Quote of the Day (Bill Moyers, on a Prior Presidential ‘Arrogant Disregard for the Rule of Law’)

“There in brief is the Watergate morality embedded in the Nixon White House—belief in the total rightness of the official view of reality and an arrogant disregard for the rule of law, the triumph of executive decree over due process. By arbitrarily and secretly invoking the national security, the President or his men can nullify the Bill of Rights and turn the Constitution into a license for illegitimate conduct. The President is set above ordinary standards of right or wrong. What's right is what works. And he alone decides what that is. One man, in effect, becomes the state. It was close. It almost worked. And it would have changed things for keeps: the public conscience smothered, the Congress intimidated, the press isolated, and the political process rigged. The President would have been free to dictate the popular morality for his own ends. And we would have been at the mercy of unbridled, capricious and arbitrary rules. It was close. It almost worked. But not quite. Something basic in our traditions held.”— American journalist, political commentator, and former White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers (1934-2025), “An Essay on Watergate,” Bill Moyers’ Journal, original air date Nov. 7, 1973, directed by Jack Sameth

I was fortunate enough to meet Bill Moyers at a local promotional event for Fooling With Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft—one of his book/PBS series tie-ins in which he interviewed cultural figures such as Joseph Campbell. He signed my copy of this particular book, and immediately followed up with a response to a question I had asked about the source of a quote.

Late last month, when I heard about Moyers’ death, I realized with a shock that I hadn’t heard about him for a while. His commentaries had become lower-profile, largely confined to his Website, after his retirement from PBS in 2015.

That year, I remembered with a start, coincided with Donald Trump’s descent down the escalator at Trump Tower and into a political arena that he quickly defiled more than many of us dreamed possible. 

I badly missed Moyers’ soft-spoken, earnest, but piercing insights into the culture of Washington and what the changes about to ensue in American life meant for the survival of the republic.

The memories forged in youth endure the longest. So it was for me, as, I suspect, for many others, in my first exposure to Moyers—not as the press secretary for Lyndon Johnson (a tenure that began 60 years ago this month), but in my early teens, watching Bill Moyers’ Journal.

From his time in government, and even as part of major news organizations (Newsday, PBS, CBS), Moyers knew how addictive power could be. He was hardly a naif, giving, for instance, the go-ahead to the ethically dubious “mushroom cloud” commercial used against Barry Goldwater in LBJ’s 1964 Presidential race.

But, as a Baptist deacon's son and ordained minister himself, he also recognized that at some point, it was necessary to one’s soul to cease participating in evil. When he couldn’t continue defending a Vietnam War policy he knew to be wrong, he resigned after only a year as press secretary, even if it meant incurring his boss’s wrath to the end of the Johnson’s life.

“An Essay on Watergate” outlined in detail, through conversations with Presidential historians, how LBJ’s successor, Richard Nixon, sought to expand the prerogatives of his office as a means of striking at his enemies. 

But neither Johnson nor Nixon could even conceive of the lengths to which Donald Trump would defy the Constitution, trampling norms and pushing, pushing, pushing against laws, daring Congress and the courts to rein him in.

What Moyers warned could have come to pass had Watergate gone undetected and unpunished—" the public conscience smothered, the Congress intimidated, the press isolated, and the political process rigged,” not to mention “unbridled, capricious and arbitrary rules”—has occurred with Trump’s second coming to power.

In a 2022 podcast interview with Dr. Bandy See, Moyers laid out a case for how a notably psychologically disturbed Trump had posed a threat to the Constitution. 

But fewer people were aware of this discussion compared with the audience he could reach in his years on television—and it’s a sign of our political fragmentation that, even if he had reached the old numbers, many people would not have paid attention to the message.

Such is the plight of our time—or, as the biblically conscious Moyers would have known, a prophet is without honor in his own country.

(The image accompanying this post shows Bill Moyers speaking with attendees at a special screening and discussion of his documentary, "Rikers: An American Jail", at the First Amendment Forum at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University in Phoenix, AZ. It was taken Apr. 19, 2017, by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ.)

Quote of the Day (Wilfrid Sheed, on Political Conventions)

“Well, you know about conventions. No matter how dull they try to make themselves, to show how America has truly come of age, they still have all the silly excitement of kids’ birthday parties. If you've happened to miss one, the next closest thing would be wandering around a county fair with a straw hat and a jug of moonshine.”— English-born American novelist and essayist Wilfrid Sheed (1930-2011), People Will Always Be Kind (1973)

For delegates at conventions, I imagine that Wilfrid Sheed’s description here still captures the giddy feeling of getting together with others of your tribe cheering for a candidate. But so much else has changed, for both attendees and television viewers.

