Tag Archives: Richard Nixon

national news

Secret Service fails ex-president

The hits just keep on coming at the Secret Service department.

Now this: It took the agency charged with protecting presidents and former presidents more than a year to repair a faultyĀ alarm system at the Houston home of former President George H.W. Bush.

Let’s see. We’ve had agents frolicking with hookers in South America, a man busting through security at the White House, someone crashing a small helicopter on the White House lawn — and now reports of a failure to respond in a timely manner to concerns about an alarm system at the home of the 41st president of the United States.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/agents-took-13-months-to-fix-alarm-at-ex-president%e2%80%99s-home/ar-AAbxl7P

There’s more, too.

Vice President Joe Biden’s home in Delaware had its alarm system shut off indefinitely by the Secret Service because it, too, wasn’t working properly.

This is getting increasingly difficult to understand, let alone justify.

The Secret Service is charged with protecting the highest government officials in the land, namely the president and the vice president. It also protects former presidents and their families. The one notable recent exception to that was the late former President Richard Nixon, who resigned from office in August 1974 and who then hired private security officers to protect him in his family in his post-presidency years.

The rest of them, though, get — and deserve — protection from the Secret Service.

That the agency wouldn’t repair former President Bush’s home security immediately after its malfunction became known is unconscionable. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and new Secret Service directorĀ Joseph Clancy have declared security upgrades for those under the agency’s protection to be a top priority item.

Do you think?

 

environmental news

Happy Earth Day, everyone!

So help me, I wish Earth Day was a bigger deal than it has become.

For a whole day — as if that’s enough time to honor the only planet we have — we’re supposed to put Earth on the top of our mind’s awareness.

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This is the 45th annual Earth Day. Many communities around the world are going to have public events to commemorate the day. That’s fine. I welcome all the attention that will be paid to Earth until the sun comes up tomorrow.

Given that it was created 45 years ago, that means Earth Day began during the Nixon administration. I doubt President Nixon really paid a lot of personal attention to the condition of the planet, but I certainly applaud that it was during his years in the White House that the Environmental Protection Agency was created.

In the decades since Earth Day’s creation, though, it has become something of a political flashpoint.

Some of us believe the planet is in peril. Our climate is changing and yet humankind keeps doing things to the planet that exacerbate the change that’s occurring. Deforestation is one thing. Spewing of carbon-based emissions is another. Some of say we need to do a better job of protecting our planet — or else face the consequences, which are as grim as it gets. Hey, we have nowhere else to live — for the time being, at least.

Others of us say there’s little we can do. Climate change? It’s part of Earth’s ecological cycle. We need to accept the inevitable and not seek to destroy our industrial base to chase after a cause that is far too big for mere human beings to tackle.

I won’t accept the hard-core climate change deniers’ thesis.

For the time being, I am at least grateful that the world sets aside a day to honor the good Planet Earth.

We ought to do it every day of every year.

 

national news, political news

Yep, VPOTUS is an important office

Jeffrey Frank’s essay in The New Yorker lays it out clearly.

The office of vice president of the United States is the second-most important office in the country, if not the world. It took the death of a president to make that fact abundantly clear.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-f-d-r-s-death-changed-the-vice-presidency

Frank writes about Franklin Roosevelt’s death 70 years ago, on April 12, 1945. Vice President Harry Truman was told of FDR’s death in Georgia. He was rushed to the White House and sworn in as president.

It’s what President Truman didn’t know at the time that has been the subject of discussion ever since.

He didn’t know about the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb, which then ended World War II in August 1945.

Truman only that there was something afoot in New Mexico. Secretary of War Henry Stimson told the president he had something to tell him involving a top-secret project. He informed him of the bomb and said, in effect, that if we use this device it could end the war in a hurry.

The gist of Frank’s essay is that the vice presidency was fundamentally changed after FDR’s death. Presidents have had to rely on their No. 2 men, required to keep them briefed on everything of importance that goes in the government. Why? Well, as we’ve learned, presidents can leave office quickly and without warning.

President Kennedy was murdered in November 1963. President Nixon resigned in August 1974. Both men had selected steady and seasoned men as their vice presidents who could take over at a moment’s notice. Lyndon Johnson did so while the nation grieved JFK’s death and Gerald Ford took the oath after Nixon’s resignation and reassured us that “Our long, national nightmare is over. The Constitution works.”

