Perot's Nixon Pattern
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Perot's Nixon Pattern Some see Harry S. Truman in Ross Perot's homespun, down-to-earth manner. Garry Wills, in the Washington Post, has compared him to Ronald...
...Reflecting on that anniversary, I recalled that, in 1973, trying to stave off his downfall, Nixon said that "one year of Watergate is enough...
...Secrecy is a weapon of the manipulative personality...
...Just as Nixon had a secret plan for ending the Vietnam War, Perot has tended to make a mystery of his concrete programs, the better to maintain control...
...But it wasn't...
...In 1970, he was backed by the Nixon White House in a losing race for Senator against Lloyd Bentsen...
...For a year and a half Bush did the dirty work of denying the increasingly obvious culpability of President Nixon...
...Garry Wills, in the Washington Post, has compared him to Ronald Reagan because of his contempt for the workings of government...
...Yet softies have their uses...
...The nation lives with the consequences of that ugly affair and still has to learn some of its lessons...
...According to Richard Connor, publisher of the Fort Worth Star Telegram, in 1989 he threatened to produce compromising pictures of a reporter who had written a number of critical articles concerning his son's involvement in an airport development project...
...Treasury Secretary George Shultz, who was to be promoted to the "supercabinet," offered Bush the job of deputy—in effect, Secretary of the Treasury...
...I don't have a handler," says Perot...
...In 1971, Colson recommended Bush for speaking assignments, saying this time that "he takes our line beautifully...
...Bush agreed, once he was promised that he could sit at the Cabinet table...
...the Senate committee that laid the groundwork for impeachment...
...Nothing better displayed President Nixon's low regard for Bush than what happened after the 1972 election...
...More than the press, it was the much-maligned bureaucracy and Congress and the courts that foiled the cover-up: the FBI that refused to lie down and play dead...
...Nixon has mainly written his own, starting with Six Crises...
...Three hundred thousand immigrants from Russia, almost 10 per cent of the electorate, are suffering from 50 per cent unemployment...
...That is to say, in Nixonian terms, for being a softie...
...Bush wanted the job badly, but Nixon had another assignment in mind for him?the thankless position of post-Watergate chairman of the Republican National Committee, replacing Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, who had proved to be too independent...
...Neither has Nixon had one...
...They voted heavily against a policy they saw as neglecting their needs in favor of spending hundreds of millions on political enclaves they don't want to live in...
...Nixon said that Bush was "not good on the attack," that President Reagan needed someone "stronger.' During the 1988 primaries, Nixon circulated a memorandum calling Bush "a weak individual on television" and Senator Dole "strong and courageous.' This year, while giving lip-service support to Bush, he has described Perot as "a formidable candidate" who is "not going to flame out...
...Nixon Strikes Back It didn't surprise me when the former President spent two hours briefing Ross Perot...
...One of Washington's secrets is how little regard Nixon has had for Bush, even while seemingly advancing his career...
...One wonders if today they could prevent a coup from the top...
...The ensuing "gates" —or Washington scandals—came as shocks, but no longer as surprises...
...Because one lesson of Watergate is that the lumbering machinery of government worked...
...Then, as United Nations ambassador in 1972, Bush was criticized in a White House memo for allowing himself to look "subdued and troubled" on television over a feud between President Nixon and Secretary General Kurt Waldheim arising from the Vietnam War...
...The country could hardly retain complete faith in the institution after seeing a President revealed as lying, spying, wiretapping, speaking obscenities in the Oval Office, and plotting to thwart the justice he was sworn to uphold...
...Nixon's compulsive need to control his environment, to get the goods on his enemies, led to Watergate...
...Israelis remain divided about how far to go in meeting Palestinian demands for self-rule, but the Shamir policy of barely moving at all and braving the wrath of the United States and the rest of the world collapsed of its own dead weight...
...In a 1983 interview with Patrick J. Buchanan on CNN, he suggested that Bush be dumped from the 1984 Reagan ticket...
...Where Bush Won Israel may be the only country in the world where President Bush might have voted for Labor against the conservatives...
...We have not used the power in the first four years, but things are going to change now...
...The suspension of loan guarantees did not, as some had feared, help Shamir by offending Israeli pride...
...A pity...
...Certainly the strong victory of Labor Party leader Yitzchak Rabin over Likud Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir on June 23 was good news for the beleaguered President...
