NIXON AND HIS MONICA

...The Nixon she knew, Crowley declares, was a better man than the one who caused and suffered from Watergate...

...How could they think Nixon meant what he said on those tapes...

...I gave them what they needed...

...Why do smart people do dumb things that hurt them...

...And there was Hillary, on the impeachment committee, screaming about the eighteen and a half minutes, and she’s in Little Rock, shredding,” he told Crowley with justifiable rancor—adding: “She’s up to her ass in it, and they are both guilty as hell...

...Figures struck by disgrace may eventually win back the right to be taken seriously by serious people...

...Hart and Kennedy were high-powered senators well on their way to being crowned by their party when they were derailed by mishaps with women and water...

...In the New Yorker, David Remnick adds, “A prominent Washington journalist once told me that Hart, after a couple of drinks in an airplane, . . . described his own fall in 1987 as a conspiracy of power elites: the military establishment, the energy industry . . . all the industries he planned to reform...

...Even after their comeback, there remains a duality in their public persona: However respected they become inside a particular discipline, they continue to be figures of fun in the general culture, good for a laugh on the radio or a skit on late-night TV...

...Convinced, correctly, that he could have survived had he at once exposed and denounced the original burglary, Nixon demanded of Crowley, “Didn’t anyone learn from Watergate...

...Hart’s career as a politician and public figure ended...

...Wrong” is what is done to them by their enemies...

...As Crowley puts it, “Nixon advanced a theory about his downfall that subtracted him from the equation...

...Nixon and Kennedy tried a different technique: Knowing that Watergate and Chappaquiddick would always be with them, they set out to construct a different reality—a reality of hard work upon serious matters— that might give a new balance to their lives...

...And they never do anything wrong...

...Nixon was driven from the presidency, though he later remade himself as an itinerant statesman...

...Carl is essentially a f—up and he has to fail, and Nixon is a f— up and he has to fail, so Carl could always understand Nixon...

...Nixon could not erase Watergate, but he could place it in context as not the only moment in his life...

...The closest Crowley comes to wringing a confession from Nixon is his admission that he had been “wrong” (but mainly “stupid”) in giving his opponents an opening: “The press didn’t trust me after Hiss, and they were just out there, circling and waiting...

...Those who were after me during Watergate were after me for a long time,” Nixon said to his Monica...

...But who should feel for them, if not one another...

...When Hart bowed out in 1987, Nixon wrote: “Dear Gary: This is just a line to tell you that I thought you handled a very difficult situation uncommonly well...

...weak points, he was perplexed by the emerging symmetries of the efforts at cover-up, enraged that those who had once pursued him so fiercely should now do the same things themselves...

...The ultimate cause of their scandals is the hatred of others, circling, waiting to seize them...

...But Crowley, in fact, resembles Bill Clinton’s Monica less than she resembles Doris Kearns (now Doris Kearns Goodwin), another sweet young thing who gained access to another wounded old lion and used it to launch her career by writing Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream in 1976...

...So, “step by step, book by book, speech by speech, he began the comeback,” Crowley writes...

...I should have been more careful about not doing anything wrong...

...It was a blind spot he shared...

...Could it be because they gave fair-minded people reason to suspect them of questionable, criminal, or stupid behavior...

...And then, having done his worst, he did the unexpected: He improved, disentangling the statesman who had always been there from the bonds of his ego...

...There are always offices they cannot seek, places they cannot go, things they cannot say, issues they cannot address...

...Not in their minds...

...In a 1984 article on the selfdestructive arc of Carl Bernstein, Rudy Maxa quotes Dustin Hoffman, who played Bernstein in the movie version of All the President’s Men: “I understand why Carl did so well on Watergate...

...His theories about Watergate . . . were more about creating a psychological shelter than about advancing a new truth...

...I had been a target since Alger Hiss,” Nixon explained to Crowley, “because during that case I did the worst thing you can do to the press, prove them wrong...

...That they made disheartened supporters think they defiled the office they held...

...Or as Hillary Clinton put it on Good Morning America, a “vast right-wing conspiracy” has had her husband in its crosshairs since his first term as governor of Arkansas...

...I knew that they were out there, ready to pounce...

...Could it be that they had made enemies by their conduct...

...There were also some matters of pride: “Confounding his enemies became less a matter of revenge, and more a matter of his own unwillingness to accept the sentence they had imposed on him...

...Their mutual interest seems to border on obsession— and it suggests that while generations of politicians claim to model themselves on John F. Kennedy, it may be Nixon who has the genuine political followers...

...It makes the whole thing that much sadder: “When Nixon looked back to that time,” Crowley writes, “he was struck by the incomprehensible sadness of his own downfall and suffering...

...Nixon—like Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, and Bill Clinton—belongs to the gang of American politicians A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery is a writer living in Alexandria, Virginia...

...Hart, Remnick says, was “fascinated by Nixon—by his cynicism, and his uncanny ability to remain in the political limelight...

...Clinton thinks Whitewater, Monica, and the China affairs were made up by talk radio...

...Like all his brothers in scandal, he could not face the fault in himself...