Sheed didn’t know it back in 1973, but the central notion of conventions for the 140 years to that point—a quadrennial gathering in which a party would truly decide on its nominee and running mate—was already coming to an end.

Dismayed by the outcome of their Chicago convention in 1968, when party grandees chose a nominee, Hubert Humphrey, who had not entered a single primary, the Democrats had instituted by 1972 new rules that made primaries the principal means of selecting nominees, and limited delegates’ ability to back off pre-convention declarations of loyalty.

With party leaders’ role in choosing nominees vastly diminished, it would be all over but the shouting when delegates got to the convention and the TV cameras—which had aired for all the world to see the Democrats' disorder inside and outside the confab in '68—whirred once again.

That same year, the Republicans amplified their 1968 model for how conventions would be run—" a picture of a buttoned-down organization,” headed by "law-and-order" nominee Richard Nixon, as recalled in Don Gonyea’s August 2018 NPR retrospective.

Not only would films of the candidate now be aired in prime time, but TV networks would receive advance copies of minute-by-minute convention-night scripts already approved by party leaders.

Conventions were now becoming extended, prime-time political commercials rather than events where party futures were decided—marketing opportunities that reflected the experiences of Nixon advisers H.R. Haldeman (a longtime J. Walter Thompson executive) and Roger Ailes (whose work as the candidate’s executive producer for television was chronicled in Joe McGinniss’ The Selling of the President 1968).

This year’s GOP convention already looks like it will follow this recent model. As for the Democrats—well, we’ll see if they remain bound by the rules they instituted a half century ago, or if they will remind viewers, after so much time, of the Will Rogers wisecrack, “I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat.” 

The image accompanying this post, showing the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, on Aug. 22, 1972, is from the Nixon White House Photographs, 1/20/1969 - 8/9/1974 series, in the White House Photo Office Collection (Nixon Administration), 1/20/1969 - 8/9/1974.

Flashback, March 1974: Nixon Imperiled as Watergate ‘Unindicted Co-Conspirator’

A 50-page grand jury report in early March 1974 shattered the relative calm that had descended on Washington after Richard Nixon had appointed Leon Jaworski four months earlier as the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal.

Nixon may have felt that at last, the firestorm ignited by the firing of Jaworski’s predecessor, Archibald Cox, and the resignations of Attorney General Elliott Richardson and William Ruckelshaus in protest during the “Saturday Night Massacre” had settled down.

He had stated in the annual State of the Union message that “one year of Watergate is enough,” and Jaworski’s crackdown on leaks from his office even as he sifted through evidence surrounding the coverup of the June 1972 break-in at Democratic national headquarters allowed the President to catch his breath and believe that he could hold onto his office.

But the sealed grand jury report altered the political atmosphere immediately, as noted by New Yorker reporter Elizabeth Drew, in in one of the best contemporary accounts of the crisis that drove Nixon from office, Washington Journal:

“Even though the indictment was expected, it came as a hammer blow. That keeps happening: the impact of the actual event is sharper and more disturbing than was anticipated. We can anticipate the facts but not their impact, their emotional reverberations. So we are unnerved when seven former Administration and reelection-committee officials—including the President’s closest associates, men who held great power—are indicted.”

Those figures included Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman, former Attorney General John Mitchell, and special counsel Charles Colson, all of whom were convicted for their role in the affair.

But the big bombshell was contained in a bulging briefcase that passed from the jury to Judge John Sirica, then to the House Judiciary Committee: the naming of Nixon as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the case—a dubious first for the American Presidency.

The President’s career was in mortal danger now, as Capitol Hill had been notified that his involvement in the coverup was extensive—enough that it might constitute evidence that he had committed the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that could trigger impeachment.

The question at the heart of Watergate—is the President above the law?—was now posed inescapably.  It would not be answered clearly even with the resignation of Nixon, once his political support had evaporated, five months later.

His pardon by successor Gerald Ford left an imperfect denouement, with the President out of office but never having been brought to trial, let alone found guilty by a jury (though Ford would emphasize that the pardon constituted admission of wrongdoing).

Even before then, however, the case had, to some extent, been clouded with ambiguity. Though impeachment had been mentioned in the Constitution, that document had been silent on whether the President could be indicted.

In fact, as related in Win McCormack’s article in the March 2024 New Republic, the answer had developed out of another investigation of the time, involving bribery charges against Spiro Agnew.

