Richard Nixon once said, “The finest steel goes through the hottest fire.” Some go through trials and tribulations, become steel, but are crippled by internal flaws. Others go through equally tough times and find grace as well as strength.
When the new Watergate exhibit opened on March 31, 2011 at the federal Nixon Presidential Library, former Nixon foundation director John H. Taylor wrote at his blog that
“it was high time for the Nixon library, now in its 21st year, to grow up and accept that the judgment of history, no matter how it comes out for Nixon, lies beyond the reach of advocacy by family, friends, consultants, and especially those whose own reputations hang in the balance alongside the president they served, often honorably but sometimes, as this new exhibit shows, not.”
He won praise from the Los Angeles Times for his reaction:
“In all the brouhaha over the exhibit, we most admired the comments of John Taylor, a longtime Nixon aide who ultimately concluded that it should go up. ‘If we’re really sure the president over time will be seen as the great president some of us believe he is, we can’t be afraid of what someone might say that’s critical,’ Taylor said.”
I was probably the least surprised reader of that editorial. And I had the longest road to travel to get there. In 1992, Nixon’s lawyers called my archival cohort “incompetent,” as lawyers do in advocacy when trying to “impeach.” Ouch. Then, in 1996, Taylor and I sparred in dueling letters in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In 1998, I was surprised at the criticism he leveled at my archival cohort in The American Spectator, although in retrospect, he did have some of us pegged correctly as “Hardy Boys.”
It’s almost routine these days to see pundits wring their hands over toxic public discourse and worry about over-reliance on taunting. (I’m not even going to try to Google the terms “politics” and “junior high.”) One of the difficulties for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in carrying out its mission lies in the fact that the culture of the historian (which many of its employees and customers are) and the politician are so different. As I noted in my first post here on December 6, 2010:
“The political world depends on personal loyalty. While in office, presidents are surrounded by aides who often offer knee jerk defenses of the principal, at best, and mud slinging at critics, at worst. Acting U.S. Archivist Frank Burke once wrote that NARA serves ‘not to implement the programs of the administration in office but to protect the records, good and bad, of the administrations of the past.’ I believe that it may be hard for representatives of the two cultures, one based on the concept of loyalty to man and party and often defensive in posture, the other fact based and objective and open in posture, to explain their objectives and values to each other.”
That Taylor and I sniped at each other in 1996 is not surprising. It was only four years since my difficult testimony experience in Kutler v. Wilson. And two years since the death of Richard Nixon, whom Taylor served (seemingly well to this outside observer) as chief of staff and later Nixon Foundation director. Just as it takes time to process grief, it takes time to gain perspective on the tough experiences we undergo. In 1996, both of us probably were fed up with seeing reductionism and cartoonish images used in narratives related to our work. But it took us a while to realize we had options other than battling each other.
In February 2008, Taylor, then still associated with the Nixon Foundation, started a group blog, The New Nixon (TNN). I discovered it in June 2008. I didn’t read the archived posts until later, I just looked around at what was on the site that summer. Then I took a deep breath and posted a comment under an essay by Taylor. [Original link no longer works due to revision of website. My comment at TNN in 2008 still is available via the Internet Archive here.]
In an email today, I asked John what his reaction was when I showed up at TNN. My late sister, a staunch Nixon supporter, used to laugh at me, the political Independent, and call me a gadfly. (Yeah, sisters keep it real, don’t they?) Taylor responded this way (I have his permission to quote from his message to me today):
“I remember very clearly what I thought when you posted. You were coming on a Nixon site making a substantive comment, evincing no rancor or hard feelings about our prior published exchanges. If you’ve seen ‘Hunt For Red October,’ what you did was like when Scott Glenn orders ‘all back full,’ knowing the Russian will hear him and possibly blow him out of the water — but he suspects not. I thought, ‘How gracious of her; it’s a peace offering; and if I want this blog to mean anything, it’s exactly what we need.’ I doubt whether I’d have had the courage to act as you did, but it doesn’t matter; I didn’t need to.”
His posted response to me at the time at the blog? A one liner, but a very astute one: “Ms. Krusten: Thank you for your thoughtful post.” My response? I thought to myself, “hooray, we might be able to make some breakthroughs, the historian/former archivist and the Nixon Foundation representative.” And we did, at TNN until January 2009, then at his individual blog, The Episconixonian, and since December 2010 at mine. By the end of 2010, we were tag-teaming in supportof Tim Naftali, federal director of the Nixon Presidential Library, in his efforts to put up an historically sound Watergate exhibit.
So, why did I show up at TNN? Well, remember, I voted for Nixon. I haven’t forgotten why. The same year that John and I exchanged fire in the CHE’s letters section, I wrote in an article published in Presidential Studies Quarterly that Nixon had been “demonized beyond belief” while in office and that his distrust of historians was understandable. Truth be told, I wanted to help the Nixon Foundation. Here it was in partnership now with NARA, my old employer. Most of the reporting on the establishment of the federal Nixon library had little nuance, in my view. NARA was painted one way, the Foundation another. Why not see if I could help the Foundation people out of what looked like a pretty deep hole?
I enjoyed my exchanges with John at TNN. Seeing his reactions to Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland was really interesting. He was especially good in discussing the Ellsberg break-in. (Perlstein joined some of the convos, too.) However, things changed when Taylor left the Foundation around January 2009 to become full-time Vicar at St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church and School.
