Nixon and Obama—Soul Brothers?
Four decades ago, Lamar Alexander worked in Richard Nixon's White House. Sen. Alexander today says Barack Obama's White House reminds him of that place, that time, that mindset and those people.
Intending no disrespect to my old colleague, these days are not at all like those days, and this president and White House are nothing like the White House in which this writer worked from Inauguration Day 1969 to August 1974, when Marine One lifted off the lawn.
Richard Nixon had been elected in the most turbulent year since the Civil War.
Between New Hampshire and November, there was the Tet Offensive, LBJ's announcement he would not run again, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, race riots in 100 cities and Washington, D.C., the takeover of Columbia University by radicals, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a Democratic convention in Chicago marked by rancor inside the hall and police-radical confrontations outside, and a campaign in which Hubert Humphrey was shouted down at rallies until he agreed to a bombing halt in Vietnam.
No, these times are not those times.
Nixon took the oath as a minority president, 43 percent, in a hostile city, with both houses of Congress against him and a national press corps that had loathed him since he exposed the establishment golden boy Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, 20 years before.
Obama took the oath with close to a filibuster-proof Senate, a near 80-seat majority in the House, the media at his feet, not his throat, and a city in adulation that had voted 93 to 7 for Barack Hussein Obama.
Not even JFK entered office with more goodwill.
While Obama inherited an economic situation far worse than did Nixon, Nixon inherited a war far more divisive and bloody than Iraq and Afghanistan combined, with 535,000 troops in Vietnam or on the way, and 200 soldiers coming home every week in caskets and body bags.
By October 1969, Nixon had ordered 100,000 troops home from Vietnam, proposed a Family Assistance Plan, enunciated a new Nixon Doctrine, welcomed the Apollo 11 astronauts home from the moon and become the first President to visit a communist country, Romania.
Obama has held a beer summit and won a Nobel Peace Prize.
In both October and November of 1969, 500,000 demonstrators marched on Washington to—in the words of David Broder—"break Richard Nixon" as they had broken Lyndon Johnson.
Wrote Broder, "The likelihood is great that they will succeed again."
"Instead of making pronouncements about not being the first U.S. president to lose a war," admonished Time, "Nixon would perform a better service by preparing the country for the trauma of distasteful reversal"—i.e, a U.S. defeat.
Nixon answered the demonstrators and their media auxiliaries with a Nov. 3. speech calling on "the Great Silent Majority" to stand with him and against those out to destroy his policy and presidency.
When the three networks—primary sources of news for two-thirds of the nation then—trashed his speech, Nixon authorized a counterattack by Vice President Agnew, which caused an avalanche of telegrams to pour into ABC, CBS and NBC denouncing them, in solidarity with the administration.
By December, it was not Nixon who was broken. Antiwar activists never mustered those numbers again, and the media had been exposed as out of touch with Middle America.
That month, Nixon rose to near 70 percent approval, and Agnew was the third most admired man in America, after Nixon and Billy Graham.
Nixon and Agnew had not wanted the fight, they had not started the fight, but they had not backed down —and they had won the fight.
What were they supposed to do, Lamar? And when has Obama encountered anything like that?
Lamar left the White House in mid-1970 and decries Agnew's depiction of Albert Gore Sr., of his home state of Tennessee, as "the Southern regional chairman of the Eastern Liberal Establishment."
But was that not true? Gore was defeated in 1970 because he had lost touch with Tennessee. And Lamar's friend Bill Brook won.
They may have called us all paranoid, but as Henry Kissinger once mordantly observed, "Sometimes, even paranoids have real enemies."
As for an "enemies list," the only mistake was writing it down.
Does Lamar not think Nixon had enemies out to destroy him?
Does he not believe there was rejoicing in Washington when Nixon fell, or smug satisfaction when Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were lost—on the faces of those who persuaded themselves that America could not succeed in Vietnam because they had failed?
No one denies Nixon made mistakes. Even he conceded, "I gave them a sword, and they ran it through me."
But those enemies were not a figment of his or our imagination. The Nixon-haters were real, and they were legion.