The Vice-President had moved to sidestep the investigation into his conduct as governor of Maryland (with, as it turned out, Agnew continuing his larcenous ways as he moved into the nation’s second-highest office) by demanding a trial by the Senate.

The Justice Department had wanted a determination that the Vice President could be indicted. The Veep, every bit as corrupt as Nixon but more bombastic and less capable than the President, would otherwise be left in charge with his own corruption charges pending if Nixon were indicted.

Left unsaid by Richardson and his lieutenants but clearly implied, however, was that the wish for a finding that though a Veep could be indicted, a sitting President could not.

While Jaworski was eager to accept this solution, many in the group of prosecutors he had inherited from Cox were not. Jill Wine-Banks, for instance, a young assistant prosecutor, disagreed with her boss.

A few years ago, in promoting her memoir, Watergate Girl, she pointed out the injustice of Nixon’s men going to jail while their boss suffered no such penalty.

The makeshift solutions meant to ensure, as the cliché of the time went, that “the system worked” were not without critics even then, as Wine-Bank’s example demonstrates.

Americans' tendency to forgot (or, for some youngsters, never learn) their history has meant that many might even regard the scandal, in the dismissive phrase of Nixon press secretary Ronald Ziegler, as a "third-rate burglary."

Drew's account offers a useful reminder of why the crisis involved far more than a mere break-in, even that it wasn't simply that "the coverup was worse than the crime":

"The problem for the White House, as we keep learning, was that there was so much to cover up. The break-in at the Watergate combined the elements of covert operations, espionage, secret funds, hidden contributions, and aggression against political opponents (real and perceived) which also characterized other activities carried out under the Administration.”

But, in deciding to review Donald Trump’s claim of Presidential immunity from prosecution, the Supreme Court may well make a greater hash of things than occurred in 1974 under Chief Justice Warren Burger, when the justices' unanimous decision might have  upheld the doctrine of executive privilege but not in the case of a criminal prosecution.

In contrast, now the court contains one associate justice (Clarence Thomas) whose wife connived behind the scenes to keep Trump in power—a conflict of interest if there ever was one.

Quote of the Day (Andrew Ferguson, on Notes Made by Famous Readers in Their Favorite Books)

“The task of a marginalia maven is at right angles to the task of reading a book: It is an attempt to read the reader rather than to read the writer. For several decades now, scholars have been swarming the margins of books in dead people's libraries. Those margins are among the most promising sites of ‘textual activity,’ to use the scholar's clinical phrase—a place to explore, analyze, and, it is hoped, find new raw material for the writing of dissertations. Famous readers whose libraries have fallen under such scrutiny include Melville and Montaigne, Machiavelli and Mark Twain.”— American journalist and author Andrew Ferguson, “Nixon Between the Lines,” The Atlantic, October 2023

I came upon this article several weeks ago and set it aside for future reference. Early last night, I became intrigued by Ferguson’s opening paragraphs: his discovery of Richard Nixon’s books in the late President’s library and museum in Yorba Linda, CA.

An inveterate reader, Nixon engaged heavily in these materials, becoming a counterpart to the famous authors that Ferguson mentioned as scribbling in margins. One book the disgraced ex-President digested in his unwanted retirement deeply annoyed him with its revelation that in 1969, his then-National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, had ridiculed him “in private conversation with liberal friends.”

Irony of ironies: even as Ferguson was researching his biography of Nixon among these previously unsampled books, Kissinger himself was appearing at the Nixon Library to promote his own latest book, Leadership, in which he had praised his old boss.

A further irony of ironies: only a few hours after reading about this conjunction of events, I found on the Internet that the man Ferguson called “the 20^th century’s only celebrity diplomat” had passed away, at age 100.

Somewhere in the afterlife, I suspect, Nixon and Henry the K are going to have a very long conversation.

This Day in Vice-Presidential History (Agnew Resigns in Disgrace)

Oct. 10, 1973—Less than two weeks after defiantly vowing that he would not resign as Vice-President even if he was indicted, Spiro Agnew did exactly that, pleading no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the dropping of charges of political corruption.

John C. Calhoun had resigned as Andrew Jackson’s Veep over policy differences, but Agnew was the first to leave the office in disgrace.

The investigation that brought him down, though separate and distinct from the Watergate scandal involving his boss, Richard Nixon, furthered the growing national impression of an administration reeking with corruption, and fed the possibility that, if one of the two highest elected officials in the land could be forced out, so could the other.

Perhaps because he largely faded out of the spotlight after his time in office, perhaps because he increasingly became viewed as a useless occupant of a once-useless office, Agnew and his crimes have been largely forgotten.

