History will be kinder to him than people thought

Jonathan Aitken (who, unlike most politicians, actually served his sentence in prison) reminds us that it is the hundredth anniversary of Richard Milhous Nixon's birth. It's an interesting article as it tries to grapple with a complicated personality. Undoubtedly, the main thrust of it is right: Nixon's superlative abilities and achievements have been obscured by the Watergate scandal, which is still cited as the worst possible thing that could happen in politics.

The still unresolved scandal of Fast and Furious has been described as Obama's Watergate, as has the murder of the American ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi. Two important differences: the left-leaning media has devoted about one tenth of the attention it did to Watergate to the two outrages combined; and, most importantly, nobody died because of Watergate. Nobody. More people died in the back of Teddy Kennedy's car than at Watergate.

One or two things are missing from this article. Nixon's paranoia was partly a personality defect but partly the understandable result of the media hounding that started soon after the Hiss case in which he played a pivotal part. In fact, if it had not been for the young Rep. Richard Nixon Whittaker Chambers's testimony would have been ignored. Neither Chambers nor Nixon were ever forgiven for being right on Hiss and many other Communist agents.

The other cause for his paranoia was the result of the 1960 Presidential election: not only was the result very close but there were and are serious doubts about some aspects of it. Votes disappearing and appearing in Illionois is not something that is calculated to enhance one's respect for the winning candidate and his party. Unlike Al Gore, Nixon decided not to challenge anything as he thought that the Constitutional process and Presidential position were all important. It would seem that Eisenhower was also strongly of that opinion. But it must have left a mark on Nixon.

As the anniversary approaches it will be interesting to see what sort of articles and opinions will be published.

A double anniversary

Today is Ronald Reagan's birthday but, much more importantly, it is the 60th Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II's accession to the throne. I thought a couple of pictures would do for both.

Is this important?

There is a feeling around, which I share, that we know far too much about politicians’ and other vacuous celebrities’ private lives. Do I really want to know that the wife of Northern Ireland’s First Minister had an affair and, feeling depressed, thought about suicide, even if she is a politician herself? Oh how I don’t. Then again, if there is a matter of public finance being misappropriated the or, at the very least, money being acquired without any indication of a clash of interests, story becomes justifiably public

Do I care which schools politicians choose for their children? Certainly not, unless they also ensure through their votes that the rest of this country’s population has no similar choices.

In other words, it is sometimes difficult to work out where private ends and public begins. Each case has to be regarded individually and the assumption ought to be that privacy applies to politicians as much as anyone else, particularly if it is a matter of health. Unless …..

Unless important events are happening and a political leader’s health is of vital importance. This relates to a review in the Wall Street Journal of a few days ago of a book about President Roosevelt and his health, particularly in the last few months of his life that just happened to include the Yalta Conference.

As the article points out:

There is a familiar, almost immutable narrative to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's life: A vigorous young patrician politician is struck down by polio at age 39, struggles to recover his mobility and his career, is elected governor of New York and eventually president by virtue of his grit and the press's willingness to play down his infirmity and, finally—in facing down the Depression and then Hitler and Tojo—works himself to death even as he gives life to a liberated world.

A quick look at the photographs of the three leaders at Yalta in early 1945 show that Roosevelt, the youngest of them, was looking considerably more tired and unwell than the other two. (Stalin was looking particularly pleased with himself, as well he might.)

At the time people did not want to believe that one of the war leaders should be mortally ill but since then there has been a great deal of discussion about the possibility that Roosevelt had, for some time, been suffering from cancer.

Why does it all matter? According to the authors, "it is inexplicable that FDR, given his grim prognosis, made no effort to ensure that, should the worst occur, he would be succeeded by a strong and capable vice president." Roosevelt's third-term vice president, Henry Wallace, was "dangerously naïve about Stalin and the Soviet Union; had he become president during the war, it is inconceivable that the conflict and the postwar world would have taken the same
course."

As for the inexperienced Harry Truman, the slowly declining Roosevelt got
lucky with the selection of his fourth-term running mate. "FDR's Deadly Secret"
doesn't assign a nefarious design to FDR's behavior; he was, though, making "one
of the greatest gambles in world history," hoping to stay alive long enough to
achieve his goals.

Indeed, America and the western world were lucky in that it was not Henry Wallace, the man known to be one of the Soviets’ useful idiots, who took over in 1945 and the worries about Truman (who was not actually as inexperienced as people sometimes make out) proved to be unfounded.

