The Saturday Night Massacre and the Presidency

"The recall of MacArthur, the steel seizure, and the dispatch of troops to Little Rock share still another notable characteristic: In each case, the decisive order was a painful last resort, a forced response to the exhaustion of all other remedies, suggestive less of mastery than failure -- the failure of attempts to gain an end by softer means" (Neustadt, Presidential Power, 24).


The Saturday Night Massacre, forty years ago yesterday, was critical in the public story of Watergate; it marked the point at which impeachment of the President of the United States became part of the normal political conversation. Indeed, one might say that it marks the point where the standard for a major presidential scandal became impeachment; ever since, from Iran-Contra to Lewinsky to, I don't know, whatever they're talking up on Fox News these days, everyone has been a lot quicker to bring up impeachment than they ever were before Richard Nixon needed three Attorneys General to fire a special prosecutor.

The Massacre was also one of the best illustrations of Richard Neustadt's key point about presidential power: that presidents do not, and can not, govern by command as a normal way of going about their business.

The problem for Nixon was that he was saddled with a special prosecutor who was, in his view, overreaching his mandate (and, at any rate, threatened the presidency by attempting to obtain White House tapes which would prove Nixon guilty of offenses he would surely be impeached and convicted for if they became public). Now, Archibald Cox was supposed to be independent, but he was still part of the Department of Justice. Could Nixon either get him to back off, or, even better, get rid of him?

In the event, the answer was: only by command. Persuasion utterly failed. Which ultimately meant that Nixon couldn't get what he wanted -- relief from a truly independent prosecutor.

Remember, "persuasion" for Neustadt doesn't really mean convincing someone that the president's preferences are good in some abstract way; it merely means convincing someone that to do what the president wants is in his or her own self-interest at that moment. That could involve an appeal to the good of the nation, but it's more likely to be done by some combination of bargaining and the sort of influence that the president's scope gives him. That is, the head of an agency might do what the president wants in order to receive budget support in the future, or the promise of a promotion to a bigger job, or perhaps threats to a political ally. Whatever is available; and while presidents have very limited powers of command, they have nearly limitless tools to use for this kind of persuasion. If, that is, they know how to use their office.

What Neustadt tells us is that the structure of the presidency and the executive branch is set up that way. Part of that is because command only works in particular circumstances; without fairly unusual conditions (Neustadt identifies five), it doesn't work at all. Part of it is that executive branch officials must obey multiple masters -- even when the president can technically fire them (as was the case for the Attorney General), they can often nevertheless ignore what he wants. Indeed, that's part of what happened here. Elliot Richardson simply refused to do what Nixon wanted, meaning that eventually Nixon needed to turn his lower-case order into a proper Presidential Order that Richardson could no longer ignore. And yet even here, Richardson resisted and resigned.

Why? Because Richardson had made a promise to the Senate -- that he would appoint a special prosecutor and let him do his work. Why? Because the Senate insisted; they would not confirm him otherwise. Why did Richardson keep his word to the Senate over his loyalty to the president? Because he was the sort of man who would do that. And why did Nixon appoint such a man to such a post, anyway? Because the politics of the situation required it during a time that spring when the outgoing Attorney General and the previous one were both implicated in wrongdoing, and during a time when the independence of Justice Department investigations of White House wrongdoing was under fire.

Nor is this the only time when executive branch refusal to go along with presidential plans mattered in the Watergate saga. Indeed: the whole thing started when Nixon's ("Huston") plan for domestic surveillance was shot down by the FBI, leading Nixon to bring an alternate version of that plan inside the White House. And while presidents generally can get their orders followed within the White House, it's the regular executive branch departments and agencies which have the expertise to carry out policy successfully.

Neustadt calls command -- director orders, rather than persuasion -- a "last resort" for a president:

Not only are these "last" resorts less than conclusive, but they are also costly...[D]rastic action rarely comes at bargain rates. It can be costly to the aims in whose defense it is employed. It can be costly, also, to objectives far afield (27).  

So he wrote, over a decade before Nixon's attempt at command was successful at ridding him of Archibald Cox, but at a terrible price indeed.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Valerie Harper, 74. Was in "Blame it on Rio." Also a Columbo. Seems totally weird to me that most young folks nowadays don't watch the classic sitcoms; one of the few things that definitely makes me feel like an old guy.

Also some good stuff:

1. I pretty much disagree with Scott Lemieux about the filibuster, but I do agree with him that it doesn't really matter what the Framers thought.

2. I still love the election reports series from the Monkey Cage. One of the most valuable things out there. This time, it's Natalia C. Del Cogliano and Mariana L. Prats on Argentina.

3. And Nixon just keeps on saying horrible things. Elspeth Reeve has more.

The Fun of Nixon/Obama Comparisons

George Will trots out the lame argument today that Barack Obama is a far more serious crook than Richard Nixon ever was. Jonathan Chait does a takedown, and it's fine, but I get the sense that he's not really into it...perhaps because Will puts so little effort into his own column.

I mean, really.

