David S. Broder, 81, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post who reported on every presidential campaign since the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race, died Wednesday in Arlington of complications from diabetes. Broder was informally referred to…
A look at the opera “Nixon in China” by Max Frankel, a former executive editor of The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Nixon’s trip to China.
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A Witness Sees History Restaged and Rewritten
Sex and The City star Cynthia Nixon has a new bundle of joy. Her fianc
Though it had its premiere in 1987, “Nixon in China” may have come to the Metropolitan Opera at just the right time.
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Music Review: President and Opera, On Unexpected Stages
Largely because of his advocacy of psychedelic drugs, Tim Leary became a high-profile political prisoner whom Nixon called “the most dangerous man in America” (the same label Nixon used to describe Daniel Ellsberg). Leary was sentenced to ten years in prison for possession of .0025 grams of cannabis. read more
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Timothy Leary on the Culture of Secrecy
Michael Gerson’s column misinterpreted my intentions and my convictions.
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Putting the Nixon tape in context
The life of a man named Gerry Gitell is an eloquent response to Nixon’s slur against the Jews (Nixon caught himself on tape saying that he “didn’t notice many Jewish names coming back from Vietnam…”), just as the heroism of Jack Jacobs is an eloquent response to Nixon’s slur. Gerry Gitell, the father of a friend of mine named Seth Gitell, died last month in Nevada at the age of 69. He served as a captain of the Green Berets; he lived the mission of the Green Berets even after he arrived home from Vietnam, and even as he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Gerry Gitell is best-known in Special Forces circles not for his work as a combat adviser in Vietnam, but as the man who, in essence, discovered Sgt. Barry Sadler’s song, “The Ballad of the Green Beret.” The story is fascinating : Before he left Fort Bragg, N.C., for Vietnam with the 5th Special Forces Group in 1965, he befriended Sadler, who wrote the ballad with author Robin Moore. As a public information officer, Gerry Gitell was the one who saw the song’s promotional value at a time when the anti-war movement was budding. He obtained recording equipment from the Special Warfare Center and persuaded their commander, Brig. Gen. William Yarborough to support them in recording and selling the song. For his effort, he received 25 percent of the royalties from the hit that topped the charts for five weeks, surpassing “We Can Work It Out” by the Beatles and “Paint it Black” by the Rolling Stones. Veteran Special Forces officer Sully de Fontaine, who was among the Green Berets at the funeral, described Gitell as “a soldier’s soldier.” Here is a video created by the Las Vegas Review-Journal about his life and death. I asked Seth by e-mail what it meant to his father to be a Jewish soldier in Vietnam. Here is what he wrote back: After my father moved to Las Vegas in 2000, he ultimately became active in the Special Forces Association, Chapter 51, the local branch of the national alumni group. The group sent a contingent of members to serve as an honor guard at his funeral at the Southern Nevada Veterans Cemetery and to lead the gathering in the singing of “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” They also served as many of the pallbearers, who accompanied the coffin to the hearse, which took him to his final resting spot. While we waited, the oldest of them — a veteran of the anti-Nazi partisans in Belgium, the Israeli Army in the War of Independence and Vietnam — motioned to the coffin, and then to two of his comrades and said “four Jewish boys.” It was a point never lost on my father that while often forgotten, Jewish soldiers fought and died in Vietnam just as they had in World War II and other conflicts.
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An Eloquent Response to Nixon’s Slur, Part Two
Christopher Hitchens, among others, has been waiting to hear the thoughts of the Anti-Defamation League on the matter of Henry Kissinger’s craven and obscene comments to his President, the craven and obscene Richard Nixon. This is what Kissinger had to say about the crisis provoked by the suppression of Jews by the Soviet Union: “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy, And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” Hitchens : It’s hard to know how to classify this observation in the taxonomy of obscenity. Should it be counted as tactical Holocaust pre-denial? That would be too mild. It’s actually a bit more like advance permission for another Holocaust. Which is why I wonder how long the official spokesmen of American Jewry are going to keep so quiet. Nothing remotely as revolting as this was ever uttered by Jesse Jackson or even Mel Gibson, to name only two famous targets of the wrath of the Anti-Defamation League. Where is the outrage? Is Kissinger–normally beseeched for comments on subjects about which he knows little or nothing–going to be able to sit out requests from the media that he clarify this statement? Does he get to keep his op-ed perch in reputable newspapers with nothing said? Will the publishers of his mendacious and purloined memoirs continue to give him expensive lunches as if nothing has happened?” Here now, recently over the transom, a press release from the Anti-Defamation League: ADL: KISSINGER REMARKS ON NIXON TAPES REVEAL “DISTURBING FLAWS,” BUT DO NOT CHANGE HIS LEGACY New York, NY, December 13, 2010 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said a 1973 discussion between President Richard M. Nixon and his top foreign policy advisor at the time, Henry Kissinger, released as part of the Nixon Tapes, “shows a disturbing and even callous insensitivity” toward Soviet Jews, “but should not change history’s verdict on the important contributions and ultimate legacy” of Kissinger. The press release goes on to quote Abe Foxman, the ADL director, as saying, “Dr. Kissinger’s contributions to the safety and security of the U.S. and Israel have solidly established his legacy as a champion of democracy and as a committed advocate for preserving the well-being of the Jewish state of Israel. The Nixon Tapes should not change history’s verdict on the important contributions and ultimate legacy of Henry Kissinger.” Foxman’s reaction to Kissinger’s words — among the most vile ever spoken by a Jew about his own people — is surpassingly sad to me. He is a better man than his reaction suggests.