Outside of The Baltimore Sun—in effect, during his days as governor of Maryland, his hometown newspaper—hardly any major newspaper has observed the anniversary of the departure of a politician once the proverbial “heartbeat away” from the Presidency.

I am writing this blog post partly to fill this informational gap. 

Fundamentally shallow, ill-informed, unscrupulous, and unworthy of high office, Agnew demands our attention because he tapped into what has become apparent in the years since as some of the worst instincts of the American people: zenophobia, resentment, and alarming credulity about the greatest canards about the press and dissenters.

Only in his second year as governor of Maryland in 1968, Agnew received Nixon’s backing as Vice President after having swerved from a relative racial moderate to an uncompromising champion of “law and order” who requested and used the National Guard after unrest following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

He could facilitate Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to peel white voters away from their traditional Democratic voting patterns—yet did not command conservative allegiance the way that California Governor Ronald Reagan did.

To Nixon’s chagrin, Agnew increasingly built a base in that very voting bloc, largely because he gleefully seized the attack dog role that the President assigned him, in speeches featuring alliterative phrases crafted by speechwriters William Safire and Patrick Buchanan. 

The right-wing contingent of the GOP ignored Agnew’s gaffes and racial/ethnic slurs (e.g., “fat Jap,” If you’ve seen one slum, you’ve seen them all”) and embraced him as its champion.

Even though he had become disenchanted with Agnew’s poor management skills, his predilection for hitting the golf course rather than learning policy, and his lack of seriousness and temperamental steadiness, Nixon ironically found in 1972 that he could not dump the Veep from the ticket without alienating the conservative wing of the party.

Only a couple of months into the following year, just when Agnew had emerged as a strong contender to succeed Nixon at the end of his term, the Vice-President picked up the first hints that he was being investigated for extorting money from contractors while governor of Maryland. Amazingly, he continued to carry out the scheme while Vice President.

Following a script that Donald Trump would follow far more successfully more than 40 years later, Agnew demonized reporters and sought to quash the investigation as a witch hunt (even, as Rachel Maddow revealed in her podcast and book Bag Man, enlisting George Bush—then head of the Republican National Committee—in the effort).

It all came to naught. Agnew’s call for his impeachment before the Senate—where, he calculated, he stood a better chance of surviving than in a court of law—led Nixon to decide that this was a threat to his own political future.

Moreover, Attorney General Elliot Richardson regarded as untenable any scenario in which Nixon, if impeached, could be succeeded by Agnew, himself a crook.

The path was paved for a deal that, even at the time, many (including the young prosecutors investigating Agnew) regarded as what UPI’s Mike Feinsilber called at the time “two standards of justice, one for the powerless and one for the strong.” 

“Accused in 40 detailed pages of having pocketed well over $85,000 in kickbacks," Feinsilber explained, “Agnew was given lighter punishment than others get for stealing a car.” That “punishment” turned out to be a $10,000 fine, a three-years probation sentence, and disbarment by the Maryland court of appeals.

After saying goodbye to Nixon, Agnew never spoke to the President again. When the Veep showed up at his old boss’s funeral in 1994, many in Nixon’s family and inner circle may well have welcomed him as much as a skunk slipping into a perfume factory.

After all, he had charged, in a memoir published seven years after leaving office, Nixon’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig, had urged him strongly to resign: “The President has a lot of power—don’t forget that.”

“I interpreted it as an innuendo that anything could happen to me,” Agnew recalled. “I might have a convenient ‘accident.’”

By the way, that memoir was titled Go Quietly…Or Else—a title more appropriate about an encounter with the Mafia than about service to the American people. Altogether in keeping with the undignified, unsavory liar and crook who produced it.

This Day in Presidential History (‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon Ascends Political Ladder With Nasty Senate Win)

Nov. 7, 1950—Congressman Richard Nixon gutted out victory in his campaign for an open U.S. Senate seat in California, adding to his influence within the national Republican Party. But it came with a price that lasted till the end of his life: the “Tricky Dick” nickname bestowed by Democratic opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas.

The ambitious 37-year-old, two-term Congressman, as he had done in four prior years in public life, infuriated liberals with his take-no-prisoners campaign, which represented some of the darkest moments in the history of American politics.

But the story behind the campaign was, like Nixon himself, more interesting and more complicated than the two-dimensional version seen by Nixon’s friends and foes throughout his three-decade career.

Given the growing importance of California in national politics in the postwar era, whoever emerged as the winner in the contest was bound to become a star with the electorate. But Ms. Douglas—like Nixon, bored with life as a junior member of the House of Representatives—had already been a real star before her run for public office.

