Nixon: Past & President [View all]

[H2O Man]

I just had my oldest son order me two books on Nixon and Watergate. The first one is “The Nixon Tapes: 1973,” by Douglas Brinkley. It’s the second of his series of White House transcripts (last year’s 759-page book covered the years 1971-72). The second is Geoff Sheppard’s “The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot that Brought Nixon Down.” Sheppard is a former Nixon staffer and attorney who presents a well-documented case that there was misconduct involving the judge of the Watergate defendant’s trial, and prosecutors involved in the cases.

As winter approaches, I always try to stock up on good reading material. Among my interests are the consecutive presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Like many of my generation, I liked JFK, and still wonder how different the world might be had he lived to serve two terms (and, of course, wonder the same about RFK); find LBJ a contradiction -- half-good, per the Great Society, and half-terrible, per Vietnam; and find Nixon wholly repulsive, a man who threatened the very foundations of our constitutional democracy.

Yet, for a variety of reasons, I find both LBJ and Nixon to be fascinating characters. They were, perhaps not coincidentally, the only two modern presidents who suffered complete breakdowns while in office. In that time period, common folk politely referred to such things as “nervous breakdowns,” yet as has been well-documented, both men had on-going episodes of psychosis while in the White House.

A common myth about Nixon and Watergate is that two inspired journalists uncovered the truth about the series of illegal activities known collectively as “Watergate,” and then Democrats in DC brought down the administration. And that sounds almost as noble as George Washington admitting that he chopped down a cherry tree. But, off course, it is far from an accurate history of what happened.

The Sheppard book has been cited by pale conservative Patrick Buchanan as evidence that “the left” was wrong -- terribly wrong -- about Richard Nixon. Baloney. The value of the book -- and I have yet to actually read it -- is that it destroys the lie that it was Democrats and “leftists” that knee-capped the Nixon administration. How thoroughly the author covers issues such as who characters like Bob Woodward and Mark Felt really were, as well as the “politics” of many of the major players in uncovering the scandals, remains to be seen. But I am really looking forward to reading the book.

I suspect that the average American citizen today would find the idea of reading 800+ pages of Nixon White House transcripts painfully boring. But I love it. I’d rather be reading that, than watching the latest update on Donald Trump’s nonsense on MSNBC or CNN. Of course, I am interested in the 2016 presidential election, and try to remain informed on the important issues. But, as a citizen of both the United States and world, I feel a responsibility to be as educated as possible about the combination of corruption in government, the influence of intelligence and police agencies on politics, and the ways that the corporate media distorts reality when reporting the news to the public.