Tag: Richard Nixon

Some smart analysis by a conservative lawyer-pundit on what’s next for Trump

On By Dan KennedyIn Politics7 Comments
Photo (cc) 2016 by Gage Skidmore

After months — years? — of anticipation, Donald Trump has reportedly been indicted (free link) by the Manhattan district attorney’s office on criminal charges that he paid off a porn star he’d had sex with in order to buy her silence ahead of the 2016 election. Hey, it could happen to anyone, right?

I don’t really have anything to add to the mountains of commentary that’s going to come our way. But I do want to recommend this recent edition of “The Ezra Klein Show.” The guest was Times columnist David French, an anti-Trump conservative of long standing who also happens to be a pretty sharp lawyer.

As French explained it, Trump faces criminal exposure on three fronts. The Stormy Daniels case is actually the weakest because it rests on some rather esoteric and unproven legal theories. I’m not going to get into it, but French’s explanation was clear and compelling.

The strongest of the three cases is that Trump corruptly tried to interfere with the 2020 vote count in Georgia, not just pushing Republican officials to overturn the results but threatening them if they refused. French is of the view that this one is close to a slam-dunk, as Trump was caught breaking the law on audio recordings.

Finally, there are whatever federal charges may come out of Trump’s actions during and before the attempted insurrection of Jan. 6 — seeking to overturn the election, putting Mike Pence’s life in danger and inciting a mob to violence. French seems to think that the case is reasonably strong but may prove too complicated when it’s put before a jury.

Also, I like to joke with my students about my Unified Richard Nixon Theory of Everything. Well, the Times is observing that Trump would be the first former president to face criminal charges. True — but that’s only because Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon before he could be indicted.

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How a former top news executive helped cover up the Reagan campaign’s misdeeds

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics6 Comments
Tom Johnson, the former top executive at the Los Angeles Times and CNN, knew about Barnes’ allegations, believed them — and never said a word. Photo (cc) 2016 by the LBJ Library.

Please see this follow-up item.

If you were part of media and political circles in the early 1990s, then you were certainly aware of sensational accusations by Gary Sick, a top national security official in the Carter administration, that Ronald Reagan’s campaign had sabotaged efforts to bring the Iranian hostage crisis to a close during the waning weeks of the 1980 presidential campaign.

Jimmy Carter suffered a landslide re-election defeat at Reagan’s hands — an outcome that might have been different if he’d been able to celebrate the return of the 52 American hostages. Indeed, it was the prospect of such an “October surprise,” Sick argued, that led Reagan operatives to intervene with the Iranians and promise them weapons from Israel if they would agree not to release the hostages until Reagan was in office.

Sick’s charges could not be proven. But, on Saturday, The New York Times published a startling account (free link) about Ben Barnes, a former aide to the late Texas Gov. John Connally, who says that he and Connally were directly involved in working to delay the release of the hostages. Connally, a Democrat-turned-Republican who had served as treasury secretary under Richard Nixon, had run unsuccessfully for president himself in 1980 and was hoping for a plum appointment from Reagan. The Times’ Peter Baker writes of Barnes:

Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.

Why now? Barnes is 84; Carter, who’s 98, has entered hospice care. In Barnes’ telling, he was suffering from pangs of conscience. “History needs to know that this happened,” Barnes told Baker. “I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”

Now, my apologies for leading with the background, which is something I always tell my students not to do. Buried deep within Baker’s story is a massive media scandal. Get a load of this:

Mr. Barnes identified four living people he said he had confided in over the years: Mark K. Updegrove, president of the L.B.J. Foundation; Tom Johnson, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson (no relation) who later became publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN; Larry Temple, a former aide to Mr. Connally and Lyndon Johnson; and H.W. Brands, a University of Texas historian.

All four of them confirmed in recent days that Mr. Barnes shared the story with them years ago. “As far as I know, Ben never has lied to me,” Tom Johnson said, a sentiment the others echoed. Mr. Brands included three paragraphs about Mr. Barnes’s recollections in a 2015 biography of Mr. Reagan, but the account generated little public notice at the time.

Yes — Tom Johnson, a former publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN, has known about Barnes’ story for years, believes it and sat on it. This is an unconscionable act on Johnson’s part. Barnes’ story can’t be entirely verified, but it tracks with what we already know and is the closest thing we’ve had to proof that the Reagan campaign deliberately prolonged the hostages’ agony for political gain. I mean, this is really shocking stuff.

It also fits with a pattern of Republican candidates for president interfering in American foreign policy and cutting deals with our adversaries in order to gain political advantage.

