Bye-Bye Bush

...Perhaps not, but who would believe the Russians, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when President Kennedy forced Khrushchev to back down...

...He can pardon, but not reinstate...

...But my interest in the scandal is more than mere nostalgia...

...Like other defectors, he has probably been given a new name by the CIA and settled somewhere...

...recounts Nixon’s interviews with British TV journalist David Frost...

...Over the years, you could take your pick of theories: Fidel Castro avenging himself because of the Kennedy plot on his life...

...After his re-election in 2004, Bush talked of having amassed political capital that he would expend on great reforms, like overhauling Social Security...

...But awarding the election to the biggest bankroll would certainly give us the best President money could buy...

...As for Iran’s nuclear program, Putin gave verbal assurance of a willingness to discuss tougher sanctions in the United Nations Security Council...

...Tw o years later, the Berlin Wall was torn down...

...AMAZING race...

...When the United States supported a plan for granting independence to Kosovo, once a province of Serbia, Russia, which regards Serbia as its backyard, threatened to veto the United Nations’ plan...

...There has been considerable speculation that he will try to get the term limit removed...

...He retains his constitutional prerogatives...

...Haldeman and John Ehrlichman go to jail without lifting a finger to save them...

...The American President remains committed to a missile defense system with components in Poland and the Czech Republic, Putin’s opposition notwithstanding...

...So I have a suggestion to make: The primaries should be abolished altogether, and the nomination should be awarded to the candidate of each party who has raised the most money...

...Proponents of that wall speak of keeping out terrorists as well as job-seeking illegal immigrants...

...After 35 years, the evidence of Nixon’s misdeeds continues to mount as more and more files are released...

...When Bush recently chided Putin for derailing democratic reform in Russia, he fired back by inferentially comparing America with Hitler’s Third Reich...

...But Romney has so far lent his campaign an additional $2.4 million and $6.5 million, respectively, of his own...

...Under the headline “Base to Bush— It’s Over,” Byron York of the conservative National Review wrote in the Washington Post on July 8 that Bush has estranged the Republicans he needs most...

...A Matter of Loyalty THE TOPIC du jour at countless Washington Independence Day parties was the remission of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence...

...Father Bush and wife Barbara were on hand to provide a homey touch...

...Bagley has written a book titled Spy Wars, in which he argues that a high-level KGB defection, just weeks after Kennedy’s assassination, was no coincidence...

...And pretty much everybody should be satisfied, except maybe the television networks, which stand to lose millions in payments for political ads...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Bye-Bye Bush Forall practical purposes, President Bush’s tenure can be said to have ended, even though he will not leave office until January 20, 2009...

...Not much of great consequence seems to have come out of the RussianAmerican summit by the sea...

...In Richard M. Nixon, Elizabeth Drew examines a complex President...

...One facet of the story had to do with Yuri Nosenko, a high-ranking KGB off icer who defected to the United States via Geneva, bringing word that the KGB was not involved in the assassination...

...President Lyndon B. Johnson feared that it might be the Russians under Khrushchev...

...I wonder if it will be another 35 years before we see equally damning George W. Bush-era f iles that somehow have escaped the shredder...

...Come to think of it, I’m not sure that my idea should be limited to the nominations...

...And the Winner Is...

...Another Spell of Wallitis BUILDING a wall may mean safety for some, but tragedy for many...

...No, that’s a bad idea...

...Another says, “We are ready for a new President...

...In 1974 Nixon, facing impeachment and prosecution, was advised by his chief of staff, Alexander Haig, that his options included pardoning himself and then resigning...

...So Nosenko was held in a cell for five years while agency interrogators tried to break him...

...But one pardon we were spared...

...York quotes one GOP activist as saying, “Bush fatigue has set in...

...And in The Conviction of Richard Nixon, James Reston Jr...

...He will undoubtedly enjoy the book by his onetime handler...

...President Richard M. Nixon, on the other hand, let his loyal aides John N. Mitchell, H.R...

...or maybe the Soviet Union, where Lee Harvey Oswald lived for three years as an American defector...

...Facing a confrontation with Senate Democrats over subpoenas and other matters, the President has seen his approval rating dip to the 60s in his own party...

...the Mafia, the CIA, or both in combination...

...His two-term limit expires next March...

...Maybe that’s the good news...

...Domenici told National Public Radio he was breaking ranks after reading Lugar’s moving 50-minute speech to an almost deserted Senate chamber the night of June 25...

