Richard nixon

Last September, when 60 Minutes asked Joe Biden what he thought of the August raid at Mar-a-Lago where the FBI found folders of classified documents mixed in with Donald Trump’s personal effects and papers, the president said he was shocked. Biden wanted to know how “anyone could be that irresponsible.” He worried about what sources and methods might have been compromised by his predecessor’s carelessness. Were there agent lists among those purloined records? That bit of political point-scoring has become a petard with which the president has hoist himself. Two months later, Biden’s lawyers found classified documents in his Wilmington home and garage and in his personal office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington.

In the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, I went to an event at the AFI Silver Theater and Cultural Center in Washington’s Maryland suburbs. The occasion wasn’t a film but an evening with Bob Woodward. He talked about the lessons of Watergate and what it was like to chase down all, or at least most, of the president’s men. He was, however, pretty coy when it came to talking about the big reveals he would make in an upcoming book about the Trump presidency. “Follow the money,” he winked. He intimated that there would be big revelations about Trump and Russia. What they might be he never said. The reverential crowd of several hundred Washingtonians was ready to burn incense at his feet. But the oracle simply refused to deliver.

Having worked with former president Richard Nixon during the last years of his life, I’m often asked what his view would be about some present-day issue. Given the rampant comparisons between the calamitous fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban following the Biden administration’s precipitous withdrawal and the disastrous fall of Saigon in 1975, Nixon’s perspective would have been invaluable. He believed, like all strong, effective US presidents, that American strength means greater stability and peace and American weakness begets instability and conflict. With the end of the cold war and the bipolar international system, the US became the global hegemon, nearly solely responsible for a stable global order.

If you were called upon to invent the human antithesis of rock and roll, you couldn’t do better than our nation’s 37th president, Richard Nixon. Habitually clad in a funereally dark suit and dress shoes, even when strolling on the beach, Nixon’s tastes in music ran to the semi-classical strains of Mantovani and the Boston Pops, and a penchant for sitting alone at night brooding to Wagner. I once asked the legendary White House fixer Gordon Liddy what his chief thought, if anything, about pop music. ‘Crap,’ Liddy replied succinctly. In late 1970, the 57-year-old Nixon was at something of a low point. A combination of the continuing war in Vietnam and domestic economic woes proved disastrous for the GOP in that November’s midterm elections.

‘You gotta swallow this one, they stole it fair and square.’ That’s a Republican hack speaking to Richard Nixon, as fabricated in Oliver Stone’s 1995 biopic about our nation’s 37th president. The reference is to the 1960 election, in which Nixon’s opponent John F. Kennedy prevailed by 303 electoral votes to his opponent’s 219, although the popular margin was a scant 113,000, or about 0.16 percent, out of 68,837,000 ballots cast.

So, impeachment it is. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced that the House will begin articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, and the vote will probably take place before the year is out. The inevitable is, it turns out, inevitable. Henry Kissinger knows something about impeachment. Not because his boss, Richard Nixon, was almost impeached, but rather because Kissinger is a realist. And the reality of impeachment is that it doesn’t work — the threshold for launching impeachment proceedings is low enough that it can be done frivolously, for merely partisan purposes. But the threshold for removing a president from office is so high that it has never been met, and it almost certainly won’t be met in the case of Donald Trump.

The Democratic party and the chattering classes are playing a dangerous game with impeachment. Their are two modern precedents — Nixon’s resignation before his probable impeachment in 1974 and Bill Clinton’s actual impeachment in 1998. But neither is comparable to the contemplated impeachment of Donald Trump. All impeachments are partisan, but this one is in doubly bad faith: it has no chance of succeeding in removing Trump, and it has no chance of acquitting him in a way that will strengthen faith in the country’s institutions. The only outcome possible is to confirm for Democrats and Republicans alike the idea that 2020 is a regime-change moment, for reasons that go far beyond Trump.

Why do conservatives oppose preserving the environment? Why do they fail to address the pollution of the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink? Why do they oppose regulating the plastic waste that destroys habitats and causes the extinction of species? If ‘conservative’ means conserving a way of life, then protecting the environment is not only helpful but necessary to conservatism. Instead, the environment has become a partisan issue for the progressive left, while conservatives defend the industrial system which causes pollution, deforestation, and animal extinction. According to the World Health Organization, 91 percent of the world’s population live in places where air quality exceeds health guidelines.

The day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller arrested and charged me, the Nixon Foundation falsely claimed that I had no relationship with the former president. The Nixon Foundation’s statement is ludicrous. The Foundation is run by people who never actually met Richard Nixon. In 1972, I was a junior member of Nixon’s re-election campaign staff. I have pled not guilty to Mueller’s charges, and am respecting a gag order issued by the judge. But on the question of my warm and extensive relationship with President Nixon, the record must be corrected. In 1972, as the youngest staff member on the Committee to Re-elect the President, I shook the great man’s hand only once, when he toured the re-election headquarters.