There is another aspect to Roosevelt’s obvious health problems. What was it he really wanted to achieve beyond victory over Germany and Japan? Had he even formulated it to himself? Roosevelt’s inability to stand up to Stalin was notorious. Did this have anything to do with his health and the heavy medication he would have been taking? Or did it have more to do with the fact that he was surrounded by people like Alger Hiss, a very close presidential adviser at Yalta, throughout the negotiations and between them? One can go beyond that and ask how many people around Churchill may have been taking orders and reporting back to one of the organizations in Moscow? British investigations into that issue have lagged behind the American ones.

Interestingly enough, the December issue of Standpoint carried a long article on that very theme but dealing with British politicians. “Should we know about our leaders’ health?” asked Jeremy Hugh Baron who has had a seemingly distinguished career in medicine though not, I suspect, as an ordinary physician.

The article goes through the many problems Churchill and Eden had with their health, as well as the ones Attlee did. To us it seems quite extraordinary that it was not just the public who were not told about Churchill’s heart attack during the war, he did not himself. Moran, his physician, took a lot upon himself.

So how much of Churchill’s inability to stand up to Stalin, how many of his numerous mistakes were due to his ill health and how much of it would have happened anyway, given the complexity of the situation? Should the public have realized that the country was being governed by people who were seriously ill or their substitutes?

The most shocking tale is of Churchill’s second premiership, which, many would argue, ought not to have happened, anyway, as Sir Winston was past the time, because of his age and the condition of his health, when he could have taken on something as difficult as that.

In June 1953, Churchill had his fifth and most severe stroke, which caused him to stagger and speak with a slur. But the Cabinet noticed nothing amiss. His left side became paralysed and he was driven to Chartwell. He ordered Colville to tell no one. Moran warned that Churchill might die that weekend, so Colville sent for the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rab Butler and Salisbury and told the Palace.

Ordinarily, Churchill should have resigned, as his wife wished, and the Queen sent for Eden. However, that day Eden was being operated on in Boston. It was held to be unfair to Eden if Butler was appointed PM. Butler could have asserted himself, but as on two later occasions when he might have claimed the post, he loyally held back. There was no way a peer, such as Lord Salisbury, could have been made a caretaker premier, so a conspiracy was hatched.

The first problem was the bulletin. Moran had prepared, and he and Brain signed, a tactful but honest bulletin: "For a long time, the Prime Minister has had no respite from his arduous duties and a disturbance of the cerebral circulation has developed, resulting in attacks of giddiness. We have therefore advised him to abandon his journey to Bermuda and to take at least a month's rest."

Butler and Salisbury vetoed this because medical correspondents would correctly tell the public that their PM had suffered a stroke. When King George VI had his chest operation, a bulletin talked loosely about "structural changes in the lung", and while doctors assumed correctly that this meant cancer, this was not widely discussed in the press
…
Butler and Salisbury therefore prepared their own bulletin, which the two physicians agreed to sign: "The Prime Minister has had no respite for a long time from his very arduous duties and is in need of a complete rest. We have therefore advised him to abandon his journey to Bermuda and to lighten his duties for at least a month."

Colville sent for the three press lords, Beaverbrook, Bracken and Camrose, who agreed to a total gag. Butler took the Cabinet and told them of Churchill's stroke, although this was not minuted, while the business of the state was conducted by Colville and Churchill's son-in-law, Christopher Soames.

However, surprisingly, Churchill made a remarkable recovery, chaired the Cabinet, again refused his family's advice to resign and, helped by Moran's stimulant tablets, made successful speeches to the House of Commons and the party conference: "If I stay on for the time being, bearing the burden at my age, it is not because of love for power or office.

The idea that matters of state could have been conducted by the Prime Minister’s secretary and his son-in-law, whose political abilities were never of the highest order or even half-way good defies one’s imagination. The fact that RAB Butler did not insist that, in the circumstances, the Queens should have sent for him shows that he was not cut out to be Prime Minister.

There is, however, no doubt that, as a consequence of all this shenanigans he country and the Conservative Party suffered.

Rathergate revisited

The story of Dan Rather, the rightful heir of Walter Cronkite ("the Tet offensive was a disaster for the Americans") and Ed Murrow ("how dare you suggest my friend Lawrence Duggan was not an honourable man"), being caught out by the right-wing blogosphere led by Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs is well known to all.

