Tricky Dick (a sobriquet he picked up very early in his career), but they couldn’t ignore him.
The moral of the story is that a little paranoia can take you quite far in American government.
In another of life’s little ironies Nixon didn’t live long enough to learn that CIA official Mark Felt was Woodward and Bernstein’s Deep Throat source. When Felt himself ran afoul of lawmakers Nixon defended him against his critics. I’m sure it was no accident that Felt kept this secret almost to his own grave.
This is a wonderful telling of the story and not without some colourful editorializing by the author. I hope somebody turns it into a Richard III for our age. Now that I think about it, somebody probably has.
Over the next few days we will learn if the Senate considers extortion of a foreign leader rises to the threshold of an impeachable act, but this Senate will not subpoena either witnesses or executive documents to convict or exonerate President Donald J. Trump.
What would Richard Nixon have thought of Trump’s activities? He very likely he would have done the same thing and considered himself above the law. And it very well could be where Trump got the idea.
And Richard Nixon would have considered both himself and Trump more casualties in the long and sordid history of presidential dirty tricks, including the theft of the 1960 election by John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and the more recent theft of the 2000 election by the Republican-dominated Florida Supreme Court.
“They” are out to get me, Nixon believed. But then again, in Washington “getting” people is a time-honored sport.
Nixon, as you may recall, was forced out of the Presidency by his own party after investigators got their hands on “the smoking gun,” transcripts of Oval Office tapes in which Nixon made it clear he was part of the coverup of the Watergate break-ins. And obstructed justice. And tried to get the CIA to interfere in FBI investigations.
Nixon maintained that he was fingered because he was a bastard — the only thing he owned up to. That if he was part of the establishment he would have gotten a pass.
Of course, Nixon had a long history of being a bastard. It helped him get elected to the House of Representatives and later the Senate. And it really helped him become Eisenhower’s running-mate in the 1952 presidential election.
He was a red-baiter and later on as President initiated bombing campaigns in North Vietnam and Cambodia. And he kiboshed talks to end the war in Vietnam to secure his Presidential bid in 1968. He also did little to halt the murder and displacement of millions of East Pakistanis in what would eventually become Bangladesh.
And as dirty as American national politics could get, that didn’t compare with the dirty tricks in foreign policy like (Nixon and Kissinger)toppling a duly elected Chilean President, (Kennedy) engineering the murder of a S. Vietnamese leader and coup in that country, (Truman) dropping A-bombs on two Japanese cities, (Eisenhower) deposing the elected leader of Iran, (Kennedy) hiring Mafia assassins to poison Fidel Castro, and the (Eisenhower) ousting of Guatemala’s democratically-elected President Jacobo Arbenz.
Donald Trump’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani hearkens back to the good ole days when the ends always justified the means. It’s as if the 1975 Senate Select (Church) Committee on abuses perpetrated by US intelligence agencies never existed.
And, as we know from the Edward Snowden revelations, the tradition established by J. Edgar Hoover and others surveillance of American citizens (yes, it was the Kennedys who ordered the bugging of ML King’s boudoir) continues with massive surveillance of American citizens through social media, cellphone tower pings, and facebook.
Ironically, Nixon didn’t need the dirty tricks in his re-election campaign in 1972 any more than George W. needed the Patriot Act to subdue Al-Qaeda. (Or takedown Saddam Husain for that matter). The Democrats fumbled their own campaign, and one can wonder if they aren’t doing it again.
But Nixon wasn’t all villain. As Vice-President he worked hard to help integrate the schools after Brown v. Board of Education and the stand-off at Little Rock. And as President he worked to implement the now discredited program of bussing minorities to schools.
He created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviet Union, and stymied his Soviet adversaries by opening up US relations with Communist China.
Fifty years after the “China Opening” might be a good time to reflect on its impact. For one thing, it reduced the likelihood of a nuclear holocaust. But it also eventually resulted in China joining the World Trade Organization and a massive transfer of wealth from the West to the East.
Good for poverty-stricken Chinese.
Not so good for Rust Belt America.
Like Lyndon Johnson, Nixon came from nothing. He was a colleague of the red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and at the outset a friend of John Kennedy.
In spite of a deep inferiority complex (or maybe because of it) he married a beautiful woman and scraped his way to the top of the pile.
They all hated Tricky Dick (a sobriquet he picked up very early in his career), but they couldn’t ignore him.
The moral of the story is that a little paranoia can take you quite far in American government.
In another of life’s little ironies Nixon didn’t live long enough to learn that CIA official Mark Felt was Woodward and Bernstein’s Deep Throat source. When Felt himself ran afoul of lawmakers Nixon defended him against his critics. I’m sure it was no accident that Felt kept this secret almost to his own grave.
This is a wonderful telling of the story and not without some colourful editorializing by the author. I hope somebody turns it into a Richard III for our age. Now that I think about it, somebody probably has.