During the 1968 campaign, Nixon’s henchmen secretly threw a wrench into U.S. peace talks aimed at ending the Vietnam War and also took a half-million-dollar bribe from the right-wing junta then running Greece. As we all know, Donald Trump was happy to benefit from a Russian influence campaign in 2016, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had ties to Russian intelligence. Trump’s 2020 campaign featured his threat to withhold weapons from Ukraine unless officials there announced they were investigating Hunter Biden — an act that led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Barnes has filled in an important missing piece of history and cast serious doubts on the legitimacy of Reagan’s presidency. Reagan kicked off more than 40 years of right-wing economics that have left us with declining wages, widening income inequality and the toxic belief that private interests should come before the public good. It’s disheartening to receive confirmation that it never should have happened.

Antitrust legal actions against Google and Facebook spread to 200-plus newspapers

On By Dan KennedyIn Local News2 Comments
Some 200 newspapers are engaged in legal actions claiming that Google and Facebook exercise Godzilla-like dominance of digital advertising. Photo (cc) 2009 by Dr Zito.

A lawsuit filed by newspapers against Google and Facebook that claims the two tech giants violated antitrust laws is gaining momentum. Sara Fischer and Kristal Dixon of Axios report that more than 200 papers across the country have joined the effort, which is aimed at forcing Google and Facebook to compensate them for what they say are monopolistic practices that denied them advertising revenue.

I don’t see any New England newspapers on this list. But the papers that are involved in the lawsuits in some way represent about 30 different owners in dozens of states, according to Fischer and Dixon. About 150 papers owned by 17 different groups have actually filed suit so far.

What’s interesting about this is that it has nothing to do with the usual complaint about Google and Facebook — that they repurpose journalism from newspapers, and that the newspapers ought to be compensated. By contrast, the current lawsuits are aimed at practices that the plaintiffs claim are clearly illegal.

The Axios story doesn’t get into the weeds. But I did earlier this year shortly after the first lawsuit was filed by HD Media, a small chain based in West Virginia. Essentially, the argument is twofold:

  • Google is violating antitrust law by controlling every aspect of digital advertising. Paul Farrell, a lawyer for HD Media, put it this way in an interview with the trade magazine Editor & Publisher: “They have completely monetized and commercialized their search engine, and what they’ve also done is create an advertising marketplace in which they represent and profit from the buyers and the sellers, while also owning the exchange.”
  • Facebook is complicit because, according to a lawsuit filed by several state attorneys general, Google and Facebook are colluding through an agreement that Google has code-named Jedi Blue. The AGs contend that Google provides Facebook with special considerations so that Facebook won’t set up a competing ad network.

The two companies have denied any wrongdoing. But if the case against them is correct, then Google is profiting from a perfect closed environment: It holds a near-monopoly on search and the programmatic advertising system through which most ads show up on news websites. And it has an agreement with Facebook aimed at staving off competition.

“The intellectual framework for this developed over the last three to four years,”  Doug Reynolds, managing partner of HD Media, told Axios.

The lawsuit also comes at a time when the federal government is beginning to rethink antitrust law. A generation ago, a philosophy developed by Robert Bork — yes, that Robert Bork, and yes, everything really does go back to Richard Nixon — held that there can be no antitrust violations unless consumers are harmed in the form of higher prices.

President Joe Biden’s administration, by contrast, has been embracing a more progressive, older form of antitrust law holding that monopolies can be punished or even broken up if they “undermine economic fairness and American democracy,” as The New Yorker put it.

The newspapers’ lawsuit against Google and Facebook is grounded in the Biden version of antitrust — Google and Facebook are charged with leveraging their monopoly to harm newspapers economically while at the same time hurting democracy, which depends on reliable journalism.

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H.L. Mencken: Semi-forgotten genius or a flawed but talented figure?

On By Dan KennedyIn Culture3 Comments
Photo (cc) 2013 by Paul Sableman

I recently attempted to fill one of the many gaps in my education by reading an anthology of work by H.L. Mencken, a Baltimore-based journalist of some renown during the first half of the 20th century (“The Vintage Mencken,” edited by Alistair Cooke). I came away disappointed.

Though I had already prepared myself for his well-advertised racism and antisemitism, I hadn’t realized that he was a misogynist as well. And, though he could certainly turn a phrase, many of his pieces do not hang together with any sort of coherence. For example, the longest — a critical essay about Theodore Dreiser — begins by mocking him, moves on to trashing him and then concludes with the observation that maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. I say this without any personal insight into Dreiser, as I don’t believe I’ve ever read him, not even his best-known novel, “Sister Carrie.” I just thought it was odd that Mencken couldn’t make up his mind.