The wife of actor Melvyn Douglas, she began as a stage actress in New York, where her appearance attracted the kind of notice that most performers would kill for, from Heywood Broun: that she was "ten of the twelve most beautiful women in the world.” After an intensive period of study, she then switched to opera singing Europe. Later, she went with Melvyn out to Hollywood, finding new exposure to the public on film and radio—but not before the shock of seeing ordinary Americans struggling with the impact of the Great Depression triggered an impulse towards activism that would last through the end of her life.

Douglas’ high-profile advocacy of the New Deal made her a favorite of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who encouraged her to run for public office. On Capitol Hill starting in 1945, she found an additional mentor—and lover—in rising Texas Congressman Lyndon Johnson.

More interested in spotlighting issues than in the drudgery of committee work or ascending the long ladder of seniority in the House, the charismatic Douglas had her eyes on higher office within a few years. Her passion for liberal causes and glamour led some to see her as a potential future Vice-President. But her next objective turned out to be the Senate seat that opened when incumbent Democrat Sheridan Downey, citing ill health—and facing a primary challenge from Douglas— declined to seek reelection.

But securing that slot, in a state with districts far more conservative than the one she represented, was going to be harder for Douglas to accomplish—and even more so facing a Republican opponent like Nixon.

Unlike Douglas, Nixon had acted deferentially to party elders. The Alger Hiss case on which he built his reputation as an anti-communist was better substantiated than the endless array of reckless charges in which Senator Joseph McCarthy was already engaged. Adlai Stevenson’s later description—"McCarthy with a white collar"—was apt.

But he had also established that he was a gut-puncher who would hit below the belt in his first successful run for office right after the war ended against Jerry Voorhis. During debates, he associated the congressman—who had, six years previously, sponsored legislation requiring registration by groups controlled by foreign governments—with subversives, and not so subtly suggested the same thing by documenting Voorhis' voting record on pink paper.

Douglas made the mistake of a preemptive strike on Nixon in late June 1950, charging that he had voted with New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio, of the leftist American Labor Party, in denying aid to South Korea and cutting assistance to Europe in half. Nixon could credibly say that this claim distorted the rationale and history behind these votes, while opening Douglas up to a devastating—and far more unscrupulous—series of counterpunches by her opponent.

Taking the advice of campaign manager Murray Chotiner, Nixon popularized a nickname given Douglas by primary opponent Ralph Manchester Boddy, “Pink Lady,” and hammered home the point with “pink sheets” comparing her record with Marcantonio’s.

Hearing one stump speech by the Republican, a Douglas supporter had warned the congresswoman that he could be a “cagey” strategist, and Mrs. Roosevelt cautioned Douglas that the Pink Sheets should be rebutted strongly and immediately. But Douglas underestimated the pamphlets and their perpetrator, regarding the whole thing as “ridiculous, absolutely absurd.” She paid dearly for that.

Nixon might righteously disclaim responsibility for the excesses of some of his supporters, but he could not plausibly deny his own anti-Semitism. Nixon’s aides discovered that the half-Jewish Melvyn Douglas had changed his surname from “Hesselberg” in the late 1920s at the suggestion of a producer. On the stump, Nixon took to referring to his opponent as “Mrs. Hesselberg” before smilingly correcting his “slip.”

Unlike Hillary Clinton in her campaign against Donald Trump, Douglas could not be credibly charged as opportunistic—even Nixon biographer Conrad Black recognized her strength as “a sincere and attractive woman fighting bravely for principles most Americans would agree with if they were packaged correctly.” But she faced an even more uphill battle than Clinton would in battling gender denigration.

The dislike of her by Nixon supporters was expressed not just verbally but physically: pelting with stones, spitting, dousing with hay, splattering with raw eggs, and rock throwing by children. Reporters noted that Douglas—who, only the year before, had been praised for keeping her figure—had now taken to eating candy bars that added 10 pounds onto her frame. The same stress from the campaign led to longer speeches that strained her voice and made her sound shrill. Los Angeles Times political columnist Kyle Palmer frequently called her “emotional.” And it was all capped by the most revolting remark of Nixon’s in the entire campaign: "She's pink right down to her underwear."

Besides red-baiting and gender politics, another significant Nixon advantage lay in fundraising. Douglas’ financial reserves, garnered primarily from labor unions, could not match Nixon’s, derived mostly from large corporations and farming interests.