Will's big case is that the Obama Administration has selectively implemented the ACA. This is picking up steam among conservatives...but Will (as Chait notes) doesn't really argue it; he merely asserts it. Truth is, it's at about the level of "he has czars!" All presidents, all executive branch agencies, need to interpret laws while they implement them. Have some agencies during the Obama presidency crossed over the line between "interpret" and "rewrite"? Probably! It's a very fuzzy line at best. Implementation really does pose challenges; virtually all laws, no matter how well written, wind up colliding with reality in unexpected ways, and that creates tough calls for regulators and administrators. However, just as with the first term "czars!" talking point, what we're getting here is the implication that no interpretation is ever needed or justified. That's just not so.

At any rate. Obama's administration delayed implementation of some ACA provisions for a year; Nixon illegally refused to spend Congressionally appropriated money, which got him slapped down by the courts and eventually overridden by an angry Congress.

Obama's administration conducted an undeclared war in Libya; Nixon's administration conducted an undeclared and secret war in Cambodia. OK, not secret to the Cambodians.

Obama's administration hounded whistleblowers and prosecuted them to the full extent of the law. Nixon's broke into a whistleblower's psychiatrist's office to (attempt to) get dirt on him, and wound up all told doing so much that the case against him was thrown out in court because of administration malfeasance.

Obama's IRS...well, Chait covers this. Unless new information suddenly emerges, Nixon is the champ here, too, and it isn't close.

Obama's NSA did a wide range of things which were probably legal, but still in the view of many constituted abuses; Nixon wiretapped government officials and reporters. And we're still pre-Church, so the FBI and the CIA are up to all sorts of things. This one is probably the least clear...my bet is that when all the evidence is in the 1969-1974 abuses will top the Obama-era abuses, but it could easily wind up being a judgement call.

And then there's the accusations, backed by at least fairly strong evidence, that Nixon spiked peace talks before he took office; I can't think of anything analogous with Obama.

Am I forgetting anything? Oh, year: Watergate. Haven't mentioned that one, yet. Well, Watergate per se; some of this stuff wound up being folded into it, but nothing about about breaking into the DNC, or for that matter about ordering the Brookings firebombing, or having an operative trail Ted Kennedy, or campaign dirty tricks, etc.

Anyway, the fun of this is that whatever the accusation against Obama, it's pretty easy to come up with something similar that Nixon actually did, but worse.

I should note: that doesn't imply that Obama hasn't done anything wrong! Just that "worse than Nixon" is the wrong place to go.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Tahmoh Penikett, 38.

And for some good stuff:

1. James Fallows on presidents and leaks. Exactly right. As I said last week: don't worry about leaks; listen to them.

2. Wonderful piece from Sarah Kliff looking at the rollout of Medicare.

3. Brendan Nyhan has advice for reporters on covering scandal. Good.

4. Ed Kilgore dissents in part from my take on Harry Reid.

5. Philip Klein on what might happen to the ACA.

6. And Elizabeth Drew on Nixon. I don't agree with everything she says, but it's still a good quick summary of what Watergate was from someone who remembers it well.

Q Day 8: How Did Republicans Get This Way?

EJF asks:

[W]hat are the root historical causes of the current Republican Party dysfunction? When did things start going wrong? Was it 1993?

I don't think we really know, but I think there are two or three reasonable theories.

One is that it's demand-driven. Essentially, there's a very good market that responds strongly to The Crazy. They'll donate for it, they'll buy products of it, they'll listen to or watch shows about it. It's not a huge market, but it's big enough that it creates seriously goofy incentives for Republican politicians and other party leaders -- there's a lot of money in being Rush Limbaugh, so much so that third-rate talentless hacks can make a very good living as pale imitations of what he does.

A second theory is more elite-driven, and is based more or less on the concept of "learning" -- that people tend to copy those things that they perceive of as having worked. Alas for the Republicans, the two big winners over a half-century were...Richard Nixon and Newt Gingrich. So if you emulate those two, you're going to wind up with a much worse type of politics than if you emulate, oh, FDR.

But wait -- isn't there also Ronald Reagan? Yup, there is. But for a variety of reasons, Reagan's pragmatism hasn't been much of a model for the GOP. The big thing that they took from Reagan, alas, was that detailed policy knowledge was a net-negative: thus George W. Bush. There is an impulse to find a Reagan -- thus the movement to draft Fred Thompson in 2008 -- but that's about it. Instead, they've invented an ideologue Reagan who never compromised his pure conservative principles, something that Reagan made easy to do because his particular political (and personal) genius was precisely an ability to constantly believe in his own purity regardless of what he had actually done.

As far as when they become dysfunctional, I don't know...I don't think I'd put a clear date on it (although the Gingrich defeat of the Bush budget summit agreement is surely a very big marker). Some of it goes back, perhaps even before Nixon; some of it appears to be much more recent.

The Future of Nixon

Andrew Sullivan notes that Richard Nixon sometimes didn't kick disabled kids in the face and was a pragmatist on domestic policy and concludes:

This was a criminal who betrayed the core of American democracy, lied to the people, persecuted those dedicated to free speech, ordered robberies and cover-ups, and laid the ground work for some of the best innovations of the time - like the EPA - and the worst - price controls. For one generation he will always be evil. For the next he may be more complicated. Still a crook and an enemy of the Constitution. But complicated.