In my opinion that was a turning point for the MSM though the game is still being played out. Not only it showed CBS producers and anchormen using dubious methods to campaign in all but name for one presidential candidate but it reopened the debate about the media's role in the Vietnam fiasco. All to the good.

The story is not over as Mr Rather is suing CBS for breach of contract or, as Bernard Goldberg points out on his blog, for the restoration of his stature and legacy.

The posting is of extreme interest as it goes through the story again and points out a few additional facts that have been lost in the brouhaha. For one thing, Mary Mapes, the producer, had known for some time before the infamous programme went out that George W. Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam but other pilots were deemed to be more experienced and were sent out ahead of him. Hmmm. A little different from that darling of the media, Bill Clinton.

There is also the point made in the very interesting discussion that joining the National Guard is an honourable thing to do and training to be a fighter pilot, which Bush did, is extremely hazardous at any time.

Read the whole posting and have a look at the comments.

No, it was not a landslide

Readers of this blog and of EUReferendum would have noticed that I am not a great fan of President Obama's. Yes, it is personal: I dislike politicians who have no knowledge or understanding and who are so obsessed with a few ideas that they try to impose them on people by hook or by crook. Furthermore, I do not like his attempts to behave as if he were a ruling monarch and not the president of the greatest democracy in the world.

However, I cannot argue with the obvious fact that he won last year's election decisively. That, however, is not the same as winning with a landslide. President Obama got 52.9 per cent of the vote and carried 28 states as well as Washington DC but you would expect that. The Republican who could carry Washington DC has not been born.

That compares reasonably but not overwhelmingly with the 2004 election when President Bush got 50.7 per cent of the vote and carried 31 states. Not Washington DC, naturally enough.

What does a landslide look like? Well how about President Reagan in 1984 getting 58.8 per cent of the vote and carrying 49 states? Or President Nixon in 1972 getting 60.7 per cent of the vote and carrying 49 states?

It seems that the Obama victory is further from a landslide even than we thought. According to the census, although the number of those who voted went up from 2004 by 5 million voters, the actual proportion went down somewhat: from 63.8 per cent to 63.6. Not a huge drop, admittedly, but it does put pay to the notion that Barack Obama's presence galvanized the people of the United States.

He is merely a politician and from Chicago at that, not the Messiah.

Have we really forgotten what free speech means?

This is a very small episode and does not, in any way, imply that Britain with Gordon Brown as Prime Minister is similar to Nazi Germany/Communist East Germany/Soviet Union/China. Still it is curious.

The other day I was at the Legatum Institute (and more of that in a separate posting) and, while talking to one of their directors, said that even the sterling work the Daily Telegraph has done in the expenses scandal will not make me buy that newspaper again. Their coverage of the American election was so disgraceful, I explained, that I resolved never to give them another penny.

Pressed to explain further I did: it was not a coverage of an election campaign but a long series of love letters to Obama. No issues, no arguments, no facts were given. We were treated to journalists swooning over Obama, his wife, his family and his (completely untested) fantastic abilities. To this day readers of the Telegraph are surprised at the occasional bit of news that show President Obama being somewhat less than the greatest orator ever (here is a blog that is essential reading to all) or not perhaps the Messiah he was painted by that newspaper.

The person I was speaking to looked stunned then sighed with relief. It's so unusual, she said, to hear anyone say this. Clearly, nobody she had spoken to (and this is a think-tank on the right of the spectrum) has dared to admit to a distrust of The One and to a dissatisfaction with the way the British media covered that election.

Is Obama the most popular politician in history?

To listen to some commentators, particularly the British media, you would never believe that President Obama was not elected by a landslide (compare his results with Reagan's and Nixon's second electionm - they both carried 49 states) and he is not the most popular president in history, as well as the best loved politician in the world, the universe and everything else.

Obama's popularity rating after those famous 100 days is riding at 56 per cent. (One wonders whether these figures were taken before that idiotic performance with the Airforce One aeroplane over New York City and Jersey City.)

The headlines have been amazing. Nobody has ever been this popular. Errm, that is not exactly true. It seems a number of recent presidents clocked in at a higher rate after 100 days, not least the much derided George W. Bush. George Mason University's History News Network has the figures.

Obama is not the worst - he comes above Clinton, who scored 55 per cent at this point of his presidency. In other words, as the Washington Times spells it out, Barack Obama is the second least popular president at the 100 day mark in forty years. So it's all a media hype then, is it?