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ADL: Kissinger’s Vile Words Means Nothing
Christopher Hitchens, among others, has been waiting to hear the thoughts of the Anti-Defamation League on the matter of Henry Kissinger’s craven and obscene comments to his President, the craven and obscene Richard Nixon. This is what Kissinger had to say about the crisis provoked by the suppression of Jews by the Soviet Union: “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy, And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” Hitchens : It’s hard to know how to classify this observation in the taxonomy of obscenity. Should it be counted as tactical Holocaust pre-denial? That would be too mild. It’s actually a bit more like advance permission for another Holocaust. Which is why I wonder how long the official spokesmen of American Jewry are going to keep so quiet. Nothing remotely as revolting as this was ever uttered by Jesse Jackson or even Mel Gibson, to name only two famous targets of the wrath of the Anti-Defamation League. Where is the outrage? Is Kissinger–normally beseeched for comments on subjects about which he knows little or nothing–going to be able to sit out requests from the media that he clarify this statement? Does he get to keep his op-ed perch in reputable newspapers with nothing said? Will the publishers of his mendacious and purloined memoirs continue to give him expensive lunches as if nothing has happened?” Here now, recently over the transom, a press release from the Anti-Defamation League: ADL: KISSINGER REMARKS ON NIXON TAPES REVEAL “DISTURBING FLAWS,” BUT DO NOT CHANGE HIS LEGACY New York, NY, December 13, 2010 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said a 1973 discussion between President Richard M. Nixon and his top foreign policy advisor at the time, Henry Kissinger, released as part of the Nixon Tapes, “shows a disturbing and even callous insensitivity” toward Soviet Jews, “but should not change history’s verdict on the important contributions and ultimate legacy” of Kissinger. The press release goes on to quote Abe Foxman, the ADL director, as saying, “Dr. Kissinger’s contributions to the safety and security of the U.S. and Israel have solidly established his legacy as a champion of democracy and as a committed advocate for preserving the well-being of the Jewish state of Israel. The Nixon Tapes should not change history’s verdict on the important contributions and ultimate legacy of Henry Kissinger.” Foxman’s reaction to Kissinger’s words — among the most vile ever spoken by a Jew about his own people — is surpassingly sad to me. He is a better man than his reaction suggests. UPDATE : Marty Peretz has a different view (not on the merits of Kissinger’s vile comments, but on Kissinger’s contribution to the safety of the state of Israel: I know something about Kissinger’s maneuvering for the Jewish state and for the Jewish people. I and a few Harvard colleagues were in touch with him, actually met with him during the dread days of the Yom Kippur War when Israel’s very survival was at peril. (Henry Rosovsky, Samuel Huntington, Michael Walzer, Thomas Schelling and I comprised the group.) Dr. K. confided to us how difficult it was to persuade his bigoted boss that a great deal of American arms (and sufficient Lockheed C-130s “Hercules” aircraft to deliver them) were needed and needed instantly. There is no doubt in my mind that Kissinger rescued the third commonwealth with these munitions. Imagine, by the way, if George McGovern had defeated Nixon in the 1972 election. McGovern’s enmity to Israel was and is well-documented. There would have been no military aid and no Israel. So, if Kissinger needed to flatter Nixon in order to convince him, that flattery was also a blessing.
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ADL: Kissinger’s Vile Words Mean Nothing
The Richard Nixon Presidential Library will open a trove of records at the facility and online Thursday, including 265 hours of White House tapes, officials said.
The rain sheeted down; time washed away. I looked down from the rooftop in Saigon where, more than a generation ago, in the wake of the longest war of modern times, I had watched silent, sullen streets awash. The foreigners were gone, at last. Through the mist, like little phantoms, four children ran into view, their arms outstretched. They circled and weaved and dived; and one of them fell down, feigning death. They were bombers. This was not unusual, for there is no place like Vietnam. Within my lifetime, Ho Chi Minh’s nationalists had fought and expelled the French, read more
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Vietnam: The Last Battle
On Jan. 9, 1969, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a memo to President-elect Richard Nixon, on whose White House staff Moynihan was to serve. Moynihan wondered whether the disintegration of “private sub-systems of authority” presaged “the ultimate, destructive working out of the telos of liberal…
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The wisdom of Pat Moynihan
