PRESS: The Mauling of Nixon

...This is not a serious approach to a serious matter...

...The rapprochement of the United States and China took courage on the part of Mao, Chou En Lal and Nixon, who won not even grudging respect from his opponents for doing what they had been too cautious to do on their own, and who lost the support of a solid chunk of his own constituency...

...The fact that a lot of people were glad to see him go does not mean there was a vendetta: he was guilty, and he got caught, and he resigned because the alternative was conviction by the Senate...

...The real question is not whether Nixon was fairly nailed for his role in Watergate, something he ought to be left to argue alone, but whether he was altogether the low scoundrel and uninspired mucker he's been made out ever since...

...THOMAS POWERS 26 May 1978:340...

...There is room for argument, even if there has not been much of it so far, and the best place to begin is with the givens...

...Would George McGovern have won a better deal after surrendering every negotiating point in advance...

...The other major given in the Watergate matter is that Nixon was not "hounded" from office...

...The fact is that none of Nixon's predecessors had done it, or even dared to suggest they might do it...

...Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson all managed to sound both pugnacious and timid where Russia was concerned, an alarming mix...

...If anything, Nixon handled this problem with somewhat more finesse...

...I've forgotten who described our relations as those of two scorpions in a bottle...

...The facts are no longer much in dispute, few administrations having been plundered more quickly or thoroughly of their secrets, but the facts do not automatically speak for themselves...

...Both men solved it in pretty much the same way, too: they fought like hell for three years, and gave the other side just about everything it wanted...

...Well, he turned into the elegant person he always wanted to be, too...

...In creating the Tramp Chaplin had of course made his art out of the poverty of his own early life, and in creating Pierre he was only following throughmmaking a movie out of what his more recent successes in life had taught him...

...I once read, with astonishment, that the Roman Empire was never so well-administered as it was under Cafigula...

...would you have felt better if we had deliberately actively and secretly betrayed them, rather than simply abandoning them...

...he was too well protected...

...Nixon wa Commonweal: 339 only chasing votes for 1972, and besides, it was all Kissinger's idea...

...We led the South Vietnamese down the garden path...

...OR BANK DRAFT TO: Rev...

...Nowgong, Assam, India.bombing raids on Hanoi at the end of 1972...

...By a coup...

...According to Vernon Waiters, who served as Kissinger's translator during the negotiations in Paris, Le Duc Tho (who later shared the Nobel peace price with Kissinger)once suggested the United States might get rid of Thieu by killing him...

...If the Russians had proceeded witl their's back in 1972, we'd be building one by now a well...

...Inertia is a powerful force in political affairs, and while Dean Rusk, say, may have favored an understanding with China, in an entirely theoretical way, he had no idea how this was to be achieved, recommended no practical steps in its pursuit, and showed every sign of preferring the existing estrangement to the uncertain penalties of a domestic wrestling match on the subject...

...Because the United States and the Sovie Union both retained the capacity to destroy each othe: thrice-over, SALT I has been dismissed as of no conse quence...

...WESTERBECK,JR...

...When she decides to come back to him, he is philosophical and poised...

...It is even possible to see in Pierre a disaffected version of the Tramp...

...In the first place, he reached a degree of accommodation with the Soviet Union and signed the first meaningful arms limitation agreement since the Second World War...

...It should occasion no surprise when the defendant tries to hide the facts of the case, but in this instance even Nixon's account of his own feelings is completely unreliable...

...As a sketch on the mass-murderer Landru, Verdoux is Chaplin's ultimate parody of that deadly charm which he had first created twenty-five years earlier in ,Pierre.COLINL...

...And Pierre, the rich man without feelings, is also probably the person whom Charlie himself feared success and fame would make him...

...Other presidents were the target of public abuse---FDR was attacked as a traitor to his class~ Eisenhower dismissed as a golf-crazy reader of Western novels, Johnson denounced as a war criminal--but none have had to suffer quite the vituperative savagery aimed at Nixon...

...The only career benefited by this film was that of Adolphe Menjou, who did indeed turn out to be someone Charlie might have feared he would be: come--someone who was to betray the socialist ideals and humanitarianism of Charlie's youth, During the period when Charlie had to go into exile from America, Menjou appeared before one of the Congressional witch hunts as a "co-operative witness...

...They couldn't kill him...

...Though intended to launch the stardom of Edna Purviance, A Woman oJ Paris killed off her career instead...

...What sort of lies would we have had to tell the coup-makers to convince them this was in their best interests...

...This is the sort of thing which does not seem like much until you consider it in historical context and pay close attention to the details...

