Nixon's Id On Display

Coming out of reading Nixonland, I'm fascinated by his Presidency, and the fact that he used the Oval Office the way that a speaker would use Hyde Park, spouting off about whatever popped into his head. And he KNEW he was taping it! Yesterday the Nixon Library released 200 more hours of Nixon tapes, and I wish I was not working so that I could go down to Yorba Linda and listen to every one of them. Here's just one example:

-- On Dec. 9, 1972, Nixon talks to Colson about the appointment of building trades union leader Peter Brennan as secretary of labor:

NIXON: "The idea, they finally think the appointment of a working man makes them think we're for the working man.”

COLSON: “That's precisely it.”

NIXON: “They talk about all the tokenism. We appoint blacks, and they don't think we're for blacks. Mexicans. They don't think we're for Mexicans. But a working man, by golly, that is really something."

It takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to complain about charges of tokenism while admitting that he's hiring a trade unionist for reasons of tokenism.

The AP has some more:

"Never forget," Nixon tells national security adviser Henry Kissinger in a taped Oval Office conversation revealed Tuesday. "The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.

"Professors are the enemy," he repeated. "Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it."

The conversation was on Dec. 14, 1972, four days before the U.S. unleashed a massive bombing campaign on Hanoi and Haiphong aimed at getting North Vietnam to negotiate more seriously in peace talks.

"We're going to bomb them," Nixon told Kissinger and adviser Alexander Haig, green lighting one of the most controversial acts of the war. "We'll take the heat right over the Christmas period, then on January 3, it's Christmas withdrawal."

As early as 1966, Nixon was quoted as saying that Vietnam could not be won. He was bombing them into the Stone Age to get a better deal at the bargaining table, to get "peace with honor." This didn't work since he was inaugurated, but here in Christmas 1972, he's continuing with it.

The most obvious thing here is that all of the elements of the modern Republican Party are on display in Nixon's brain dump. The resentment, the anti-intellectualism, the demonization of academia and the press, the digging up of dirt (the big revelation is that Nixon's people knew about Tom Eagleton's shock treatments before it was made public), the siege mentality, the persecution complex, the bullying, the need to look tough, etc.

Of course, we had a chance to punish Nixon for his crimes, but we passed it up in the spirit of comity. Good move:

It's a good thing we decided for the good of the country not to play the blame game and to let bygones be bygones because it resulted in the Republicans completely changing their ways.

Dick Cheney, for instance, learned from Nixon's mistakes and completely repudiated Richard Nixon's imperial presidency and profane disrespect and operated with bipartisan good faith and total transparency as a result of the generosity with which Richard Nixon (and later Ronald Reagan) were dealt. It's a heartwarming story of the power of positive reinforcement, forgiveness and redemption.