(Ted and Joan Kennedy - Election Night 1962 - battling the stigma of nepotism)

Going a back a ways today. The legacy of Ted Kennedy, who left us this year, has been remembered of late as a staunch supporter of Universal Health Care - his tireless arguments in favor of reform of our shattered Healthcare system and the uphill battle he encountered for so many years in the process. But we don't spend much time on the early days of Ted Kennedy, the candidate for Senate. His opponent George Cabot Lodge, son of the former running mate to Richard Nixon in 1960. Ted Kennedy had to weather the baggage of being the brother of the President, How would that impact his ability to be an effective member of the Senate, even as a Junior Senator. The questions were frequently asked, even on this episode of Meet The Press.

Ted Kennedy: “Mister Spivak, I want to make my position extremely clear that my decisions in the United States Senate will be based upon my own belief of what I think is in the best interests of the state, the best interests of the nation, and in the dictates of my conscience. I have disagreed with the President before. I imagine I’ll disagree with him in the future. But upon this will be made my determinations about the questions effecting both the state and the nation.”

On October 28, 1962, with the Cuban Missile Crisis on everyone's minds, the Senate seat race in Massachusetts took a serious backseat to the events 90 miles south of the mainland.

But even so, 1962 would be the beginning of the Ted Kennedy years.

(Turned upside down read: No Immediate Miracles)

I'm often reminded that, when a crisis erupts and the Republicans are in charge, the solutions often fall into the category of Bonehead Misfires.

True to form, in 1974 when the country was in the midst of inflation, recession, mass unemployment and a crisis of faith (owing to the recent resignation of Richard Nixon and the quickly ending Vietnam War), Gerald Ford announced a new package, complete with slogan and buttons - Whip Inflation Now. Rather than use the dreaded Tax-Word, Ford proposed a "surcharge" on individuals making over $7500 a year and families making over $15,000 a year (remember, this is 1974 when money was a little different and less funny then). The immediate effect was to squeeze the middle class and create more loopholes for those who could most afford it.

Ford envisioned a kind of World War 2 gung-ho attitude on the part of the American people, willing to sacrifice at the drop of a hat. The resulting effect was dramatically less so.

(In case you were getting all dewey-eyed for the 70s)

Before George P. Schultz landed in the Reagan Administration as Secretary of State, he served for a while as Treasury Secretary under Richard Nixon, right during the fabled Energy Crisis of the 1970s.

Granted, we hadn't gone through this kind of thing before. It was 1973 and we were about to be distracted in a big way by Watergate, but the thought of skyrocketing gas prices, panic buying at the pumps and oil companies raking in massive profits just hadn't happened this way before or to this extent.

And so everyone, including Schultz was busy scratching their heads wondering what to do as is evidence by this exchange during his appearance on Meet The Press from December 2, 1973.

Irving R. Levine (NBC News): “Would not higher prices for gasoline favor higher income groups to the disadvantage of lower paid people?”

Schultz: “Not necessarily. The . . obviously you have a family budget with so much purchase of gasoline and fuel oil, and to the extent that lower income groups use proportionate to their income a little bit more than higher income groups, it has some of that effect. But I don’t think it’s a major problem in the family budget.”

Levine: “ But would not a lower . . .

Schultz: “It’s much more of a problem than if we don’t pay the price that is necessary and we don’t have any fuel.”

Levine: “But would not a person with a big income feel free to buy whatever amount of gas is necessary to do the driving that he wishes to do, where a lower income person would not be able to?”

Schultz: “That is true of all kinds of things that are reflected in the buying power of people at different incomes.”

Levine: “ Do You oppose rationing entirely, even as a last resort?

Schultz: “Well I said it should be the absolute last resort, and I’m not really sure that it is a genuine alternative in the sense of being really a workable type of system. Of course there are various kinds of rationing, and depending on how its designed it could work better or worse. I think it is worth remembering that toward the end of World War Two we had patriotic fervor and so on, we had six thousand people in OPA, enforcing . .getting after people in the black market, which I think gives you an idea the difficulties of a rationing system.”

Okay, no simple answer. But the disconnect associated with "well, only higher income people drive" strikes me as typical Republican response. Even during the course of the interview, Schultz offers a few snide asides about higher and lower economic brackets. And of course, he was very much in favor of letting the marketplace go insane.

Remember the definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over expecting different results - or as a friend put it, doing the same thing over and over and knowing what the results are going to be.

