Nixon Without Gifts
State of the Day guest contributor, Jack, takes us back, then forward again as he hopes a new Dan Rather steps up soon to ask the question we all want answered. Here is a cut and paste to get you started. The entire piece will appear, as the kids say, after the fold.
Nixon Without Gifts
Guest Post by Jack
"Are you running for something Mr. Rather?"
"No Sir. Are you?
This testy exchange between Richard Nixon and Dan Rather at a presidential press conference in May 1974, preceded a question from Rather to Nixon about the Watergate scandals that three months later would end the Nixon presidency in disgrace.
It was an unprecedented public display of insolence from a reporter to an American President. Nixon had tried to make a joke at Rather's expense. As Rather introduced himself to cheers and jeers, Nixon asked him if he was running for something. Coming from Nixon it wasn't much of a joke in the first place, but instead of laughing it off as etiquette required, Rather responded in a tone laden with sarcasm, "No Sir. Are You?" Had the exchange involved anyone other than a scandal beleaguered and politically neutered Richard Nixon it probably would have cost Rather his job.
As a college student at the time, I remember seeing replays of this spat and recalling that it was all part of the political soap opera of the age. The Watergate era of the Nixon presidency was after all a new and improbable drama every day. Nixon's complicity in crimes ultimately immersed him in scandals that had he not blabbed about them on tape, he probably would have survived.
Nixon had ordered that his conversations in the Oval Office be recorded by a voice activated system. No doubt the tapes were expected by Nixon to illuminate his greatness, but they also exposed a rather casual approach to law and ethics and a bit of indifference to constitutional constraints upon his power. Caught red-handed it was Mr. Nixon who would lose his job and not Dan Rather.
The self-inflicted nature of Nixon's undoing added irony and amusement to the saga and compounded the drama of his demise. So too was the drama intensified and paralleled by Nixon's public humiliation, part of which was also self-inflicted. Months before the Rather exchange Nixon gratuitously declared in a rambling response to another reporter's question that, "I am not a crook." Immortal words that forever condemned him to be remembered as just that.
But the Rather riposte was perhaps a deeper humiliation in that it sliced through the veneer of respect that clung precariously to Nixon by virtue of his office, and that publicly at least had not been violated even during Watergate. Mr. Rather shed that politeness and basically told Nixon to screw off right on television. In yet a final insult to Richard Nixon, Rather would eventually sit atop his profession while Nixon would languish for years at the nadir of his life.
The humiliation of Mr. Nixon during his fall can properly be viewed as just desserts. For the extended and drawn out nature of his demise was quite simply and selfishly all about Richard Nixon. He stubbornly refused to give up a presidency which he had forfeited his constitutional right to hold, and thus over many months inflicted great agony and immense damage on his office and his country, magnifying the failure of his presidency. And as his downfall also revealed, Nixon's considerable gifts were overshadowed by a dark and dysfunctional side.
Today, in another failed presidency, it is all about George Bush. And once again it is due to the dysfunction of the man. But this time it is worse. Mr. Bush is Nixon without gifts. His presidency is failure without success.
All about George. It is how the Iraq War should be remembered in its making and its misery. It is where any analysis of the debacle should begin, how accountability for its failure should be explained, and how the responsibility for its tragedy should be assigned.
No matter the plot or the details, Iraq is all about George. No matter deposits of oil, dominos of democracy, weapons of mass destruction, ties to terrorism or ties to whatever, America went into Iraq first and foremost, and in the end, because of one inadequate and dysfunctional man.
No one else who could have or should have been elected President in 2000 would ever have invaded Iraq. A well balanced person, a fully formed adult, a person of judgment, a person who reads, or listens, a person who controls his insecurities, inadequacies, and all his complexes, oedipal and otherwise, all basic requirements for a president, would never have invaded Iraq. It was a task tailor made for George. Only he who would proclaim himself the Decider, in a shrill fit the same as when Nixon proclaimed himself not a crook, could have invaded Iraq.
He came to office with almost no qualifications beyond his father's name and connections and sought to succeed where he believed, wrongly as always, his father had failed. He had to outdo the Old Man and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
It wasn't enough for George to take on Osama bin Laden and Al-Queda after 9/11. It wasn't enough for him to preside over the greatest American tragedy since Pearl Harbor. It wasn't enough for him to soothe a nation in its sorrow and take its vengeance on those who had actually inflicted such tragedy. It wasn't enough for George because it never was about the nation. George had to overthrow Saddam. By doing so he could sit at the helm of the Bush family dynasty, above them all.
