Richard Nixon's acceptance speech, 1968 Republican Convention

This four-minute montage is from the 1995 Oliver Stone film, "Nixon" , with Sir Anthony Hopkins as Richard Nixon. Stone's film takes Nixon from his middle-class youth in a hardscrabble farm town backwater of Southern California to his heights as the most powerful man in America, to his ignominious fall.

On the eve of another Republican Convention speech in Florida tonight, this clip seamlessly incorporates footage of movie sound stage, actors, real people, and actual television coverage of the August 8, 1968 convention climax.



The 1968 Presidential race had some things in common with this one 42 years later. Both were divisive campaigns, both saw a country sharply divided and both featured a backdrop of a foreign war that had spun out of control.

But there were differences. The Republican Party had a broader ideological base in 1968. Nixon, defeated for President by John Kennedy in 1960, had managed to weave himself to a renomination eight years later by outmaneuvering his opponent on the right (Ronald Reagan, the governor of California) and his opponents on his left (Nelson Rockefeller of New York State and George Romney of Michigan.)

Romney was the father of Mitt Romney in case you hadn't heard.

Ironically there was an insurgent effort at the Miami convention to put George Romney on the ticket. Nixon squelched it, preferring a little-known hard-liner, Maryland governor Spiro Agrew, for his running mate.

Nixon successfully maneuvered his way to victory in the general election garnering about 42 percent of the vote against the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey and the hard-line demagogic segregationist George Wallace. Vice-President Humphrey was hampered by his inability to put distance between himself and Lyndon Johnson war policies in Vietnam. Nixon wove a together a "law and order" campaign that promised a secret plan to end the war with a get-tough approach to young demonstrators and minority activist groups.

The actual speech by "Tricky Dick" is not as interesting as this. I mainly remember August 1968 as the first time we had a color television set in the Noakes family home. I have to say the colors on the set were more interesting than the GOP speeches, at least in my Democratic household. :-)

"All The President's Men" (1976) Richard Nixon Gives Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman a Movie To Make

(left to right) actor Dustin Hoffman, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodard,and actor/producer Robert Redford at the premiere of the movie in 1976 in Washington, DC.   

 

While perhaps not the best finest political film  ever made in America, the Alan J.  Pakula directed  "All the President's Men" (1976) might have been the most widely anticipated... and the least disappointing. 

 

The 1974 book on which it was based came out a few months before Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency on August 9th of that same year.     Leading up that point were eighteen months of subpoenas, lies and denials from official sources inside the White House. 

 It was the  investigation of a late-night  "third-rate burglary" on the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972 and the eventual tie-in to Nixon and his minions behind  the special secret "plumbers unit" of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP, also known as "Creep) that led to "the  greatest Constitutional crisis in America since the Civil War."    

The movie itself sets about detailing how two unheralded journalists opened a crack in the inner sanctum of power by establishing a connection between the Mafia-like operations of secret money exchanges and secret slush funds in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  These monies were clandestinly  diverted to, among other things, financing "The Plumbers" operations. Nixon knew directly about the break-in a few day later, and instructed H.R. Halderman, his trusted aide, to get the FBI off investigating the case "for the good of the country".   

 Once the burglars were caught by the police and put on trial, money was needed  to buy their silence in court about who they worked for, in effect suborning perjury in a criminal case.  Nixon had no problem with that.

 "We could get that. On the money, if you need the money you could get that. You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. It is not easy, but it could be done. But the question is, Who would handle it? Any ideas on that?" -- Nixon to John Dean, March 21, 1973.

In the most ironic twist of that era, all was revealed on the audio tapes that Nixon himself made of his phone calls and meetings in the Oval Office

 By early 1973 the rest of the media (and, lo and behold, even the Congress!)  had begun to sit up and take notice.  Senate Hearings were held, chaired  by the amiable Democratic Senator from North Carolina, Sam Ervin.  I recall they made for much more interesting viewing in the Summer and Fall of '73 then any programing of game shows and local news I'd even seen.  

After numerous denials by the inner circle of the White House that the powers-that-be knew anything about a secret money laundering and black-bag operations, one man, Nixon's personal lawyer, John Dean, came forward and spilled the beans on his boss. A lot of other things fell into place after that. Soon  Special Counsels appointed by Congress (Harvard professor Archibald Cox and later  Leon Jarworski)  demanded some of those White House tapes and transcripts be made available for the public to see just how deep in the scandal the White House "men" were.  

