Different values and often competing objectives make it difficult for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to craft a uniform face to present to a very diverse group of stakeholders. Some of the people with which it deals seek learning, others validation or even absolution. Ignorance and indifference are in the mix among some stakeholders, as well. And then there is the element which is one of many undiscussables in official Washington. Political life has a strong Mean Girl and Bully Boy schoolyard vibe. This results in the creation of a lot of walking wounded among presidential family members and associates. Unlike the rest of us, they’re pushed and shoved and jostled and sometimes spat at in a free-for-all. This can color how they view the world and affect the tools they pick up to fight battles.
It’s easy to overlook the price the families of politicians pay when by contrast, the rest of us largely work in a grown up, regulated world with codified standards of conduct, professional principles, and human resources experts and lawyers who serve as ethics counselors. We’re not subject to stupid taunts and cartoonish stereotyping, thoughtless exaggerations, and, yes, cruel or cowardly attacks. Unlike Richard Nixon, we don’t hear demonstrators opposed to the Vietnam War shouting “F—- Tricia! F—-Julie!” at our family members.
That some of NARA’s stakeholders stereotype each other and have trouble understanding each other is a factor in trying to craft agency policies and strategies. Nixon’s former chief of staff, John H. Taylor, and I discussed such stereotypes this past spring when I posted an apology to him (“Dueling letters, misperceptions, 1996”). John implied that he and I both once had looked at each other through a stereotyping filter. I tend to agree that we did just that! John observed that he tried hard to establish professional standards at the private Nixon library that operated from 1990 to 2007.
“David Greenberg was still writing in 2007 of his fear that we would throw up roadblocks to scholars. Why? Not because he was mean and nasty, but because it was assumed that Nixon aides would all act a certain way, as we had always assumed about archivists and scholars. And so the wheel goes around!”
My post apologizing to John went up on March 25, six days before NARA opened the Watergate exhibit at the Nixon Presidential Library curated by federal director Tim Naftali. I took the first step, apologizing to Taylor in public. He followed suit at his own blog. Time does help heal some wounds for some of us. John and I both gave each other the gift of listening and seeking to understand each other. Unfortunately, it is a rare gift and hard to give or accept in the political world.
When I learned during the George W. Bush administration that NARA would be establishing a federal Nixon Presidential Library in California, I was worried. As a former Nixon tapes archivist at NARA, I had been a participant and a target in the “Nixon wars.” I expressed some of my concerns in an article for the History News Service in 2004. The title on my draft was something like “Nixon’s Foundation Haunted by Past Actions.” My point was that the Foundation trailed some pretty hefty baggage. Unfortunately, in publishing my essay, the editors of the site, which is run by academics, applied their own title to it: “Will There Be a Last Nixon Cover-up?”
I just Googled the terms Nixon “Will Alexander” Nagourney Naftali to see if the New York Times story about the Nixon Presidential Library last week resulted in discussion or even links at any archivists’ or historians’ blogs. No such hits. Could it be that the story attracted so little notice for the same reason the HNS editors used an over the top title for my article–because people expect Nixon’s advocates to act a certain way? Is inflammatory language used against federal employees at the National Archives shrugged off by some archivists and historians as not newsworthy (“It’s Nixonites, what do you expect?”)
I was a participant in and even a designated target (externally and internally) in the Nixon wars. Remember, I’ve heard a credible report that a senior official on AOTUS Don Wilson’s team told the Nixon side that the members of my archival cohort were rogue archivists. Very disappointing and certainly undeserved but a lesson in how “Washington” operates.
I was part of GenOne, the first generation of federal archivists to identify the full scope of Nixonian “abuses of governmental power,” as defined in the statutory and regulatory language. Because of my work in public service at NARA, I was beaten up, took fire on behalf of my bosses at the Nixon Presidential Materials Project, and knifed in the back. But around the time that NARA moved to open a federal library in Yorba Linda in 2007, I considered reaching out to Taylor, then director of the Nixon Foundation, and to Nixon’s daughters.
I wanted to explain to them the federal archival ethos and to prevent future attacks on NARA’s employees of the type we had endured. “Ever the idealist,” as one of my bosses once said of me, I fleetingly wondered around 2006 or 2007 if I could be a bridge builder between the National Archives and Nixon’s family. I actually looked on the Internet for how I could contact Julie and David Eisenhower and Tricia and Edward Cox.
I wasn’t afraid of Nixon’s daughters. I had established rapport with H. R. Haldeman when he came to NARA in 1987. And I had met Julie and Tricia at the Youth Inaugural Ball in 1969. And I had copied Julie on a letter of support I had sent Nixon on May 23, 1974. (A copy most likely is in the library at Yorba Linda. If you would like me to send you a PDF copy, shoot me an email at the address listed on my About page here. I don’t have time to scan it tonight and to redact the address.) I wrote to Nixon in 1974, “I admire your strength and courage during this difficult period–my prayers are with you and your family. I also admire your most courageous daughter, Julie Eisenhower, for standing up for you the way she does.” Like Julie, I would stand up in public time and again and speak up for those I supported. People such as Tim Naftali.