Some of Mencken’s writing, of course, was satisfying. I particularly enjoyed this description of life as young reporter and how it had deteriorated into something approaching factory work:

Whether or not the young journalists of today live so spaciously is a question that I am not competent to answer, for my contacts with them, of late years, have been rather scanty. They undoubtedly get a great deal more money than we did in 1900, but their freedom is much less than ours was, and they somehow give me the impression, seen at a distance, of complacency rather than intrepidity. In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and even then he was little molested until his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is commonly farmed out to literary castrati who never leave the office, and hence never feel the wind of the world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes.

Some of Mencken’s best pieces are obituaries of the famous and the infamous, and he especially rises to the occasion following the death of William Jennings Bryan. “He was, in fact,” Mencken writes, “a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses…. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the barnyard.”

Good stuff, even if it doesn’t quite rise to the level of Hunter S. Thompson’s monumental sendoff of Richard Nixon, which remains in a class of its own.

I enjoyed Mencken’s putdown of Woodrow Wilson, who has only gradually come to be regarded as one of our worst presidents. (“[H]e knew better than they did how to arrest and enchant the boobery with words that were simply words, and nothing else.”) Then again, Mencken disdained Franklin Roosevelt and even expressed some misgivings about Abraham Lincoln, offset by his grotesque nostalgia for the Confederacy.

I guess the best way to understand Mencken is not as a half-forgotten genius but, rather, as a flawed but talented writer who will probably continue to fade into obscurity.

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Garland makes good on Biden’s promise to stop harassing the press

On By Dan KennedyIn First Amendment, Media, Politics1 Comment
Attorney General Merrick Garland. Photo (cc) 2016 by Senate Democrats.

Give President Joe Biden credit for having a keen understanding of what it takes to hold together his Democratic-liberal-progressive coalition.

When he said in May that it was “simply, simply wrong” for the government to spy on journalists, I was skeptical that he would follow up his sentiment with concrete action. After all, he was vice president under Barack Obama, whose harassment of reporters in his campaign against leaks was legendary. Other presidents also thought nothing about going after reporters, including Donald Trump, George W. Bush and, of course, Richard Nixon.

But press secretary Jen Psaki followed up by assuring reporters that Biden meant what he said. And, on Monday, it came to fruition with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s announcement that the administration would stop attempting to seize journalists’ records in nearly all circumstances. In a memo quoted by The New York Times, Garland wrote:

The Department of Justice will no longer use compulsory legal process for the purpose of obtaining information from or records of members of the news media acting within the scope of news-gathering activities.

Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, issued a statement of approval, saying:

The attorney general has taken a necessary and momentous step to protect press freedom at a critical time. This historic new policy will ensure that journalists can do their job of informing the public without fear of federal government intrusion into their relationships with confidential sources.

Technically, Garland was acting on his own. The attorney general is supposed to be independent of the president. But Garland could hardly continue with the anti-press policies of Biden’s predecessors after Biden himself had spoken out so strongly in favor of reform.

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Garland’s actions come in response to some truly shocking actions undertaken by the Trump administration, some of which spilled over into the first few months of the Biden presidency. Acting on what appeared to be political motivations, the Trump Justice Department sought phone and email records from journalists at The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN. Judging from the timeline, the Trumpsters seemed to be looking into those news organizations’ reporting on the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russian interests.

There are some exceptions to Garland’s order in the case of life-or-death situations, or if a reporter is believed to be actively helping a source obtain classified information. But these exceptions strike me as reasonable rather than being easily exploited loopholes.

Garland’s memo also says that the Justice Department will support efforts to pass legislation making the guidelines permanent so that they don’t expire as soon as Biden leaves office. That’s really the key, since future presidents and attorneys general would otherwise not be bound by Biden and Garland’s good intentions.

Yes, Trump officials spied on reporters. But every president abuses the press.

On By Dan KennedyIn Media
Photo (cc) 2018 by Adam Fagen

Previously published at GBH News.

The revelation last week that the Trump Justice Department had spied on three Washington Post reporters’ phone records barely caused a stir. But as much as I’d like to think that such behavior would shock the conscience, I can understand why the story failed to resonate. It was, after all, the sort of thing that all administrations do. To invoke a pandemic cliché, it was a sign that nature is healing.

Not to sound cynical and world-weary. We should be outraged. We should be shouting from the rooftops. When the government uses its awesome legal powers to stymie journalists who are trying to do their jobs, we lose our ability to hold the powerful to account. The incident would stand as yet another example of former President Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies — except that, at least in this instance, his actions were right in line with those of his predecessors.

As Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review wrote, “it’s not ‘bothsidesism’ to call out loathsome things that both sides are actually doing.”

So what happened? Devlin Barrett of the Post reported last Friday night that the Justice Department informed current Post journalists Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller and former Post journalist Adam Entous that their phone records had been obtained, and their email logs had been unsuccessfully sought, for mid-April through July of 2017. The phone records showed whom the reporters were in contact with but did not reveal the contents of the calls.

There are a few details that make this particular exercise of executive power especially disturbing. The three reporters were delving into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia during the period in question. The records were sought in 2020, when the attorney general was Trump enabler William Barr. Thus the incident could be seen as part of Trump’s long-standing obsession with covering up his ties to Russian interests.

In other respects, though, it was business as usual.

I wrote a commentary in 2012 for HuffPost headlined “Obama’s War on Journalism.” It’s a matter of public record that Barack Obama, during his eight-year presidency, showed a shocking lack of regard for the role of the press in a free society. Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, were obsessed with identifying government officials who had leaked sensitive or embarrassing information to the press. One reporter, James Risen of The New York Times, was threatened with jail for several years.

The Obama years were extreme but not exceptional. Previously, then-Times reporter Judith Miller actually did a stint behind bars for refusing to cooperate with an independent counsel’s investigation into possible wrongdoing by officials in George W. Bush’s administration: Someone had publicly identified a CIA operative in apparent retaliation for an op-ed (oops, guest essay) her husband had written for the Times that accused officials of ignoring evidence contradicting their claim that Iraq was trying to build nuclear weapons.

At least in that case, Bush had nothing to do with the investigation that landed Miller in jail. But Bush hardly had clean hands. After the Times reported that Bush’s National Security Agency was illegally spying on Americans, Bush denounced the paper’s work as “a shameful act,” and people around him urged that the Times be prosecuted under the World War I-era Espionage Act. The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its revelations.

Of course, Richard Nixon’s attempts to retaliate against the press were legendary, ranging from including hostile reporters on his “enemies list” to threatening to strip The Washington Post of its television stations.

A central dilemma in all of these cases is that though the First Amendment offers robust protections for anything that the media might publish or broadcast, it is relatively silent on protections for reporting. In Branzburg v. Hayes, the 1972 decision that reporters do not have a constitutional right to protect their anonymous sources, Justice Byron White wrote that “news gathering is not without its First Amendment protections.” As a general rule, though, reporters have no more protections in going about their jobs than do ordinary members of the public.

Will the situation improve under President Biden? Not likely. As the CJR’s Allsop pointed out, the Biden Justice Department didn’t just inform the three Post journalists that they had been spied upon — it went out of its way to endorse the practice. Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for the current Justice Department, was quoted in the Post’s account as saying that the department “follows the established procedures within its media guidelines policy when seeking legal process to obtain telephone toll records and non-content email records from media members as part of a criminal investigation into unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”

Raimondi added — shades of Obama and Holder — that “the targets of these investigations are not the news media recipients but rather those with access to the national defense information who provided it to the media and thus failed to protect it as lawfully required.”

With public approval for the media near record lows, and with the courts unlikely to carve out any new protections for journalism, it’s not realistic to think that things are going to change for the better any time soon.

At the very least, though, the president could issue guidance to his Justice Department, backed up with a strong public statement, that the government will not spy on, subpoena or prosecute journalists except under the most dire life-and-death circumstances.

Biden appears to be intent on breaking with his predecessors in many ways, especially regarding the size and scope of government. Respecting the role of the press would be one way that he could ensure greater scrutiny of that government on behalf of all of us.

Revered, yet today largely unheard: The life and career of Duke Ellington

On By Dan KennedyIn Culture4 Comments
Duke Ellington performs for patients Nov. 3, 1954, at the KFG Radio Studio for Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora, Colorado. (U.S. Army photo)

Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker are often described as the three founding giants of jazz. Parker’s music comes across as modern and accessible to those of us listening today, though too modern and inaccessible when he arrived in the 1940s. Armstrong seems like an artifact from the distant past. That leaves Ellington, generally regarded as one of the great geniuses of 20th-century music but not often heard anymore unless you seek him out.

I had long wanted to know more about Ellington and his music, so I recently listened to the audio version of Terry Teachout’s 2013 biography, “Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington.” I learned a lot. But I wish, instead, that I could have listened to a series of lectures with examples from Ellington’s music. A nearly 18-hour biography of a musician with no music felt like a lost opportunity. I also would have liked a more generous telling of the Duke’s life.