Presidential nominees have picked well since FDR’s time. Some have chosen not so well, as Frank notes.

But the notion that vice presidency — in the (sanitized) words of Texan John Nance Garner — “isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit” was laid to rest forever when Harry Truman was handed the keys to the Oval Office.

We’ll be sure to keep this in mind when the next nominees for president pick their VPs.

 

International news, national news, political news

Foes 'all too willing to test us'

Here’s a tiny part of what former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said before a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“Hereā€™s the simple truth of our foreign policy: Our allies doubt us and our adversaries are all too willing to test us. No one should be surprised, no one should be surprised that dictators like Assad would cross the presidentā€™s red line because he knows the president will not even defend the line that separates our nation from Mexico.”Ā 

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/perry-compares-middle-east-troubles-texas-border

Did you get what he’s inferring here? Perry is possibly going to run for the Republican nomination for president of the United States — againĀ — in 2016. To make the case to GOP voters, he must lambaste the president from the other party.

I understand how it works. Democrats do the same thing to Republican presidents as well, as U.S. Sen. Barack Obama demonstrated when he won the presidency in 2008.

But is this “testing” of U.S. power and prestige limited to just this president?

Let’s see: President Richard Nixon was tested when Arab nations executed an oil embargo in 1973, causing near-panic at gasoline service stations throughout this country. President Ronald Reagan was testedĀ in 1983 when terrorists blew up the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, killing 241 of our young Marines. President George H.W. Bush was tested in Panama when the dictator Manuel Noriega kept looking the other way while drugs were pouring into this country from Panama. President George W. Bush certainly was tested when terrorists flew those hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11.

Yes, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were tested too. Carter faced the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-80 Ā and Clinton had to deal with those warlords in Somalia.

Testing of U.S. presidents has been the norm perhaps since the end of World War II, when this nation emerged from that global conflagration as the world’s pre-eminent military and economic power.

It goes with the territory. It’s part of the president’s job description.

 

national news, political news

Hit the road, Gov. Kitzhaber

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It’s looking like lights out for Oregon’s embattled governor.

John Kitzhaber is now getting the word from top state Democrats — his own partisans — that it’s time for him to go. A growing ethics scandal involving his fiancĆ©e, Cylvia Hayes, is now threatening to overwhelm his ability to govern his state — my home state.

It’s not looking good for the governor. He can’t possibly hang on.

http://news.yahoo.com/oregon-governor-planned-quit-changed-mind-074856606.html

His fiancĆ©e has been implicated in a scheme in which she funneled state business to her lobbying firm, allegedly using her connections as the state’s de facto first lady to fatten her wallet/purse.

As for Kitzhaber’s role in this, well, he is the governor and his fiancĆ©e allegedly was acting as the state’s agent.

It’s bad, man. Real bad.

As for state Democrats telling the governor it’s time for him to quit, this has a Watergate-ish ring to it.

Flash back to 1974. President Richard Nixon was in deep doo-doo over the Watergate scandal. It was revealed that he had told the FBI to back off its investigation of whether the president’s re-election committee was complicit in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate office complex.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee then approved articles of impeachment against the president.

It was then that none other than Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater led a GOP delegation to the White House to inform the Republican president that he was toast, that he couldn’t be acquitted in a Senate trial. “You have to quit, Mr. President,” Goldwater said.

Nixon did resign a few days later.

History is sounding as if it’s repeating itself in the Oregon State Capitol Building.

You have to quit, Gov. Kitzhaber.

 

political news

Campaign button brings back cool memory

Cleaning and rearranging my desk this week brought me in touch with a memento of a long-ago event that meansĀ much to me to this day.

It is a campaign button, given to me not many years ago by a gentleman — a friend of mine — who had a similar political coming of age at the same time.

It is a McGovern-Shriver presidential campaign button.

I cast my first voteĀ for presidentĀ on Nov. 7, 1972 for Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota and former Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver of Maryland. McGovern was the presidential nominee selected at a tumultuous Democratic National political convention in Miami; his running mate, Shriver, wasn’t his first pick, as you’ll recall. The first selection was Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, who then revealed he had gone through treatment for depression; McGovern dumped him because at the time the public didn’t understand fully that Eagleton was cured of whatever ailed him.

But that was a vote of which I remain perhaps most proud of all the votes I’ve ever cast for any candidate running for any office.