Well, I can't really argue against "may be," but I very much doubt it.

In the long run, no one is going to remember Nixon for China; they're certainly not going to remember him for the EPA and other laws he accepted from a liberal Congress. Nixon isn't similar to Lyndon Johnson, who really is developing and deserves a "complicated" reputation because we attribute quite a bit of responsibility to him for both the major achievements and disasters of his presidency. The Nixon-era achievements, assuming that they are seen as significant achievements down the road, won't be like that. No one thinks -- or will think -- that Nixon actually cared about the environment, or thinks of him as having primary responsibility for most of these domestic policy enactments. To the contrary: the odds are pretty good that many currently overstate Nixon's domestic policy record because they like playing up the contrast with contemporary Republicans. That distinction may not matter much to future historians. Indeed, a somewhat similar vogue for Nixon's foreign policy matched the peak of Ronald Reagan's latter-day Cold War presidency, but has now (I think) faded, so that now we're just as likely to blame Nixon for his Vietnam policies as we are to praise him for detente and China.

No, specialists in diplomacy and Cold War history will debate Nixon's contributions to those things, but for everyone else Watergate is going to overshadow all that. And rightly so.

He's going to be remembered as the crooked president who was forced to resign because otherwise he would have been impeached and convicted. Complicated? Sure; all humans are complicated, and Nixon surely at least as much as anyone. But his legacy as a politician won't be especially complicated.

Nixon 100

Sometimes, the most obvious things are worth pointing out. Richard Nixon -- born 100 years ago today -- was on a national ticket 5 times, and had he completed his second term would have held national office for 16 years. Not only that, but because his vice presidency and presidency were interrupted by Kennedy/Johnson, he first took national office in 1953 and resigned the presidency in August 1974, spanning over 20 years.

And of course Nixon was around longer than that; he became at least somewhat famous while in Congress. But Congress-famous isn't the same as national-ticket famous, or even close. I mean, Bob Dole was RNC chair for a while in the early 1970s, but I'm guessing that most Americans had never heard of him until Gerald Ford selected him as his 1976 running mate.

Nixon also almost perfectly lined up with the classic TV age, the era in which virtually every US household had a TV and virtually all of those TVs carried almost nothing but the (3) national networks, a public television station, and one independent channel -- so when the president gave a prime time speech or press conference, or when the national party conventions were on, odds are people were going to watch.

So it's not really surprising that Nixon would loom large, even without Watergate and resignation or anything else other than just running for and holding office when he did, for those who lived through that era. Including, of course, the historians and reporters who lived through that era -- and they help determine which politicians will loom large for the next generation or two. And of course in the event Nixon's career overall and his presidency in particular surely had a lot more drama than, say, George H.W. Bush's had.

I'll recommend, again, Garry Wills on Nixon, and of course the main sources for my Watergate posts: Fred Emery's Watergate; The Haldeman Diaries; and the tapes collected by Stanley Kutler in Abuse of Power. If you want to listen to White House tapes, you can go to the Miller Center; the Nixon Library has others. My latest Watergate post was a good one, just last night; and I'll also link to my quick version of what Watergate was, and to my overview of what Watergate tells us about the presidency.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Karen Dotrice, 57. That's Jane Banks -- and, on Upstairs Downstairs, Lily. Not bad!

Sure is a lot of good stuff today:

1. These are the maps I really like of the 2012 election.

2. Downballot, 2012 was apparently not such a good year for women running for office. Abby Rapoport discusses. I wish we had a partisan breakdown, though. See also Ann Friedman on Year of the Woman talk.

3. Aaron Blake on GOP Senate candidate quality. Not definitive, but consistent with everything else I've seen.

4. Totally agree with Mark Blumenthal about this one: "Crowning a single "best pollster" now on the basis of just one poll from each organization is a futile and misleading effort." Plus more about what to expect as the vote-counting continues. Excellent, informative post.

5. I pretty much agree with everything Scott Lemieux says about the phony idea that Nixon was a liberal on domestic policy. Congress matters! So does context. Meanwhile...I've fallen behind, I know, on Watergate. With the election out of the way, I'll get back to it soon.

6. Dan Larison says some really smart things in this post (especially the second to last paragraph), but truth is that I'm just going to be a sucker for any post entitled "The GOP, 'Real Parties,' and Factions." The idea that Larison is reacting to -- that a major political party in a two-party system in a nation of 300 million could be a Burkean party united in the pursuit of an idea -- is about as wrong as you can get. Perhaps if I get to it I'll write more about it; suffice to say that as weird as it is for conservatives to pretend (as they often do) that groups only exist among other people, it's even weirder to invoke Madison while pretending one's side isn't motivated by self-interest. Ah well. Back to Larison: I'd suggest next time he go with "What the GOP,  'Real Parties,' Factions, the San Francisco Giants, and Elvis Costello have to do with the New Star Wars Movie," if he really wants to get a link from me.

7. Or just put a picture of Harold and Kumar up. Noah Smith on makers and takers.

8. And young voters, Facebook, and experimental treatments, reported by Rebecca Rosen (via my buddy Christine). Key point from Don Green: the Obama young voter cohort may well keep voting for Democrats for a long time.

