Before the Fall

...It is possible that LBJ's decision to announce the agreement with Hanoi prior to lining up Thieu was influenced by domestic politics, but I am not convinced...

...In my udgment the propriety of the Chennault nvestigation is a close call...

...The insider's account is generally a self-serving exercise...

...Safire commenced his book the day he signed on with Nixon for the Come Back, and he worked on it continouously during his tenure at the White House, taking careful notes, snitching sensitive memoranda, and catching the "color" of the place with the pen he employed as camera...

...The Dragon Lady, Anna Chennault, is portrayed by Teddy White, Safire, and others as a major player in the drama of the politicization of the October 31 bombing halt decision...

...too many people are evolved at too many levels and in too iany ways...

...He chose the role "of sloganeering philosopher, or creative interpreter," a role he played less well than he supposes...

...according to Safire a crippled President was "manipulating foreign policy for political ends against a political deadline" (pp...

...Chennault, and Safire leaps from this disclaimer to the conclusion that there was a tap and it was illegal...

...If Hoover told Nixon that Mrs...

...Safire wisely observes that "[t]c) 'know your place' is a good idea in politics," yet he never quite knew whether his place was that of Boswell or Johnson, failing to sense that The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 5 while the talents of each were formidable, they were nevertheless dissimilar and not to be dissipated on doing poorly what the other did well...

...Safire attempts to even the score with Magruder, Kissinger, and "The True Believers" without pretense to subtlety, and if he avoids exaggerating his own importance, it is not because he fails to emphasize his personal contribution to that which was most notable (and noble) in the Nixon Administration and his firm opposition to that which was otherwise...

...Safire also asserts that Lyndon Johnson tried to make a deal with the North Vietnamese in Paris in time to influence the 1968 election...

...afire's rush to judgment in this matter is inseemly and ill-considered...

...86) that "In 1960, Nixon had blown his lead to Kennedy, but then came back to nearly even in the finalweek...

...Safire has no use for ideologues or ideology...

...Li In my judgment the propriety of the Chennault investigation is a close call...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator • August/September 1975 • Volume 8, Number 10 1967 Special Book Review/Tom Charles Huston Surviving the Fall A William Safire's memoir of his service in the Nixon Administration should be distinguished from the Watergate volumes that have appeared and that will be forthcoming...

...No individual should have the right to walk off with classified national security documents, to publish them in support of his own cause or for his own profit...

...Nixon's worst speech (announcing the Cambodian excursion) was one Safire didn't work on, while Nixon's most noteworthy domestic achievement was "The New Federalism" which Safire claims to have midwifed...

...And though I began my review with the same presumption that Safire states as fact, I concluded it was Hanoi, not Washington, that was shooting for a pre-election deadline...

...It is also my view that Johnson had every reason to assume President Thieu would acquiesce...

...Perhaps...

...The unfortunate result is illustrated by Safire's discussion of the Pentagon Papers controversy in the summer of 1971: "I still think a good case can be made for opposing publication in the courts: The press should not have the power to decide what is a defense secret and what is not...

...According to Safire, Nixon had been on the right track for the issue of busing when he was listening to Safire, Garment, and Price, but he unfortunately allowed himself to be derailed by Colson and Buchanan...

...In the course of the discussions at Camp David, the President asked Secretary of the Treasury Shultz on what authority he could impose a limitation on textile imports: Shultz: "You don't have that authority under the trade acts...

...This was certainly assumed by Nixon (and apparently his staff ) to be true, but I don't believe it is...

...Haldeman who "enjoyed the play of power too much...

...Chennault's phones had been tapped, then he either misspoke or he covered his tracks at the Bureau, for he concurred in writing with the recommendation of the Washington Field Office that a telephone tap not be installed on her residence telephone because it was too risky...

...These may be good reasons to have run Nixon out of town on a rail, but they are hardly good reasons to give carte blanche to the New York Times to traffic in stolen secrets...

...IL If you merge an author who is enamoured with every word that flows from his pen with a publisher who figures he can price his book by the pound, you end up with a volume that is hefty, expensive, saturated with trivia, and marred by errors great and small...

...Lyn Nofziger had a sign on the wall of his office at the White House that could well serve as the motto of most of those who profiteer in inside information: "Don't get mad...

...The temptation to exaggerate his own importance, to even the score with old adversaries, to vindicate, with the benefit of hindsight, his spurned advice or ignored recommendations is too great to be resisted by most inside chroniclers of political events...

