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Date: August 13, 2007 10:57:28 AM PDT
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Subject: Fwd: Richard Nixon's Conspiracy Theory
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From: "Jim S." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: August 13, 2007 11:52:42 AM PDT
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Subject: Richard Nixon's Conspiracy Theories
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http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2007/08/richard-nixons-
conspiracy-theories.html
*Richard Nixon's Conspiracy Theories*
Monday, August 13, 2007
http://hnn.us/articles/41698.html
*How Paranoid Was Nixon?*
By Kenneth J. Hughes, Jr.
8-13-07
Mr. Hughes is the Nixon tapes editor for the Presidential
Recordings Program at
the University of Virginias Miller Center.
It wasn't the crime, but it wasn't the cover-up, either. Something
more basic
took down a president 33 years ago.
Long before prosecutors identified him as an unindicted
coconspirator, Richard
Nixon was a conspiracy theorist. In the last 10 years, the
government has
systematically declassified hundreds of hours of White House tapes
recorded on a
voice-activated system that President Nixon had the Secret Service
install in the
oval office. They reveal a textbook example of what historian
Richard Hofstadter
called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."
Any group can be the target of a conspiracy theory. Nixon targeted
three --
Jews, intellectuals, and Ivy Leaguers. Their connection wasnt
logical, but
political. Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., summarized the
reaction of the
Republican bureaucratic old guard in the 1930s, when Franklin
Roosevelts New
Deal brought new kids to town: "There were too many Ivy League men,
too many
intellectuals, too many radicals, too many Jews." So when
Congressman Dick
Nixon, a young Republican from California on the House Un-American
Activities
Committee in the 1940s, played a prominent role in exposing the
Alger Hiss spy
ring (which contained the tiniest fraction of the Jews,
intellectuals and Ivy
Leaguers who worked in the New Deal, but more than enough to make
the right wing
feel vindicated) Nixon rocketed to political stardom. As Garry
Wills has noted,
Nixon entered his 30s having never held public office and exited
his 30s having
been elected Vice President of the United States. The Hiss case
made him.
Later, it would unmake him.
Nixon drew lessons from the Hiss case about Jews, intellectuals,
and the Ivy League.
"Remember that any intellectual is tempted to put himself above the
law."
"The guys from the best families are most likely to develop that
arrogance that
puts them above the law."
"If they're from any Eastern schools or Berkeley, those are
particularly the
potential bad ones."
"The Jews are born spies," with an "an arrogance that says --
that's what makes a
spy. He puts himself above the law."
What's important is that Nixon said the same thing about all three
groups -- that
they were arrogant and put themselves above the law. Hofstadter
would have seen
what was coming next. "A fundamental paradox of the paranoid
style," he wrote,
"is the imitation of the enemy." His examples include anti-
Catholic Ku Klux
Klansmen "donning priestly vestments" and the anti-Communist John
Birch Society
forming cells and employing front groups. Had he lived long enough
to hear the
Nixon tapes, Hofstadter could have added to the list an anti-Semitic,
anti-intellectual, anti-Ivy League president arrogantly putting
himself above the
law. The Nixon quotes above come from June and July tapes of 1971,
when he was
on the verge of creating a secret police organization, the Special
Investigations
Unit (S.I.U.), without congressional authority. The S.I.U. is
better known as
"The Plumbers," since one of its purposes was to plug "leaks" like
that of the
Pentagon Papers, a classified multi-volume Defense study of Vietnam
War
decision-making that the New York Times had begun publishing on
June 13, 1971.
By coincidence (a common phenomenon conspiracy theorists have a
hard time
accepting), the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel
Ellsberg, had Jewish
ancestors, a career as a defense intellectual, and a degree from
Harvard. By
further coincidence, the man who conducted the Pentagon study,
Leslie H. Gelb,
and the man who recruited Gelb to the Defense Department, Morton H.
Halperin,
were also Jewish intellectuals with Ivy League degrees. While
Halperin and Gelb
let Ellsberg see a copy of the Pentagon Papers, at a time when
Ellsberg had a
security clearance and needed the study for Vietnam research, no
investigation,
legal or illegal, ever found evidence that either Halperin or Gelb
took part in
the leak. But political paranoids dont need evidence. Nixon
quickly formed a
conspiracy theory and never let it go. In the privacy of the oval
office, he
lumped Halperin and Gelb together with Ellsberg as "the three Jews."