Nixon's the One

By the way, speaking of that Politico story:

Others have overcome innate political limitations on the way to the White House, including George H.W. Bush and Richard Nixon.

Did Bush have below-average campaigning skills for someone at that level? His electoral record is pretty mixed. He couldn't win statewide in Texas in two tries during an era in which Texas was competitive but still leaned Democratic. His 1980 presidential run wasn't a winner, but was hardly an embarrassment. He captured the 1988 nomination...but as a sitting vice-president; he certainly didn't win as easily as, say, Al Gore did in 2000. His 1988 general election run strikes me as about par for the course, as does, really, his 1992 race -- combined, I don't think he stands out as either particularly impressive or awful. For whatever it's worth, he did a fair amount of party-building in Texas, so that might count as a plus.

Going back to 1980: he finished a clear second in a field that included Howard Baker, vice-presidential nominee Bob Dole and John Connally -- and he gave Ronald Reagan at least a bit of a scare for a while. That's pretty good!

But Richard Nixon? All candidates have "limitations," but Nixon was a terrific campaigner. Beat an incumbent to win a House seat. Jumped rapidly to the Senate -- and jumping from a House seat to the Senate in California isn't easy. No, he didn't defeat JFK in 1960, but barely losing during an era in which Democrats had a solid edge for the WH isn't a particularly bad result. He won both Republican nominations he sought (1960 and 1968) easily. He didn't win by much in 1968 against Humphrey, but overall it's hard to say that he did worse than reasonably expectations would have predicted in his three presidential general elections.

What I think this gets to is that some in the press have a very narrow indeed version of what constitutes political skills -- although remember that Nixon, in particular, was thought to be great on television right up to the debates in 1960, and one can make a pretty good case that he actually was pretty good on TV throughout his career. So even when it comes to things such as "good at giving speeches on TV" our memories and judgments are not very good guides sometimes. And "good at giving speeches on TV" just isn't that crucial a skill for electioneering. It's something, but I doubt if it would turn out to be that big a deal if we had a good study of it. Forming coalitions and alliances, having good judgement about policy and party actors, hard work, knowing how to work a room, willingness to put up with the indignities of the campaign trail, and plenty of other things matter, too.

Anyway, I mostly wanted to make the point about Nixon being good on TV (which, I should say, I mostly am cribbing learned from Garry Wills).* I think part of this is because both liberals and cynical sophisticated reporters were, shall we say, unmoved by the mawkishness of the Checkers speech, and so the fact that it was an enormous success and saved his career has been forgotten. Part is because of the 1960 debates, I suppose; part is because the hatred between him and the press really was mutual, especially by the end (enemies lists will do that!), and so they had a hard time seeing what many American saw in him. But whatever that was, it sure worked.


*I'm really overdue for re-reading Nixon Agonisties; I've looked through it on and off, but haven't fully re-read it in quite a few years now. On the other hand, I've had the Wills book on Julius Caesar at the top of my pile for a few months now and haven't gotten to it, so I'm not sure when any re-reading will actually happen. Anyone know how good the Julius Caesar book is?

Catch of the Day

The catch goes to Paul Glastris, who (via Ed Kilgore) looked at Paul Ryan last night and saw Eddie Haskell.

That's perfect. If you young'ns don't remember, Eddie Haskell was Wally Cleaver's friend who was noted for "his unctuous politeness to adults and his weasly, sharp-tongued meanness to everybody else." The great thing about Eddie Haskell as a character, though, was how utterly phony his act was, and therefore how ineffective it was; Ward and June were never, if I recall correctly, even remotely tempted to fall for it. Which, of course, is pretty much how I feel about Ryan.

Kilgore also points us to Charles Pierce, who sees "there's a lot of old Dick Nixon in young Paul Ryan." That's not what he means, though, in that (as he explains) it's not the old Dick Nixon -- it's the young Nixon of the 1950s that's on display in Ryan, albeit one who didn't actually work his way up from nothing the way the real Richard Nixon did. Nor does Ryan, off screen, appear to have Nixon's incredible work ethic; and while Nixon's targets were hundreds and hundreds of local Republican big shots that he constantly tended to for decades until it finally paid off for good in 1968, Ryan's targets were the much smaller, albeit apparently just as easily duped, Republicans of the Washington conservative establishment plus some of the Washington press corps. No, it's no surprise that some of them are not as wise as Ward and June Cleaver.

The two are closely related; apparently Garry Wills didn't go with Eddie Haskell, who after all never did an honest day's work in his life -- which was hardly Nixon's story. Nixon, as Pierce says, earned his resentment the hard way. For Wills, Nixon is Dickens's unctuous Uriah Heep. Since I know Leave it to Beaver much better than I know David Copperfield (at least the one with two p's; I know about the other one), I won't comment further on it, except to say that Nixon Agonistes is as good a book as you're going to read about American politics and I can't recommend it highly enough.

At any rate, I'm supposed to be on Ryan here, and not making it all go back to Nixon all the time, but you know, sometimes that's just how it is. And: great catch!