...Perhaps the coincidence of the foiled terrorist car bombings in Britain helped to revive a little of the sense of common danger evoked by 9/11...

...All of a sudden, the Wall Street Journal was talking about a hot Democratic primary race...

...He is lobbying to hold the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi on the Black Sea...

...What does he owe an aide who has broken the law to serve him or some greater cause...

...And after the assassination, Khrushchev ordered a crash investigation to determine whether there was any KGB connection...

...I got my indoctrination into the horror of mortar and concrete on August 13, 1961, watching East German Communist police close off East Berlin, f irst with barbed wire and then with concrete...

...Clinton’s $27 million...

...The Russian counteroffer of a radar system in Azerbaijan is not taken seriously...

...It has come to look as though the extended primary campaign will be settled not by who makes the most appealing arguments, but by who raises the most money...

...And now, if in September Bush cannot convince Republicans that his latest strategy in Iraq is working, he may be in danger of losing control of the war...

...And he can make war, but not indefinitely pay for that war...

...As for the George W. Bush-Vladimir V. Putin summit in Kennebunkport, Maine, the staff who labor in the foothills signaled that they would be satisfied if Russian-American relations, which have reached some kind of low point, do not get any worse...

...Maybe, but with the KGB files presumably available since the collapse of the Soviet Union, something should have surfaced to support that theory...

...Rather, it is that fearing they would be blamed, they staged a defection in order to persuade Americans that the Russians were not involved...

...Now comes Tennent H. Bagley, one of the CIA people involved in Nosenko’s walk-in defection at the American Embassy in Geneva in 1964...

...In the second quarter, Obama was reported to have raised $32.8 million to Mrs...

...In the posthumously published American Spy, ex-CIA agent E. Howard Hunt writes of commanding the Watergate break-in...

...The second quarter had Giuliani on top with $17.2 million to Romney’s $13.7 million...

...Initially, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York was regarded as the almost inevitable choice for Democratic standard bearer...

...That’s not to mention the Broadway hit based on those interviews—Frost/Nixon...

...The Republican Senators slip away, one at a time—foreign policy dean Richard G. Lugar of Indiana . . . George V. Voinovich of Ohio . . . Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico . . . and there will be more...

...Maybe so, but some in the CIA—notably counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton—were convinced the Nosenko defection was a fake, intended to pull the wool over American eyes...

...He figuratively bit his nails, hoping the Warren Commission would find out otherwise, as it did...

...There is no telling who would be chosen by our justices’ arithmetic...

...Maybe the Supreme Court could preside over the process...

...Real differences persist, yet they were apparently discussed with businesslike cordiality...

...In Ni xon’s Shadow IT HAPPENED 35 years ago, on June 17, 1972...

...Filling out the picture, the Right-leaning Washington Examiner wrote of Cheney’s slipping approval rating under the headline, “Cheney Fatigue Settles Over Some in GOP...

...A lot of summits have passed under the bridge since then, not all of them friendly, including one that Soviet Party Chief Nikita S. Khrushchev stormed out of in Paris in 1960...

...Then there were President Bill Clinton’s wholesale pardons just before leaving office, including one for fugitive financier Marc Rich—convicted of tax evasion and illegal trading with Iran—whose wife was a loyal money-raiser for Clinton causes...

...T w enty-six years later, President Ronald Reagan spoke for unhappy Berliners, but also for the world, when he stood before the closed-off Brandenburg Gate and challenged Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall...

...The capital is gone, and there is not much to show for it...

...That way , we spare ourselves having to worry every quarter about who has come up from behind...

...Seaside Summitry Winston Churchill coined the phrase “meeting at the summit” during World War II to denote a lofty encounter of grand leaders making grand decisions...

...A whole generation has grown up since a handful of Cuban-American zealots broke into Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building...

...And Yuri Nosenko, where is he...

...Then came the Federal Election Commission’s reports of money raised during the first quarter of this year, and lo and behold, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois had raised over $25 million, nearly matching Senator Clinton’s $26 million...

...But his emphasis was on drawing the Teheran government into negotiations...

...Judging from his current popularity in Russia, Putin would almost certainly win...

...The President followed the example of his father, who issued pardons to former Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger and others involved in the Iran-contra scandal...

...Israel has been working for years on a 436mile fence to close off the Arab section of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza...

...ASpooky Theory THEREHADBEEN no news about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination for some time, but here we go again...

...The question is whether Putin will be president in 2014...