...More sinister than what President Nixon did was what he planned to do following his winning landslide re-election despite Watergate...
...When the New York Times asked Perot about a 1988 report by Dallas Times-Herald columnist Laura Miller that he had favored cordoning off a crime-ridden Dallas neighborhood and conducting house-to-house searches for guns and drugs, he replied: "How much do you know about Laura Miller...
...Perot exhibits a tendency to go for the journalistic jugular, too...
...So is news management...
...The "electronic town hall" Perot talks about as a way of submitting his proposals to the nation was, in fact, pioneered by Nixon near the end of the 1968 campaign, with a televised town hall featuring planned questions from selected citizens that left the press on the sidelines...
...Well, dig in...
...Nixon might have liked to be invited to the Republican National Convention in Houston in August, 20 years after his renomination in Miami Beach...
...If Americans have become disenchanted with their government, equating incumbency with guilt and inexperience with innocence, you can trace the attitude back to Watergate...
...Since Rabin is more flexible than Shamir on the matter of West Bank settlements, the Administration may be able to reinstate loan guarantees for immigrant housing in Israel and thus improve the President's position with American Jewish voters...
...The White House would have its own intelligence and surveillance operations, and the full power of government would be turned on Nixon's "enemies.' "They are asking for it and they're going to get it," Nixon told John Dean before the 1972 election...
...The nation was saved from Nixon authoritarianism by the government it disdains, the press it despises—and whatever providence it is that makes conspirators into stumblebums...
...the Federal judge who went after the higher-ups of the convicted Watergate burglars...
...A Presidential candidate lacks an incumbent's potential for conspiratorial behavior, but on June 21 Perot was depicted in the Washington Post as a zealot who had President George Bush and members of his family investigated...
...All this, as it happened, occurred only days after the 20th anniversary of the break-in into Democratic National Head-quarters in the Watergate building, which started a train of events leading to President Nixon's resignation...
...For, although it is not generally realized, that is what was in the making...
...Journalists occupied a prominent place on the Nixon "enemies" and wiretap lists...
...Nixon's speech writer, William Safire, heard his boss say at least a dozen times, "The press is the enemy...
...On August 7, 1974, he wrote the President urging him to resign for the good of the party and the country...
...Not much, I bet...
...Nor is 20...
...Nixon already had pretty much decided to resign, but he took Bush's prompting as self-serving and a stab in the back...
...White House Counsel Charles Colson, in a postelection critique, berated Bush for having been too liberal and for having refused to use "some very derogatory information about Bentsen...
...Perot, a less adept writer, recruited novelist Ken Follett to glorify him in On Wings of Eagles...
...I find a similarity with Richard M. Nixon in Perot's evident need to control his environment and his penchant for lashing out at those who cross him...
...Perot said the story was fantasy and, borrowing a Watergate term, accused the Bush White House of "dirty tricks...
...Those worried about unemployment, inflation and lagging investment came to view the policy of "in your face" as a luxury Israel could not afford...
...But Bush, no longer Nixon's softie, vetoed that...
...Nor when Nixon warned that President Bush was missing the boat on aid to Russia...
...As much as anything else, what seems to have motivated Israelis to opt for flexibility on the Palestinian issue was a realization of the economic cost of rigidity...
...was on a speculative list of possible Nixon raunning mates, but he was never seriously considered...
...That is why these two like the "media" but not the "news" part of the news media...
...friendship and financial support...
...The late-blooming files and tapes disclose his plans to centralize power in a "supercabinet," with White House agents riding herd on departments like political commissars...
...In defeat, Shamir said Likud had "raised the prestige of the people of Israel...
...Both of these talented, compulsive men are very much handlers of their own destinies, and have used books to burnish their images...
...Finally, however, he did what was, in Nixonian terms, unforgivable...
...One consequence was to rip open the majesty of the Presidency...
...In 1968, Representative Bush (R.-Tex...
...On the contrary, it probably helped Rabin with voters who were anxious about losing U.S...
...the Assistant Attorney General who refused to be the President's patsy...
...Since then, unfortunately, government agencies and the judiciary have been increasingly politicized...
...So, nine years later, having worked hard at his own rehabilitation, Nixon seized his first opportunity for a potshot at Vice President Bush...
...In victory, Rabin promised to concentrate on peace and jobs...
...Clearly, Israelis today are more concerned about peace and jobs than prestige...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 8