The More Things Change

Not Watergate related: Bob Haldeman's diary, July 11, 1972 (for those who haven't been following along, Haldeman is Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff):

Billy Graham called to give me the names of all his Christian youth types. He's very enthusiastic and thinks we have a very good group to work with us. He also feels we have a good chance on the blacks by splitting them and getting the religious blacks who are scared of the criminal elements [sic] and so on to come over to our side. He thinks we're in good shape with the Jews.

It's not quite the same as today; there's nothing about abortion and gays scaring all the blacks to vote for Nixon (at least not from what Haldeman says about what Graham said). But it's awful close!

And as long as I raised it I might as well let you know it worked about as well as usual, too. Nixon wound up with, according to one study, about a third of the Jewish vote -- more than he got in 1968, but just about normal for 1972-1984. As for African Americans...Gallup has "nonwhite" as a category, which is quite a bit more Republican than just the black vote (compare later years when both are available), and McGovern won that by a whopping 87-13 spread; ignoring survey error, Nixon only did one point better than in 1968, and two points worse than the combined Nixon plus Wallace total. 

Jimmy Carter: Popular?

John Sides notes that, whatever else one can say about Mitt Romney's "even Jimmy Carter" comment, as it happens Carter isn't particularly unpopular: the last poll John found, from January 2011, had a 53/37 approval/disapproval split on Carter's presidency.

The point John is making -- that comparing Barack Obama to Carter isn't apt to be a very successful campaign line -- is most likely correct, so I'm not going to get into that.

But I will note that 53/37 isn't especially good for a former president; a similar 52/42 was 5th out of the 9 most recent presidents who Gallup polled about in October 2010. In February of this year, Gallup asked about it differently: were presidents above or below average? 38% said Carter was below average or poor, beating only George W. Bush and Richard Nixon of the eight most recent presidents (adding BHO and omitting JFK and LBJ from the 2010 survey).

Moreover, and getting back a bit to John's point, it seems at least somewhat likely that people might like Jimmy Carter more than they like his presidency and the policies he pursued, and that some of his presidency approval ratings are really a reflection on his post-presidency. I suspect the way to get at that would be to ask more specific questions: approval on foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy. My guess is that Carter would be hurt by that (and Nixon, for whatever it's worth, helped).

The other point I'd make about this, which is not at all relevant to the 2012 campaign, is that my guess is that Carter's popularity won't outlast him. Carter is one of four postwar presidents who benefited from a sustained organized effort to improve his reputation after he left office. Two of those, Carter and Nixon, were essentially one-man operations; the other two were campaigns on behalf of Kennedy and Reagan. I wish I had more numbers easily accessible on this, but for what it's worth...Nixon died in 1994. In 1999, Gallup had a 22/41 above/below average ratio for him. Awful, but it's getting worse; this year, the ratio was 14/55. Now, it's not a huge change, and it's certainly possible it's just statistical noise, but my guess is that Nixon probably helped himself by pumping out seemingly serious policy books and making seemingly serious policy pronouncements during the 20 years he lived after the White House, mainly by making it likely that the most recent mention people had seen about him was positive. Once that ended, the odds are very strong that the last mention people have seen of Nixon is Watergate. Similarly, if the last thing you've seen about Jimmy Carter is the post-presidency do-gooder stuff, you're apt to think well of him, but if the last thing you've seen is about gas lines, inflation, hostages in Iran, and the 1980 election then you probably won't be as thrilled.

"Southern Stragety"? Overrated

Andrew Sullivan has an interesting point about party and ethnic reconciliation:

I cannot help but think of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, and how its legacy still poisons our politics. For a very long time, the deep cultural divide in this country was in part managed by the Democratic party. Its alliance of Southern conservatives and Northeastern liberals - perhaps exemplified by the Kennedy-Johnson ticket - gave what we now call parts of red and blue America a joint incentive to work out their differences through a common partisan affiliation. The had a fellowship that facilitated compromise. A less coherent ideological party structure actually created a more coherent political debate. I wonder if civil rights legislation would ever have been achieved without this...we should take a moment to remember Nixon. And the deep damage his opportunism wrought.

Electorally, the "Southern Strategy" is pretty severely overrated. Look at the maps. The last year the South was solid was 1944; the last year that the South was solid while the Democrats lost was 1924. An interesting comparison is 1952 to 1920. Harding won overall by a much larger margin than Ike (Harding got 60%, Ike only 55%). And yet in the South, Eisenhower did better everywhere. He won Texas, Florida, and Virginia. In the deep South, check out Mississippi: Ike lost by a substantial 20 point margin, but Cox won Mississippi by 60 points in 1920 (by the way, I'm using this site for all of these numbers). And then, of course, five of the six states that Lyndon Johnson lost in 1964 were in the deep South.

So by the time Nixon is the nominee in 1968, the idea of a Democratic Solid South is an anachronism. Did Nixon accelerate the trend? I don't think so, really. It's really a done deal by 1964, at the presidential level.

That doesn't mean that there was nothing to the Southern Strategy in terms of Republican policy choices and rhetorical strategies. It was likely that as conservatives in the South moved from the Democratic Party to the Republicans (which, again, was going to happen regardless of any "strategy") that the conservative wing of the GOP would become a solid majority within the party, and that there would be no more presidential nominations for the moderate/liberal Eastern Establishment. On the other hand, it's at least possible that there were other potential paths for that conservative party majority on issues including race. So Sullivan's point might be relevant. I'm not sure. But I do think that as an electoral strategy, the Southern Strategy is pretty much a nothing.