I hung around the Taylor-less Nixon blog for a little over a year. But I largely stopped posting comments at The New Nixon in the spring of 2010. As I wrote in an essay for the History News Network, some of the anti-Obama pieces baffled me. (Around May 2010 I realized that they mostly were mirror posts by a blogger from Townhall). I kept urging the bloggers to use their unique knowledge to educate members of the public in an objective, non-partisan way, on what it was like to work in Washington and in the White House. Otherwise, the site would just mirror what you’d see on any conservative political blog. Few takers, unfortunately.
The lack of response from the bloggers to posted comments baffled me, as well. I didn’t understand that. Social media provide opportunities for engagement. Putting up posts and remaining silent when people responded mystified me as a tactical choice. (I’ve seen historians do that, too.) [Added Wednesday morning: In the post-Taylor era, only David Emig, who presented as a moderate politically, seemed willing to engage with demonstrated comfort with those commenting on his essays at TNN. He only posted essays sporadically, however.]
How people use blogs depends on what is their strategic vision for the effort, of course. The Nixon side had a certain reputation. In expressing some frustration over an article David Greenberg wrote around 2006, John Taylor said recently, “it was assumed that Nixon aides would all act a certain way, as we had always assumed about archivists and scholars.” In response, I admitted to having been in contact with Greenberg at the time and said some of what he wrote may have reflected what he heard from me about my experiences as a NARA employee.
So, missed opportunities for The New Nixon bloggers to position themselves for what lay ahead, including the controversy over the Watergate exhibit. Too bad. The former archivist did try to help them, although perhaps only Taylor saw that.
The political world often shows signs of an argument culture but it isn’t always kumbaya within the academy and in some professional forums, either. Far from it. Donald Hall covered some of the issues in “Collegiality and Graduate School Training” in Inside Higher Ed in 2006. He observed that
“The most stressful and (in retrospect) useless courses that I took as a grad student were ones that pitted student against student in forms of antagonistic and hyper-competitive gamesmanship. To be sure, some of us were able to compete adroitly in such an environment; after all, graduate students are usually quick witted and driven to succeed, otherwise they wouldn’t have made it, or even wanted to make it, as far as graduate school.
Some of us were quite able to marshal a caustic comment, point out a flaw with deadly accuracy, and try always to make the smartest comment in class and thereby effectively keep center stage — if the professor demanded and rewarded such behavior.”
In Hall’s view,
“It is not useful or responsible to encourage students to attack, demean, or ‘toughen up’ each other. While vigorous debate and disagreement should always be welcomed, encouraging hyper-competitiveness and combativeness among graduate students simply creates and re-creates an academic culture of egotism, suspicion, and generally anti-social behavior. We reap the harvest of that training in our own overly contentious faculty meetings and vicious departmental squabbles.”
How often do you see political players analyze their world in public with anything close to that level of insight or awareness or courage or honesty ? Not often! No wonder NARA keeps getting caught in culture clashes, time and again.
Halls’ advice for handling classroom discussions has applicability for blogging, in my view. Just today I saw what might have been a flame war averted in an archival forum because the people took a mature approach to expressing their differences. Hall explained,
“I do not demand consensus and certainly allow for expressions of dissent in a group report back to the class. However, what I do expect is a willingness to engage in dialogue and to articulate some shared goals or points of agreement, even if significant differences remain. As students respond to each other’s work in class — whether in group settings or in individual presentations — I also ask that they commend what is positive and successful even if they express disagreement or find problems with an argument or a specific line of reasoning. Productive conversation always demands a dynamic of generosity even in the midst of significant disagreement.”
Before he died, Lee Atwater said, “My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood.”
No one is perfect. No one is right all the time. No one has all the answers. What’s missing more and more in the political world is the dynamic of generosity that Hall describes. That means that whether in blogging or debating on radio or tv, people with a political mindset too often play a weak hand when they think they have a strong one.
Grace and a dash of humility make listening easier and learning more likely to occur. John Taylor taught me that by the way he welcomed me to his Nixon blog. Lesson learned!
So let’s go from SoCal to NHL ice chronologically. In 1978, the National Archives sent me as part of a team of archivists to Laguna Niguel, California on Temporary Duty assignment (TDY). During the two-week assignment, we reviewed some pre-presidential Nixon records held at the Federal Records Center in Laguna Niguel. Here’s an article which describes the recent move by NARA out of the “Ziggurat,” as the building is called for its striking architecture. A friend and colleague who was part of the Nixon Project review team took some photos of us in the room where we did our review work as well as atop the building. Since the photographer is not pictured in the photos he took, I’ve put in a separate photo of him as part of my tribute to The Lost Generation, top left. I still laugh in seeing the photo below at the memory of my colleague telling me he would take more pictures that showed me but my face was too shiny! Hah. Well, friends keep it real.
So from sun to ice. When I worked out at the Nixon Project at Pickett Street in Alexandria, Virginia, I mostly spent my lunch breaks out walking (Sony Walkman)! Occasionally I went shopping or out to lunch with friends. One of my most memorable outings was when my friend and colleague Lori and I went out to the nearby Mount Vernon Recreation Center, where the NHL Capitals then held some of their practice sessions. 