One aspect that especially impressed me was that — unlike Armstrong (the subject of an earlier Teachout biography) — Ellington was largely able to elude the racist stereotypes of the day. From the earliest years of his career, Ellington was presented as an artist who came about as close to transcending race as was possible at the time. (And no, it’s still not possible today.)

Part of it was because of his manager, Irving Mills, who deserves a great deal of credit even if he and Ellington eventually had a falling-out. (Among other things, Ellington discovered Mills had lied to him about how much he’d spent on a coffin for Ellington’s mother.) Part of it was because Ellington came from a middle-class Washington family with bourgeois aspirations; Ellington was ever-conscious of acting as a Black role model. And part of it, Teachout acknowledges, is that Ellington was light-skinned.

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My problems with Teachout are three-fold. First, he dwells at excessive length on Ellington’s voracious sexual appetites. Second, he dwells at even more excessive length on Ellington’s habit of lifting what he’d heard from other musicians without giving credit. Music, and jazz in particular, is a collaborative art, and it seems to me that the point could be made without driving it home over and over. It has to be said, though, that Ellington went too far at times, so much so that he broke the heart of his closest collaborator, Billy Strayhorn.

Third, Teachout’s analysis of Ellington’s music strikes me as oftentimes pedantic and obscure. Teachout believes that Ellington’s genius was in making three-minute records, and that his longer pieces fell short because he had never studied the European classical composers to learn how it’s done. But is that really a fair criticism? Ellington was a Black composer working in an African American idiom. Maybe his longer pieces came out just the way he wanted them to.

Even so, I learned a lot. Right now I’m listening to “Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band,” recorded between 1940 and ’42 and regarded as the height of Ellington’s career. And Teachout includes a lot of fascinating details, including Ellington’s receiving the Medal of Freedom from Richard Nixon at a White House reception at which Nixon sat at the piano and played “Happy Birthday” for the Duke.

In a New York Times review, James Gavin called “Duke” a “cleareyed reassessment of a man regarded in godlike terms.” Despite its flaws, I found it to be a valuable guide to a the life and work of a genius who, today, is known mainly for being well-known. It’s time to listen to Ellington anew.

How an intrepid Greek exile, the CIA and The Boston Globe nearly kept Richard Nixon out of the White House

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Elias Demetracopoulos was a fascinating character — World War II resistance fighter, journalist, opponent of the military junta in Greece and, ultimately, a political exile in the United States. Today, though, he is all but forgotten.

In a new biography, James H. Barron seeks to rectify that. “The Greek Connection: The Life of Elias Demetracopoulos and the Untold Story of Watergate” (Melville House) portrays a larger-than-life figure who could have altered the course of American history if his warnings about illegal Greek financial contributions to Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign had been made public. As Barron reveals, The Boston Globe came tantalizingly close to breaking that story — but it went untold until years later.

Given what we already know about Nixon’s attempts to sabotage the Vietnam peace talks during the 1968 campaign, the new details about secret Greek money described by Barron can only add to Nixon’s reputation as a corrupt, cynical politician willing to wade illegally into international affairs if he thought it would benefit him. Watching President Donald Trump clumsily bulldoze his way over the path blazed by Nixon calls to mind Marx’s observation that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Barron is a lawyer and journalist based in the Boston area whose career stops included The Boston Phoenix, and who has written for The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, The New Republic and The European. He was the first book review editor for Campaigns & Elections. Barron is also a founding advisory board member of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, now the WGBH News Center for Investigative Reporting. His wife, Marjorie Arons-Barron, is the retired editorial-page editor at WCVB-TV (Channel 5) and a well-known local blogger.

The following email interview has been lightly edited.

Q: What were the circumstances that led you to tell Demetracopoulos’ story?

A: Serendipity. I was rushed to the ER by ambulance in 2007. Before they figured out my problem, I tried to quell my fears by imagining an idyllic morning on the island of Mykonos 40 years before. Afterward, I thought about why, at that perilous moment, my mind went to Greece in 1966.

I briefly considered writing a novel set there, but I’m not a fiction writer. I was fascinated by the Bostonian Greek tycoon Tom Pappas’ role in the 1968 election and started to write about him. In 2009, I told the legendary investigative reporter Sy Hersh about my project. He advised me to focus instead on Elias Demetracopoulos, the person who tried to blow the whistle on Pappas.

After meeting Elias in Washington, I realized this episode was a small part of a remarkable life, beginning with his days as a 12-year-old involved in the Greek resistance. He was captured, tortured, imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Nazis. Later, as an aggressive, fiercely independent journalist, he fled Greece when a military junta seized power in 1967, escaping to the U.S. over State Department objections.