Nixon fired Cox during the famous "Saturday Night Massacre" on a weekend in October of 1973 and also had to fire two of his Attorney Generals who refused to do the deed. No matter; the wheels of justice ground on. Eventually the Supreme  Court ordered Nixon to turn over all documents related to the scandal, including the tapes, a system revealed under oath by Presidential aide  named Alexander Butterfield.   

 Nixon's taping system had "hoisted him on his own petard", as Shakespeare might have said, repeating himself from "Hamlet".  Many of Nixon's men went to jail. The Man himself was pardoned by his appointed vice-President Gerald Ford a month after leaving office. Nixon was one step ahead of losing his office (and his pension and other perks)  when he quit and likely facing jail before being  pardoned. The system had worked, and at least a  certain amount of justice served. 

But the narrative of this fine film only goes up to  the beginning of Nixon's Second term. No matter. Everyone seeing it like me in a theater in 1976 knew what the ending would be already.  The end of "Nixonland" in the USA was  broken down in a series of camera shots of headlines spiting out on a telex machine--headlines ending with Nixon's resignation as the last piece of news in the film.

I wonder if the modern media really goes in much for investigative journalism these days if there's not a sex scandal involved?   Certainly more could have been done to refute the case for the war in Iraq in 2003 for instance. But this film reminds us at least  that there was one time in American politics, to quote the newsman Jimmy Breslin, that "the good guys  finally won."    

Here Robert Redford (as reporter Bob Woodard) gets a strong idea just how far into the Executive Branch this story of five burglars caught at the DNC headquarters might go.

 It's perhaps the greatest irony of the whole "Watergate Crisis" that the Democratic party challenger  for the top job, the ill-starred Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, or any other nominee would likely have lost the campaign anyway thanks to Nixon's trip to China and the ending of the direct American role in the War in Vietnam. 

 

 But Nixon didn't know alll that in 1971, when he unleashed his goons and employed illegal money schemes to try and ensure himself another four years of power.    

 

 

"The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" - Trailer

In the early 1960's Daniel Ellsberg started out as a "hawk" who believed in the Vietnam War.

He first served on active duty as a Marine rifle company officer in the 1950's, later a scholar and professor, and by 1959 a senior analyst at the defense-based think-tank, The Rand Institute near Los Angeles.

By 1964, he had become an important intellectual conduit for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara when he and President Lyndon Johnson launched a major American-led escalation of The Vietnam War in 1964 (using a misleading report about attacks on an American warship in The Gulf of Tonkin.)

Risking twenty years in jail for espionage, Ellsberg snuck out a copy of a top secret report about the lies and half-truths and cover-ups that led the American public into endorsing the Vietnam war, a war that cost 58,000 American lives and also killed up to two million Vietnamese. In 1971, he turned these copies over to "The New York Times" and selected Congressmen, and in so doing became a highly controversial figure and a target for the Nixon White House.

The massive tome of papers, that Ellsberg released to the New York Times and selected members of Congress became known as "The Pentagon Papers". This recent documentary explores Ellsberg change of mind and heart about the war he not only analyzed but led a Marine company into battle in. It keenly explores his motivations and those around him, including his wife and his colleagues who also changed their minds on the war.

I found this a riveting documentary. If you're interested in how America went into this war and how leaders don't trust their citizens with the whole truth, or any truth at all at times, its is worth seeing.


http://firstrunfeatures.com/mostdangerousman.html

**2010 Academy Award Nominee!**

Co-winner of this years Freedom of Expression Award from the National Board of Review (and one of their Five Best Documentaries of the Year), Winner of the Special Jury Award at IDFA, and in contention for the years Best Documentary Oscar, The Most Dangerous Man in America tells the story of Daniel Ellsberg, a high-level Pentagon official and Vietnam War strategist, who in 1971 concluded that the war is based on decades of lies and leaks 7,000 pages of top secret documents to The New York Times, making headlines around the world. A riveting story of how this one mans profound change of heart created a landmark struggle involving Americas newspapers, its president and Supreme Court. With Daniel Ellsberg, Patricia Ellsberg, Tony Russo, Howard Zinn, Hedrick Smith, John Dean, and, from the secret White House tapes, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who called Ellsberg the most dangerous man in America.

Bringing the War Home : "The Weather Underground" (2002)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Documentary

Recently the name of William Ayers (pictured below in the video frame) and the group called The Weather Underground resurfaced in the American Media for a couple months during the Presidential Elections. Mr Ayers had been briefly associated with Barack Obama's early political campaigns in Chicago in the mid-90's and has served on a non-profit board with the President-Elect. Ayers, along with his wife Bernadine Dohrn, were leaders in the Weather movement , a violent late 1960's --early 1970's radical group of young people opposed to racism and the Vietnam War those motto was "bring the war home".