I was nearly 23 years of age. The Constitution had been amended the previous year granting 18-year-olds the right to vote. But because the voting was still 21 when I was 18, I couldn’t vote in the 1968 election — even though I had a keen interest in that contest.

My own interest came from uncertainty about the Vietnam War and whether we were engaging in a conflict that was worth fighting. I had just returned home from my own service in the Army and came away from my time in Vietnam asking questions about the wisdom of our continuing along that futile course.

There also was that break-in at the Watergate office complex that would grow into a significant constitutional crisis.

Sen. McGovern was a war hero who rarely mentionedĀ his combat serviceĀ along the campaign trail. Meanwhile, his Republican foes kept denigrating his opposition to the Vietnam War as some sort of chicken-hearted cop-out. This man knew war. He’d fought it from the air as a bomber pilot in Europe during World War II.

McGovern’s opposition to the Vietnam War didn’t sell in the final analysis. Even though public opinion was deeply split on that war, McGovern would lose the election almost immediately after the polls closed. The TV networks declared President Nixon’s re-election literally within minutes of the polls closing.

It was over. Just like that.

I had taken on a duty for the McGovern campaign in my home state of Oregon. IĀ helped spearhead a voter-registration effort at the community college I was attending. Our task was to register young Democrats to vote that year. We did well on the campus.

As a result — I’d like to think — Multnomah County went for McGovern narrowly over Nixon that year. Mission accomplished in our tiny portion of the world.

I’ve voted in every presidential election since. This was the first — and so far only — election in which I served as a foot soldier in a cause in which I believed. By the time 1976 rolled around, my journalism career had just begun. Therefore, all I could do was vote.

The campaign button reminds me of how idealistic I was in those days. It also reminds me of how much energy I possessed as a young man who saw politics as fun, exciting and quite noble.

Age has rubbed some of that idealism and energy away. But only some of it.

 

 

national news, political news

GOP readies for internal fight

One of the many forms of conventional wisdom in the wake of the 2014 mid-term election goes something like this: Republicans, flush with victory at taking over the Senate and expanding their hold in the House, now face a fight between the tea party extremists and the mainstream wing of their party.

Let’s go with that one for a moment, maybe two.

I relish the thought, to be brutally candid.

The likely Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, may be looking over his shoulder at one of the tea party upstarts within his Republican caucus, a fellow named Ted Cruz of Texas.

Cruz wants to lead the party to the extreme right. McConnell is more of a dealmaker, someone who’s been known to actually seek advice and counsel from his old friend and former colleague, Vice President Joe Biden. Cruz, who’s still green to the ways of Washington, wants to shake the place up, seeking to govern in a scorched-Earth kind of way. He wouldn’t mind shutting down the government again if the right issue arises. McConnell won’t have any of that.

So, will the battle commence soon after the next Congress takes over in 2015.

Lessons unlearned doom those who ignore them.

Republicans have been through this kind of intraparty strife before. In 1964, conservatives took control of the GOP after fighting with the establishment. The party nominated Sen. Barry Goldwater as its presidential candidate and then Goldwater got thumped like a drum by President Lyndon Johnson.

They did it again in 1976, with conservative former California Gov. Ronald Reagan challenging President Ford for his party’s nomination. Ford beat back the challenge, but then lost his bid for election to Jimmy Carter.

To be fair, Democrats have fallen victim to the same kind of political cannibalism.

In 1968 and again in 1972, Democrats fought with each over how, or whether, to end the Vietnam War. Sens. Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy challenged LBJ for the nomination in 1968. Johnson dropped out of the race, RFK was assassinated, McCarthy soldiered on to the convention, which erupted in violence and Democrats then nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who then went on to lose to GOP nominee Richard Nixon.

Four years later, the Democratic insurgents nominated Sen. George McGovern after fighting with the party “hawks.” McGovern then lost to President Nixon in a landslide.

So, what’s the lesson?

History has shown — and it goes back a lot farther than just 1964 — that intraparty squabbles quite often don’t make for a stronger party, but a weaker one.

Bring it on, Republicans!

 

 

legal news, national news, political news

Chief justice going soft? Hardly

Conservatives reportedly are getting itchy over some recent decisions by U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts.

Why, he’s siding with some of the Supreme Court’s liberals and that dreaded swing vote on the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy.