Good for Joe Conason for pointing out that Pat Buchanan of all people has no business complaining about the Obama administration daring to point out that Fox News is an arm of the Republican Party after all of the things the Nixon administration did that Buchanan himself was involved in. Chris Matthews sure wasn't going to do it.

Media Matters has a nice run down of why this latest meme by the right calling the Obama administration "Nixonian" is utterly ridiculous.

Conason wrote about many of the points he attempted to make to Buchanan during this segment in his column at Salon this week--

Criticizing Fox News isn't "Nixonian." But Fox News is:

With outraged Washington journalists and Republican politicians crying "Nixonian!" over the public scuffle between the Obama White House and the Fox News Channel, what began as a mundane spat is turning into a cosmic jest. Somewhere, Nixon himself is enjoying a mordant laugh to hear this shrill defense of his old servant Roger Ailes, the television wizard whose deceptive campaigning ushered him into the presidency more than 40 years ago -- and who then became the living symbol of everything negative and nasty in American politics during the two decades that followed.

To understand what is going on today, it is essential to remember that where Ailes came from, "Nixonian" was not an insult but a badge of honor -- and seething hatred and even persecution of the press, rather than mere criticism, was a way of life.

Whatever the merits or defects of the strategy pursued by Obama's communications office in pushing back against Fox News, the furious backlash inside the Beltway is badly overwrought. Mainstream defenders of the conservative cable channel suddenly seem to be afflicted with a strange amnesia, causing them to forget not just the numerous episodes of partisan distortion that have permanently pocked its reputation, but the dirty war against the press and the First Amendment that was waged by the Nixon gang in the late '60s and early '70s. That lost memory does a disservice to journalism and history.

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Transcript via Lexis Nexis below the fold.

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White House communications director Anita Dunn has said Fox News "often operates as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party." Karl Rove, former senior advisor to George W. Bush, responded by saying "the White House is engaging in its own version of [Nixon's] media enemies list" Sunday.

h/t danieljbmitchell:

In 1971, President Nixon proposed a national health insurance plan built on heavily employer private coverage. Senator Ted Kennedy proposed what would today be called a single-payer plan. In 1974, the debate had morphed into Nixon vs. Kennedy-Mills vs. Organized labor. Despite the prediction in the second clip shown, the result was stalemate rather than passage in 1974 or 1975.

There's nothing new under the sun, especially when it comes to the frothing at the mouth right-wing rage over health care reform. But thanks to the 24/7 media's transformation of politics into just another form of entertainment, delusional Birthers, deceitful Deathers, raging Teabaggers and town hall intimidators are dominating press coverage of the debate. And it's all a recurring symptom, Rick Perlstein argues in the Washington Post, of a nation in which "crazy is a preexisting condition."

In his instant classic Nixonland, Perlstein documented how Richard Nixon, "a serial collector of resentments," fanned the flames of racism, anti-communism and the budding culture war not only to take power in his time but to help produce a bitterly divided America in ours. Now in his Washington Post op-ed, Perlstein makes clear that we've been here before.

The repeated outbreaks of "black helicopters" in the 1990's, the National Indignation Convention in 1961, cries that the Civil Rights Act would "enslave" whites and countless other episodes of seeming conservative madness, Perlstein reminds us, result from the combustible combination of authentic fear and manufactured outrage:

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

But Perlstein's cautionary tale is not merely one of the more things change, the more they stay the same. In its pursuit of entertainment over objective truth and conflict over common sense, he suggests, today's media environment rewards extremist claims and behaviors it once shunned:

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(h/t Heather.)

One of the things I learned early on in my journalism career is that words have power. They also have consequences. Fortunately, I have a conscience. I credit my Catholic upbringing for that.

I found so much to admire in the concepts of social justice and compassion with which I was raised, and even though I'm not longer a Catholic, I still take exception to the way these so-called Catholics distort the faith.

It infuriates me when I see people like these distort and twist the truth about healthcare reform - for what reason? I mean, they're pretty much the scrubs of the right wing, a bunch of has-beens and wannabes. Do they do it to feed their egos? To keep the cocktail-party invitations flowing? Let's look at this group of "moral" leaders who are fighting so desperately to save the elderly from socialist liberal euthanasia.

It's mostly older people who watch "The McLaughlin Group," I think, so the antics of these clowns mostly fly below the radar - just like talk radio.