Its not like no one warned Nixon. The day the Times started
publishing, former
national security adviser Walt Rostow, after talking it over with
Lyndon Johnson,
called the White House and fingered Ellsberg. Alexander M. Haig,
Nixon's deputy
national security adviser, asked about Halperin and Gelb, but
Rostow didnt think
either would do it. "He said whoever did this could not be a good
Democrat," Haig
reported to Nixon the next day. "He said he would have to be a
radicalized
individual." Anyone leaking thousands of pages of classified
documents must
abandon all hope of future government employment. Ellsberg burned
that bridge,
but Gelb would later work for President Carter, Halperin for
President Clinton.
Like other political paranoids, Nixon did have some real worries. Not
necessarily the ones he put in his memoirs, about potential leaks
threatening his
diplomatic opening to China or nuclear arms negotiations. Both of
these
initiatives involved legitimate national security secrets. But,
the tapes show
that Nixon's first concern was with the potential exposure of an
illegitimate
secret, his bombing of Cambodia.
It's questionable whether Nixon ever had the right to keep the
bombing of North
Vietnamese infiltration routes through Cambodia secret. He claimed
later it was
necessary for Cambodian Prince Sihanouk to preserve his public
neutrality
regarding the Vietnam War. By the time the Pentagon Papers were
published in
1971, however, Sihanouk had been overthrown, and Cambodias
government was no
longer officially neutral, but pro-American. The foreign policy
rationale for
secrecy was gone, but a pressing political one remained. The
bombing of
Cambodia, once revealed, was bound to cause controversy. Nixon had
won the 1968
election only after publicly pledging support for Lyndon Johnson's
decision to
halt the bombing of North Vietnam. How would he explain that in
his first months
in office he had secretly started bombing another country?
On this subject Nixon was plagued by another coincidence. Halperin
knew about the
secret bombing. Henry A. Kissinger, Nixon's national security
adviser, had hired
Halperin in 1969 onto the National Security Council staff. (One
might wonder how
someone with Nixon's views of Jews, intellectuals, and the Ivy
League could
employ, as his most trusted foreign policy adviser and de facto
Secretary of
State, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany whose intellectual
credentials started
with three degrees from Harvard. Bigots can make exceptions for
some of their
best friends and Nixon did for Jews, intellectuals, and Ivy
Leaguers he
personally deemed "loyal." Kissinger, in his judgment, rose to the
level of
"loyal bastard.") Kissinger had hired Halperin onto the National
Security
Council staff at the start of Nixon's presidency. When someone
leaked a story on
one of the Cambodian bombing runs to the Times, the president had
the F.B.I. tap
Halperin's phone. The wiretap lasted 21 months. The F.B.I. found
no evidence
that Halperin revealed any classified information. That was not
enough for Nixon.
Halperin remained at the top of one enemies list (the Nixon White
House had
multiple lists) along with Gelb and the Washington think tank where
both were
scholars, the Brookings Institution. A White House aide claimed
that Gelb took a
Top Secret report on the 1968 bombing halt with him to Brookings.
That was
enough for Nixon. It prompted his most bizarre response to the
Pentagon Papers:
an order to break into Brookings and steal a report whose existence
has never
been confirmed.
The Brookings break-in never came off. But the Special
Investigations Unit,
employing C.I.A. assets recruited from Florida's Cuban American
community, did
manage to burglarize the Beverly Hills office of a psychiatrist who
had treated
Ellsberg. They were looking for information on the conspiracy.
They got
nothing. All the president's men never could make a case against
Halperin and
Gelb. The Special Investigations Unit disbanded. But some of its
members got
back together during the campaign for one more job, and then
another, and then
their luck ran out and they got themselves arrested breaking into
Democratic
Party headquarters at the Watergate complex.
The president had to make a choice. On the one hand, he could let
the criminal
investigation proceed unimpeded, knowing it would lead from the
Watergate
break-in to the earlier break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's
office to the
impeachable offense of a president establishing a secret police
agency that
operated outside the Constitution and above the law. On the other
hand, he could
launch a cover-up. The choice Nixon made destroyed him, but the
alternative
would have destroyed him, too, and probably quicker.
In his parting remarks to the White House staff, on the day he
relinquished the
presidency, Nixon drew a simple moral lesson from his downfall:
"Always remember,
others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you
hate them and,
then, you destroy yourself." This seeming confession of moral
failure cloaked a
subtle claim of moral justification: They started it, with their
hate; he was
only defending himself, fighting fire with fire.
Nixon's private words, immortalized on tape, offer more complex
lessons. Nixon
had moral clarity, but it fueled his immorality. His conviction
that he was
fighting evil became his excuse for doing evil. His attempts to
break an
imaginary conspiracy ultimately led him to launch the real
conspiracy that broke him.
[Posted by Alex Constantine at 12:26 a.m.]
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