HAPPY ANNIVERSARY: Open Thread

Today and tomorrow, August 8 and 9, mark the glorious fortieth anniversary of the end of the Nixon regime, so it's appropriate to look back, post some memories, and maybe think about the significance of the time.

Having watched it in real time I know that my memories and thoughts have changed over the last forty years. I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday my reaction the day I woke up and the news of the break-in broke. "Now they'll never vote to re-elect him" was literally my first thought. Just goes to show how wrong you can be.

Even looking back it's striking how completely this one story dominated the national attention throughout the summer of 1973, when I would get home from my summer job as a letter carrier to watch the hearings, and into the run-up to impeachment in the summer of 1974. I'll share a few of my observations and maybe you, our readers, will have some thoughts of your own to share.

==> One thing that the revelations of subsequent years have shown us is that Nixon may not have been worse than we thought at the time, but he was definitely worse than we knew. I'm talking, of course, about the fact that had been suspected but has since been confirmed that Nixon betrayed his country by trying to prevent an "October surprise" that would throw the election to Humphrey in 1968. To avoid this Nixon carried on secret communications with the government of South Vietnam urging them not to make any deals, but to hold out until he got into office when he would get them a better deal than they would get from the outgoing Johnson administration.  Think of the tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese whose deaths are directly attributable to this one action on Nixon's part.

==>Nixon and so many of the men--yes, they were all men-- around him were lawyers. Not knowing any lawyers at the time I didn't really understand why it seemed so shocking that it was lawyers saying the things we hear on the tapes and making these decisions, but having spent thirty-five of those intervening years practicing law I now see just how shocking it was. Even if you don't attribute any particular virtue to lawyers, how could they not have considered the legal consequences and criminal liability as they sat in the Oval Office planning payoffs of a million dollars to convince potential witnesses to clam up or lie in order to protect the presidency? If nothing else, this level of criminality, in which the President, the Attorney General, and all of his top aides were in it up to their elbows proves that Nixon was uniquely corrupt in the ranks of American presidents.

==>Finally, the "where were you?" moment. We knew the resignation was coming, but I didn't get to see either of his last two speeches on television. The announcement of his resignation was on the evening of August 8, and while he was making his resignation speech I was at Pine Knob outside of Detroit at a Joni Mitchell concert. We knew the time was coming, and someone a few rows in front of us had a portable television, but we didn't see anything. Still, the crowd roared with one voice when Joni came onstage after a warmup set of dental music from her backup band, Tom Scott and the L.A. Express, and announced "The president has resigned!" 

What about you? Where were you and what do you remember? 

Bork, dead at eighty-five

Robert Bork is dead, and that is, as Martha Stewart would say, a good thing.
The first thing that most of us learned of Robert Bork was in 1973, when as Solicitor General he cooperated with Richard Nixon's efforts at obstruction of justice by firing Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, a date that will live in infamy as the Saturday Night Massacre. The Massacre was Nixon's attempt to prevent Cox, whom he had appointed special prosecutor to investigate the Watergate and other Nixon administration crimes, from gaining access to the tapes Nixon had secretly made of conversations in the White House. When Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus both refused to fire Cox on Nixon's orders, and resigned instead, Bork was only too willing to do the deed. 
Fortunately, the effort was unsuccessful, Nixon's tapes were eventually unearthed, the firing of Cox was ruled to have been illegal, and Nixon finally made it out of town just ahead of the impeachment. Bork's effort to help Nixon with the coverup had failed.
This episode alone would have been enough to mark Bork as one of the greatest political criminals of our time. 
Fast forward almost fifteen years. Ronald Reagan is president and one of his less-remembered programs was his campaign to reverse the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement. Not only did he launch his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, famous primarily for the murders of three civil rights workers, but his presidency was marked by support for the apartheid regime in South Africa, support for racist policies at Bob Jones "University", and racist attacks on welfare recipients.
For such a president Bork was the ideal candidate. With his academic and judicial credentials and his policy preferences that the federal government had no business trying to prevent private businesses from discriminating against black people or trying to prevent the Southern state and local governments from thwarting black people's right to vote, and that the Equal Protection Clause should never have been read to apply to women, he was everything Reagan wanted.
The first time I met our senior Senator, and now the senior member of the U.S. Senate, was with a group of activists urging Senator Leahy to oppose Bork . He generously gave us his time, probably an hour or more, and I left feeling confident that Senator Leahy would do everything he could to block Bork's confirmation. He didn't fail us.
The hero of this episode, though, was Senator Ted Kennedy, and I will reproduce in full his speech on why Bork would be such a blight on the Supreme Court.  

Mr. President, I oppose the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, and I urge the Senate to reject it.

In the Watergate scandal of 1973, two distinguished Republicans — Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus — put integrity and the Constitution ahead of loyalty to a corrupt President. They refused to do Richard Nixon's dirty work, and they refused to obey his order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. The deed devolved on Solicitor General Robert Bork, who executed the unconscionable assignment that has become one of the darkest chapters for the rule of law in American history.

