Nixon 25 Years later
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Nixon 25 Years Later Thoughts on the August 9 anniversary of Richard M. Nixon's resignation: Maybe I needed 25 years to get over being listed as an...
...He appears at ease, ready to leave his political future to "the rhythms of life" and to devote himself to an unfinished agenda of social improvement...
...A decade is too short a time to assess the post-Cold War era...
...The State Department, retaliating for Soviet regions closed to foreigners, had arbitrarily marked off a U.S...
...If absolutely necessary we will have the meeting without you...
...Clinton Keying Up I can't find anything to say about Hillary Rodham Clinton's bizarre interview in the premiere issue of Talk magazine, which hit the stands August 3. There is something to be said, though, about her husband...
...The President, for example, no longer gave the impression of being ambivalent about Al Gore...
...You were in your early 20s, I guess, when you accompanied him on his incredible 1959 tour of America...
...Your father could be very funny...
...While he crunched numbers on the surplus and spending with that phenomenal facility he has, there emerged the outline of a central design: In his remaining months he will serve the vulnerable segments of society that he neglected in pursuit of middle-class votes in two elections...
...I let him tell me about his hunting vacation in the Crimea, then said I would love to go down there, but I had a problem that maybe he could help me with...
...In the real world, Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan had "a friendly lunch" with Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright in Singapore...
...But it was evident that some shift had occurred...
...I don't need to tell you what an earthy, outgoing man your father was...
...Schorr, you can go on your vacation...
...Keying up for what...
...In the real world, Russian Prime Minister Sergei V. Stepashin came to Washington shapka in hand...
...The honor escaped him, but history should note that he accomplished much before he destroyed himself...
...And China agreed to accept compensation for the families of embassy aides killed in the Belgrade bombing...
...Soft Power In the world of big power fantasy, Russia steals a defiant march on NATO in Kosovo...
...He reinstated plans for a Clinton-Jiang Zemin summit in September and broke into English to urge the United States to restrain Taiwan from moving toward independence...
...Responding to Earth Day, he established the Environmental Protection Agency and named as its first administrator the vigorous William D. Ruckelshaus—who later, as Deputy Attorney General, would be fired for refusing to fire the Watergate special prosecutor...
...He pledged to end hunger in America, and he did extend food stamp programs to almost every county in the country...
...In the world of big power fantasy, China accuses the United States of trying to dominate the Balkans, refuses to accept a phone call from President Clinton to apologize for the accidental bombing of its embassy in Belgrade, and puts relations with Washington into deep freeze...
...In fact, he said rather hyperbolically that Gore has "done more than any Vice President in history...
...Nixon did not disappoint...
...As for himself, he said that far from winding down, he was "keying up...
...It was all the result of a bureaucratic foul-up...
...region to be closed to Soviet citizens...
...But it was a bum rap...
...Once, in Warsaw, he spotted me and chortled, "There is my American sputnik...
...It speaks well for his parenting that he didn't put you in a cocoon, as Soviet bosses generally did with their children, and that you turned out so normal...
...He whispered "Shh...
...Although they may respond angrily to perceived American provocations and hegemonic designs, so far the Clinton Administration has been in a position to sit out the storms and await the return of the calm of economic need...
...When Nixon took office, the cartoonist Herblock, who habitually drew him with a deep five ?'clock shadow, gave him a clean shave...
...He asked for a bailout from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and for a relaxation of quotas on iron exports to the U.S...
...He sponsored an affirmative action program called "the Philadelphia plan," requiring government construction contractors to hire a specified number of minority workers...
...Lowering his voice to confidential tones, looking around as though to make sure we were not being overheard, he whispered, "Mr...
...In context, as we heard it, he was trying to reassure the shaky satellites, after the Soviets had crushed the Hungarian uprising, that Communism would outlive capitalism...
...Clinton also said he was totally prepared for his wife to become a Senator, even if that would mean having to attend meetings of Senate spouses...
...Yet he also left his mark on domestic policy...
...We are witnessing the exercise of what Dean Joseph Nye of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School calls "soft power...
...He asked the Clinton Administration to create "the necessary atmosphere" for resuming negotiations on Beijing's World Trade Organization membership...
...Another thing...