...Even those closest to the 'resident do not know how much imortance he attaches to a recommendaion submitted or a fact emphasized or a onsideration noted in the course of the ecision-making process...

...This was something the Kennedy people put out in Teddy White's book after the fact and, of course, has no foundation...

...Since Roper pointed this out in an extensive article written after Teddy White's book came out, it would be well for Huston to put this in the back of his mind so that he does not fall into the error of repeating the mythology which those who managed Kennedy's campaign like to perpetuate...

...It is true that LBJ was not above using the FBI as his personal Pinkerton Agency, as recent revelations about the Bureau's 1964 activities clearly show...

...Under pressure at home, Thieu balked and Johnson had to choose between acting unilaterally with the expectation that Saigon would ultimately fall into line and admitting to Hanoi that the tail wagged the dog...

...Speechwriters are prone to assume that the struggle over the explanation accurately and fully reflects the struggle over the decision being explained...

...Fortunately, he also assumed the role of "camera" and in telling it like he heard and saw it, he has played the role ably...

...he is a party man who believes in partisan, not ideological, politics...

...In perhaps the most important and certainly the most boring chapter in the book, "The Economic Summit," Safire reports the crucial conversations among the President and his advisers that led to the imposition of wage-price controls and the closing of the "gold window...

...It is a marked haracteristic of Presidents that they arely acknowledge to subordinates the ifluence of a particular factor in the )rmulation of a major decision, and quite ften Presidents are themselves unable to etermine the precise consideration that pped the scales and resulted in the section of one option as opposed to anther...

...Even if we assume that there was a tap, it is not clear it waE Safire's contrast between a compassionate President reaching out to his critics and a vindictive President keeping two of his most tenured aides from his daughter's wedding shows us more than all the Oval office tapes...

...That smacks wrong from the point of view of international leadership, and I don't want to corrupt my national security power...

...His word pictures of the tension between Kissinger and Secretary of State Rogers, of the struggle between the President and the bureaucracy over the relocation of Navy personnel, of the interplay between the draftsmen of Presidential words and the President who speaks them, and of the contrast between a compassionate President reaching out to his critics at dawn on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and a vindictive President scratching the names of two of his most tenured aides from the guest list for his daughter's wedding show us more of the man and the institution than all the reels of Oval Office tapes...

...Chennault was instituted as the President ordered, but I am convinced Hoover ignored LBJ 's order for a wire tap because he under, stood better than Mitchell the risk of placing a tap at the Watergate where Mrs...

...In his mind, Nixon was never a conservative (I agree with him on this) and Nixon's best instincts were most clearly aligned with the nation's best interestwhen the President charted a liberal course (I disagree with him here...

...Huston who "placed the knife on the table...

...Lowell Weicker and Anthony Lewis do not have the last say on these matters...

...Safire, the professed "centrist," worked in tandem with the house "liberals" (Garment, Price, Moynihan, et al...

...The irony of the Nixon Presidency is that so much of what Nixon didn't want to do, he did and, by so doing, double-crossed himself...

...It is not so much a product of Watergate as a victim...

...The President was a gifted stump speaker who responded well to Safire's tutorials on the use of "one-liners" provided by Safire but he never completely heeded Safire's admonition to stop saying "vitally important...

...I found no probative evidence that American policy was materially altered to expedite a bombing halt in time to salvage Humphrey's campaign, and while there is good reason in my judgment to be critical of the terms of the settlement, the essential terms were on the table in Paris well in advance of the campaign, and when in mid-October the North Vietnamese agreed in principle to accept them, Washington had either to go along or revoke its offer...

...357) Safire appears to be saying in this passage that while he thinks there is a good case for the government to go to court Before the Fall by William Safire Doubleday $12.50 when a newspaper seeks to publish stolen secrets, it was wrong for the government to do so at the order of President Nixon because he had defiled the legal process by the "national security" illegalities of his aides...

...Nixon: "No...

...Somewhere between the first draft and publication he succumbed to the backlash of Watergate, reappraising his subject with an eye blurred if not blinded by the hysteria of the witchhunters...

...get even...

...An insider's view of events is necesarily a partial one, for no single ndividual in government, however inimately involved in the events he is re)orting, can have access to all the evilence, be familiar with all the important acts, or be aware of all the subtle factors hat influence a major policy decision...

...Actually Safire adds little that is new to the available information on this queer episode, but he does add much that is wrong...

...56, 90-91...

