Home today – anyone who follows the news knows why. Still thinking over recent events and how they fit into the larger narrative of archives, history and civic literacy.
At Thursday’s Cuban Missile Crisis forum at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the speakers discussed John F. Kennedy’s willingness to take acceptable risks. It was exhilarating but also dispiriting for me to hear them talk about Kennedy acting in cognizance of multiple roles: Commander in Chief; a diplomat; someone who sought to step into the shoes of the person on the other side; and a politician. I enjoyed it because I’ve always sought to take a multi-textured view of complex issues. But hearing so smart a discussion felt jarring during the silly season of election campaigning in the United States. The nuance embracing grown up world colliding with the cartoonish schoolyard world, again.
My dashboard consistently has shown since I launched my blog in December 2010 that my least read posts are those I promote on Facebook and Twitter as urging the Nixon side to do better. Why? I’m not sure. My readers generally prefer to communicate with me off web. I’ve engaged in some enjoyable discussions over the telephone and in person with some of them. But this question isn’t one anyone ever has addressed.
Is it an expectations thing, a sense especially by my readers Outside the Beltway that the Nixonians are who they are, that the Nixon Foundation is what it is, so write them off? As a group which invites right wing radio hosts such as Mike Gallagher to speak to audiences who laugh and applaud as he assails “liberals” as people for whom “American flag pins” don’t align with their mindset? And posts at its site about Gallagher’s appearance on (eyeroll) September 11. Yep, September 11, 2012. I shook my head as I read that. And flashed back to September 11, 2001 and how my fellow commuters and I on Washington’s subway displayed flag pins and scarves and ties in the weeks following that day, regardless of our political opinions.
Or is the unpopularity among my posts of the ones pushing the Nixonians to do better due to something else?
Is it related to perceptions in the archival, records and historical communities of what have been called the “Nixon wars?” If so, then some of that may stem from misperceptions. Because what happened really represented a multi-tiered collapse of Washington in the face of Nixonian opposition as much as anything else. Nowhere in the official record, and definitely not in those of any entities with “oversight” roles, will you find the story of what happened and why. Behind the scenes, there were some actions. Officially? Nothing.
Being at the center of the Nixon wars? I’ve described in various forums what happened to me and my NARA colleagues as a result of our having fulfilled a statutory mandate to identify “the full truth” about “abuses of governmental power” generally known as Watergate. But some of what happened (not all by any means, of course) stemmed from choices made inside the government, not outside.
Both Inspector General complaints against me (which I easily rebutted) came from inside Washington, not the Nixon side. So, too, the decisions to handle the Kutler Nixon tapes litigation in which I testified in 1992 the way it was. We all have choices. Let’s establish a record always has been the way I’ve looked at it. Win or lose. It tells you a lot about the nation’s capital that my generation of archivists embraced as acceptable some risks that official Washington could not, would not, and did not. All part of the story.
Did things have to play out the way they did? Former Nixon chief of staff and former Nixon Foundation director John H. Taylor and I have debated whether it might have made some difference if his side and mine at NARA would have had a better understanding of each other while Nixon still was alive. Nixon died in 1994, two years after my boss, Fred Graboske, and I gave truthful testimony in Kutler v. Wilson. Fred and I are pictured in 1988 as NARA employees and during a wonderful visit to the National Archives last week.
There are many elements that kept understanding from happening. As a result, I tend to think only marginal improvements might have occurred under the best of circumstances. Our lawyers and executives were right to keep us sequestered behind what I then thought was a secure firewall during most of the 1980s. The scapegoating that occurred during the George H. W. Bush administration definitely could and should have been avoided, of course. Management 101 that you consider sustainability and avoid that sort of thing.
Why has the Nixon side continued to stumble? And who has been calling the shots in terms of advocacy and outreach? I understood that the Foundation needed a major course correction as far back as 2004, when I wrote an article called “Aggressive advocacy haunts the Nixon Foundation.” Too nuanced a title? Others may have thought so! The editors at the History News Service (a different entity than the History News Network) published it under their own title, “Will There Be a Last Nixon Cover-Up?”
Live by the Nixonian sword, die by it in public perceptions, perhaps. But that my own title was more nuanced tells you a lot about my purpose in writing my essay. I was telling Nixon’s side: Here’s your past–understand it and decide if you reject it or accept it. You can work to shed it or not.