Colson is Ill

Chuck Colson is apparently in gave condition.

Colson, as you probably know, had a famous prison conversion and has been doing good works (along with a fair amount of politics, I believe) since the 1970s.

But of course our concern here is with Watergate. It's worth pointing out that if there are any significant Watergate-related secrets that Richard Nixon took to the grave, Colson is probably the last person living who would have a good chance of knowing them. Collectively, Colson, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman presumably knew almost everything that Nixon knew, and the other two are gone. John Mitchell, too, could have told Nixon something that the others didn't know. Rose Mary Woods died in 2005. I can't imagine that Nixon revealed anything significant to his children. Or, for that matter, Pat Nixon, who died long ago anyway. I'd be shocked if Nixon told anyone who he started working with during his retirement anything we don't know.

I very much doubt that John Dean has any knowledge of what Nixon knew that he hasn't spilled long ago. G. Gordon Liddy, David Young, and Egil Krogh are still alive, and may know of some Plumbers activities that never became public, but it's not likely that they would know whether Nixon knew about them or not (and they almost certainly wouldn't know firsthand). I suppose it's vaguely possible that there's something that Henry Kissinger knows. Dwight Chapin? Seems unlikely.

What is left to know? The known unknown is prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in, and Gemstone generally. I'm also curious about the unknown unknowns. Could there have been significant additional Plumbers projects? Significant additional wrongdoing outside of the Plumbers framework?

The one thing that I'm confident we don't have a complete record of is the "Nixon said/ordered crazy things" category. I'm confident of it because tapes have been released fairly late in the day that added to it, and so it stands to reason that there was more of it that happened when the tapes weren't running. And Colson in particular is likely to have been around for plenty of that sort of thing. Of course, we have enough to make the context of Watergate perfectly clear -- Nixon may not have ordered the specific felonies involved in the Watergate break-in, but he frequently urged his staff to commit similar felonies for similar reasons. But more detail is always good.

Ah well; there's always the chance that some new documents or tapes or other evidence will turn up in the future.

A Theory of Interesting Presidents

Stanley Cutler says that "of all the presidents in the last 50 years, it is Nixon that’s the most interesting." Is Nixon more interesting than LBJ? I'm not sure. I would say, however, that I find Nixon, Johnson, and Reagan to be the most fascinating postwar presidents.

Which suggests a theory of interesting presidents: the partisan presidency makes for less interesting presidents. Generally, the partisan presidency began to form as early as the Carter years, but really didn't pick up steam until the Reagan administration; it's pretty much fully formed, I would say, by George H.W. Bush's presidency.

The idea would be that partisan presidencies are much less likely to take on the shape of the president's personality. So Barack Obama or George W. Bush might be just as inherently interesting as John F. Kennedy or Jimmy Carter, but it just doesn't matter as much; what they do as president is much more a function of party than presidential personality.

To be sure: even now, personality (and skills, and other president-specific traits) certainly can matter. But less so, perhaps, than they did when party was less important.

Is this theory correct? I have no idea. Reagan doesn't quite fit. And it's certainly very possible that my sense of the presidents who are interesting is highly subjective -- or, that it might be influenced by other things that have nothing to do with party. It's certainly also possible that the three I find most interesting really are, in some sense, the most interesting -- but that it's just random luck that two of them served during the peak of the personal presidency.

So, who do you think were the most interesting postwar presidents?

Rich Presidential Candidates

David Frum asks "When Did Our Presidents Get So Rich?"

Great question, and even better applied, as he does in the post, to presidential candidates:

It seems that the income gap is widening between presidential candidates and the average voter. Barack Obama in 2008 was not a person from a wealthy background, but compared to the typical voter, he was still much wealthier than say, Harry Truman was in 1948.
It would be interesting to see a chart of the relative differential between the combined incomes of the two candidates in any given year and the income of the typical voter in that year. I don't have the answer at hand, but I'd guess off the top of my head that the "narrowest years" out of the past century would be 1924, 1948, 1968, 1972, and 1976; the "widest" 1928, 1960, 1964, 2004, and 2008. But I may be wrong! Has anybody out there ever in Internet land ever considered this data point?