...There is no reason for Safire to believe as a matter of law that the surveillance of Mrs...

...Free Speech, Free Soil, and Free Men" was hardly an advertising gimmick employed by Lincoln's managers in 1860...

...but the Constitution does contemplate that our foreign relations will be conducted by elected Presidents, not by dragon ladies...

...but in October of 1968 the President of the United States had reason to be concerned about sensitive peace efforts being sabotaged for partisan purposes and perhaps a right to know what was going on, for what was at stake was not an election, but a war...

...For example, who cares that "Bus" Mosbacher whispered to Safire that "Frenchmen wrote the book on State Dinners," that DeGaulle went to funerals because he was a gentleman, that Nixon traveled to Moscow with seven suits, that Mrs...

...and he could exercise his constitutional powers as thief Diplomat and Commander-in-Chief effectively only if he knew what was being urged upon a government with which le was engaged in sensitive negotiations 3y those who conceivably could influence :hose negotiations behind his back...

...Safire's slogans will be forgotten, but men will long turn to his book to learn what happened and how it happened, so that with the benefit of additional sources—most significantly, one hopes, Richard Nixon's own recollections—they may understand why it happened...

...I had made essentially the same observation in a memorandum to Nixon in March of 1968, noting that RN had lost his "commanding August lead" over Kennedy...

...Nixon discussed with Kosygin the sexual composition of Congress, or that on June 29, 1969, Flanigan, Safire, Borman, and Chapin decided that a Bible—"Both Testaments"—would go to the moon with the crew of Apollo XI...

...Ramsey Clark wrote Safire a letter stating that he never approved a tap on Mrs...

...But RN was not amused and corrected me: "One bit of mythology which should not be included in future discussions of 1960, is that we had a commanding lead over Kennedy in August...

...Chennault was illegal or that she had the right to be poking her nose into sensitive matters of war and peace involving government-to-government negotiations free of surveillance of the United States Government...

...Is it really important to posterity whether Kissinger was "a Lothario" or that the women whose opinion Safire respects say Henry the K "is an attractive, if shy dinner partner" ? The fly-specking errors in the book may be quickly dismissed as inconsequential (e.g., Safire's office was Room 124 of the Old EOB, not Room 125 [and Abe Lincoln never kept an office there—construction of the building didn't commence until 1871...

...The pattern of tapping by several agencies of government confirmed to Nixon by Hoover later, set up a 'tolerance' of this type of activity that had disastrous ramifications later" (p...

...With post-Watergate insight, Safire concludes that "Mrs...

...The distinctions between what, how, and why are critical ones in appraising the importance of this book...

...In his desire to justify the dust-cover claim of an "inside view," Safire overreaches...

...The polls from the time Congress adjourned in August until the election did not vary from either 51-49 Nixon or 51-49 Kennedy—except for one aberration by Gallup two weeks before the end of the campaign in which he showed 53-47 Kennedy, a figure which obviously had been stimulated by the Kennedy press and which Gallup with good judgment corrected the following week when he found that his own surveys did not bear out the figure...

...Safire points the finger at Kissinger who "cannot escape history'sjudgment of the way he watered the roots of Watergate...

...Safire has ably captured this irony and thus contributed significantly to an understanding of Nixon and his Presidency...

...and proudly and justifiably claims significant victories in routing "The True Believers...

...Safire's editors would have been wise to scissor seventy thousand words or so at the risk of knocking a couple of dollars off the product...

...If the final decision was politically motivated, the careerists, including Ambassador Bunker and General Abrams, supported it...

...The second paragraph, however, doesn't follow logically from the first...

...Physical surveillance of Mrs...

...I read most (according to State, all) of the thousands of cables between Washington and Paris, Saigon, and other capitals relating to the Paris negotiations as well as countless memoranda of conversations and other records...

...A book was largely finished prior to the collapse of the Nixon Presidency, and wading through the nearly seven hundred pages of the published volume, one catches glimpses of what it would have been like if Safire had not learned that his telephone had been tapped at the apparent direction of Henry Kissinger and if he had not felt compelled by the disclosures of Watergate to compensate for his instinctive pro-Nixon tilt by weaving self-righteous libertarian sonority into the narrative...

...but the 2onstitution does contemplate that our oreign relations will be conducted by lected Presidents, not by Dragon Ladies...

...In retrospect, of course, publishing the Pentagon Papers was the right andproper thing for the newspapers to do: not for the reasons then advanced, but because President Nixon was defiling the government's right to file by the improper use of 'national security' as the reason for illegal eavesdropping and burglary...