Other factors added to Douglas’ woes:

*Leftover bitterness from the primary: Downey and Boddy had intensely criticized Douglas, who had done little to reconcile with them afterward. The lingering resentment became manifest in September, when 64 leading Democrats endorsed Nixon over Douglas. (Other Democrats were more surreptitious, with Jack Kennedy coming to Nixon’s office with a contribution from the Massachusetts Congressman’s father, who loathed Douglas.)

*Spillover effects from national and other state races: Harry Truman, still smarting over James Roosevelt’s attempt to draft Dwight Eisenhower as a Democratic Presidential candidate in 1948, refused to stump in California when the son of Franklin and Eleanor ran for governor two years later. Douglas became collateral damage from that decision, even though the President had encouraged supporters of her primary rivals to support her in the fall.

*Press endorsements: The influential conservative Los Angeles Times did not run a single picture of Douglas throughout the campaign. Newsweek reporter Ralph de Toledano even assisted Nixon aides in crafting a speech attacking Douglas.

*The Roman Catholic Church: While Catholic union leaders largely backed Douglas, the rank and file were less inclined to do so. They may have been heavily influenced by Archbishop James Francis McIntyre’s decision to order sermons throughout the Archdiocese of Los Angeles the month before the election that, while not specifically mentioning Nixon or Douglas, preached anti-communism and communist infiltration in the government. As parishioners left Mass, Nixon campaign operatives were waiting outside, ready to distribute the anti-Douglas “pink sheets.”

*Douglas’ ineffectiveness at close range: Nixon and Douglas met twice face to face, with the Democrat battered each time. She did not reckon with her opponent’s ability not just to distort her record but to unnerve her. Once, he looked at his watch, grinning, as she arrived late for a Beverly Hills joint appearance. Another time, he announced that he had a check from “Eleanor Roosevelt,” so nettling Douglas at the suggestion that the former First Lady had donated to Nixon that she did not even recover her equilibrium when the joking Nixon explained that this “Eleanor Roosevelt” was in fact the widow of Theodore Roosevelt Jr.

*Douglas’ alienation of opposition groups: If Hillary Clinton sparked a hornet’s nest by calling Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables,” Douglas exhibited similar tone-deafness by calling Nixon’s “brownshirts.” That was not bound to endear her with conservative male voters who had fought in the war against Fascism and had their own varying reasons for supporting Nixon.

With all these factors against her, it should not have been surprising that Douglas lost by a nearly 3-2 margin to Nixon. In the wake of her loss, she decided not to seek public office again. She resumed acting and concentrated more on her family. 

Yet two decades later, Douglas had the satisfaction of living long enough to see "Don't blame me, I voted for Helen Gahagan Douglas" proliferating on California bumper sticks at the height of the Watergate scandal that drove “Tricky Dick” from public office for good.

Indomitable Eyewitness: Gotham Bard Pete Hamill, RIP

Pete Hamill had witnessed and written about many of the deadliest events in his country’s history, and after a New Year’s Eve celebration nearly 50 years ago he feared so much that his own alcoholism might lead him to an early grave that he never picked up a drink again.

Even in the past couple of years, with his body failing, his mind remained filled with purpose and projects. That’s why the news of his death this past week at age 85 makes it all the harder to think that we won’t get to hear what he thinks anymore.

Hamill was a throwback to a time when newspapers really mattered. In his later years, he turned his hand increasingly to fiction. But newsrooms proved an addiction he never wanted to shake.

Two brief stints editing The New York Post and The Daily News led him to concentrate on what ailed his profession. The answer was not surprising for someone who made his reputation as a columnist: papers required a voice to distinguish them not just from hometown rivals, but also counterparts across the country:

“Somehow the experience of being in Chicago seems unfocused since the death of Mike Royko,” Hamill observed in News is a Verb:Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century. “San Francisco certainly is not the same since the death of Herb Caen. Big, swaggering voices and intensely passionate voices are giving way to bland, interchangeable voices that wouldn’t frighten a rabbit. Almost all daily newspapers seem to resemble all other newspapers in the way they choose the news, the way they cover it, and the way they present it. Newspapers are more and more like television, where all local news shows resemble all other local news shows.”

A “swaggering” voice? No. “Intensely passionate”? Absolutely. Alternately angry, streetwise, open to the possibilities of all he encountered, Hamill blended a Whitmanesque love of a bursting city with an Irish-American kid’s intense bond with the Brooklyn where he grew up and died.

A collection of his columns was titled Irrational Ravings, taking its name from Spiro Agnew's description of his writing. Readers have their own favorites in the vast amount of material he produced over the years. Two that sprang to mind for me in the immediate aftermath of his death: the Grammy-winning liner notes for Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and a 1977 column lamenting M. Donald Grant’s exile of the great Tom Seaver from the Mets.

