Setting and Character

Warmth

The "Warmth" Memorandum (see also Matthews 282-283)

Nixon's self-awareness



Haunting

"Kennedy's record in foreign policy, as Kissinger points out over and over again, was an utter disaster"

From the Senate Watergate Committee report (Matthews 280-281)

At about 1 a.m. on Saturday, July 19, 1969, Senator Edward Ken-nedy was involved in an automobile accident at Chappaquiddick, Mass. Later that morning, as news reports of the accident reached the public, Caulfield was directed by Ehrlichman to send Ulasewicz to the scene of the accident as soon as possible. Ulasewicz flew to Boston on the Eastern Airlines shuttle on July 19 and rented a car for the trip to Martha’s Vineyard and Chappaquiddick. Ulasewicz spent 4 days in the area on this first visit and reported back continually to Jack Caulfield in the White House, who passed the information on to Ehrlichman and others as it developed. Ulasewicz spent a good portion of the remaining summer and much of the fall of 1969 at Chappaquiddick trying to dig up politically valuable information from Senator Kennedy’s accident.

Start around 36:00 (audio from 1972)

"FAKE NEWS!" -- 1969 EDITION

"I realize that we have an insurmountable wall of opposition and indifference in the media"

Nixon sics Agnew on the media (START AROUND 4:00)




Evan Thomas provides a flashback:

November 1950, when Rep. Richard Nixon, not yet 40 years old, was elected to the U.S. Senate from California, he received an invitation to a Georgetown dinner party. Every Sunday night, columnist Joe Alsop assembled some of his friends, usually high ranking officials at the CIA and State Department, with a few journalists and politicians thrown in, to dine and drink (copiously) at his house at 2720 Dumbarton Ave. Alsop and his pals wanted to take the measure of young Nixon, who was seen as a rising star in the Republican Party. Alsop’s weekly dinner, known in his circle as “the Sunday Night Supper,” was intimidating to Nixon. Alsop’s friends had gone to Harvard or Yale and carried themselves with assurance. Nixon and his wife, Pat, who had little experience in high society, were visibly uncomfortable as they arrived, recalled Tish Alsop, the wife of Joe’s brother and fellow columnist, Stewart Alsop. It did not help that Nixon’s host forgot his name and introduced him as “Russell Nixon.” At dinner, Ambassador Averell Harriman, a crusty old school diplomat who was slightly deaf, loudly announced, “I will not break bread with that man!”

Retribution against the media 

Wartime President

In Anaheim, RN reacts to the San Jose incident (Matthews 288-289):

And now, I turn to an event related to all this, that occurred in San Jose yesterday. You saw it on your television screens, an incident in which you saw 3,000 people inside listening to the speakers and 1,000 demonstrators outside, demonstrators who shouted epithets, but, in addition to that, who hurled bottles and rocks and bricks, broke windows, damaged the President's car, damaged the buses, injured some of the people in those buses.

It was a violent demonstration. And as that demonstration was concluded, there were those that were trying to indicate what it meant.

I want to give you tonight my judgement as to what that demonstration meant.

I say to you tonight, it is time to draw the line. I do not mean a party line. Because, when I speak of a line, I am referring not just to Republicans or Democrats, I am referring to a line between those who understand this problem and deal with it effectively and those who do not.

You recall what happened at the University of Wisconsin, where someone was killed in a lighted building. Listen to what the Wisconsin State Journal said in an editorial. "It isn't just the radicals that set the bomb in the lighted, occupied building who were guilty. The blood is on the hands of anyone who encouraged them, anyone who talked recklessly of revolution, anyone who has chided with mild disparagement the violence of extremism, while hinting that the cause was right all the time."

Everything Converges (start around 4:50)