...America's principal attraction, its booming economy, contrasts sharply with Russia's near bankruptcy and China's foundering economic reform and growing labor unrest...
...No one figured out how to waive that ban for the leader of the other nuclear superpower...
...In addition, he sought lucrative launches of American satellites on Russian missiles...
...And its Armed Forces conduct exercises positing a nuclear response to a Western attack...
...In 1957 he accepted my invitation to appear on CBS television, the first-ever TV interview with a Soviet leader...
...With impeachment five months behind him and the end of his Presidency 18 months ahead, Bill Clinton, a man of many images, seems to have settled on the one he now wants to project...
...I covered him for five years in the '50s, in Moscow and on his foreign trips, until he broke up the 1960 East-West summit in Paris...
...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Nixon 25 Years Later Thoughts on the August 9 anniversary of Richard M. Nixon's resignation: Maybe I needed 25 years to get over being listed as an "enemy" by our 37th President and subjected to an FBI investigation...
...You mean, no meeting...
...I think your father showed a lot of guts in his secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in February 1956, in which he denounced Stalin's murders and inferentially admitted at least being a silent accomplice to these crimes...
...I was present when he said it in 195 7 at a Polish Embassy reception for Polish Communist chief Wladyslaw Gomulka...
...And he did try...
...Finally, in a move that was as astonishing as any he made while President, he reached into the bag of liberal big government ideas to freeze wages and prices as an anti-inflation measure...
...Did anyone ever tell you why...
...I remember that you were very disappointed — and your father was furious—about not being allowed to go to Disneyland...
...I owed your father a lot...
...Clinton's emphasis was on health insurance for poor children, keeping Medicare viable, prescription drugs for the indigent elderly, saving teaching hospitals from bankruptcy because of cuts in Federal spending and the like...
...I Knew Your Father A letter to Sergei Khrushchev, Brown University professor and newly naturalized American: Welcome...
...That phrase dogged him forever after...
...But it may well be that this is a period when hard military power is losing much of its meaning in big nation relationships and the soft power of economic and political leadership is coming to matter more...
...But as Watergate fades, there comes into focus the Nixon who could have been a Presidential great were it not for his tricky side, his paranoid side...
...In his Inaugural Address he called on Americans to "lower our voices...
...With Labor Secretary George P. Shultz, Nixon pushed a plan for school desegregation in the South, although he opposed mandatory busing...
...The year before, trying to check rumors of an emergency Central Committee meeting to act on the Hungarian uprising and the outbreak of hostilities in the Suez, I engaged your father in a conversation at a diplomatic reception...
...My capitalist bosses would not let me leave Moscow because of rumors of a Central Committee session...
...Elliot L. Richardson, who resigned as Attorney General in a conflict over the surrender of the White House tapes, looked back in a 1987 speech and said, "Richard Nixon had it within his grasp to be our greatest post-World War II President...
...Aided by adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he proposed a bold welfare reform that would have pioneered a guaranteed minimum income...
...elsewhere he invoked a campaign poster that said, "Bring Us Together...
...Our newspapers seem to find it ironic that you have become an American, considering that your father said of this country, "We will bury you...
...The same could not be said about the other child of a Communist boss who came to America, Svetlana Stalin, a very troubled woman...
...In a discursive 70-minute news conference on July 21, marked by pauses for reflection and occasional guffaws, he laughed off a questionabout whetherthere had been "an interesting shift in role...
...Soft powerpermits Washington a large margin for error in dealing with these big, but not great powers...
...To complaints about Moscow's exporting weapons technology to countries like Iran, Stepashin's answer, in a Washington Post interview, was that his country has to resort to shady deals to survive because it lacks foreign investment...
...Nixon is best remembered for his foreign policy achievements —the China breakthrough, the détente with the Soviet Union, the arms control treaty...
...He left no doubt that he would veto the almost $800 billion Republican tax bill that threatened his social and educational priorities...
...I knew your father as well as a bourgeois correspondent could know a Communist leader...
...It was defeated in Congress by an unholy alliance of liberals and conservatives...
...The phenomenon is defined as "the ability to achieve desired outcomes through attraction rather than coercion...
Vol. 82 • August 1999 • No. 9