Q: You write that Demetracopoulos went to Democratic Party operative Larry O’Brien in 1968 with information that Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign had received a secret $549,000 payoff from the Greek junta. You also speculate that O’Brien didn’t inform President Lyndon Johnson, even though it could have led to Nixon’s defeat at the hands of Hubert Humphrey. Why do you think O’Brien sat on it?

A: I explore different theories. O’Brien trusted the message, but not the messenger. Before fleeing to the U.S. in 1967, Elias had been a scoop-hungry reporter whose exposés had so angered American officials that the CIA and State Department tried to destroy his reputation and effectiveness, often placing false information in his intelligence files. JFK press secretary Pierre Salinger passed lies and unjustified speculation to O’Brien and others that, beneath his charming exterior, Elias was a communist who secretly worked for “the other side,” and should not be trusted.

Joe Napolitan, Humphrey’s media adviser, begged to use the Pappas illegal foreign money revelation in ads. O’Brien said no. David Broder of The Washington Post told me that, given how close that election was, Elias’ disclosure would have been a “bombshell” that could have changed the outcome. Imagine history with no President Nixon and no Watergate.

Q: There’s a great Boston Globe angle in your story. You write that Washington bureau chief Bob Healy took Demetracopoulos’ tip to editor Tom Winship, who in turn assigned the story to Christopher Lydon. Lydon ended up writing a profile of Tom Pappas, who was part of Nixon’s campaign as well as a bagman for the junta, but he was unable to prove there had been a payoff. Did the Globe ever try to revisit that story?

A: Healy’s tip came informally from CIA agents, not Elias, indicating that American intelligence at some level knew about the Greek junta plot to bribe the Nixon-Agnew campaign. O’Brien told Elias that, because the matter was so delicate, if he wanted O’Brien to go to LBJ to expose the scandal, Elias must not talk to the press. And he didn’t.

Lydon wrote about the Greek money rumor in the Globe but said the charge was “unsubstantiable.” Lydon interviewed Pappas, who denied the charges, and O’Brien’s press secretary, who said nothing to Lydon about Elias — despite Elias’ detailed revelations to O’Brien, his offers to provide corroborating witnesses in Athens, and even to fly some witnesses to the U.S. More problematic were non-Globe reporters like Gloria Steinem, who summarily dismissed the Greek money rumors as an illegality the frontrunning “New Nixon” would not stoop to commit.

The Globe never revisited the story. Elias moved on, considering his efforts to blow the whistle on Pappas a distraction from his principal fight to restore Greek democracy. Lydon later joined The New York Times, where he met Elias and found him to be a credible source.

Q: The title of your book refers to “the untold story of Watergate.” As you explain, the gang of Nixon operatives who broke into O’Brien’s office at the Watergate complex may very well have been looking for O’Brien’s notes on what Demetracopoulos had told him four years earlier. That would place Nixon’s relationship with the Greek junta at the center of both his 1968 and 1972 campaigns. How does that change our understanding of the Watergate scandal and the Nixon presidency?

A: Greece was peripheral to Nixon’s foreign policy interests, save for his preferring a staunch anti-communist dictatorship to a messy democratic government, human rights be damned, and as a source for illegal campaign funds to be milked by his tycoon fundraiser Tom Pappas.

Watergate is a metaphor for abuse of power during the Nixon years. The scandal didn’t begin with the planning for the June 1972 break-in. Its roots are in the illegal financing of the 1968 election, the potential disclosure of which caused, in the words of the historian Stanley Kutler, the “most anxiety” in the Nixon administration “for the longest period of time.”

Elias’ 1971 congressional testimony against Pappas pushed Nixon’s henchmen into overdrive and led to schemes to have Elias deported, not to mention looking away when the Greek junta plotted to have Elias kidnapped and killed. The sole opportunity to expose the reasons behind the Watergate break-in before the election was stopped because of untruthful attacks on Elias’ reputation.

There is strong circumstantial evidence that at least part of what the burglars were directed to find was whatever derogatory information the Democrats had on Nixon, especially financial documents related to foreign contributions.

Q: Demetracopoulos was a well-known, well-connected figure for many years, yet today he is all but forgotten. What do you think is the single most important lesson of his life and career?

A: Fame is fleeting. Two of the most influential columnists of that time, Walter Lippmann and Joseph Alsop are also largely forgotten today.

The central takeaway from Elias Demetracopoulos’ life is that one intrepid individual, against great odds, can make a difference — but standing up to abusive governments often entails profound risks, great personal sacrifices, and a lifetime of relentless attacks and harsh consequences.