Except as usual the Decider screwed it up. America has now seen almost four years of the Decider's failures in Iraq, beginning with the greatest blunder of all, the decision to invade in the first place. It turned out exactly as the father, the one Bush who understood something about Iraq, and the one father George never consulted about Iraq, knew that it would. The father understood the repercussions of blowing the lid off Iraq, and so he left it to Saddam.
Forswearing the judgment of his father, and lacking his wisdom, the Decider has failed to outdo his father, but he is succeeding in outdoing the failures of Richard Nixon. Nixon at least enjoyed certain foreign policy successes. The Decider has no successes. He enjoys only the failures he has inflicted on his country and the world. Even Vietnam, that other debacle now so often compared to Iraq, was not the failure for Nixon that Iraq is for the Decider. Nixon at least ended Vietnam and it was not his in the beginning. Iraq has always been the Decider's, and he will never end it.
It is now beyond all capacity of Mr. Bush as a man and as a force of nature to end Iraq. Iraq will go on and on, and it may well reverberate through the world in a way Vietnam never did, because unlike Vietnam, everybody wants a piece of Iraq. In blowing up Iraq, the Decider has outdone even himself and blown the lid off the entire region. His capacity for failure unbounded, it now remains to be seen how far and fast he falls, and how far the world falls with him.
We can only hope that as this tragedy unfolds there will be the spectacle of a publicly humiliated Mr. Bush, stripped once and for all of the deference his office confers. We can only hope for a Dan Rather of our day to come along. Then when the Decider smirks and chuckles as he talks about how bad it is in Iraq, that person can finally ask him, right there on television, what should be asked of him everyday, "Sir, isn't it time for your selfish, immature, and arrogant ass to go?"
Three thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. Let us hope there finally comes along just one reporter with the courage to perform and risk something as small as a job to humiliate the man responsible.
"Are you running for something Mr. Rather?"
"No Sir. Are you?
This testy exchange between Richard Nixon and Dan Rather at a presidential press conference in May 1974, preceded a question from Rather to Nixon about the Watergate scandals that three months later would end the Nixon presidency in disgrace. [...]
We can only hope that as this tragedy unfolds there will be the spectacle of a publicly humiliated Mr. Bush, stripped once and for all of the deference his office confers. We can only hope for a Dan Rather of our day to come along. Then when the Decider smirks and chuckles as he talks about how bad it is in Iraq, that person can finally ask him, right there on television, what should be asked of him everyday, "Sir, isn't it time for your selfish, immature, and arrogant ass to go?"
Nixon Without Gifts
Guest Post by Jack
"Are you running for something Mr. Rather?"
"No Sir. Are you?
This testy exchange between Richard Nixon and Dan Rather at a presidential press conference in May 1974, preceded a question from Rather to Nixon about the Watergate scandals that three months later would end the Nixon presidency in disgrace.
It was an unprecedented public display of insolence from a reporter to an American President. Nixon had tried to make a joke at Rather's expense. As Rather introduced himself to cheers and jeers, Nixon asked him if he was running for something. Coming from Nixon it wasn't much of a joke in the first place, but instead of laughing it off as etiquette required, Rather responded in a tone laden with sarcasm, "No Sir. Are You?" Had the exchange involved anyone other than a scandal beleaguered and politically neutered Richard Nixon it probably would have cost Rather his job.
As a college student at the time, I remember seeing replays of this spat and recalling that it was all part of the political soap opera of the age. The Watergate era of the Nixon presidency was after all a new and improbable drama every day. Nixon's complicity in crimes ultimately immersed him in scandals that had he not blabbed about them on tape, he probably would have survived.
Nixon had ordered that his conversations in the Oval Office be recorded by a voice activated system. No doubt the tapes were expected by Nixon to illuminate his greatness, but they also exposed a rather casual approach to law and ethics and a bit of indifference to constitutional constraints upon his power. Caught red-handed it was Mr. Nixon who would lose his job and not Dan Rather.
The self-inflicted nature of Nixon's undoing added irony and amusement to the saga and compounded the drama of his demise. So too was the drama intensified and paralleled by Nixon's public humiliation, part of which was also self-inflicted. Months before the Rather exchange Nixon gratuitously declared in a rambling response to another reporter's question that, "I am not a crook." Immortal words that forever condemned him to be remembered as just that.