I'm not aware of any research into this, but one of the things it reminds me of is the story of Richard Nixon in the 1960s. Here's how Garry Wills put it.
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Thursday Niight, Nixon came to Convention Hall -- its interior seen through dazzles, veils woven by the rows on rows of lights. He was proud of his acceptance speech. It would (carefully) reveal his inner self. He came to make the only moral claim that mattered to his audience. To tell them he had made it. "You can see why I believe so deeply in the American dream." He had risen, politically, from the dead. And he had done it by the route these men respected -- by making money. Nixon had been a candidate before, and politician always; but only after his 1962 defeat did he become a wealthy man. The Checkers speech was truthful, back in 1952 -- he was poor; he was young, starting out, working hard to succeed. But then there had been failure, political defeat. And through it all he had not earned the money to be independent. Only when he became a Wall Street lawyer, with $200,000 a year from his practice, and with Bebe Rebozo to help him invest in Florida land, could he look his fellow Republicans straight in the eye at last. A campaign coordinator who worked with Nixon through the years put it this way: "Dick could not have made it to first base in 1968 without a substantial personal income. Republicans, especially those who finance the party, respect only one thing, success, and they have only one way of measuring success, money. Dick never had any money before now. He could not talk to these people as an equal, even when he was Vice-President. The thing that woul dhave kiled him with them was any suspicion that he simply needed a job. Now they knew he'd be giving up a damn good job, and good money" (282-283, emphasis his).
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I strongly suspect that Wills gets this right. Does it still apply? The recent Republican nominees who started life with little, such as Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan, certainly had made plenty of money by the time they won the nomination (Bill Clinton, on the Democratic side, too, although in that case it was his wife who was making the money, for however that works out).

Anyway, I know there's some data about Congress, but I'm not aware of what anyone has compiled about presidential candidates. Has anyone collected these data?

"Imitate Nixon" is So Rarely a Good Idea

I strongly recommend Andrew Sprung's epic takedown of a particularly awful column by Gideon Rose in the Sunday NYT.

Sprung hits most of the important points, but there's one more worth making. The Nixon theory was that the danger for the US in leaving Vietnam and allowing the loss of South Vietnam to appear to be US policy would be that future allies and enemies alike wouldn't trust the US to stand by its friends.

But that's a dubious proposition to begin with if, as Nixon expected, South Vietnam was going to fall anyway.

Moreover, it's not the only possible lesson that enemies could draw from Nixon's strategy, which after all, as Sprung points out, was extremely costly to the US. The other lesson is what apparently bin Laden believed: that the US could easily be enticed into fighting long, drawn-out stalemates -- and that once in, it was fairly easy to keep bleeding it indefinitely. As long as you (that is, bin Laden or North Vietnam and it's allies) are willing to absorb the damage, too.

Generally, "we're easily duped into doing something stupid and self-damaging" isn't nearly as wise a message to send as Nixon, and Rose, seem to believe it is.

June 17, 1971

The newspapers have just identified Daniel Ellsberg as the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers. The President of the United States, Richard Nixon; his Chief of Staff, Bob Haldeman; National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger; and senior staffer John Ehrlichman react (my emphasis added):

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Haldeman: [a28:35] You can maybe blackmail [former President Lyndon B.] Johnson on this stuff.
President Nixon: What?
Haldeman: You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing.
President Nixon: How?
Haldeman: The Bombing Halt stuff is all in the same file. Or in some of the same hands.
President Nixon: Oh, how’s that show—oh, I wondered, incidentally—
Haldeman: It isn’t in this. It isn’t in these papers, but the whole Bombing Halt file . . .
President Nixon: Do we have it? I’ve asked for it. You said you didn’t have it, Henry.
Haldeman: We can’t find—
Kissinger: We have nothing here, Mr. President.
President Nixon: Damn it, I asked for that, because I need it. [Unclear]—
Kissinger: Yeah, but Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together for three years.
Haldeman: We have a basic history of it—constructed our own—but there is a file on it.
President Nixon: Where?
Haldeman: [White House Aide Tom Charles] Huston swears to God there’s a file on it at [the] Brookings [Institution].
Kissinger: I wouldn’t be surprised.
President Nixon: All right, all right, all right [unclear — overlapping voices]—
Haldeman: In the hands of the same kind—
President Nixon: Bob—
Haldeman: The same people.
President Nixon: Bob, now you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it.
Kissinger: But couldn’t we go over? Now, Brookings has no right to have classified documents.
President Nixon: [Unclear]. I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.
Haldeman: They may very well have cleaned it by now, with this thing getting to—
Kissinger: Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if Brookings had the files.
Haldeman: My point is, Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesn’t know for sure that we don’t have them. [a29:56]
Kissinger: But what good will it do you, the Bombing Halt file?
Haldeman: The Bombing Halt—
President Nixon: To blackmail him.
Haldeman: The Bombing Halt—
President Nixon: Because he used the Bombing Halt for political purposes.
Haldeman: The Bombing Halt file would really kill Johnson.
Kissinger: Why, why do you think that? I mean, I didn’t see the whole file, but—
Haldeman: On the timing and strategy of how he pulled that?
Kissinger: I—
President Nixon: I think it would hurt him.
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A few notes:

1. Just to be clear: this is the President of the United States (1) conspiring to blackmail a former president, and (2) conspiring -- ordering his top aides -- to steal files from a Washington think tank (although as far as we know, neither actually happened, although the Brookings operation got to the planning stages).

2. This is one year before the Watergate criminals were caught. You'll hear that it was the cover-up, and not the crime, that brought Nixon down; the problem is that a real, complete confession by everyone would have certainly put all the president's men in jail, and almost certainly would have put Nixon in jail, too. As it worked out, there also turned out to be no way to only confess some things but cover up others...but there was never any question of covering up, because they were guilty of multiple felonies and they knew it.