But that was before I had a chance to read some of Hamill’s eyewitness accounts of the defining cataclysms of his—our—time. For instance, few have narrated the terror of 9/11 as grippingly as he did:

“Above us, at 9.55, the first of the towers began to collapse. We heard snapping sounds, pops, little explosions, and then the walls bulged out, and we heard a sound like an avalanche. Everything then happened in fragments. I yell to my wife, "Run!" And we start together, and this immense cloud is rolling at us. Bodies come smashing together in the doorway of 25 Vesey Street and I can't see my wife, and when I push to get out, I'm driven into the lobby. I keep calling her name, and saying, "I've got to get out of here, please, my wife..." We're deep in the lobby, behind walls, and the glass doors are locked tight. We look for a back door. There is none. A half-dozen of us go down narrow stairs.

“I'm desperate now to get out, to find my wife, to be sure she's alive, to hug her in the horror. But I'm sealed with these others inside the tomblike basement of an office building. Then there's a sound of splintering glass. One of the emergency workers has smashed open the glass doors. I feel as if I've been there for an hour; only 14 minutes have passed.”

Or this, on the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the friend he had urged to run for President:

“I saw Kennedy lurch against the ice machine, and then sag, and then fall forward slowly, to be grabbed by someone, and I knew then that he was dead. He might linger a few hours, or a few days; but his face reminded me somehow of Benny Paret the night Emile Griffith hammered him into unconsciousness. Kennedy’s face had a kind of sweet acceptance to it, the eyes understanding that it had come to him, the way it had come to so many others before him. The price of the attempt at excellence was death. You saw a flicker of that understanding on his face, as his life seeped out of a hole in the back of his skull, to spread like spilled wine across the scummy concrete floor.”

The decline of the newspaper world that Hamill loved could be marked by the nemeses at the dawn and end of his career, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.

Hamill regarded Nixon with fear, seeing him in 1977 as “the Bela Lugosi of American politics, lying out there in the crypt of San Clemente, and rising into the darkness at night.”

In contrast, Hamill could only view Trump with cold contempt as a prime example of the “celebrity virus” affecting journalism, underscoring the mogul’s “jowly megalomania” two decades ago, in News is a Verb:

“Trump flies to the spotlight, even demands it. His motto seems to be ‘I'm written about, therefore I exist.’ He personally telephones gossip columnists and reporters to present them with stories about the wonders of himself, his great love life, his brusque divorces. In the spirit of true collaboration, the newspapers quote ‘sources close to Trump’ as their authority, a code known to other editors and reporters but not revealed to the readers. In a way, Trump has his own brilliance. He has a genius for self-inflation, for presenting an illusion of accomplishment that often becomes the accomplishment itself. A tiny solar system now revolves around Trump's own self-created persona: his ex-wives, Ivana Trump and Marla Maples Trump, followed by his poor teenage daughter, Ivanka Trump, who as I write is being hurled into the world of fashion models under the benevolent gaze of Daddy. This vulgar saga threatens to go on and on.”

At the same time, as far back as 1969, Hamill detected a major crack in the former New Deal coalition that led to stunning victories for Nixon, Ronald Reagan and, eventually, Trump. In "The Revolt of the Lower Middle Class," he listened to and reported on the discontent of blue-collar ethnic Catholics on racial issues--and, more disturbingly, their susceptibility to television's "politics of theatre" that helped thrust a shameless real estate huckster into the Oval Office.

I met Hamill on a couple of occasions. Once was in the mid-'70s, at the apex of journalism’s glamour in the wake of Watergate, when he spoke in Bergen County, NJ, on a panel about investigative reporting with Gabe Pressman, Nick Pileggi, and Jack Newfield. I remember him saying that by "investigative journalism," most people probably had in mind muckraking. But the way he thought of it, all journalism was "investigative" if it told people something they may not have known already.

At a time when I was seriously thinking of becoming a journalist, that observation made a great impression on me. Even now, some 45 years later, when I have pursued more general fact-based writing, I have found it enormously useful to keep in mind. Nonfiction lives so long as both writer and reader learn something new in the course of encountering the reality behind the material.

I’m sorry I didn’t seize the chance to talk to Hamill afterward. Several friends who did get to know him have mentioned how his warmth, generosity and personal example inspired them in the newsroom.

That approachability and equanimity, I think, differentiated him from a friend and colleague who also rose to fame in the 1960s: Jimmy Breslin. A 2018 HBO documentary on these “deadline artists” have led many viewers to see the two in a similar light: largely self-taught Irish-Americans, onetime habitues of smoky saloons, and liberal lions in a newsroom age that might as well be ancient Rome compared with today.