The John Taylor of whom I wrote in 2004 changed, grew, learned, and evolved in his thinking. We’ve been friends in the virtual world since 2008. But the Nixon Foundation picked up additional baggage after Father John left to become a full-time Episcopal priest in January 2009. Its blog, The New Nixon, published few truly historical essays in 2009. Instead, a Townhall blogger, David R. Stokes, used it as a mirror site to post partisan essays. That established a record for the blog during Barack Obama’s first year in office that it might have avoided, in my view.
Other bloggers at TNN put up standard political fare in 2009 to the point where I argued against it, at the site and in email, saying I could see that on any ordinary GOP or conservative site. And Bob Bostock? He called in 2010 for then NARA Nixon Presidential Library director Tim Naftali to find an Alger Hiss library to head, instead. Soon after that, I gave up on TNN. I was out of there as someone who commented, for good, as it turned out.
The blog still exists–I occasionally glance at it, which is how I found Robert Nedelkoff’s good essay about George McGovern last week. (I actually liked it more than I did Rick Perlstein’s account in The New Republic of McGovern and Nixon.) But the Nixon Foundation’s blog no longer accepts comments. Just as at the two Nixon Legacy Forums I attended at NARA November 2011 and June 2012, we have content pitched at us with no ability to debate, push back, or otherwise engage. Not only that, negotiations with former Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries Sharon Fawcett spelled out how the Nixon Legacy Forums must play out at NARA.
The negotiated conditions tell me the risks of examining Nixon’s legacy from a position acceptable to independent scholars still are deemed unacceptable by his side. Including the fact that many name historians are introduced in NARA’s McGowan Theater by Doug Swanson or Tom Nastick, people who in my view could just as capably introduce the Nixon events, but can’t. The Nixon people repeatedly have sought to cloak themselves in perceived protections other presidential foundations haven’t sought at NARA. Which means the Nixonians are moving, by choice, in to a Centenary Year in a position of continued weakness.
I thought about how the Nixon Foundation’s blog slid downhill after a promising start under Taylor in 2008 when I read an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education this morning. Peter Schmidt reported on a study which attributed some student perceptions of faculty bias to poor communications. He quoted the study’s results but also pointed to disagreement on some of the elements. I’m too far removed from the academy to assess fully the issue of instructor bias. But I recognize the traits the surveys examined in other settings, including the blogosphere.
“One of the three surveys measured a trait called ‘argumentativeness,’ a tendency to seek out, rather than avoid, situations where one can argue a point of view. The researchers characterized that trait as generally positive. A second survey measured a trait called ‘verbal aggression,’ which the researchers characterized as generally negative. That trait was defined as a tendency to engage in ad hominem attacks or otherwise attack the self-concept of people who hold opposing views. The third survey measured how students perceive and respond to instructor bias, asking questions related to students’ general attitude toward the faculty as opposed to their experience with particular instructors.”
Schmidt reported that
“How students communicate when confronted with opposing viewpoints, the study found, has a lot to do with how likely they are to see instructors as politically biased or to react to perceptions of bias in ways that undermine their own learning. In a nutshell, students who are predisposed to verbally attack people with other viewpoints are more likely than others to perceive their instructors as ideologically biased. Students who are predisposed to enjoy a good, reasoned argument are less likely than others to react to perceptions of instructor bias by withdrawing from classroom discussions or censoring themselves to hide their true beliefs.”
Some of this is philosophical and temperamental more so than political. David Brooks observed recently in “What Moderations Means” that “Moderation is . . .a distinct ethical disposition. Just as the moderate suspects imbalance in the country, so she suspects it in herself. She distrusts passionate intensity and bold simplicity and admires self-restraint, intellectual openness and equipoise.”
In his written and oral comments about “Nixon the Man,” Richard Nixon pointed to his coolness during crises. Yet he flared up at times and sent aides on ill thought out missions, such as counting Jewish civil servants at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Facing successive generations (with some admitted zigzags by the agency over time) of National Archives officials who sought to uphold statutory mandates, his advocates repeated the “take ’em out” tactics Nixon once used against BLS officials.
It need not have been that way and it certainly need not stay that way. There are many ways to interpret the quip about Nixon attributed to Henry Kissinger: “He would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him.” As I watch the Nixon Foundation’s continued struggles, I find myself thinking, where would it be now, had someone inside the group whom its officials would listen to thought it worth offering it some tough love? And, more importnly, its officials been willing to embrace such advice courageously and learn from it? In a much better place although the road would have been tougher than the one its officials have followed of late.
Risks deemed acceptable or unacceptable. All part of a continuing and fascinating narrative.