3. The whole transcript is worth reading, and the audio is pretty good on this one, too. Here's the link again. The best part, at least for comic relief, is Haldeman suspecting that Ellsberg might have done it for the money because maybe he was "on dope."

4. Or perhaps the best part is Kissinger. You have to really listen to get the flavor of it, for him...as it happens, I just began re-watching Gallactica, and, well, listen and see: switch out the accent, and isn't Kissinger a dead ringer for Gaius Balter?

5. I'm thinking of running more of these. Anyone interested? Meanwhile, also from June 17, Nixon on the Jews,

Catch of the Day

Joseph Califano's "back in my day" op-ed about How To Handle Congress is absolutely demolished by Dylan Matthews.

I think Matthews caught just about all of the specific reasons to pretty much ignore the op-ed, but I'll add one more: it's worth noting that Lyndon Johnson's bullying style, whatever its strengths, wound up getting him exiled from Washington. Bullying, it turned out, traded short-term gains for long term disaster, for both Johnson and, then, although the style was different, Richard Nixon.

Yes, presidents should often fight hard when bargaining with Members of Congress (or the other people who they need to cut deals with). But both Johnson and Nixon found that there were severe policy and political consequences to treating themselves as the only legitimate policy makers, and treating everyone else with contempt. Johnson, in particular, found out that when you lie to and constantly humiliate everyone around you, they're not going to be particularly eager to tell you things you may not want to hear -- and they're not going to be particularly loyal to you when things go south.

A Little Friday Counterfactual Fun

I did one item already on Hubert Humphrey, but I hope you won't mind a second one. Nelson W. Polsby did an edited volume of counterfactuals once, and his contribution was "What If Robert Kennedy Had Not Been Assassinated?" It's been a while since I read it, and it doesn't seem to be readily available through a bit of googling (or, alas, on my bookshelf),  but the basic story Nelson told was that Humphrey would have won the nomination; would have offered the VP slot to Kennedy; and Kennedy, being among other things thoroughly a politician, would have accepted. The Democratic Party thus unified, Humphrey/Kennedy go on to defeat Nixon, and all sorts of good things (including, perhaps most importantly, a relatively quick exit from Vietnam) ensue.

That's what I remember from the essay, and I think it's all quite likely. One of Humphrey's problems in 1968 was that he was trapped by the prospect of LBJ withdrawing support; with Kennedy on his side, not only would many antiwar Democrats have been a lot more favorably disposed towards him even without any other changes, but at least in my opinion he would have had a lot more leverage to ignore Johnson. As it was, Humphrey wound up very close in the popular vote but down 301-191 in the electoral college (with Wallace taking 46 electoral votes). A three-point swing in each state would have brought Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Alaska, and (just barely) Illinois to Humphrey for 74 additional EV and a 265-227 lead. California, which Nixon held by 3.08%, would have put Humphrey over the top without going to the House. There's no way to prove anything one way or another, of course, and usually VPs don't make any difference at all -- but in this particular counterfactual, I think it's at least plausible that Humphrey/Bobby does three-plus points better than Humphrey/Muskie.

Now, I don't remember what Nelson speculated down the road, if anything, other than as a long-time Humphrey supporter he certainly thought HHH would be a good president. Just for fun, though...it's easy to imagine the oil shock followed by the deep 1974-1975 recession giving a somewhat younger Ronald Reagan the presidency in 1976 over Vice President Bobby Kennedy, perhaps with a GOP Congress (no Watergate landslide in 1974, for one thing). After that...well, I guess it depends on what you really think of Reagan. It's easy to argue that a pre-Laffer, younger, Reagan serves a couple of successful terms and actually establishes the GOP as a majority party for a while. On the other hand, it's also possible to imagine Reagan having a miserable time with the same things that Jimmy Carter couldn't handle, and Democrats reviving in 1978 and 1980.

But wait! I cheated a bit there; I ignored the 1972 election. I'm stipulating that Humphrey is pretty good at the presidency, and if so (and given what else we know) it's likely that he wins a major landslide in 1972. Over who? Most likely, Ronald Reagan, then halfway through his second term in California, and the clear conservative champion. It's true that in this alternative history the nomination process hadn't been reformed in the same way, but it's very hard for me to see Rockefeller or someone from the liberal wing winning, and I'm not sure who was available to succeed Nixon as the person who was tolerable to both sides. Maybe Reagan sees the writing on the wall and waits until 1976, but I doubt it. I say he runs, gets the nomination, and is totally clobbered.

And you know what? A history in which Goldwater and Reagan get clobbered (plus Nixon, originally from the conservative wing, losing two close elections) might just be enough to shift things around considerably. How? I have no idea. Perhaps it's Howard Baker or someone like that who becomes president in 1976, and Republicans evolve into a moderate conservative party with Reaganites marginalized, and wind up with a long-term majority instead of the deadlock that actually happened after 1980. Perhaps a true three party system emerges, with a southern-based, Wallacite Conservative Party replacing the Southern Democrats. Maybe then Republicans wind up relatively isolationist and libertarian, while Democrats keep serious Cold Warriors in the fold. Who knows?

I'm enjoying the comments over on the other Humphrey post, and I can't wait to see what y'all say on this one.