The
Nixon Defense – John W. Dean (Viking Books)
The
Invisible Bridge – Rick Perlstein (Simon and Schuster)
The President’s men spied on fellow citizens, he
allegedly used the IRS to harass political opponents, he waged war without the
consent of Congress and he utilized the machinery of government in an effort to
hide these crimes. And for all this he faced impeachment and eventual removal
from office, except for the fact that members of his own political party
stepped in and told him, for the sake of the country, he had to go.
No, this is not a conservative dream scenario of what
should happen to Barack Obama; instead it is the reality and the story of what
actually happened to Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal that ended his
Presidency. The comparison between the Nixon Presidency and the Obama
Presidency, as pointed out by many political insiders is striking.
To try to understand the seismic political shift that
has taken place over the last 40 years and to try to put into perspective the
magnitude of politician’s indifference to the public and their craven lust for
power it helps to look back at a time in our history when we actually held
these politicos to account for their actions.
To get a better understanding of Richard Nixon and his
rise to the Presidency there is no better source than Patrick J. Buchanan, one
of a very small handful of advisors who worked with Nixon prior to his initial
election to the White House, who later made the transition to advise the
President after he assumed office.
Buchanan’s new book, The Greatest Comeback- How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create a
New Majority clearly details how Nixon rebounded from a pair of blistering
political defeats, first in the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy
and 1962 California gubernatorial race to Pat Brown.
Buchanan brings the reader behind the scenes, utilizing
his own personal goldmine of memos to Nixon which feature the candidate’s
scribbled responses. Those memos combined with Buchanan’s recollections lay out
how Nixon managed to coalesce a fractured Republican party and unite Barry
Goldwater’s conservative wing with the liberal factions of George Romney and
Nelson Rockefeller, along with the nascent New Right of Ronald Reagan to build
a majority that swept him to victory in the 1968 Presidential election.
Buchanan paints a portrait of a masterful politician
who took the pieces of a broken down political career and took a disparate
political party to victory. Once again the Obama/Nixon parallels are striking.
John W. Dean worked as the White House legal counsel to
Richard Nixon from 1970 to 1973 and was described as “master manipulator” of
the Watergate break in, who later stuck a deal with prosecutors, pleading
guilty to a single charge related to the cover up of the crimes, in exchange
for becoming a “star witness” for the prosecution of the case.
Since that time Dean has seemingly made a career out of
writing books about Nixon, Watergate, and other books trying to compare acts of
alleged political wrong doing to those of Watergate. Now with the 40th
anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, Dean takes another run and Nixon/Watergate in
what he claims will be the “definitive” account of the story, The Nixon Defense is culled from a
collection of recordings and transcripts of “never before heard” conversations
on the topic.
If you’ve never read another Watergate book, then you
may find this to be an interesting dissertation on the subject, but students of
the time and those at all versed in the detail, will likely find this “new”
effort from Dean to be a bit shop worn and redundant of other accounts that
have come before.
For some, myself included, there is still a level of
distaste and sliminess that seems to be part and parcel of Mr. Dean’s
self-interested lack of loyalty.
Transition and change are certainly a focus of today’s
political circumstance. So what form would change take as we transitioned from
Nixon era politics to the failed Presidency and malaise that marked Jimmy
Carter’s time in the White House?
Author Rick Perlstein offers up his take on things in The Invisible Bridge – The Fall of Nixon and
the Rise of Reagan. In the end The Invisible
Bridge turns into an epic (880 pages!) flail; a disjointed account, chock
full of questionable “facts” and liberal characterizations of Reagan that end
up sounding like verbal caricatures.
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