John McLaughlin is the former Jesuit priest who cared so deeply about God, he quit the order rather than give up his speechwriting gig with Richard Nixon.

Pat Buchanan, a good friend of McLaughlin's and the Nixon speechwriter who got him the job, is a product of Jesuit schools and presents himself as a Catholic so conservative, he still goes to the Latin Mass. He has occasional lapses in which he actually tells the truth, but these are so few and far between, it's not worth mentioning. Pat is generally is so willing to distort reality, it's a given. If Pat vehemently tells you the sky is blue, stick your head out the window and check.

Monica Crowley, another Nixon employee, is a Fox News "analyst" - i.e. someone paid to twist and mold the truth into something to inflames passions against Democrats. (By the way, her sister, Dr. Jocelyn Crowley, is married to Hannity's former co-host, Alan Colmes.) Apparently she's pretty good at distorting truth:

Crowley was accused of plagiarism in 1999 for an article she authored titled "The Day Nixon Said Goodbye" that appeared in the The Wall Street Journal. After accusations of plagiarism from at least one reader, an acknowledgement of "striking similarities" between Crowley's article and an article by Paul Johnson titled "In Praise of Richard Nixon" in the October 1988 issue of Commentary Magazine was published. A Journal editor stated, "Had we known of the parallels, we would not have published the article."

Crowley acknowledged the similarity between the pieces, and said "there are clear similarities in the language. I have wracked my brain, and I can honestly tell you that I have not read [Johnson's article]."

An article in Slate Magazine detailed five specific passages in Crowley's article that contained identical language and phraseology to Johnson's piece, and concluded that "it just isn't possible for Crowley not to have read Johnson's article."

There is something called "The Ten Commandments," and Christians generally agree that it's important. John, Pat, Monica and their ilk simply ignore any of those commandments that are politically inconvenient ("Thou shalt not bear false witness") or they apply them selectively ("Thou shalt not kill" only applies to fetuses, and not Iraqi children). They dig out obscure parts of the Old Testament they insist mean Jesus condemned gay people, and yet they still eat shrimp and lobster - condemned in the same book of the Bible.

We already know they will do or say anything that will further their political cause and erode ours.

So spare me the wide eyes and crocodile tears. No one's suggesting we off old people, and they know it. They're just so shameless and cynical, they couldn't resist.

Everyone knows if liberals really believed in killing people when they're no longer productive, people like McLaughlin and Buchanan wouldn't be here.

(Lest we all forget - only thirty-five years ago)

Hard to imagine it was only thirty-five years ago that President Nixon announced his resignation. It certainly answered weeks of speculation and the end to a long and bitter fight that erupted in the White House and almost took the country down with it.

Nixon: "I have never been a quitter - to leave office now is abhorrent to everything in my body. But . . . . "

I'm not sure we actually ever recovered from Watergate and the Nixon years. To many, it seems to be the gift that just keeps on giving.

History is just like that.

(Nixon in Caracas - It wasn't kisses they were throwing)

A look back at our previous stabs at foreign policy tonight. This one has to do with the ill-fated Vice-President Nixon Goodwill tour of Latin America in 1958.

The reaction was particularly hostile towards Nixon and it came as something of a surprise to the White House.

Initial reaction was Communist sympathizers whipping up anti-American sentiment, and targeting Nixon during his visit as a show to the world that the U.S. was losing support in the Southern Hemisphere.

But it seems the Anti-American sentiment had very little to do with Cold War posturing - we were simply the bad guys and no one in Washington wanted to admit it.

Shortly after the visit was cut short, CBS Radio ran a special edition of their "Radio Beat" discussion series and asked the question "what went wrong?"

The broadcast, from May 15, 1958 featured Moderator Stuart Novins and Galo Plaza, former President of Ecuador. Adolf A. Burleigh, former Assistant Secretary of State. Serafino Romualdi, Inter-American Representative for the AF of L/CIO (and also, it was later found, a long time CIA agent). Robert Alexander, Associate Professor of Economics at Rutgers University, Frances Grant, Secretary General of the Inter-American Center for Democracy and Freedom and CBS news correspondent Wells Church, who was traveling with the Nixon party.

This one hour panel discussion focuses on why the U.S. presence in Latin America has cultivated such a degree of hostility, and what has happened to U.S./Latin American relations since the end of World War 2.