But the Rather riposte was perhaps a deeper humiliation in that it sliced through the veneer of respect that clung precariously to Nixon by virtue of his office, and that publicly at least had not been violated even during Watergate. Mr. Rather shed that politeness and basically told Nixon to screw off right on television. In yet a final insult to Richard Nixon, Rather would eventually sit atop his profession while Nixon would languish for years at the nadir of his life.
The humiliation of Mr. Nixon during his fall can properly be viewed as just desserts. For the extended and drawn out nature of his demise was quite simply and selfishly all about Richard Nixon. He stubbornly refused to give up a presidency which he had forfeited his constitutional right to hold, and thus over many months inflicted great agony and immense damage on his office and his country, magnifying the failure of his presidency. And as his downfall also revealed, Nixon's considerable gifts were overshadowed by a dark and dysfunctional side.
Today, in another failed presidency, it is all about George Bush. And once again it is due to the dysfunction of the man. But this time it is worse. Mr. Bush is Nixon without gifts. His presidency is failure without success.
All about George. It is how the Iraq War should be remembered in its making and its misery. It is where any analysis of the debacle should begin, how accountability for its failure should be explained, and how the responsibility for its tragedy should be assigned.
No matter the plot or the details, Iraq is all about George. No matter deposits of oil, dominos of democracy, weapons of mass destruction, ties to terrorism or ties to whatever, America went into Iraq first and foremost, and in the end, because of one inadequate and dysfunctional man.
No one else who could have or should have been elected President in 2000 would ever have invaded Iraq. A well balanced person, a fully formed adult, a person of judgment, a person who reads, or listens, a person who controls his insecurities, inadequacies, and all his complexes, oedipal and otherwise, all basic requirements for a president, would never have invaded Iraq. It was a task tailor made for George. Only he who would proclaim himself the Decider, in a shrill fit the same as when Nixon proclaimed himself not a crook, could have invaded Iraq.
He came to office with almost no qualifications beyond his father's name and connections and sought to succeed where he believed, wrongly as always, his father had failed. He had to outdo the Old Man and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
It wasn't enough for George to take on Osama bin Laden and Al-Queda after 9/11. It wasn't enough for him to preside over the greatest American tragedy since Pearl Harbor. It wasn't enough for him to soothe a nation in its sorrow and take its vengeance on those who had actually inflicted such tragedy. It wasn't enough for George because it never was about the nation. George had to overthrow Saddam. By doing so he could sit at the helm of the Bush family dynasty, above them all.
Except as usual the Decider screwed it up. America has now seen almost four years of the Decider's failures in Iraq, beginning with the greatest blunder of all, the decision to invade in the first place. It turned out exactly as the father, the one Bush who understood something about Iraq, and the one father George never consulted about Iraq, knew that it would. The father understood the repercussions of blowing the lid off Iraq, and so he left it to Saddam.
Forswearing the judgment of his father, and lacking his wisdom, the Decider has failed to outdo his father, but he is succeeding in outdoing the failures of Richard Nixon. Nixon at least enjoyed certain foreign policy successes. The Decider has no successes. He enjoys only the failures he has inflicted on his country and the world. Even Vietnam, that other debacle now so often compared to Iraq, was not the failure for Nixon that Iraq is for the Decider. Nixon at least ended Vietnam and it was not his in the beginning. Iraq has always been the Decider's, and he will never end it.
It is now beyond all capacity of Mr. Bush as a man and as a force of nature to end Iraq. Iraq will go on and on, and it may well reverberate through the world in a way Vietnam never did, because unlike Vietnam, everybody wants a piece of Iraq. In blowing up Iraq, the Decider has outdone even himself and blown the lid off the entire region. His capacity for failure unbounded, it now remains to be seen how far and fast he falls, and how far the world falls with him.
We can only hope that as this tragedy unfolds there will be the spectacle of a publicly humiliated Mr. Bush, stripped once and for all of the deference his office confers. We can only hope for a Dan Rather of our day to come along. Then when the Decider smirks and chuckles as he talks about how bad it is in Iraq, that person can finally ask him, right there on television, what should be asked of him everyday, "Sir, isn't it time for your selfish, immature, and arrogant ass to go?"
Three thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. Let us hope there finally comes along just one reporter with the courage to perform and risk something as small as a job to humiliate the man responsible.
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