In the end, I didn’t write them. And I tend to think now it wouldn’t have worked, anyway, that I might have placed myself at risk, as a current civil servant, for no payoff. But I toyed with the idea for several months. I knew if surrogates used “Nixonian” tactics–savvy insiders know the practice in the political world is to use surrogates to do the fighting–the Nixon side would come off badly in the eyes of some of the former President’s critics. I wanted to help his family avoid falling into traps that would lead people to say, “I told you so. Nixonites, what do you expect!”
But John Taylor, him I did reach, as he reached me. My breakthrough with Taylor ended up occurring publicly at the Nixon Foundation’s blog in 2008. I was afraid of him (he had used harsh language about my cohort in his “Nixon man” role in the past). But at the same time, I was not afraid. Because I had a very, very strong sense of who I was. And I have always had great serenity regarding the way I’ve handled my duties as a public servant. So I posted a comment in the summer of 2008 under an essay he had put up at the Nixon Foundation’s blog. John remembers the moment:
“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.”
I’ve often said that the presidency is very lonely. This applies to Democrats and Republicans alike. A president has no peers. And he is surrounded by at-will employees. To the extent he allows pushback and in-private challenging of what he does, it’s up to him to create an environment where this is permitted by a trusted few. The structure and the conventions work against this. In public, spokesmen rush out to explain away his actions and to defend them. Lawyers and political aides look for ways to protect his interests. So different from the rest of us, who walk utterly alone into our yearly annual review meetings! And, if we’re lucky have friends or loved ones to whom we can mutter, “wow, did I screw up.”
Who is there to say to a President, as our friends say to us, “Dude, you really messed that one up. Man, you blew it!” And whom he would trust enough to say, “Yeah, totally” and explain why and what he has learned. Not many! He both is in a cocoon and exposed to vile and sometimes undeserved attacks by political opponents. (This feels worse now than in the past in the age of 24/7 cable and talk radio and blogs which feed emotionally needy voters seeking affirmation and validation for their choices at the ballot box.)
All too often, presidents are wounded, then handed crutches by well-meaning supporters and aides, with no one available to help them recover fully and walk again without a limp. This makes it difficult for them to pivot and to accept scrutiny by historians, journalists and other researchers once their records are moved from the White House to the National Archives. The extent to which they stumble in their relations with NARA depends on how they adjust to walking with a limp.
If the principals struggle to integrate the hyperbole of campaign slogans with the reality of what they do in Washington, what about pundits? Don’t we see daily in newspapers and blogs how people who have convinced themselves that they have a strong moral compass actually struggle to confront issues honestly? Too often, they, also, find excuses to explain away actions by those whom they support and scramble to pick up mud to fling at those they don’t. Rarely do they offer a guiding light.
Shankar Vedantam used to write a column on The Department of Human Behavior for the Washington Post. He once discussed actor-observer bias and how people view actions as situational or dispositional. He wrote
“Where a Republican might say that another Republican who failed had a hard job to do, Democrats would be likely to conclude the person was incompetent — we choose situational explanations to justify the errors of our allies, and we choose dispositional explanations to judge the errors of our opponents.
Our psychological perceptions get flipped when our allies and opponents do the right thing. Republicans are likely to see the success of other Republicans as dispositional — reflecting the innate nature of Republicans. But Democrats are likely to see the success of a Republican as situational — thus depriving their opponents of credit.”
No wonder I’ve never gotten much traction on the archivists listserv, in the records managers’ forum, or among most historians. Moving out of shelters and comfort zones is hard! Presidents, their families, and their associates have many well-meaning enablers who make it hard for them to endure the scrutiny that is part of public service. And to distinguish between the cherry picking and agenda driven scrutiny of the politically driven and the learning culture and objectivity of the best historians and political scientists.
In “What if the secret to success is failure,” Paul Tough looked in last week’s New York Times magazine at a quality described as grit as an indicator of which students persevere and which fall by the wayside when faced with challenges.
“Our kids don’t put up with a lot of suffering. They don’t have a threshold for it. They’re protected against it quite a bit. And when they do get uncomfortable, we hear from their parents. We try to talk to parents about having to sort of make it O.K. for there to be challenge, because that’s where learning happens.”
Cohen said that in the middle school, “if a kid is a C student, and their parents think that they’re all-A’s, we do get a lot of pushback: ‘What are you talking about? This is a great paper!’ We have parents calling in and saying, for their kids, ‘Can’t you just give them two more days on this paper?’ Overindulging kids, with the intention of giving them everything and being loving, but at the expense of their character — that’s huge in our population. I think that’s one of the biggest problems we have at Riverdale.”
That’s what people often do to the political leaders they support, close up or from afar. So much in the mix! And tough issues, too. Issues that involve sheltered people who at the same time are battered people. People hunkered down in shelters, for whom, unlike for people such as I, there is no easy rescue.
