Monk

I am not sure to what we owe the occasion, but we have gotten a nice little historical piece on President Nixon's radical play with the fundamentals of the economy, which is all the more remarkable when you consider that he is supposed to be a conservative Republican. Considering how indebted we were becoming, though, I imagine that we had to let go of the gold standard sometime, and it is perhaps more of a wonder that we held onto it as long as we did. But the wage and price controls still baffle me. Perhaps this is an exploration of some of the historical roots of our fiscal and budgetary difficulties.

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On the afternoon of Friday, Aug. 13, 1971, high-ranking White House and Treasury Department officials gathered secretly in President Richard Nixon's lodge at Camp David. Treasury Secretary John Connally, on the job for just seven months, was seated to Nixon's right. During that momentous afternoon, however, newcomer Connally was front and center, put there by a solicitous president. Nixon, gossiped his staff, was smitten by the big, self-confident Texan whom the president had charged with bringing order into his administration's bumbling economic policies.

In the past, Nixon had expressed economic views that tended toward "conservative" platitudes about free enterprise and free markets. But the president loved histrionic gestures that grabbed the public's attention. He and Connally were determined to present a comprehensive package of dramatic measures to deal with the nation's huge balance of payments deficit, its anemic economic growth, and inflation.

-- Lewis E. Lehrman at The Wall Street Journal

Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” affords us this shuddering glimpse into the Nixon White House, as the president and his men struggle with the Vietnam War, which has become our prototype for being stuck in a quagmire and which demonstrated that the Americans can be bloodied and beaten, even by Third World powers. They are discussing another wave of escalation against the north:

Connally urged him, "Don't worry about killing civilians. Go ahead and kill 'em. People think you are now. So go ahead and give 'em some."

"That's right, " concurred the president.

"There's pictures on the news of dead bodies every night," chimed in Haldeman. "A dead body is a dead body. Nobody knows whose bodies they are or who killed them."

I guess this was before Republicans came up with the concept of compassionate conservatism. In all fairness, Americans had been dying in that war for about ten years with no good end in sight, and there is no question about the totalitarian brutality of the enemy. However, the problem in Vietnam was the problem that we now have in Afghanistan, more than thirty years later: what are we fighting for?

All sweet souls of noble understanding want to see the fruits of democracy and freedom take root wherever the light of reason can shine, of course, but such grand ideals must achieve some recognizable form through real, man-run institutions, by a government, and therein lies the rub - along with all the corruption and all the betrayals and all that human misery, that familiar trail of broken dreams.

The United States backed a number of governments in Saigon, but there was no true democratic leadership, but only corrupt gangs taking advantage of the American need to have a native government to be fighting behind. And that is how things look with Afghanistan today and the Karzai government.

A key difference with Afghanistan, though, is the nature of the threat. Even if we cannot get a liberal republic, there is something to be said for having some forward bases in a region of the world that spawns terrorist cells, the country that was the original home of al-Qaida. It makes it easier to swat those cells down. It also helps to have a footprint in that region in the dread event that another massive invasion is required in some grimmer future.

Obama’s quandary is how to maintain a positive presence with the least pain in that alien, unwelcoming land. I am sure he did not want to be another president ceaselessly bleeding troops in a quagmire not of his making. Iraq is enough pain for any Administration. But it can all seem like one big swamp of illiberal, murderous fanaticism. Still, it is important to maintain your humane side, and not sink into the nihilistic doldrums of the Nixon Administration, not that I think we really have to worry about that with Barack Obama, who perhaps would have made a better pastor than a president.

Back in 1970, when Americans were still adjusting to the Supreme Court ruling that people of different races had a constitutional right to wed, someone suggested to President Richard Nixon that same-sex marriages would be next.

“I can’t go that far; that’s the year 2000,” Nixon rejoined.

-- Gail Collins for The New York Times

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“The Israelis, who are one of the few peoples whose survival is genuinely threatened, are probably more likely than almost any other country to actually use their nuclear weapons,” Henry A. Kissinger, the national security adviser, warned Mr. Nixon in a memorandum dated July 19, 1969 — part of a newly released trove of documents.

-- David Stout for The New York Times

Our history over the controversial and sensitive orgins of Israel's nuclear program during the Nixon Administration is enriched.

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