But, with an irascibility that could flare into downright pugnacity, Breslin, for all his gifts as a writer (enough to earn him a Pulitzer for commentary), would never have been named an editor of a tabloid, as Hamill was twice in the 1990s, at the New York Post and the Daily News. 

Hamill had the charisma to motivate staffers with his mission of a tabloid that would reach out to striving immigrant communities. Unfortunately, his vision diverged from those papers’ owners, and he was terminated before his innovations could take hold.

That second stage in Hamill’s career was only possible because, at a critical moment, he freed himself from the “stoic ethic” and “liquid alchemy” connecting his Brooklyn upbringing and the world of Ernest Hemingway.

Hamill owned up to all his mistakes made while under the influence in his evocative 1994 memoir, A Drinking Life. He got out at the right time, before he hit rock bottom and could have been robbed of the memory necessary for writing. In the end, he came away with a multitude of friends and just as many stories, all narrated in a rich whiskey baritone that left listeners craving every word.

About two decades ago, Hamill was interviewed on TV about the impact of drinking on Ernest Hemingway, a crucial early influence on his own work. The quality of Hemingway's work fell off so much toward the end of his life, Hamill observed, because drinking affected his judgment, so he could never finish his work as easily as he once did. I couldn't help feeling that Hamill had been looking at what could have easily happened to himself, and that he was so grateful he avoided it.

Nobody with blunt opinions expressed through a mass medium is without detractors, and Hamill was no exception. They did not come exclusively from the right wing (and, in light of later events, his placement on Nixon's "enemies list" was surely a source of envy to his friends). 

Some, for instance, have criticized the columnist for his initial sharp denunciation for the "Central Park 5" in what is now universally seen as a miscarriage of justice. In the past week, Ross Barkan chided him as an "irrepressible sentimentalist."

But DNA was not so common in criminal investigations at the time of the Central Park case, and Hamill demonstrated in A Drinking Life that he was hardly unaware of the dangers of the provincialism in his Brooklyn neighborhood to what Barkan calls "a deeply complex, flawed and inevitably flawed society."

A year and a half ago, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Hamill spoke of the importance of libraries to him, in a way that I, with a similar blue-collar ethnic background, could identify with:

“I come from the white working class, but I was fortunate. I had parents that thought things would be better tomorrow or the day after tomorrow and the way out of poverty was through the library. My mother got me a library card when I was five. I couldn't read yet, and there were mothers like that all over New York.”

I hope that, in the years ahead, future children of the working class will go into their own libraries and look up Hamill’s work, to know how Americans lived and survived in a tumultuous time.

(Photo of Pete Hamill taken in Brooklyn in September 2007 by David Shankbone.)

Song Lyric of the Day (Stevie Wonder, Rebuking an American President)

“It's not too cool to be ridiculed

But you brought this upon yourself

The world is tired of pacifier

We want the truth and nothing else.”—American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Stevie Wonder, “You Haven't Done Nothin',” from his Fulfillingness' First Finale LP (1974)

Stevland Hardaway Morris, better known as Stevie Wonder, was born 70 years ago today in Saginaw, Mich. He was a decade into his phenomenal run as a hitmaker—but still only a few years into his zenith as a fully recognized creative force—when he released this uncharacteristic cry of rage.

It wasn’t that the Motown musicmaker did not act as a public social conscience, before or later—he not only covered Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” but would later advocate for a national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in “Happy Birthday”—but 1974 was different for him, as for most Americans increasingly during that time.

Tired of racial division, tired of the ugly aftereffects of the Vietnam War, tired of Watergate—tired, above all, of the politician who, all evidence to the contrary earlier in his career, had promised to “bring us together”—Wonder finally had had enough.

Normally the most warm-hearted of souls, he sent a blast of hot funk at the venal occupant of the White House in August 1974, with his new single, “You Haven't Done Nothin'.” Two days later, Richard Nixon resigned.

Cause and effect? Oh, if only! But he had created a protest song that, nearly five decades later, has become newly relevant.

The next time Wonder has a chance to perform this in concert again, he might want to dedicate it to the Orange Menace now presiding over a greater stream of deception than Richard Nixon could ever have imagined. The singer might provoke a tweet or two from said Menace, not to mention execration from the latter’s army of MAGA hat-wearers. But sometimes the quality of a man is best determined by the nature of his enemies.

(One admirer of Wonder is Dr. Robert Holden, who hails him in the blog post, "Stevie Wonder Is My Life Coach.")