"How Did Trump Get Away With It When Nixon Didn't?"

"Trump also bent administration rules to obtain a top security clearance for his son-in-law, who served as his unofficial secretary of state and went on to negotiate for himself a highly unusual $2 billion investment deal with Saudi state funds just months after the administration ended. Any one of these incidents would have been an administration-shaking event in the 1970s or '80s, even in the '90s or early 2000s. The old rules were sloughed off in the 2010s, and by the 2020s were barely remembered."

David Frum at The Atlantic marks the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation.

"Those Old Rules and Expectations Simply Do Not Apply"

"What these Republicans care about is prevailing against their opponents, period. Accusing these GOP voters of double standards is beside the point. It's true that if any Democratic president had been accused of even one-tenth of the charges swirling around Trump, Republicans would be calling for blood. But what does it prove to point this out? That Republicans are hypocrites? Sure they are. Proudly. They hate it when their enemies break norms and laws, and they love it when their teammates do the same thing. That's the mindset of someone willing to fight dirty."

Damon Linker at The Week explains Republican support for Donald Trump.

And Andrew Levison at Washington Monthly gets into "What Democrats Still Don't Get About Winning Back the White Working Class."

The Kids of Today Should Defend Themselves Against the '70s

"That bleak decade saw the nation turn against most of the institutions that had been central since World War II. The quagmire in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal that forced Richard Nixon's resignation turned many Americans, on the left and the right, against the federal government. The post-Nixonian presidency came to be viewed as an office whose holders should not be trusted. When President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon in September 1974 for any crimes that he might have committed, all hope of healing the nation went right out the window. Jimmy Carter's campaign in 1976 revolved around the basic promise that voters could trust him. Though Congress looked good at the height of the Watergate investigation in 1973, polls showed public confidence in the legislative branch falling thereafter. The number of Americans who trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time declined from almost 80 percent in 1964 to 25 percent when Reagan took office in 1981."

Julian Zelizer at The Atlantic contends that "[f]or President Trump, it's all about the 1970s."

"The Fish Rots from the Head"

"Well, our system depends upon something like a consensus, something like majority rule. But now we have a president who outright lies about... everything. He lies about the number of votes he received, about the size of his inauguration crowd, about his own achievements, about Muslims cheering in the streets after 9/11, and so on. He lies about basic observable facts.
"I think the cumulative effect of all this lying is to make people deeply cynical about out entire system, and that's very corrupting."

Sean Illing at Vox interviews historian Robert Dallek about Donald Trump.

Lone Deep Nancy Transfer

The New York Times reports the deaths of actress Elizabeth Peña, singer Tim Hauser, clothing designer Oscar de la Renta, newspaper editor Ben Bradlee, RFK press aide Frank Mankiewicz, and Reagan astrologer Joan Quigley.


And the NME announces the deaths of singer Alvin Stardust and bassist Jack Bruce.

"Seldom Has Pride So Preening Preceded a Fall So Far"

"Indeed, after wading through so many of Richard Nixon's vulgar and contemptuous characterizations of friends and foes alike, as well as his septic rants about Jews and blacks, readers of these volumes may well feel the need for a long shower, where they might reflect on how it came to be that a man whose character was such a combustible compound of principle and pettiness, cunning both grand and base, ambitions lofty as well as loathsome, political acumen and raw prejudice, was ever allowed to ascend to the presidency in the first place."


Forty years after the resignation, David M. Kennedy reviews Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter's The Nixon Tapes 1971-1972 and John Dean's The Nixon Defense in The New York Times.

If You Think You're Lonely Now, When Did He Know It

The New York Times reports the deaths of magazine publisher Felix Dennis, actor Eli Wallach, guitarist Teenie Hodges, former I.R.S. commissioner Johnnie M. Walters, former Senator Howard Baker, and singer Bobby Womack.

Searching for Alien Watergate

The New York Times runs obits for Secret Service agent Lem Johns, artist H. R. Giger, documentarian Malik Bendjelloul, and Nixon aide Jeb Magruder.

"The Outrage Was Immediate"

"Only one of the principals of that evening in 1973 is still alive: William Ruckelshaus. Now in his 80s, he runs a foundation in Seattle and is still active in national life. He was then, and still is, a moderate Republican. I wrote to him and asked, 'If you knew, that ultimately, President Nixon would be forced to resign and that future generations of Republican legislators would spend so much time trying to even the score, would you have taken a long view and done what was necessary to protect the president and keep him in office?' I didn’t really expect an answer—but within two days an email came back: 'The answer is no.'"

Michael Goldfarb in Salon connects the Saturday Night Massacre to today.

American Phantom Shadows Band

The New York Times publishes obits for television personality Dick Clark, actors William Finley and Jonathan Frid, musicians Levon Helm and Greg Ham, guitar teacher Bert Weedon, and Nixon aide Charles W. Colson.

"Our Long National Nightmare Really Is Over—at Last"

"A final, crucial innovation is the museum's emphasis on the many people within the government who refused to carry out orders from the president that were illegal. 'Their story is now preserved,' says Naftali, who curated the exhibit. 'Students who come here will learn that you can say no when asked to say or do something that's wrong.' Highlights here include Treasury Secretary George P. Shultz describing how he refused a president's order to audit the tax returns of anti-war Democrats, and Chief of Staff Alexander Haig saying he refused Nixon's request to burn the tapes."

