Among the Intellectualoids / Nixon and Sheehy
Taylor, John H.
Nixon and Sheehy by John H. Taylor T wo tenets of Richard Nixon's Weltanschauung were that liberals hated to be proved wrong—and that they hated Nixon because he had proved them wrong so often. In...
...Her source had squealed, and as a counter-journalist I had a direct hit...
...In fact, although we had no hi-tech trade show, we had 1,723 visitors during the same three days...
...Grover had called us to ask about our exhibit schedule, but he didn't ask what our attendance had been, nor did he visit Yorba Linda himself...
...I told him what Nixon had said that morning...
...At 81, he did not take the Brown family's fortunes that seriously, particularly because he had long before realized that if he had been elected governor of California in 1962, when he was defeated by Kathleen Brown's father Pat, he might never have been elected president...
...Two months after the president's funeral last spring, Business Week's Los Angeles bureau chief, Ron Grover, in an item about a hi-tech trade show at the nearby Reagan Library that drew 2,400 visitors over three days, wrote that "crowds [were] absent" at the Nixon Library, which he called a "snore...
...You are very deft at exposing the idiosyncrasies of publicpeople, their exercises in pride and hubris," I wrote to Sheehy...
...As I wrote to Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, "That [Reeves] spoke so readily of being the source makes me wonder why [Sheehy] did not attribute the story to him in the piece, but that is between you and her...
...Without that sentence, of course, my letter would have seemed a classic example of a source attempting to clean up after a reckless remark made to a reporter...
...Maybe she thought 'reportedly' sounded better than 'as Richard Reeves told my husband over dinner.'" But Vanity Fair refused to print my letter unless I agreed to the deletion of this sentence: "If Ms...
...In his 1987 Waltzing With a Dictator, former New York Times reporter Raymond Bonner accused Nixon of having personally authorized Ferdinand Marcos's declaration of martial law in 1972...
...Still, she didn't even bother to write back...
...Even the Times, in a 1972 editorial, had praised Marcos for acting as he had in the face of Communist-inspired unrest...
...Bonner did not speculate as to why Nixon's alleged Secret Log Erasers had deleted conversations with Marcos that no one cared about, while leaving evidence of every meeting or phone call the President had with Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Chuck Colson, and John Dean...
...John H. Taylor, director of the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California, was President Nixon's chief aide from 1984 to 1990...
...These generally required many letters and phone calls and sometimes a not-so-veiled threat of a libel action by the former president's personal attorney...
...Alger Hiss's 1950 perjury convictions have been vindicated by recent revelations about links to the Soviets first suggested by Congressman Nixon in 1948...
...The charge received wide publicity when the Times published an article about it without giving President Nixon a chance to respond...
...The main thing Richard Nixon did wrong, in the eyes of his critics, was simply being Richard Nixon...
...In his view, it had been his enemies' anger that magnified the spark of Watergate into the wildfire that consumed him...
...Undoubtedly...
...President Nixon would not have disavowed such an action had it occurred...
...Bonner or his publisher immediately dispatched a pair of researchers to the National Archives to study the Nixon logs...
...After the Sheehy piece appeared, I called Reeves, who said he remembered the story precisely as I did...
...He quickly said he had repeated it, without the anti-Nixon spin, to journalist Clay Felker over dinner...
...And yet when it comes to admitting a small dereliction of your own, your apparatus closes ranks as tightly as Senator Kennedy's press office...
...171 T he day the president called, I had had lunch with Richard Reeves, who was considering writing a Nixon book...
...And whether or not they were wrong was often irrelevant since, even if it was established that Nixon had not done what he was accused of, he had to have been guilty of something just as heinous...
...Chuckling about this exquisite twofer, he said, "How do you think she pulled that off...
...He neither fumed and sputtered nor said a single word that Sheehy put in his mouth...
...Felker, of course, is married to Sheehy...
...Sheehy had called me directly and asked about this rather than relying, as she apparently did, on hearsay, I would have gladly told her what President Nixon really said...
...B ut that was nothing compared to the license taken by Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair's archivist of celebrity foibles...
...They still treat the Browns like royalty.'" (I hadn't talked to Sheehy, because she had not called me...
...Yet few Nixon critics have made a practice of apologizing for being wrong about these errors, or anything else (although recent biographers Herb Parmet, Jonathan Aitken, and Joan Hoff have weighed his life on its merits...
...Would Sheehy's reputation have withstood the revelation that she had printed her husband's dinner-table gossip...
...We assembled a small file of hard-won letters to the editor and—even more prized—editors' notes, in which newspapers and magazines actually took it upon themselves to plead mea culpa...
...When I wrote to Business Week to complain, the section of my letter pointing out that Grover had not visited the Library or asked us for our attendance figures was removed by his editors before they printed it...
...Carter ignored my own letters), and said that since I had rejected the magazine's "edited version," it would do nothing to redress its snipe at President Nixon...
...Vindication finally came two years later when Stanley Karnow, in a pointed reference to Bonner in In Our Image, wrote that there was no evidence in the logs of a Nixon-Marcos conversation, and that Marcos had told him in an interview that he had not talked to the president at the time...
...Our many letters resulted only in a footnote in the paperback edition, acknowledging that the logs did not show the phone calls—but also implyingthat they had been altered...
...Even those who believed that Nixon's us-against-them attitude was regrettable conceded the implacability of the Nixon-haters...
...But in fact, the president had neither talked to Marcos nor sent him a message of any kind, and through his staff he called Bonner on it...
...It's totally my fault...
...He had spoken and written to the former governor on several occasions and applauded our having had him to the Library two years ago for a discussion about the 1962 election...
...Evidently, she felt she didn't have to...
...The fuming and sputtering are new to me," Reeves said...
...I had no idea Gail was doing a piece...
...There was no documentary evidence of such contacts, either...
...The Cambodian incursion in 1970 and the December bombing in 1972 that provoked massive protests are now seen as having saved many American and South Vietnamese lives...
...In an article about California gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Brown, Sheehy described a valentine "60 Minutes" did to the Brown family in January, and said that a "fuming" Nixon had called me the next morning...
...President Nixon had indeed called me in January, after, on consecutive days, "60 Minutes" and Anthony Lewis of the New York Times had done favorable Brown pieces...
...Beginning in the mid-1980s, Nixon began to take an aggressive stance toward errors made about him in the press...
...She wrote, 54 The American Spectator January 1995 "Can you believe that!' the ex-President reportedly sputtered to . . . Taylor . . . `Can you believe that...
...Vanity Fair's attorney wrote to the Library's attorney (whom I had called in after The American Spectator January 1995 55...
...Journalists specialize in urging politicians to admit their mistakes, but seldom admit their own...
...I'm very sorry...
...In fifteen years working for him, many spent handling his press relations, I learned that the old man was right: By and large, the liberal press do hate to admit they're wrong, especially about him...
...T his counter-journalism was always hard work...
...Watergate validated every previous charge, no matter how indisputably it had been debunked...
...We pointed out that the White House logs, which listed every telephone conversation he'd had while in office, showed no calls to or from Marcos during the period in question...
Vol. 28 • January 1995 • No. 1