...On the Republican side, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney pulled ahead in the first quarter with $17.6 million to former New York Mayor Rudolph W . Giuliani’s $15 million...

...The image did not last...

...Compiler Charles W . Colson described me as a real media enemy...

...I can envisage the Federal Election Commission, at a preordained moment on Election Day, opening the envelope and announcing the name of our next President...

...It must have tormented Lugar to say, “we don’t owe the President our unquestioning agreement...

...There seems to be a sort of junta within the government...

...When President Bush projected a new missile defense plan, President Putin did not believe it was aimed only against rogue states and terrorists...

...on an insufficiently stringent immigration bill...

...the Pentagon...

...Since it appears that money will dominate what promises to be America’s first billion-dollar contest for President, it strikes me that a lot of time and effort are being expended on fund-raising that could better be devoted to the general election...

...But what can be established is that the projected fence has helped to stimulate a booming business in tunnel building and another booming business in forging identity documents...

...The break-in propelled President Nixon down the road to becoming America’s only President to resign from office...

...That’s what you call one-way loyalty...

...I was a certified entry on Nixon’s Enemies List...

...That is how it was established...

...Nosenko said Khrushchev was greatly relieved to learn that the KGB was not involved...

...His theory is not that the Soviets had a hand in the assassination...

...In Very Strange Bedfellows, Jules Witcover tells of Nixon’s relationship with Vice President Spiro Agnew, who resigned 10 months before his boss did...

...His problem is not that his opponents oppose him, it is that his onetime supporters, in dismaying numbers, no longer support him...

...It hardly could have, given their different cultures and, more to the point, different interests...

...It’s a popularity that President Bush might well envy...

...In the end, the then CIA Director John A. McCone told me the agency concluded Nosenko was for real and the Russians were not involved in the assassination...

...What was President Bush’s rationale for acting without even consulting the Justice Department...

...Fascination with the Nixon era remains so strong that it has inspired a raft of new books...

...He can veto, but not enact...

...This comes back to me because we seem to be afflicted with another spell of wallitis—of hoping that closing off problems will solve them...

...The Kremlin news service made a point of saying Putin had stopped off in Maine on his way to Guatemala to attend a meeting of the International Olympic Committee...

...This Nixon is insecure, self-pitying, vindictive...

...And a third, “There was affection, but now they’re in divorce court...

...And, most recently, to issuing less than a full pardon to Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Joseph Wilson-Valerie Plame case...

...He will also see the president of Guatemala...

...And lest United States miss out on the closing-off festival, we have started work on what will eventually be a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border...

...It was at the first meeting of the two presidents, in Slovenia in 2001, that George looked into the soul of Vladimir and liked what he saw...

...In one of my television reports, I quoted a line from a Robert Frost poem, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,/ That wants it down...

...And finally, when the United States proposed to locate components of the system in Poland and the Czech Republic, Putin must have flipped his lid about a plan to bring former satellites into a Western defense system on his doorstep...

...No, that isn’t a typo, I mean the amazing race for the Presidential nominations, not the hymn...

...In fact, said Nosenko, the KGB considered Oswald to be mentally unstable and would never have entrusted him with any mission...

...As it happened, he told the FBI when interrogated, he was the one who handled the KGB f ile on Oswald...

...Overall, Kennebunkport had less to do with breaking deadlocks than with lowering the temperature in which the two sides discussed them...

...In mid-May American soldiers were engaged in a construction project that sought to close off the Sunni district of Adhamiyah...

...Pakistan is building a fence to close off Taliban routes into Afghanistan...

...I have a special interest in memories of Watergate...

...I have a sense that something like Watergate may be happening again...

...I have a piece of it in my office...

...As Robert Frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall...

...The commutation did not affect the $250,000 fine, paid by Libby on July 5.) I suggest that you not get too involved in the details of the President’s power to pardon or commute, which is almost unlimited...

...It is characterized by extralegal surveillance on a large scale, and extraconstitutional imprisonment of those the junta suspects...

...Nixon preferred to wait for a pardon from his successor, Gerald R. Ford, whose loyalty he correctly thought he could count on...

...The meeting in the century-old Bush summer place was elaborately casual...

...The issue here is not law, but loyalty...

...On the West Berlin side, people came up to the wall in tears as families were divided and East Berliners were cut off from their jobs in the West...

...Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt expresses bitterness in his posthumously published memoir...

...The disenchantment is attributed to several things besides the Iraq War—for example, to working with Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Mass...

...In Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Powe r , Robert Dallek plumbs the depths of that neurotic relationship...