...What I want to know is whether we have been fair to the man, and if notDwhich I hope you will concede is at least conceivable--then what are the consequences of our having condemned him more than he deserved...

...No one expected Nixon to do this before his election, and he might easily have let the matter slide...

...Would Hubert Humphrey have done as well...

...Pierre, the suave boulevardier, is the person whom Charlie's Tramp, with his cut-away coat, wing collar and carnival cane used as a walking stick, aspires to be...

...Xa ier's New Mission Hundreds, of sick,89 villages, hungry,600 open huts, naked1600 desperate andparents and dying,3400 shivering stretchingchildren need theiryour help...

...But until late 1972 Hanoi's minimum demand for an agreement was the removal of Thieu...

...The real blame for that war ought to attach to the men who got us into it, not to those who found it so hard to get us out...

...The closer the evidence got to Nixon, the more damning it was, until he literally impeached himself on the June 23rd tape...

...But Nixon has made a few people squirm in his time, as well, and it ought to be left to Higher Authority to determine if he got worse than he gave...

...This was in part because the film's unpopularity resulted from the feeling that she was too old to play the title role, which was ironic when you consider that Charlie's problem in real life was going in for gifts who were too young...

...First he underwent a schizophrenic break-down in the thirties, half of him remaining the same old Tramp while the other half became Charlie's riotous parody of Hitler in The Great Dictator...

...empty hands PLEASE SEND YOUR LITFLE MITE BY CROSSED M.O...

...The occasion of his drubbing--perhaps the last on a really large scale, but in his case one can never be sure --will be the official publication of his memoirs, a fat tome with a price to match its bulk of $19.95...

...This is short-sighted...

...I have no idea if that is really true, but the point ought to be clear enough...

...discover by reading John Newhouse's history of SALT 1 Cold Dawn...

...But the whole argument is probably moot...

...But this step was not quite so small as eveJ the optimists have been inclined to think, because i included an agreement to severely limit Anti-Ballisti...

...THE MAULING OF NINON 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 PiIIBS A notable American figure is going to take quite a beating in the press over the next six weeks...

...At one point I figured he probably felt just as sad and low in spkits when he fired Haldeman and Ehflichman as he claimed at the time, but now even that has been called into question...

...The excerpts currently running in the New York Times and other papers have a doughy, toneless quality characteristic of recent presidential memoirs...

...A second major question is whether we eventually won anything in the final peace agreement which might have justified the suffering and delay...

...In order to poke fun at a gourmet!s preference for high fowl, you have to be rich enough to know about such things...

...I know we could argue about this from now till Christmas without reaching agreement, but that is because the argument must necessarily center on whether he could have reached agreement with Hanoi sooner, with less bloodshed, and in particular without the B-52 St...

...Charlie's addiction to nymphettes is characteristic of the boulevardier's personality too...

...Few men in American ~story have risen so far-he really did work in his father's store--and none can have received less pleasure from it...

...About the only Nixon claim we can take at face value, with confidence it represents what he truly thinks on the subject, is his conviction that whatever crimes he may have committed, they did not justify impeachment or removal from office...

...A softerhearted people might find a word or two in his defense, or concede his achievements with a measure of generosity, or reflect that his deepest failing was a compulsion to repay animosity in kind, or admit that history may adjust a detail or two in the public portrait, but about the best Richard Nixon can expect is the observation that he was his own worst enemy...

...But perhaps, since Thieu trusted us, we might find a way to do it...

...Of course it must be painful for Nixon...

...But then the Tramp dis-appeared altogether and was replaced by the title character in Monsieur Verdoux, who is a dapper womanizer like Pierre...

...There aren't any surprises here: Nixon knew all about Watergate within a few days of the break-in, even if he did not know of the plan beforehand (for which there is no evidence...

...At the same time, though, the relationship between Charlie and Pierre has to have been more complicated than that...

...He did what he could to limit the investigation, short of playing a direct role himself, and he lied repeatedly about his knowledge and involvement, conceding bits and pieces of the truth only when the facts or the circumstances forced his hand...

...Nixon hung himself...

...It was bad enough before he resigned his office in disgrace in August, 1974, but it has been worse since, a venomous assault which 26 May 1978:3a8 might seem balanced and fair for an ex-murderer, a molester of small girls, an embezzler of savings from widows, a poisoner of pigeons...

...At every stage along the way his intransigence made a bad situation worse...

...The evidence of White House cover-up was persuasive almost from the beginning, but the investigators were all cautious with the facts, holding back until they turnedup a smoking gun...

