New Address, Same Politician

Op-Ed Contributor

Published: April 25, 2009

Ellijay, Ga.

“CHARACTER is fate,” Heraclitus told us. The adage is telling for presidencies. And the characters of key appointees — their intellects and professional ethics as well as their personal integrity — also hold a government’s destiny. On both fronts, Richard Nixon’s first 100 days in 1969 were filled with omens, and that history poses its questions for Barack Obama.

Nixon officials foreshadowed both the historic distinction and seamy underside of the presidency. In his scholarship, careful patronage and freedom from convention, the national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, brought insight and bureaucratic skill that would make him the president’s singular partner in statesmanship, most notably their opening to China and détente with the Soviet Union. But no less indicative in his rise was a pettiness that augured the destructive infighting of the administration and the Eurocentric foreign-policy mentality that indulged Nixon’s pursuit of the Vietnam War, his obliviousness to tragedies from Bangladesh to Chile to Indonesia, and the policies in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan that haunt us today.

The men Kissinger eclipsed were largely responsible for their own defeats. Nixon named William P. Rogers secretary of state largely because, as a former attorney general, he was bereft of diplomatic expertise and thus would not rival the White House-dominated foreign policy Nixon planned. Rogers was also a figure of exceptional diffidence, leaving an intellectual-political vacuum that was filled by the worst as well as the best of the Nixon-Kissinger policies.

Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, a congressman from Wisconsin with a history of deferring to the military, had similar effect. His cession of budget and contracting authority to the services had “the military-industrial complex … singing ‘Praise the Laird,’” The Washington Post reported. Meanwhile, policy power grew so concentrated in a secretive White House that the Joint Chiefs of Staff began their own espionage program against Kissinger, the so-called admirals’ spy ring of 1971.

Nixon’s closest aides carried their own portents. The chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and the White House counsel, John Ehrlichman, were college friends and former campaign workers whose lack of political acumen and slavishness to Nixon helped bring about the isolation of the presidency and their own ruin in Watergate. When Nixon eventually gave Ehrlichman oversight of domestic affairs, it deepened the disarray in economic and social policy.

Not least was Spiro Agnew, who rose from Baltimore County executive to vice president in just three years. While the right relished his press-baiting speeches, in inner councils Nixon found him an embarrassment. Asked why he had not replaced Agnew on the 1972 ticket, Nixon replied, that Agnew was his “insurance policy” because “no assassin in his right mind would kill me.” Agnew resigned in October 1973, pleading no contest to charges relating to bribes he took while governor of Maryland.

Other figures who later proved to be pivotal were still obscure in 1969, though their lives, too, were telling: a remarkably ambitious Army colonel and Kissinger aide named Alexander Haig would be Nixon’s last chief of staff. G. Gordon Liddy, a Treasury officer known for right-wing zealotry, would lead the Watergate burglars. And John Dean, who would replace Ehrlichman as White House counsel only five years out of law school, would give testimony in 1973 that would be crucial in bringing down the president.

And while there are obvious differences between the presidencies of 1969 and 2009, history echoes over the new government. Can Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Mr. Obama’s top economic aide, Lawrence Summers, overcome careers entwined with a despoiled corporate system and now chart its cleansing? Can officials who rose over four decades in the conventions of the political-bureaucratic culture — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; the national security advisor, James Jones; and Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan — forge truly new policies and politics? Can such figures transcend what Heraclitus called their very ethos?

President Obama will share at least one fate with Richard Nixon. The verdict on his presidency will lie with the public, and for that, too, the philosopher had a warning: “The way down and the way up are one and the same.”

Roger Morris, a National Security Council staff member under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, is the author of “Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician.”

A version of this article appeared in print on April 26, 2009, on page WK13 of the New York edition

Source: www.nytimes.com, April 25, 2009