[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: The Icon the Republicans Want to Forget

Sat Aug 28 12:41:48 PDT 2004

The article below from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by michael at intrafi.com.

very interesting
Michael

michael at intrafi.com

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The Icon the Republicans Want to Forget

August 28, 2004
 By JAMES ROSEN 

I am a product of the Nixon era," President Bush told a
small audience of journalists shortly after his
inauguration. Yet when Mr. Bush accepts his party's
nomination in New York next week, his listeners are not
likely to hear many references to Richard Nixon, his
father's political mentor and the modern-day chief
executive many observers see as the president he most
strongly resembles - in his relish for partisan combat, his
occasional deviations from conservative dogma, and in the
irrational hatred he engenders in liberals. 

Instead, conventioneers will bathe anew in the glow of the
man Nixon soundly defeated in an all-out battle for the
soul of the Republican Party in Miami Beach in the summer
of 1968: Ronald Wilson Reagan. 

In the outpouring of emotion and nostalgia that greeted
President Reagan's death, Nixon's rebuff of the Reagan
revolt received little attention, and for good reason: it
didn't fit the storyline. Beyond an aversion to speaking
ill of the dead, who wanted to remember that when
Republicans enjoyed a straight-up choice between Richard
Nixon and Ronald Reagan, they chose Nixon? 

While such convenient lapses of memory are understandable
they are also unfortunate. As the man who shaped the
party's postwar foreign policy, Richard Nixon commands our
attention now more than ever. 

Eulogists at the Reagan funeral called his presidency as
the turning point of the 20th century. In this, Reagan's
worshipers have been aided greatly by the collapse of the
Soviet Union two years after the Gipper left office. Around
this welcome event they have constructed a mythology
suggesting that our 40th president was singularly
responsible for it. 

Typical are the sentiments of John Lehman, Reagan's
secretary of the Navy, who told me at the commissioning of
the aircraft carrier Reagan in 2001 that neither Nixon nor
Lyndon B. Johnson "had any concept that they could actually
win the Cold War." Ronald Reagan, he said, believed that by
asserting America's "moral superiority, backed up by a
reassertion of strength," he could "bring about the
diplomatic collapse of the Soviet Union." Damned in their
times as cold war butchers, Johnson and Nixon are now cast
as appeasers, misguided pursuers, in Mr. Lehman's words, of
the "policies of détente ... measures of restraint." 

But did Reagan mark such a decisive change in Cold War
thinking? It wasn't so so apparent in 1987, when he
negotiated and signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces
Treaty. That accord, on which Reagan staked his foreign
policy record, hardly signified a radical departure from
the Nixon-Kissinger model of statecraft. 

Nor was Reagan the first chief executive to envision the
post-Soviet world. That was Nixon, whose plan to hasten the
Soviet Union's irrelevance, by shrewdly exploiting the
Sino-Soviet split, took shape as early as 1967. The
relative sophistication of the two leaders emerges clearly
in their recorded telephone conversation of Oct. 26, 1971
(available at the National Archives, the tape's contents
are previously unpublished). Reagan, then governor of
California, called the president following the United
Nations' vote to expel Taiwan and recognize only communist
China. Nixon, mindful of Reagan's status with
conservatives, began by reassuring the governor that "we
worked our tails off" to forestall the "bad vote." Then
Reagan pitched an idea, which involved the American
ambassador to the United Nations, George H.W. Bush. 

REAGAN: I know it is not easy to give a suggestion, or
advice to the president of the United States. But I just
feel that - I feel so strongly that we can't just sit and
take this and continue as if nothing has happened. And I
had a suggestion for an action that I'd like to be so
presumptuous as to, to suggest. My every instinct says get
the hell out of that - 

NIXON: [Laughs] 

REAGAN: - kangaroo court, and let it, uh - 

NIXON: Yeah.

REAGAN: - sink. But I know that's very, that would be
extremely difficult, and not the thing to do. But it has
occurred to me that ... if you brought Mr. Bush back to
Washington, to let them sweat for about 24 hours, as to
what you were thinking of, and then if you went on
television to the people of the United States and said that
Mr. Bush was going back to the U.N., to participate in
debate and express our views and so forth, but he would not
participate in any votes - that the United States would not
vote and would not be bound by the votes of the U.N.,
because it is a debating society. You don't have to say
that, but it is a debating society - 

NIXON: Mm-hmm. 

REAGAN: - and, and so we'd be there, our presence would be
there. But we would just not participate in their votes. I
think it would put those bums in the perspective they
belong. 

NIXON: [after a pause, breaks into laughter] It sure would!

REAGAN: I think it would make a hell of a campaign issue.

At that point, drawing on the decades of foreign policy
experience his caller lacked, Nixon paused again, and tried
to explain - gently - both the "legal problems" involved
and the interconnectedness of global issues. 

"It's a tough one, as you're well aware,'' Nixon then said.
"It's - we've got some, we've got some fish to fry on
India-Pakistan. We're trying to avoid a war there, and the
U.N. may have to play some damn role there. Uh, the -
[laughs] 'cause we don't want to get involved, obviously,
in that miserable place. It's, it's ah we will, let me, let
me give some thought to this whole thing." 

Reagan pressed on, either unaware or unconcerned that his
idea had flopped. "I think it would be very dramatic," he
said. "Here's a chance for Uncle Sam just to slap their
wrist!" 

Nixon promised to consider recalling Ambassador Bush, then
wrapped up the call with talk about his recent Supreme
Court appointees (William Rehnquist, then 47, would become
"the strongest man on the court," Nixon predicted). Nixon's
patience had apparently run out. 

Ronald Reagan was, as his supporters maintain, a remarkable
figure, and a politician worthy of emulation. Conversely,
Richard Nixon was, as his detractors claimed, an insecure,
vengeful man, a leader who brought ruin on himself and did
considerable harm to his country in the process. Yet in
spite of the Reagan-centric view that now prevails, a
steadfast (and rapidly aging) corps of "Nixon Talmudists" -
the writer Christopher Buckley's marvelous phrase to
describe purveyors of what was once the dominant mode of
analysis for modern American politics - still recognizes
which man presided over the defining postwar White House. 

Richard Nixon's name may go unspoken this week, but his
ideas will not. Expect from President Bush an echo of the
words his disgraced predecessor spoke when he accepted the
Republicans nomination in 1972 for a second term. Speaking
of Vietnam, he warned that a precipitous withdrawal from
America's foreign troop commitments "might be good
politics, but it would be disastrous to the cause of peace
in the world." He added: "There are those who believe that
we can entrust the security of America to the good will of
our adversaries. Those who hold this view do not know the
real world there is no such thing as a retreat to peace." 

James Rosen is a White House correspondent for the Fox News
Channel and the author of the forthcoming "The Strong Man:
John Mitchell, Nixon and Watergate." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/28/opinion/28rosen.html?ex=1094722107&ei=1&en=116d27b77765048e

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