In 1969-1970, Nixon had a choice: capitulate or fight.
Compared with what he went through, Obama had a cakewalk.
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I was 14 back in 69 and supported Nixon, the war, etc. In the working-class Detroit suburb I grew up in, everybody did, including "hard hat" Democrats. One cousin, my brother-in-law, and older guys I knew in the neighborhood served in Nam, as their fathers had served in World War II. But that was 40 years ago.
The war was lost anyway. The war kept ripping up the country, and the economy, until the last helicopters lifted off the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975. The cultural Marxists used the war as an excuse for a Gramscian "march through the institutions."
In the end, the unified Vietnam became capitalist anyway in the early 1990s, more than a decade after Communist China. So what was it all about? Why didn't Americans have more faith in free markets winning in the end?
Nixon in 1969 should have gone to Congress and said, "I ask you to declare war against North Vietnam. That would make the war unconstitutional, unlike the illegal war that has been waged by my Democratic predecessor. If, within two weeks, no war is declared, I will negotiate a cease fire with North Vietnam and bring all our troops home as soon as possible. Let whatever happens next be on the heads of Congress, but I'm following the Constitution."
If the war had ended in 1969, Americans quickly would have forgotten about it. It would have been just another "Democrat War," as Bob Dole put it in a debate in 1976 when he ran for vice president. Republicans would have been the party of peace, prosperity, and the Constitution, instead of war, depression, and lawlessness.
Oops! I meant the 4th paragraph in my previous blog to read "constitutional":
"I ask you to declare war against North Vietnam. That would make the war constitutional, unlike the illegal war that has been waged by my Democratic predecessor. If, within two weeks, no war is declared, I will negotiate a cease fire with North Vietnam and bring all our troops home as soon as possible. Let whatever happens next be on the heads of Congress, but I’m following the Constitution.”
Nixon was a poor president who did nothing for rightists, and much against us. Though I like the leftist caricature of him (ie, as a demonic, Machiavellian Far Rightist, willing to do whatever is necessary to save America from foreign enemies and domestic subversives), in reality, Nixon, like the slightly better Reagan, was mostly a disappointment.
Nor was he as intelligent or politically shrewd as his overblown legend would have it. Men like Lothrop Stoddard told us all we needed to know about the main struggle of the 20th century (ie, the racial struggle), and he had done so for educated men by the end of the 20s. Even without having read Stoddard, couldn't Nixon have figured out The Real War (to quote the title of one of his books), aka, The Racial War, by the time of his presidency - after the civil rights movement, and in the midst of Black Power? And yet the fool gave us Affirmative Action, and had nothing to say about stopping immigration!
@1 John
In 1973 a fellow sailor aboard the USS Wood, chimed into a discussion about Vietnam, and left us dumbfounded when he said the war was about tungsten. And sure enough, there are sizable deposits outside Hanoi. But that aside, what Strange MacNamara and his Foggy Bottom cowboys had in mind propping up tinpot Thieu, we'll never know.
Nowadays, we invade some festering hole and administer democracy complete with purple-thumbed women as the obligatory photo-op. And Little Smoking Barry wins a Nobel prize for shipping more cannon fodder to Afghanistan -- a country where empires go to die.
@3 Lone Racer
Nixon was my commander-in-chief and I had no beef with him. Prior to enlisting I had attended a New York State college where the professors told the students what to think about Milhous, and I didn't want to play. Nixon was a lot less stupid, than Obama or either of the Bushes. And Nixon was a less skillful liar than Slick Willie. Wage and price controls were probably his biggest mistake.
Nixon's biggest mistake was not trying to overturn the then recently changed immigration laws. I remember very clearly my entire family being fiercely opposed to immigration already in the late 70s. I remember discussions as to whether I should study French or Spanish in my CA grade school, with different persons opining (in 1977 !!!!!) about CA becoming a bilingual state in the future (I studied French because my family is part French, and has a long tradition of producing persons fluent in the language). A mere dozen years after the Kennedy and Johnson traitors elected to replace the traditional American people with Third World aliens ordinarily intelligent and aware people could see the demographic writing on the wall. Why couldn't the intelligent and politically expert Nixon, with presidential access to the best information on the planet, project what was going to happen, given the combination, already known by me when I was still a pre-teen, of our open immigration policies and the Third World population bomb?
