Channeling Nixon and the Continuing Reality Show Presidency

by Rev. Peter E. Bauer

During the summer of my sophomore year in college, I painted the exterior of our family home. It was the summer of 1973 and the Watergate hearings were on television. The front door of our house was open and I was painting the mantel entrance. Through the glass exterior door, I could hear the television coverage of the Watergate hearings. What a spectacle: You had Sam Ervin, the old grandfatherly white-haired North Carolina country attorney; you also had Howard Baker from Tennessee; and you had John Dean, among others. I’ll never forget Sam Ervin asking a question of one of the witnesses and saying in his drawl, referencing then FBI Director L. Patrick Gray that he was left “twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.”

Nixon was a curious creature. On the one hand, he read and he adopted policies like block grants and revenue sharing. He wanted to blaze a new trail in foreign policy with his China diplomacy. Then, again, on the other hand, he was capable of displaying a mean-spirited persona, full of paranoia. He expressed hatred for Social Workers and of course, wanted to tape all of his conversations with visitors in his Oval Office. He had his Vice-President Spiro Agnew make reference to “pointy-headed intellectuals and impudent snobs.” Every year, a new batch of excerpts of the infamous “Nixon” tapes is released. It is the gift that keeps on giving.

Now, 40-plus years later, we have the current administration with the present press secretary lecturing a reporter and commanding her to “stop shaking her head.” All of this rhetoric regarding so-called “fake” news appears to be some kind of clever decoy to take the scent of reporters off of stories that would further erode the integrity of the current leadership.

Gee, haven’t we seen this movie before?! Nixon said famously, “When the President does it, it isn’t illegal.”

Wow, who could have known and then we got an echo of this during the transition period when the current occupant of the Oval office was heard to say: “I just found out that there is no conflict of interest when you are President!”

Hmmm, that’s interesting because one of the lessons of the Nixon era and the Watergate hearings was that “No one is above the law.”

As Bob Dylan would remark: “But even the President of the United States must have to stand naked.” (From “It’s all right, Ma, I’m only bleeding.)

I wonder if the present administration doesn’t understand the irony of this situation. In the past few months, the country has witnessed more political theatre than anyone could have concocted forty years ago. G. Gordon Liddy and the plumbers are farm team players compared to the cast of characters we see prominent now in the White House. We now have an Alternative News Editor as message crafter, a real estate developer who is now an international policy emissary and a fashion designer, special counselor to the Commander In Chief, wanting to market her brand to new foreign and exotic markets. Whoever thought that this current show of shows would make the Real Housewives of Atlanta look like Masterpiece Theatre?

I’m not looking forward to what may happen when this current administration faces its first real crisis. What would happen if North Korea was successful to launch a missile that would hit either Hawaii or the West Coast, or even a more immediate target like Japan (i.e., Tokyo or Osaka)?

The current non-stop show doesn’t give a lot of confidence to anyone. Maybe it’s time to bring back Henry Kissinger. He was the one who guided the then President when times were perilous. He was also a realist, pragmatist, the one who was known for “shuttle diplomacy,” a far cry from the current chief diplomat who doesn’t have an adequate staff, who orders other diplomats to not speak to him or even look him in the eye, and who finally resorts to staying at a German sanitarium during the recent G-20 conference because there was no room for him “in the inn,” regarding the local hotels.

Clinical psychologist Cloé Madanes once said that “Family therapy is screwball comedy in need of a plot twist.”

I would also argue that the current state of American governance is a screwball comedy that it in need of a rewrite.

I hope the writers and the director can get it right.

May it be so.