That act — later ruled illegal by a Federal court — is sufficient, by itself, to disqualify Mr. Bork from this new position to which he has been nominated. The man who fired Archibald Cox does not deserve to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Mr. Bork should also be rejected by the Senate because he stands for an extremist view of the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court that would have placed him outside the mainstream of American constitutional jurisprudence in the 1960s, let alone the 1980s. He opposed the Public Accommodations Civil Rights Act of 1964. He opposed the one-man one-vote decision of the Supreme Court the same year. He has said that the First Amendment applies only to political speech, not literature or works of art or scientific expression.

Under the twin pressures of academic rejection and the prospect of Senate rejection, Mr. Bork subsequently retracted the most neanderthal of these views on civil rights and the first amendment. But his mind-set is no less ominous today.

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

America is a better and freer nation than Robert Bork thinks. Yet in the current delicate balance of the Supreme Court, his rigid ideology will tip the scales of justice against the kind of country America is and ought to be.

The damage that President Reagan will do through this nomination, if it is not rejected by the Senate, could live on far beyond the end of his presidential term. President Reagan is still our President. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate, and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and on the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.

 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Robert_Bork%27s_America

The United States was spared the injuries that would have inevitably flowed from the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, but we were not spared years of his bitter, hectoring screeds against the country that rejected him.

Conservatives love to show the bloody shirt of the Bork nomination, and they even invented a word, "borking", to describe their view of his treatment in the confirmation process. The fact is, though, that Bork was rejected not because his positions were distorted, but because they were revealed. As far as we have to go as a country, in 1987 it was clear that Bork's extremist conservative ideology was far too far out of the American mainstream to survive the public scrutiny he received.

When Bork's confirmation failed Reagan's next choice was a very conservative but less well-known Anthony Kennedy, who evolved into a principled swing vote on the Court. We can all be glad that in the last twenty-five years that seat has been occupied by Kennedy and not by Bork.

B- B- but, we're the Party of Lincoln™!

If you had to say something nice about the Republicans, I guess it would be that they at least have the decency to to recognize how vile and shameful their constant appeals to racism are.

Of course, that's only when they get caught, and they don't have the decency to stop.

The first macaca moment of the 2012 presidential campaign has been provided by the crapulent Haley Barbour, whose efforts at backpedaling could have qualified him for the circus.

It's a long and sordid history, going back to Nixon's Southern Strategy, but we can also recall the multiple explicit appeals to racism by Ronald Reagan, including his choice of Philadelphia, Mississippi to kick off his presidential campaign, his references to food stamp fraud by "big bucks" who use them to buy liquor, or his support for the racist Bob Jones University. More recently we have the racist campaign sponsored by the odious Lee Atwater, who capped off his life with a phony apology for his racist acts.

This year it's Haley Barbour and his praise for the White Citizens' Councils. Hodding Carter had a great explication of their nature and methods on NPR, but the short, although entirely accurate, version of it is that they were the clean hands, suit-wearing version of the Klan: they eschewed violence because they didn't need it as long as the Klan was there to enforce the more polite dictates of the Citizens' Councils.

Today's Republicans never miss a chance, particularly when their racism is exposed, to point out that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican (yes, the same republicans who still talk fondly about their secessionist forbears). Still, I don't think there is anyone outside of the Republican base, who buys it, so if you're a Republican reading this, just spare us.

What's the upshot of this week's brouhaha? Possibly not much, although it's important to expose today's Republicans for the racist dogs they are. That, and Barbour's shot at the 2012 campaign has taken a severe hit.

Hey, if he's not on the national ticket, I bet there's room for him on the ballot in Vermont as the candidate of the Second Vermont Republic.

Daniel Schorr, Dead at 93

Regular listeners to NPR will remember Daniel Schorr's last year as a sage, avuncular presence on Weekend Edition. He will be missed in that role.

What is more important to remember, though, is how he got to be Daniel Schorr. If you read his Times obituary you see that his journalistic career is a record of getting fired repeatedly by the so-called liberal media for standing up for his principles: Facing down a contempt of Congress charge for refusing to name a confidential source, leaking an important story to the Village Voice when CBS was too cowardly to run it, refusing to cohost a panel discussion of the Republican National Convention with party apparatchik John Connally.

Of course, his greatest honor was to be named on Nixon's infamous Enemies List.

He can serve as a model for all of us.

A new look at Nixon

There is a new dump of Nixon tapes out and, as always, they provide more information into Nixon's true character. We haven't had the chance to review everything, but here's one that again emphasizes his racism, a characteristic that permeated his career.

Nixon is heard on a muffled tape recording telling his special counsel that abortion is necessary in some cases - including instances of multiracial pregnancy.

Speaking to Charles Colson after the January 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, the president said: "I admit, there are times when abortions are necessary, I know that." He gave "a black and a white" as an example.

"Or rape," Colson offered. "Or rape," Nixon agreed.

There's more to know, but in the face of the nostalgia that has seized some people for Nixon after the true evil enacted by Reagan and Bush, it's useful to be reminded of what an evil son of a bitch Nixon was.