Hillary in Nixon's shadowIt is a twist of history not likely to be lost on Hillary Rodham Clinton that only one person in modern times has managed to win the presidency after roughly two decades as a famous and polarizing figure in the first rank of political life. His name: Richard M. Nixon.
The Nixon example comes to mind not only because Clinton is in the midst of re-tooling herself and her staff for a 2016 campaign that will presumably introduce at least some version of a “New Hillary,” but because the bombshell news that she kept at least 55,000 pages of business emails sent during her tenure as Secretary of State on a private account has struck some observers as, well, Nixonian.
The editorial page cartoon by David Fitzsimmons in Friday’s Los Angeles Times, the newspaper that helped propel Nixon to prominence, depicted Clinton writing “THNX” on an I-Phone as her friendly IT guy flashes a thumbs-up and a jowly smile wreathed by the unmistakable visage and five o’clock shadow of Tricky **** himself.
Not even Clinton’s harshest critics could claim that Servergate (or Chappaquadata, or whatever it may come to be called) constitutes a high crime or misdemeanor. But it does connote a reflexive wariness about her enemies – a wariness that sometimes seems to border on paranoia – that has long dogged Clinton, and that struck at least a few old Nixon hands as familiar.
“This is like the Nixon tapes, in a sense,” said Ken Khachigian, who was a young speechwriter on Nixon’s White House staff and is now a grizzled veteran of California’s Republican political wars. “Everybody wanted access. We resisted, and then they were eked out in death by a thousand cuts. Finally they were expropriated and now belong to the archives.”
“In some ways, this is no different,” he added. “But Nixon’s motivation was to record history, frankly. Her motivation was to control history. It’s obvious that she was wary of having her fate in the hands of other people, and it just underscores the secretiveness that she’s had for years, and how wary she is, looking over her shoulder.”
There is, of course, a bitter paradox in the fact that Clinton, as a young staffer on the House Judiciary Committee, actually worked on Nixon’s impeachment. Yet to Clinton’s critics, comparisons between the two flow — easily. Rep. Pete Roskam (R-Ill.), a member of the select committee on Benghazi, issued a statement declaring, “The last time we saw a high government official seeking to edit their responses was President Nixon,” adding – with dubious historical accuracy – “and at least then he enjoyed the benefit of executive privilege.”
To be fair, Clinton’s motives remain unclear. Her only comment about the matter so far has been a Tweet saying she wants the State Department to release the emails. But it’s worth noting that the laws and rules governing the permanent retention of executive branch records were put in place 40 years ago precisely because Nixon tried to take his with him, then waged a decades-long battle over who owned his papers.
And it now seems clear that the State Department sought the missing emails, and Clinton only surrendered them, in response to legal and congressional inquiries — not upon leaving office, as would have been standard practice. The manner of her producing the documents leaves no way of proving the completeness of the archive, but depends on her good faith.
“Burn the tapes!” bellowed Patrick Buchanan, repeating his own advice to Nixon as a White House aide, when asked by Politico about the Clinton case. “I told him to burn the tapes, fire [special prosecutor] Archibald Cox, take the amputation and if we go down, we go down. I tell you, I did think of that when I heard about Hillary. Jesus, she’s got all these emails. Who knows what’s in them?”
At least one of the president’s men said any comparison with his old boss was overblown.
“Nixon was very secretive as to who had access to his memos and what have you,” said former White House counsel John Dean, who recalled that his old boss would mark up each morning’s White House news summary with handwritten instructions for staff follow-up on issues, but would have the directives passed on by an intermediary, with no indication that they were coming from the president himself. “That was Nixonian,” he said. “Hillary’s having her own server system doesn’t quite rise to that league. It’s going to be tough to top him, actually.”
What Clinton does share with Nixon is that she, too, is “a serial collector of resentments,” as Nixon chronicler Rick Perlstein described the 37th president in his 2008 book, “Nixonland.” Whether complaining as the wife of the Arkansas governor that her family couldn’t have a swimming pool like “normal people,” or saying last summer that she and her husband were “broke” with legal bills when they left the White House, she has come by her grievances the hard way, and worn them on her sleeve.
Her declaration in “Hard Choices,” her memoir of her State Department years, that her 2008 defeat at Obama’s hands showed her that “I no longer cared so much about what the critics said about me,” rings hollow, given the well-established propensity of all in her orbit to push back fiercely at enemies, real or perceived. After all, it was she herself who named the 1992 Clinton command center the “War Room,” and she, too, who initially insisted on closing the passage to the West Wing’s “Upper Press Office,” so as to keep reportorial eyes away from the corridors just outside the Oval Office.
In his memoir, “All Too Human,” George Stephanopoulos sarcastically recounted how he wanted to answer reporters who complained to him about the press office door. “I’m not your problem,” he wrote. “Hillary is. She and [campaign aide] Susan Thomases cooked up this plan to move you to the Old Executive Office Building so we could reopen the indoor pool that used to be right below your feet before Nixon made this the press room.”
But it’s a truism that even paranoids have their enemies, and just as Nixon was correct in believing he was held in contempt by large segments of the liberal intelligentsia, Clinton was basically accurate (if politically tone-deaf) in her insistence that her husband’s impeachment was the handiwork of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
The real damage from the email controversy may lie less in any specific embarrassing revelations (though if history is any guide, there are bound to be some) than in the seeming proof that the aspect of Clinton’s personality that is suspicious, defensive, contemptuous of the press and scornful of political adversaries will never change. Such traits have hurt her repeatedly in the past, and could well do so again, despite the protestations of her staff-in-formation that she has learned her lessons and will approach her next campaign differently than her last one.
“They don’t change their personas,” Buchanan said of full-grown politicians.
In 1968, with the help of Madison Avenue and a young show-biz whiz named Roger Ailes, Nixon managed to position himself, to coin a phrase, as “likable enough” to be president. Yet there was never a “New Nixon,” any more than there is likely to be a “New Clinton.”
“But I will say this,” added Buchanan, who last year published a book about that campaign, “The Greatest Comeback.” “There was about Nixon in the early period in the comeback a sense of fatalism, a sense there was an opening down the sideline to the nomination. And maybe it’s because we weren’t under real pressure from Romney or anyone else, we were like a bubble going through that revolutionary period. And he did not get back into that mode I think he’d been in in the 1960 campaign, when staff relations were bad and bitter, until about nine months after we got into the White House.”
It's the political equivalent of the Jason Biggs/hot chick in bed scene in American Pie.
surely she isn't this dumb?