To be a whistleblower requires the courage to jeopardize your career and even risk your life. But doing so can influence history.

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Trump’s SOTU speech was a cynical exercise in pretend bipartisanship

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics
Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi in happier times. 2017 photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Was President Trump’s bipartisan outreach in his State of the Union address Tuesday night a cynical attempt to recast himself as something he fundamentally is not? Or was it an even more cynical attempt to be seen as bipartisan while winking and nodding to his hardcore supporters? As Lily Tomlin once observed, “No matter how cynical I get, I can’t keep up.” I thought it was clear that Trump was pursuing the latter course. So take this as my attempt to stay ahead of the Tomlin curve.

The conventional take was expressed in The Wall Street Journal by Gerald Seib, who wrote: “When Donald Trump became president, there was reason to believe he might govern as he campaigned, almost as an independent, standing apart from both parties, perhaps even with an ability to bridge the two parties because he was beholden to neither of them. And for the first half an hour of his State of the Union address Tuesday night, that was the very tone he set in his remarks in the House chamber. He opened his arms to Democrats, declaring that Americans are ‘hoping we will govern not as two parties but as one nation.’”

But is that really what Trump did? Consider:

  • Near the beginning of his speech, the president said that “the agenda I will lay out this evening is not a Republican agenda or a Democrat agenda.” Referring to the Democratic Party as “the Democrat Party” is a slight that goes back decades, as then-NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepherd explained in 2010. It was a calculated way for Trump to signal to his base that he was reaching out to Democrats while actually doing the opposite.
  • Trump refused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the courtesy of introducing him, as is the longstanding custom at the State of the Union. Kate Feldman noted the snub in New York’s Daily News, although she also observed that “he and Pelosi did share a cordial handshake during the first standing ovation.”
  • Much later in his 82-minute stemwinder, Trump began ranting about the evils of socialism — “as if it had gotten particularly far along,” snarked Jim Newell in Slate. Trump’s remarks were apparently aimed at Congress’ two high-profile democratic socialists, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and they seemed to have little effect. The #NeverTrump conservative Max Boot bemusedly pointed out in The Washington Post that Trump “equated [socialism] with Venezuela rather than, say, Denmark.” But it was a sign that Trump is prepared to go full Red Scare in what will surely be a desperate attempt to win re-election.

“Trump and his advisers can see he’s in a corner,” wrote the liberal commentator Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. “He needs to try to get some footing with a less confrontational, more unifying posture that most Presidents at least optically try to govern from.”

Other than Trump’s phony bipartisanship, his customary fear-mongering about undocumented immigration and crime, and his introduction of some truly admirable guests (every one of whom exuded a decency that was entirely absent from the podium), what struck me most was an unforced error in which he directly drew a parallel between himself and Richard Nixon.

“An economic miracle is taking place in the United States — and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics or ridiculous partisan investigations,” Trump said, a direct reference to the ongoing investigations into his campaign, his businesses, and his presidency. “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn’t work that way!”

As Philip Bump pointed out in The Washington Post, Nixon said something remarkably similar in his 1974 State of the Union speech: “I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough.” Bump’s riposte: “It wasn’t quite enough, as it turned out.”

The Democrats’ official response to Trump’s speech, delivered by Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, was unusually effective as these grim rituals go. Abrams gave an upbeat, warm talk while simultaneously scorching Trump over the recent government shutdown (she said she helped serve meals to out-of-work federal employees) and talking frankly about voter suppression. Abrams lost a close race for governor last November amid accusations that a variety of Election Day problems had resulted in thousands of voters in Democratic areas being turned away.

Who was watching Tuesday night? Mainly Trump voters. According to CNN polling director Jennifer Agiesta, people who viewed the speech “were roughly 17 points more likely than the general public to identify as Republicans.” And they liked what they saw, with about 60 percent giving it a thumbs-up.

Trump’s approach was pretty standard for him: Appeal to his shrinking but loyal base in the hopes that he can parlay their enthusiasm into another Electoral College victory. We are a very long way from knowing whether it will work — or even if he’ll be on the 2020 ballot given the various investigations swirling around him. It didn’t work out for Nixon. The final chapter of the Trump presidency has yet to be written.

