[BRIGADE] PJB: Nixon and Obama—Soul Brothers?
Published: Fri, 10/23/09
By Patrick J. Buchanan
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. [Tennessee Sen. Alexander to Obama's White House: Don't
fall into Nixon's trap of an 'enemies list']
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 Brock 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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