This is a disturbing but engrossing documentary about a group of young men and women, some from very privileged families, who turned to bombing domestic targets inside the United States as a way to protest the Vietnam War. They split off from the more peaceful protests of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and began to use violence in a calculated way to create a potential revolution.
Their targets ranged from the US Capitol to random violence the affluent "gold coast" of North Chicago to federal offices and banks in Berkeley and San Francisco.

The film takes contemporary interviews with surviving members and juxtaposes them with the tumult of that era. It succeeds in telling their story with a degree of dispassion that allows the viewer to come to his/her own judgements about these revolutionaries. My own feelings on the matter were that they went "off the rails" and lost whatever could be gained of a moral high ground against unjust causes. One also cannot deny that the same could be said for those in the corridors of power who promoted and prolonged the war in Vietnam. Those who like stories about heroes and heroines probably won't find any in this non-fiction network, but they will see how a network of desperate people created chaos and explosives and then reflect back on their time--some with deep regrets, some with a still-determined commitment to other social causes and others who couldn't stop their violent life and wound up in prison for crimes not related to their time with the Weather Underground.

Richard Nixon, The Early Smears

 

 

Richard Nixon began his political career after he was discharged from the US Navy in 1946.  He impressed a group of small businessmen, farmers, fruit orchard owners and sundry other Republican contributors--called The Committee of 100--to run as a GOP stalwart against a five-term Democrat, Jerry Voorhis.   

Few expected him to win, even among his backers, and Nixon at first received very few contributions for his efforts. Voorhis himself didn't take Nixon seriously, according to Stephen Ambrose in his 1987 book "Nixon: The Education of a Politican".  The incumbent spent much of the campaign in Washington, solidifying his image as a hard-working legislator.  

That was a huge mistake by Voorhis.  "Tricky Dick"--as Nixon  came to be known in a later campaign--was not one to be underestimated.  He began to smear Voorhies as a Communist sympathsizer.  He did it by trying to tie Voorhies to the CIO Labor Union, which did have some Communists among their ranks.  The problem was the CIO hadn't endorsed Congressman Voorhis.   Only one small local branch of a local CIO had issued a recommendation on a mimeopgraphed sheet of paper for its rank-and-file to vote for Voorhis.  Nixon and his team took this small handbill paper endorsemdent by one small segment of the CIO and turned it into a big lie that the whole union, and especially the Communist elements, had endorsed the Democrat. 

That same year,the  Communist Party newspaper "People's World", had denounced Voorhis as "against unity with Communists under any circumstances".  In truth, the incumbent was simply a liberal/progressive type, a mainstream New Deal Democrat friendly with working-class interests.  He had even introduced a bill in the the House of Representitives in 1940 calling for all Communists to register with the national government!

Meanwhile, in the state of Wisconsin, another Republican was having similar success in wresting a Senate seat from Robert LaFollette, Jr..  The candidate's name--Joseph McCarthy.     

To quote StephenAmbrose (Nixon, Volume I, 1987, page, 129)

 "...both Voorhis and (Senator) Robert LaFollette, Jr had become anathema to the Communist Party, because they  had denounced Russian aggression in Eastern Europe. But the truth mattered not one bit to either Joe McCarthy or Nixon."  

This  was 1946 and FDR was dead and the war was over and the GOP was desperate and the country was used to stories of spies and cloak and dagger espionage generated by radio shows and Hollywood films. If the Nazis wren't a threat anymore, go to the next best thing.  A new villiany must  be found. And it wasn't like Russia's interests in Eastern Europe were exactly in accord with the other former Allies.  

  By the time Voorhis got back to his district, he was under attack from every right-of-center newspaper in Orange County and Pasadena with ads placed by the Nixon campaign and the Committee of 100.  He also performed poorly in four debates against the young challenger.  Nixon was a formidible debater and kept Voorhis on the defensive with the outlandish CIO endorsement claim.  Voorhis responded with long ponderous appeals; Nixon just shot back with more headline grabbing attacks--"The Los Angeles Times", the paper run by arch-conservative, anti-union Owen Chandler, endorsed Nixon and no doubt kept the headlines a'grabbing.   Nixon won the election and continued his tactics for most of his career, first getting an important seat on the House Un-American Activities Committee.  He can be glimpsed below briefly near the beginning of a documentary on the HUAC witchhunts that started in Hollywood in October, 1947.  

One can't help wondering if the history of the USA would have been different if Nixon's earliest opponent had taken him as a serious contender.  Nixon did get his comeuppance with the Watergate imbloglio--but not after almost thirty years as a major force on the national and world stage.