...I will never escape from this event, because the press cannot afford to let me escape it,” he wrote his editor, adding that only “suicide” or “an act of utmost contrition, which I am incapable of making” could reinstate him in the public eye...

...But we can’t...

...The one thing he could not be was completely honest...

...And it makes the whole thing that much more puzzling: “He issued quiet and emotional explanations, fiery defiance, defensive justifications, bitter criticisms, earnest apologies, and determined lack of remorse...

...They weren’t interested in Watergate as much as they were interested in getting me on [Alger] Hiss and Vietnam...

...Hart has similarly sympathized with Bill Clinton’s troubles...

...Clinton may serve out his term in office, but his prestige and some of his power are gone...

...Maybe he could...

...But what finally makes people like Kennedy, Nixon, Hart, and Clinton do things that bring them such ridicule...

...How could people mistake the avuncular charities of Vernon Jordan and Nate Landow for witness tampering...

...Hart thought the press made him sail off to Bimini...

...NIXON AND HIS MONICA Last Thoughts of an Old Man in a Dry Season By Noemie Emery Once upon a time, there was a scandal-plagued president with an intern named Monica— but it was a blonde Monica, Monica Crowley, the girl whose interest in international politics led her in 1990 to Richard Nixon, then the King Lear of Saddle River, New Jersey...

...But believe me, Watergate was just the excuse...

...But it is always inside a limited radius, bounded by doubt and by ridicule...

...And why can’t we look away...

...Some say they fear disaster so much that they tempt it on purpose, as the man who fears heights edges close to the precipice...

...This worked to a point, as it did for Ted Kennedy, but with strict limits imposed...

...When Nixon died in 1994, Clinton’s warm speech at his funeral—a plea to judge the “whole man” apart from his scandals—struck many as being a plea for himself...

...And like Kearns, she knows our real interest is the presidential tangle of the personal and the political, the destructive imperative of ambition and selfimmolation...

...What you said about the media needed to be said,” Nixon wrote to Hart, fingering their common scapegoat in what Remnick calls their “strange kinship” of unreality and self-delusion...

...The cause always lies in the plottings of others— of the press, the special interests, the vast right-wing conspiracy, Alger Hiss...

...He egged on Clinton’s pursuers—in part from Republican partisanship, in part to dilute his unique place in history, and in part for the company misery loves...

...As the New York Times warned the Clintons at the emergence of the latest round of charges, an unresolved scandal works as a permanent fountain of negative energy, a low-grade infection and chronic disease...

...Kennedy hung on as a senator and leader of narrowgauge causes, but saw his national prospects diminish...

...Nixon and Clinton were presidents whose power had just been cemented by electoral-college landslides when they found themselves mangled by scandal...

...Like Kearns, Crowley shows—first in her 1996 account of conversations with the former president, Nixon Off the Record, and now in her latest collection, Nixon in Winter: His Final Revelations about Diplomacy, Watergate, and Life out of the Arena—that she is able to talk about policy...

...Gary Hart still appears poleaxed, frozen in time at the moment of impact...

...Apparently not...

...Intrigued by the sight of a man who—despite his very different temperament— seemed to share all his LIKE ALL HIS BROTHERS IN SCANDAL, NIXON COULD NEVER FACE THE FAULT IN HIMSELF...

...If it did not exist, other things would be invented or seized upon...

...For all such people, the scandal that destroyed them is merely the pretext for their undoing...

...who, despite good brains and political instincts, were lamed by disgrace at the height of their prospects...

...And this reflects the destructive duality in their private persona: the unresolved tension between the workhorse and the playboy Kennedy, advisthe Quaker and the gangster Nixon, the thinker and the playboy Hart, the empathizer-in-chief and the selfish thug Clinton...

...Linked as such figures are by their odd views of justice, it is inevitable they should feel common bonds...

...The world may see them as crooks, but in their own eyes they are victims, innocent targets of forces so entrenched and pervasive that even the presidency is helpless before them...

...The strain and the tension drained out of his features...

...Nixon in Winter is a roadmap for all who came after, a template for a state of mind...

...Nixon could feel sorry for Hart, and Hart could sympathize with Clinton, and Clinton could find it in himself to speak warmly of Nixon...

...But though there is only one way they all look at scandal, there are different ways they handle its aftermath...

...What is missing, of course, is a rational explanation of how so much hatred gets focused upon them...

...At his height, he felt himself more hunted than ever, making needless strikes against enemies who were already beaten and provoking the storm that drove him from office...

...Kennedy placed the Chappaquiddick crash in the train of disasters that befell his family—accident, war, assassination—as something that happened to him, not something he caused...

...But Nixon couldn’t return the favor to Clinton, at least...

...Given the utter lack of self-knowledge in Kennedy, Hart, and Clinton, Nixon’s ruminations as divulged to his aide may be the closest we come to an insight into them all...

...Some say they think themselves unworthy, feeling compelled to display their own vices when they are given too much...

...Of them all, the dualities in Nixon were the most dramatic...

...Some people say that their fear is so strong it inadvertently brings on the thing they fear...

...As Gary Hart said, “A newly aggressive and intrusive press establishment, never comfortable with my refusal to be categorized, exploited and possibly created an incident...

...Nixon thought that Watergate was about Alger Hiss...