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A malign force from Nixon to Trump: Revisiting the Roger Stone biopic

On By Dan KennedyIn Media, Politics
Roger Stone. Illustration (cc) by DonkeyHotey.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

How sleazy is Roger Stone? After the on-again, off-again Trump operative was arrested last week and charged in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, news reports invariably brought up Stone’s boasts that he and Richard Nixon were thisclose. Once again, we were subjected to those appalling photos of the Nixon tattoo that adorns Stone’s back. And the Nixon Foundationsprung into action on Twitter:

When even an organization devoted to “the consequential legacy and relevance” of the original unindicted co-conspirator wants nothing to do with you, it may be safely assumed that you are no ordinary political dirty trickster. And surely no one would call Stone ordinary.

What we should call Stone is the man who, more than anyone else, inflicted the presidency of Donald Trump upon us. It is easy to dismiss Stone as a foppish buffoon. But in rewatching the Netflix documentary “Get Me Roger Stone” this week, I was reminded of how crucial Stone was to the entire Trump political enterprise — starting in the late 1980s, when Trump visited New Hampshire at Stone’s instigation.

“The Trump candidacy was a pure Roger Stone production,” says Jeffrey Toobin, who wrote a profile of Stone for The New Yorker and is one of the principal talking heads in the 2017 film, directed by Dylan Bank and Daniel DiMauro.

By Stone’s own telling, his dirty tricks extend all the way back to elementary school, where he rigged a mock election between his candidate, John F. Kennedy (Stone was not yet a Republican), and Richard Nixon.

“I went to the cafeteria, and as each kid would go through the cafeteria line with their tray, I would tell them, ‘You know, Nixon has proposed having school on Saturdays,’” Stone recalls. “Well, then the mock election was held, and to the surprise of the local newspaper, Democrat John Kennedy swept this mock election. For the first time ever, I understood the value of disinformation.” With a slight smirk he adds, “Of course, I’ve never practiced it since then.”

Stone has somehow managed to convince himself that he has political convictions that go beyond notoriety and cashing in. Yes, at one point we learn that he holds libertarian views on issues such as reproductive choice, same-sex marriage, and the legalization of marijuana. What really motivates him, though, are the same inchoate resentments that have helped elect the Republican presidents he’s served.

“Those who say I have no soul, those who say I have no principles, are losers. Those are bitter losers,” he says, sitting in a limousine in a pinstriped suit, wearing a lavender hat and his trademark round dark glasses. “Everything I have done, everything I have worked for, is to propel ideas and a political philosophy that I want to see dominate in government. Donald Trump has now elevated the issues that I believe in: anti-elitism that was first identified by Richard Nixon, mined by Ronald Reagan, and now Donald Trump.”

Anti-elitism as a “political philosophy.” Well, it carried Trump to the presidency, and it continues to resonate with his base. In Stone’s world, as in Trump’s, winning is its own justification.

The range of dirty tricks attributed to Stone, often exaggerated by the man himself, is breathtaking. Arranging for a campaign donation from a phony socialist group to Pete McCloskey, Nixon’s 1972 Republican primary opponent. Destroying Pat Buchanan’s 2000 presidential campaign by means too complicated to explain here (Trump played a cameo), thus helping to ensure the election of George W. Bush. Instigating the “Brooks Brothers Riot” that stopped the 2000 Florida recount. Breaking the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal. Possibly even supplying CBS News with the George W. Bush National Guard documents that led to the departure of several journalists from the network, including anchor Dan Rather, after they were shown to be fake.

Toobin again: “Roger is unique in my opinion because he embraces infamy. He doesn’t worry that you’ll think he’s a sleazeball. He wants you to think he’s a sleazeball.”

Among other things, “Get Me Roger Stone” demonstrates that the Trump campaign had its origins many years ago, tying together such nefarious figures as Roy Cohn, Paul Manafort, Stone, and Trump himself. Trump and Manafort spoke extensively to the filmmakers, with Manafort saying, “Roger’s relationship with Trump has been so interconnected that it’s hard to define what’s Roger and what’s Donald.”

It seems likely that Stone would have been regarded as more of a real player and less of a sideshow freak if he hadn’t gotten caught up in a sex scandal of his own while working for Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign, thus relegating him to the shadows. Indeed, in the film we see Stone in such ridiculous situations as yelling into a megaphone while wearing a Shepard Fairey-style T-shirt of Bill Clinton emblazoned with the word “Rape” and holding forth on Alex Jones’ conspiracy-mongering “Infowars” program.

Roger Stone may come across as an absurd character. But as the film makes clear, he’s also one of the most important political operatives of the past four decades. As “Get Me Roger Stone” winds down to its conclusion, his unseen interlocutor asks, “What message would you have for the viewers of this film who will loathe you when the credits roll?” Stone’s answer: “I revel in your hatred. Because if I weren’t effective, you wouldn’t hate me.”

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