...His third achievement I hesitate even to name, but here goes: Nixon got the United States out of Vietnam...

...Always charming and a bit ironic, he is the comic by-play in this movie that undercuts the "serious drama" of Marie's relationship with Jean...

...When Maurice Chevalier sings "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," there is something decidedly perverse about his interest in them...

...In casting Menjou as the villainous French general in Paths of Glory afterwards, Stanley Kubrick was probably not far off the mark...

...Perhaps modern presidents have grown too dependent on speech writers and can no longer find their voice when the time comes to explain themselves...

...Nixon broke with this history...

...Every official investigative body bent over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt, some of them so far---the original team of federal prosecutors, for example----thattheir successors might properly have included them among the defendants...

...Nothing he might have found to say in his own defense could save him from the mauling he can expect...

...That's two...

...I have heard people argue that this was n big deal, it should have been done long ago...

...And what ever happened to the Tramp...

...Pierre's talent for living is simply the Tramp's resilience turned decadent--his naivet6 and hope transformed into a sensibility that is nerveless and effete...

...Pierre has an equal ability not to be touched by them in the first place...

...This latter is a claim which seems to invite railler...

...From the day he entered office until the day he left he referred to the capital of China as "Peiping"Mthe Nationalists' name for Peking...

...how do you feel about that...

...The North Vietnamese were tougher-minded about this matter...

...How was that to be engineered...

...Nixon is so widely and deeply disliked, his honor and capacity have been so thoroughly discredited, that even his very name has begun to seem a kind of expletive, like quisling...

...Salana, D.T...

...That may not seem like much, but consider the nature of the problem facing the American negotiators: Hanoi had us over a barrel: we could not simply abandon our prisoners--I mean, politically could notwand we needed an agreement to get the prisoners...

...Except that this womanizer, who at last wins all those hearts the Tramp has been wooing unsuccessfully for years, turns out in the end to be a real killer of ladies...

...The cost would have been $40 billion or more, anq the result would have been a balance of terror with twic the terror and half the balance...

...But one must be honest about these things: the book itself is almost beside the point...

...We all but personally murdered Diem to get him out in 1963...

...The Tramp has an incredible ability to spring back from life's rebuffs and tragedies...

...In that case it would have been up to Carter, who had trouble enough winning approval of his treaty with Panama for eventual surrender of the canal...

...Missile systems...

...It is not hard to pinpoint further probable lies to which he is still sticking, such as when he first learned of the break-in, when he first intervened, and so on...

...and abuse...

...Nixon will never free himself from the seamy mess of Watergate, and, like Caligula, is going to be remembered only for his crimes...

...Would you have been in favor of that, even if it had brought our soldiers and prisoners home year or two earlier...

...Does this matter...

...We have got only tw, choices where the threat of nuclear war is concerned to give way to despair, or take such steps as we can Even small steps are extraordinarily difficult, as you ma...

...The problem Nixon faced in Vietnam when he took office in 1969 was pretty much of the sort De Ganlle faced in Algeria when he returned to power in I958...

...The important point is not what he was, but what he did, and it seems to me that when you isolate your animosity for the man it's natural to conclude that what he did was greater than what he was...

...In the second place, Nixon established a new relation ship with China which tended to align the world's gree powers in a new way, making us all more cautious, an thus safer...

...Stripped of the complex sections on enforcement, the treaty gave Hanoi all of Ho Chi Minh's "four points" promulgated back in 1966, in return for which we got only two things, our prisoners, and the agreement itself...

...The context is one of unremitting rivalry, suspicion and hostility for nearly 30 years...

...Nixon deserves credit fol getting us out of the bottle, and even for limiting ouJ stings to a degree...

...Palatty M. Catholic Mission, P.O...

...I'm not sure he knows his own heart in these matters...

...History already seems to have a firm grip on Nixon's character, and is in no mood to forgive him for what he was out of consideration for what he did...

...The case is not open and shut, despite sentiment in favor of an early and final verdict...

...It strikes me the answer is no, and that we invite damage to ourselves by denying his genuine achievements, of which there are at least three...

...No fair reading of the case can conclude anything except that Watergate was Nixon's doing, as well as his undoing...

...This is a difficult matter to sort out...

...Nixon had the wisdom to see that a three,sided rivalry was safer than one between two superpowers, he had the skill to put his policy into effect, and he deserves credit for the achievement...

...Unlike his predecessors Nixon was unable to carry off the records of his administration, a fact which might have prompted him to reach within for his personal history, but it does not appear to have done so...