He’s just not the dependable conservative they thought they were getting when President Bush appointed him to the court.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/john-roberts-conservative-quake-112000.html?hp=f2

These nervous nellies on the right ought to relax.

I don’t consider the chief justice to be a toady to the right. He’s now holding a lifetime job and is free from the political strings to which he was attached when the president appointed him chief justice. It might be — and it’s way too early to tell — heading down a trail blazed by other formerly “conservative” justices who turned out to be anything but.

Chief Justice Earl Warren took his seat after President Eisenhower appointed him in 1953. The very next year, the Warren Court handed down the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling that effectively ended segregation in the nation’s public schools systems. Ike called the Warren appointment his biggest mistake as president.

President Nixon appointed Harry Blackmun to the court in 1971 and all Blackmun did was write the Roe v. Wade decision that ruled abortion to be a protected right under the Constitution.

President Ford named John Paul Stevens to the court in 1975, thinking he was getting a conservative jurist to serve on the court. Stevens turned out to be one of the leading court liberals.

And what about Roberts? All he’s done is side with the liberal minority on the court in a 2012 vote that upheld the Affordable Care Act. It was a narrow decision that didn’t bring about the end of the world.

The Supreme Court remains a conservative body. It has three hard-core righties — Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Roberts might be tilting more toward the center, hardly to the left. Kennedy remains the pivotal swing vote. The four liberals remain dependably so: Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor have formed a Fearsome Foursome of liberal jurisprudence.

The hard right just needs to chill out. I doubt that the chief justice is going to turn on them. Hey, if he does, then he’s joining some pretty heady company among justices who rediscovered their consciences and their principles.

Uncategorized

Ford had it right on Nixon pardon

A friend posed this question on Facebook in response to my blog post on the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation.

He asked about my thoughts relating to President Ford’s pardon of Nixon barely a month after taking office on Aug. 9, 1974.

Here it is: President Ford did the right thing.

I’ll add that at the time I didn’t agree with the decision to grant a full and complete pardon. I was barely 25 years old at the time and I suppose I wanted my pound of flesh from the former president. Nixon, after all, had clobbered Sen. George McGovern in the 1972 election, dashing my hopes after working for McGovern in Multnomah County, Ore., and after casting my first-ever vote in a presidential election.

That was then.

Time, as they say, has this way of tempering one’s anger.

It has done so with me.

I grew to respect Gerald Ford immensely over the years. I now understand why he did what he did so early in his presidency. He did it to spare the nation the heartache of a possible trial for crimes that President Nixon committed against the nation, the Constitution and, yes, rank-and-file Americans.

I wasn’t alone in looking critically at the president’s decision to pardon his immediate predecessor. Nor am I alone in recognizing President Ford’s decision.

Not too many years before his death, President Ford received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award granted annually by the JFK Library and Museum in Boston. The man who presented the award to the former president was one of his harshest critics at the time of the pardon: the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Kennedy turned to Ford and said, in effect: “Mr. President, I was wrong to criticize that decision.”

The president did perform a courageous political act. It well might have cost him his election to the presidency in 1976.

It was the right thing to do.

Uncategorized

Nixon quit, saved the country

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Why not put a positive spin on what at the time seemed to many Americans like a dark moment in U.S. history?

Forty years today, President Richard Nixon announced his resignation from office.

How is that a positive development? He saved the country from certain impeachment.

http://www.politico.com/playbook/?hp=l6

Still, I saw a poll the other day that suggests that more than half of Americans today see the Watergate scandal as just an example of politics as usual.

Those of us who remember that time recall something quite different. President Nixon committed egregious crimes against the Constitution, such as when he ordered federal spooks to cease and desist in their probe of that June 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate building.

He lied to the country. He sought to cover up an event described early on as a “third-rate burglary.” Nixon sought to bring the power of his office to bear while hiding what happened.

If that isn’t abuse of power, then the term has no meaning at all.

I was a newly married college student when the crap hit the fan in 1973-74. I didn’t want the country to go forward with impeachment. Americans knew the stakes. But when the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment, it became clear to the president he was toast.

He quit his office. In the process the 37th president well might have helped rescue the nation from untold grief.

Time passes. Attitudes have changed, I suppose. The poll I saw, however, must not mean Americans have relegated a serious constitutional crisis to what they now see as just another game of political hardball.

It was a whole lot worse than that.