Nixon and Obama: Soul Brothers?
Posted on October 23rd, 2009
by Patrick J. Buchanan |
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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.
Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War,’ now available in paperback.
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Filed under: Politics
I was there, certainly not in your shoes, but that is the way I that I also remember that period.
Nixon was deeply flawed, but I am convinced that he was a better man than the current president, and his intentions were much more honorable.
I guess it’s pretty easy to buy foreign currency with these big international banks. Seems worth looking into.
You know, I was only ten years old when I saw, on the black-and-white TV that my father refused to replace, John Dean describing a “cancer on the Presidency.” The message coming out of the CBC and CTV was that the President was a “bad man,” “dangerous,” “a criminal.”
Then, as a teenager, I learned the actual DETAILS of the Watergate affair, and, I swear to God, my very first thought was, “I wonder what the Americans would do if they ever had a REAL presidential scandal???”
If all Obama has done is have a beer summit and win a Nobel prize, why is the Right mounting the barricades?
Every president has enemies, but most have not codified them into a list for specific actions against them by the I.R.S. and extra-legal operatives. Many presidents have come into office in troubled times, but not all of them allowed federal police offcials to authorise the out-right murder of activists scary (that is to say, black) enough that most of America would go along with them. All presidents seek to expand their power and try to spend as they will, but most have not mmade, as a matter of policy, the claim that he or she has the right to avoid spending moneys they desire not to do, regardless of the will of Congress.
I haven’t heard of any other president who asked for a list of Jews to fire….
Many presidents have had drug problems—usually alcohol, but J.F.K. appears to have gone differently as well; I don’t know how many spent a good chunk of the time popping illegally-obtained tranquilisers and washed them down with hard liquor. My guess is that they dampened-down the man’s great self-hatred and feelings of inferiority, whilst leaving alone his abiding hatred for a good chunk of everyone else.
Face it, Pat, you worked for a monster.
I just wish that Obama were as Left on health-care as was Nixon.
Re Nixon, Richard Posner wrote, “I haven’t heard of any other president who asked for a list of Jews to fire….”
Henry Kissinger, Herb Stein, Myron Magnet and others apparently didn’t seem Jewish to Nixon. Hmmmm, Nixon made anti-semitic comments and had grievances regarding American Jews, but if he was an anti-Semite, he was a rather inconsistent one. Of course you did not formally accuse him of antisemitism. But that does seem to be implicit in your sentence.
Regarding the murder of Black “Activists,” The Black Panthers were engaging in an armed insurrection against the government and for that matter, the white population of our country. They played rough and they got what was coming to them.
Like most actual conservatives, I recognize the many faults of President Nixon. He was a deeply flawed and these flaws were reflected in his bad choices as a leader. But was he a “monster?”
my lord,
what have we come to when nixon is preferable to obama?
I’d guess that a lot of Nixon’s outrageous comments (”list of Jews”, etc.) were not really statements about what he thought so much as strategic attempts to control the direction of conversations by keeping people off guard. As such, I think they have more in common with LBJ’s making the Cabinet follow him into the bathroom than with real racism.
Nixon was crazy, but he was crazy like a fox. Some of what he did was evil, but that hardly makes him unique among American presidents.
what have we come to when nixon is preferable to obama?
We must compare only what we KNEW about Nixon then, because it is only the public Obama we know now. The true morality of Obama is unknown.
“I wonder what the Americans would do if they ever had a REAL presidential scandal???”
Adam: Go to youtube and search for “JFKll: The Bush Connection” It is a multipart series that lays out the scandal that never was. The real scandal is the mainstream media.
Russel, on October 24th, 2009 at 12:29 am Said:
If all Obama has done is have a beer summit and win a Nobel prize, why is the Right mounting the barricades?
I think part of the reason he has accomplished so little of what he wants to do is BECAUSE the right has mounted such a counteroffensive. That’s not to say every person on the right is against fixing the healthcare system, but that they disagree with the ways Obama and Congress want to go about fixing it. Ridiculous spending (since Clinton, and obviously including Bush) have put us down a terrible path, and it seems that the Democrats’ answer is to spend further.
Nixon was a very complex individual with many faults, but he accomplished quite a bit during his time in office.
Obama has done nada and we still know nothing of the man’s moral compass. From what we have seen, there is more to worry about than I had hoped. The verdict is still out, but our freedom’s are at stake. It is time for the MSM to find out who we really have at the helm and why, in everything he has tried to do, he brings us deeper in debt and our country closer to economic ruin.
I admire Mr. Buchanan and support his ideals of non-interventionism and protecting the American market for American companies.
But with President Nixon, Mr. Buchanan has a blind spot. Does he not remember that President Nixon left office because of looming impeachment?
President Nixon broke the laws — a lot of them. You can read the articles of impeachment against him here — http://watergate.info/impeachment/impeachment-articles.shtml.