...emphasis added...

...Safire deals with each of these major breakthroughs and while his accounts are not definitive, they are indispensable to understanding what happened and how it happened and useful in understanding why it happened...

...Yet the cheap shot is not generally Safire's style, and I can't imagine what satisfaction a man of decent instincts can derive from using his pen as an ax to clobber the disarmed...

...Safire knows all the political slogans of early Presidential campaigns and knows nothing about the political forces that gave those slogans meaning...

...He waited more than two weeks for Thieu to get his ducks in a row while he kept Le Duc Tho cooling his heels...

...Chennault resided...

...and] deserves a great deal of the blame...

...In other words, the election was a close contest from the beginning and there was no great spread between the candidates at any time...

...If, as Safire suggests, a political party offers a home that shelters the faithful regardless of the political weather, the Whigs would still be .in business...

...and the present reviewer is wiry, not cadaverous), but errors of significant historical fact ought to be corrected...

...Safire writes (p...

...Having told us who should decide what is a state secret, i.e., the elected government, he then tells us that " [i]n retrospect" his present employer was right to publish the Pentagon Papers, not because the New York Times has finally been elected to determine what is a state secret, but because Bob Haldeman ordered an FBI check on Daniel Schorr, John Ehrlichman approved a "covert operation" in Dr...

...he government is just too big and the 3sue too complex...

...That Nixon zig-zagged concerned Safire less than it did either the conservatives or liberals on the staff, but then Safire's politics are programmatic, not ideological...

...A President's preliminary drafts of a speech and off-the-cuff comments to his writers are interesting, useful, and often important indicators of how or why a decision was reached, but they are not often conclusive or complete, and a reader would be wise to keep this in mind when reading Before the Fall...

...the late Senator Ellender's first name was Allen, not Carl...

...His chapter on the "Two-Ideology System" is interesting because he quotes at length from Pat Buchanan's analysis of the political futility of Nixonian liberalism, but it reflects absolutely no understanding by Safire of American political history...

...Chennault had every right as an American citizen to urge other nations to do whatever she wanted them to do, which is why her surveillance was illegal...

...Perhaps not only Nixon but all of us have a dark side...

...There is always the 'trading with the enemy' act—that will enable you to do anything...

...it was shorthand for basic ideological differences among contenders for political power...

...I prefer to believe LBJ acted honestly in the best interest of the country as he saw it, and Safire offers no evidence to support a contrary view...

...He variously describes Magruder as "boot-licking," "a man of mirrors," and a fellow to whom "buck-passing and back-stabbing was standard procedure," and having read Jeb's account of the infamous 1970 election eve television broadcast of the Safire-edited tape of Nixon's Phoenix speech, I can understand his chagrin...

...An author is entitled to a point of view...

...In September of 1969 the President requested that I prepare a report on the events leading up to the October 31, 1968 bombing halt and it took nearly two years to complete the project...

...Fielding's office, and Henry Kissinger put Safire's name on his electronic surveillance list...

...and he was wise enough to recognize the strategic result of two steps forward and one step backward...

...the problem was that LBJ's understanding with his South Vietnamese counterpart was not based on a firm understanding between President Thieu and his colleagues in the Saigon government...

...he Alternative: An American Spectator August/ September 1975 7...

...A post-Watergate book is of a genre characterized by "finger-pointing," a less subtle version of the traditional insider's exposition of what would have happened "if only the President had listened to me...

...and Mitchell "who played the 'heavy,' who most insiders were sure was really not the heavy, but who really was a heavy...

...His characterizations in context are generally charitable by contemporary standards, but his unseemly and frequent ad hominem attacks on Jeb Magruder are on a level with the bushwhacking technique of Gore Vidal...

...we elect a government for that...

...6 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/ September 1975 illegal, since it clearly involved matters of foreign intelligence, a thicket the Supreme Court recently refused to enter...

...Although crippled by Watergate, Before the Fall is nevertheless destined to be one of the dozen books about the Nixon Presidency to which serious men will turn when that time comes, as surely it must, for a fresh look at the man who opened the door to normalization of relations with China, closed the door on war in Vietnam, and cracked the door for the flow of power from Washington to the states and localities...

...from a commercial point of view, publication of Before the Fall in the wake of Watergate was fortunate, but a good book could easily have been an infinitely better one if it had been published_ when Safire was in the dark about the darkest side of Richard Nixon...