Jon Weiner in the Los Angeles Times praises the new Watergate exhibit at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library.

"Don't Buy Books by Crooks"

"In late April, as Grosset & Dunlap fired up its million-dollar advertising campaign, the committee began arranging its own print ads for the day of the book’s first newspaper serialization. The Times and The Washington Post declined to run the ads, on grounds of taste, but Mary McGrory, who had won a Pulitzer for her Watergate columns, profiled the group in her syndicated column, describing its one-room headquarters between a laundromat and band rehearsal space, along with its grievances, which centered less on the book itself than on Nixon’s ability to cash in on the whole mess. 'Four years ago,' Flanigan told McGrory, 'he had a chance to tell the truth for free. Now he’s charging $19.95 a copy to tell us the same old story.'"

Craig Fehrman in The New York Times recalls the 1978 controversy over the publication of Richard Nixon's memoir, RN.

Most Peculiar, Mama

"Conspiracy theories spawned theories of who benefited from conspiracy theories. There was gold at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow. Even Oliver Stone was not necessary. For example, Wheen notes, “It was A Clockwork Orange which convinced [Arthur] Bremer that he must shoot George Wallace [because he couldn’t get close to his first choice, Nixon], and Bremer’s assassination diaries then inspired Paul Schrader to create the character of Travis Bickle. So: without Bremer there would be no Taxi Driver, and without Taxi Driver John Hinckley Jr. wouldn’t have become so obsessed by Jodie Foster that, to prove himself a worthy rival to Bickle, he shot Ronald Reagan.” He’s not making this stuff up.

Todd Gitlin in The New Republic reviews Francis Wheen's Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia.

And That's the Way He Was

"Yet he was a reluctant star. He was genuinely perplexed when people rushed to see him rather than the politicians he was covering, and even more astonished by the repeated suggestions that he run for office himself. He saw himself as an old-fashioned newsman—his title was managing editor of the 'CBS Evening News'—and so did his audience."

Douglas Martin in The New York Times reports the death of Walter Cronkite.

Todd Gitlin in The New Republic writes an appreciation.

Throat Closes

"'We know what’s leaked, and we know who leaked it,' Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, told the president on Oct. 19, 1972, four months after a team of washed-up Central Intelligence Agency personnel hired by the White House was caught trying to wiretap the Democratic Party’s national offices at the Watergate complex.
"'Somebody in the F.B.I.?' Nixon asked."

Tim Weiner in The New York Times reports the death of "Deep Throat," W. Mark Felt.

And Timothy Noah in Slate adds an un-appreciation.

The Final Days

"Joan Felt said her father was extremely glad. At one point, she shared, Woodward told her dad that he seemed to be doing well at 95, and he replied, 'I'm not 1,000 percent. I'm only 889 percent.'"

Chris Smith of the Press-Democrat reports the reunion of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with "Deep Throat," W. Mark Felt, in Santa Rosa, California.

Hillary Milhous Clinton

"Having said that, I must admit something I never thought I'd say: I find Hillary Clinton more of a mystery, perhaps a more complex character in a novelistic sense, than Richard Nixon. And she's one that, unlike Nixon, history may never completely figure out. I'd almost want to see her become president just to solve the mystery. Although a Hillary administration might actually compound it."

In a rambling Slate article, Ron Rosenbaum muses on connections between HRC and RMN.

In Your Guts, You Know He's Nuts

"Someone who truly believes, as Goldwater writes, that 'individual liberty depends on decentralized government,' might nevertheless subordinate his principles in time of war. But once you declare war on an idea, you've declared endless war: Once you've committed yourself to maintain a permanent war footing and a first-strike capacity anywhere at will, you've no kind of libertarian principles at all. Goldwater fantasized that the federal state ballooned in power because the Democratic Party "was captured by the Socialist ideologues in and about the labor movement." But it was the secretive, unaccountable, and ever-growing defense establishment that made decision-making less democratic and government more expensive."

In The New Repubic, Eric Rauchway wonders why today's liberals look back fondly on Barry Goldwater.

It's Tricky

"It was Nixon's war on history that made scholars leery of affording any legitimacy to his library. But while the process of revision never ceases, it now seems safe to say that—like the once-contentious debates about the morality of slavery, the futility of Prohibition or the greatness of FDR—that war is over. Nixon lost."

As the National Archives takes control of the Richard Nixon Library, David Greenberg in the Los Angeles Times contemplates the changes.

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Goffard profiles the library's new director, Timothy Naftali.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Nelson rounds up this year's batch of books on the former president.

The Cheney Connection

"The Iran-contra joint committee majority in 1987, including some Senate Republican members, charged that the minority report, with tortuous illogic, reduced Congress’s foreign policy role to nearly nothing. Senator Warren Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican and vice chairman of the Senate side of the investigating committee, paraphrased Adlai Stevenson and quipped that the minority report had separated the wheat from the chaff and left in the chaff."

Sean Wilentz in The New York Times ties the Iran-Contra scandal to the Iraq War via Dick Cheney.