He could have nipped the demographic problem in the bud, but elected not to, making him either a fool or coward or traitor, just like so many other Republicans (not to mention Democrats).
"Obama has held a beer summit and won a Nobel Peace Prize."
O, what I would give to be capable of insults like this! The master stroke is reversing the expected order, making the Nobel Prize follow the beer summit. On second thought, it's probably better - certainly safer for me - that such verbal power be in saner hands than mine.
@6 Gilbert
Nothing tops today's Naked Emperor address live from Jacksonville on CNN at a staged photo-op of posed sailors standing nuts-to-butts -- with minorities in front. "We will not put you in harm's way unless absolutely necessary." The look on the sailors' faces told a different story. He used the teleprompter again.
With events like this insults are almost unnecessary. The insult is to our intelligence.
Lamar Alexander is making a fair comparison. Nixon created affirmative action, EPA, OSHA, wage and price controls, and removed our currency from the gold standard(inflation) all by fiat. Barry is building on that foundation.
“Obama has held a beer summit and won a Nobel Peace Prize.” This isn't an insult, it is a funny, but sad factual observation.
@7 Etienne Gervaise
To our intelligence, yes, but I found even more offensive his remark, at the event you mention, professedly to console the grieving relatives of those who died in Monday's helo crashes, that "they died doing their duty and doing this nation proud." I can imagine the profound bitterness this must have raised in the gut of a devastated parent who knew the truth about this man, whose concept of duty to this country has been to cheat, threaten and extort all he can from it, to hear him, in an attempt to cloak himself in the respect earned by these men, feign respect for the very sense of duty he mocks. And for him to speak in the same breath, of pride, and this nation, in which, so far is he from taking pride, that rather he maligns and apologizes for it at every opportunity, I'm surprised the teleprompter didn't jump up and run away.
@8 Brian
Factual, yes, but an insult to go public with it, and a splendid one. Buchanan is still the best purveyor of prime, dry aged, grass fed, naturally raised red meat going.
@1 John Seiler
"The war was lost anyway."
The war was most certainly not lost, neither when you were 14, "back in 1969", nor when you were 17, in 1972, when the Communists were decisively defeated in their massive cross-border assault. The war was always winnable, by extending our DMZ blockade line westward from its terminus at the Laotian border to block the Ho Chi Minh trail. But because of those who derived, as Mr. Buchanan says, in a line that condemns them with Dantean power, "smug satisfaction when Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were lost .... who persuaded themselves that America could not succeed in Vietnam because they had failed", this option was pusillanimously rejected. The war would not have been lost and was not, in fact, lost, unless and until the traitor party (that's the Democrat, for those who say a pox on both houses, or who want the destruction of the Republican) got the only president they've ever feared, because he knew how to hurt them and loved doing it, out of office.
"In the end, the unified Vietnam became capitalist anyway .... Why didn't Americans have more faith in free markets winning in the end?"
With South Vietnam under assault by a ruthless communist regime, which was content to, in Ho's own words, "lose 10 Vietnamese for every enemy" standing in the way of his total control? Moreover, such faith would have required taking, in 1969, today's view that Communism never was a monolithic conspiracy bent on enslaving the world. The famous 1963 "Sino-Soviet split" notwithstanding, the two Communist great powers continued cooperating for several more years, and in 1969 it was reasonable (and correct) to assume that they still shared the same basic desire to harm American power where possible, with Vietnam providing them their best opportunity.
"If the war had ended in 1969, Americans quickly would have forgotten about it."
By 1969, the war in Vietnam had already cost more American lives than the Korean War, destroyed a presidency, broken the Democrat hold on the White House, created a political movement that cast suspicion on and severely weakened established authority in all walks of life, provoked a viscerally nationalistic and anti-intellectual reaction that allowed the neocons to identify patriotism with military intervention, with all that that has entailed, and provided the fertility drug for the birth of the culture war.
Need I say, I think not?