Stuart Novins:

“ Vice-President Nixon is back in Washington. He and Mrs. Nixon have had a grueling personal experience. It’s not pleasant, to the say the least, when what starts out as a goodwill trip ends in booing, stone-throwing and a situation dangerous enough to cause the White House to alert Marines and paratroopers. It’s fair to say, I think, that this also was an unpleasant experience for most Americans. The realization that we are not liked is always shocking. But sober second thoughts follow the initial impact. Is it that we are not liked by large segments of South American, or is it simply that the Communists don’t like us? Does it matter whether we’re liked or not? Do we need to reexamine our national policies relating to South America? Is there a real communist threat there?"

(Despite the overused cliche, he really was the most trusted man in America)

The idea of Walter Cronkite not being among us, even at the age of 92, is a hard concept to grasp. Those of us of a certain age who grew up with him every night, glued to our TV's during every defining moment of our history - hearing the words of calm and conscience, we came to expect he would always be around - maybe not nightly as he was until 1981, but in some form, some presence of the man we trusted - always there, always observing, always the witness.

But life doesn't work that way, and now we're left with moments of time, places in history we associate with Walter Cronkite.

Tributes the past day have been largely flashes of moments in history - the Moon landing, the JFK assassination.

I thought I would add something a little different to the mix - maybe not as earth shattering as a tragedy or a walk on the moon, but the postmortem of an election - November 7, 1968, when Nixon won by a narrow margin. The exhaustion of staying up most of the night to report returns up to the final moment when Nixon was declared winner. It's not a milestone moment, but it was typical of the eloquence, the thoughtful reflection on a night in a troubled time.

Those nights we turned to Walter Cronkite the most.

“There’s a great deal of talk tonight of Richard Nixon, not by his own admission a loveable figure, succeeding without a clear mandate, to the leadership of a divided nation. These, to put it mildly, are negative thoughts. President-elect Nixon has said his first job will be to try and unite the nation. There’s no one who can say tonight, including Richard Nixon, whether he can do that job. Who can restore the hope of the American spirit, to all our people, black and white, rich and poor. But there is one thing that should be abundantly clear, the President-elect, whether it was Nixon or Humphrey or Wallace or the candidate of the Prohibition Party, could not do that job alone. The leaders of the opposition including Dick Gregory in a particularly Statesman-like concession called for unity. Their followers can do no less than to give the new man a chance. This is Walter Cronkite, CBS News election headquarters – good night.”

And that's the way it was.

(It's not your dad's idea of government anymore)

I think one could probably argue the Reagan Years represent eight years of leaving the "hen house door open", and what we get to deal with now are the disemboweled carcasses of prudent ideas and the blood soaked abatoir of long range thinking.

Okay, leaving the grisly poetics aside, we can probably trace this "earthquake" (as Hedrick Smith puts it) back to the Nixon Years:

Hedrick Smith: “I think what happened . . .back in the 1970’s, and it actually began in the House not in the Senate, was a power earthquake that took place, an explosion of power that brought Congress as a whole in rebellion against the President. We had Watergate and Vietnam as you recall. We had the budget resolutions, the whole budget process, the whole War Powers resolution on Foreign Policy. And then an upheaval within Congress, a kind of anti-authority mood that swept the country during Vietnam and infected Congress, the members of the House threw out some of the old committee chairmen, the old seniority system was cracked, and at the same time a tremendous reform in the political financing system for campaigns, which brought a growth, an acceleration of the whole money business and special interest politics and then the dissolving effect of television. Our government is a much harder government to run for any President or for the leaders of the Senate or the House than it was in the time of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon.”

This documentary, part of the CBS Radio Newsmark series from May 8, 1988 features Lawton Chiles, Daniel Evans and Sen. Paul Trible, as well as N.Y. Times correspondent Hedrick Smith discussing with CBS News Correspondent Judy Muller the changes that have taken place in Washington in the Post-JFK, Post-LBJ period.

From all appearances, it's the downward slide that just didn't quit.

(1971 - the brief respite between the World's Longest Party and Our Great National Nervous Breakdown)

Hard to imagine that 1971 was a sort of resting point in our rather skewed history. At the time of course, it didn't seem that way - in 1971 Campuses were still hotbeds of disturbance, Vietnam was still grinding on, cities were falling apart. But we were optimistic all was going to be okay with the world and prosperity was just around the corner.

Sadly, no.

This documentary, part of the NBC Radio series "Second Sunday", aired in April 1971 was concerned about our place in the world. A reassessment of who we were as a society - the old "who am I, what am I doing and where am I going" mantra that was so popular during those years.

And questions are posed to a number of people - Ralph Nader, newly elected Governor Jimmy Carter, Senator Howard Baker, Gunnar Myrdal, Jean-Francois Revel, John Gardner (founder of Common Cause) and Dr. Milton Eisenhower who offers this interesting observation:

Dr. Milton Eisenhower: “We do seem to have a new kind of violence in this country, we have some people who are actively advocating revolution, which I think is relatively new in America.”

Question: Where do think this will lead? Do you think this is a self-defeating thing?

Eisenhower: “ First let me say that there are nihilists, there are revolutionaries; most of them young. Many of them, in our colleges and universities. But it’s terribly important that the American people understand that they constitute a very small minority. They make a lot of noise and I may say the mass media give them a great exposure to the American people, but they can’t be more than one, two or three percent of the total. Yes, this is something new.”

Question: “How do you answer the argument that we engage in violence in Vietnam, so violence is warranted here in America. And those who argue that the system is so rotten and has such basic defects that the system itself is not worth preserving and hence you need revolution in this country to purify the government.”

Eisenhower: “Well I think that’s a terribly specious argument. If we lived in a dictatorship, and the dictatorship had proclaimed and carried on the war, and therefore citizens could do little if anything about it, one could well argue that in these circumstances revolution, internal revolution would be the corrective measure to take. But once the people themselves have taken possession of the basic social power, which is the situation in our free democratic society, and we exercise this power through a representative form of government, then the only way, the only reasonable way to get action is to work through these political procedures. All other methods are illegitimate and are self-defeating. Margaret Chase-Smith made a speech in the Senate that was worth the attention of the American people, in which she said that, if the left-wing extremists, who are causing a good share of the trouble don’t look out, they are going to drive America to the right. The danger in America is not going too far to the left – the danger in America is going too far to the right.”

That last quote is particularly telling considering where the country would wind up in the next decade.

Of course, at the time no one suspected a thing . . . .

(Somewhere between delusional whack-Job and Cassandra stood Martha)

Martha Mitchell has faded into history's woodwork. Famous for her paranoid rants and haywire midnight phone calls, she had the dubious distinction of being associated (in a rather "Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers" sort of way) with Watergate via her husband, then-Attorney General John Mitchell.

Largely dismissed at the time as a bonafide whack-job, Mitchell did gain some vindication when the scandal of Watergate broke and all fingers pointed to the White House. But it didn't dismiss the fact that she was delusional, ego-centric and had a little bit of a substance abuse problem.

In this hour long interview, part of Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show, Snyder asks her point blank if she thought she was an alcoholic. Mitchell blurts out "no" (of course - wouldn't you?), even though the answers borders on the slurred. What Snyder failed to ask was if she had a drug problem. I believe the answer would have been a resounding yes - even if she had flatly denied it. All you have to do is listen to her.

So it was the curious mixture of the insane person being privy to shocking actual events, who took the elements of truth and turned them into a persecution extravaganza with all consequences directed straight at her that probably made her seem like she was imagining it.

The more she ranted, the more people thought she lost it. Of course, the Nixon White House did little to dispel that portrait - it did take the heat off for a while.

The bottom line was, she was probably right - but since she insisted it was all about her, the credibility drew more than raised eyebrows.

Of course nowadays, drugged out paranoid egocentrics get their own TV shows and loyal followings. Something that wasn't in the cards in 1974.

CNN contributor Bill Bennett must feel vindicated. Who knew Richard Nixon was such a racist? /snark

WASHINGTON — On Jan. 23, 1973, when the Supreme Court struck down state criminal abortion laws in Roe v. Wade, President Richard M. Nixon made no public statement. But privately, newly released tapes reveal, he expressed ambivalence.

Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases, such as interracial pregnancies. “There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding: “Or a rape.”

Just as interesting is the revelation that then California Governor, Ronald Reagan approved of the now infamous Saturday Night Massacre, cheer leading all the way. No wonder the GOP of today love him so much:

Nine months later, after Nixon precipitated the resignations of two top Justice Department officials and forced the firing of the special prosecutor looking into the Watergate affair, Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor of California and would later be president, told the White House that he heartily approved.

Reagan told the White House that the action — which would become known as the “Saturday Night Massacre” — was “probably the best thing that ever happened — none of them belong where they were,” according to a Nixon aide’s notes of the private conversation. Read on...