Tag: Richard Nixon

Khachigian’s Memoirs: How a Farmer’s Son Became Speechwriter for Nixon and Reagan

Ken Khachigian, the son of a farmer in Visalia, California, just published the captivating memoirs of his years in the White House as a speechwriter to two prominent U.S. Presidents, Nixon and Reagan. Titled, “Behind Closed Doors: In the Room with Reagan and Nixon,” the book’s cover page describes Khachigian as a “speechwriter, confidant and strategist to political legends.”

Khachigian’s book has attracted keen attention. The Wall Street Journal published a very positive review by Tevi Troy. Quin Hillyer, a popular Washington columnist, wrote two laudatory reviews in the Washington Examiner. Khachigian’s memoirs was ranked #2 in pre-sales of all the titles for the publisher’s new releases in mid-summer. The publisher is now planning a second printing.

Khachigian grew up in a struggling farmer’s family deprived of a shower and other basic necessities to become one of the most influential men in the White House. He started his involvement in politics as a volunteer for the Nixon presidential campaign. After the election, he became Nixon’s speechwriter. He then joined the Reagan administration as the president’s chief speechwriter. He also served as senior advisor and principal strategist for California Governor George Deukmejian in the 1982 and 1986 elections.

In an interview with the Armenian Mirror-Spectator, Khachigian related a memorable episode that happened while he was working for Nixon, when his father passed away in 1975. The President wanted to know what he could do to honor the memory of Khachigian’s father. Since his father was from the Armenian village of Chomaklou in Turkey, Khachigian made the unusual request of asking Pres. Nixon to donate to the Chomaklou Compatriotic Society. Nixon obliged by writing a personal check for $500 to the Armenian society.

Among the hundreds of texts Khachigian wrote for the two presidents, I must isolate two important documents he penned. Up until 1981, no U.S. President had described the Armenian Genocide as genocide. On April 22, 1981, Reagan issued a presidential proclamation in which he mentioned the Armenian Genocide. The text was written by Khachigian. This was 40 years before Pres. Biden finally issued a statement in 2021 officially recognizing the Armenian Genocide.

While Turkish denialists try to dismiss Pres. Reagan’s 1981 proclamation by stating that it was written by the President’s Armenian speechwriter, Khachigian counters the Turkish accusation by saying that all Presidential Proclamations carry the President’s signature; therefore, the 1981 Proclamation is an official statement by the President of the United States.

In his interview with the Mirror, Khachigian explained that since he was aware of the controversy regarding the mention of the Armenian Genocide by the White House, he checked with the Deputy National Security Advisor, Bud Nance, who said that he saw no problem with the reference. “Well that’s a fact, isn’t it?” Nance asked. Khachigian replied, “as far as I am concerned it is a fact.” Nance then said, “well, it is okay with me.”

Khachigian then decided to make sure that there will be no problems with the reference to the Armenian Genocide in the Proclamation, so he checked with Richard Allen, the White House National Security Advisor. “I want to show this to you. I’d shown it to Bud Nance. Here, please read this proclamation,” Khachigian told Allen who replied: “well, that is an historic fact.” Khachigian told him, “well, yes it is.” Allen then said, “well, as long as it is an historic fact, there is no reason why it shouldn’t be in the proclamation.”

Khachigian related another important Armenian-related episode in his book. He wrote that an Armenian friend, Jim Renjilian, invited Khachigian to accompany him to the Arlington Cemetery for Armenian Genocide Day Remembrance on April 24, 1985. During the commemorative program, Khachigian recalled the stories he had heard as a young boy about the tragic experiences of his family during the Armenian Genocide. His father was a survivor of that Genocide which Khachigian described as “the coerced exile from their homes when the Turks murdered the [Armenian] population of Anatolia by arms, starvation, pestilence, and forced march.”

Khachigian then quoted from Aris Kalfaian’s book about Chomaklou, describing the suffering and hellish experiences of the deported Armenians. Khachigian disclosed that, as a result, his father “at age sixteen, lost his mother, his brother, and sister.”

Khachigian, grief-stricken, described his emotions at the Arlington Cemetery: “The music and prayers in Arlington jolted me with reminders of my heritage and brought back those plaintive memories from my childhood. In 1915, there was a Bergen-Belsen in the Syrian desert that history had forgotten, and the pain and suffering endured by the victims and the survivors of the Armenian Genocide suddenly made my mission very real during our quiet ride back to the White House.”

Khachigian described how the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide at the Arlington Cemetery inspired him to write what many have described as Reagan’s greatest speech which he delivered days later during his visit to the former concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany.

Khachigian concluded, “the clattering of the keys on the IBM typewriter began shouting through me the story I absorbed that morning and the one the president — and I — needed to tell.”

August 30, 2024
The Grievous Return of Henry Kissinger – An Analysis

by Dr. Lawrence Davidson

The gods protect us, Henry Kissinger is back!

Henry Kissinger was President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State. He also held the latter position under President Gerald Ford. While it would be unfair to characterize him as someone who never gave a piece of good advice (he did encourage Nixon to engage in Detente with the Soviet Union), his record weighs heavily on the side of unwise counsel. As we will see he is back in exactly that role, plying bad advice that, in this case, could further erode America’s already messed up intelligence agencies.

Kissinger was originally an academic. His doctoral dissertation was on the diplomacy of two early 19^th century statesmen, Britain’s Viscount Robert Castlereagh and Austria’s Prince Klemens von Metternich. These men were major players at the great Congress of Vienna that took place after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. At that meeting Metternich argued for returning Europe to its pre French Revolution political status. Pursuing that impossible end, he backed repressive policies and regimes. One gets the impression that the history of Kissinger’s public service was, at least in part, an effort to achieve the stature of a Metternich. Toward this end Kissinger would pursue “realpolitik” which, more often than not in its American manifestation, entailed the backing of repressive policies and regimes.

Here are some of the things Kissinger espoused: the bombing of North Vietnam in order to achieve “peace with honor;” support for the murderous, Fascist regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and the equally bloody military dictatorship in Argentina; acquiescence in the annexation of East Timor by the Indonesian dictator Suharto, which was followed by genocidal massacres; acquiescence in the Serb and Croat wars against the Bosnian Muslims; support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and last but certainly not least, active lobbying for the admittance into the U.S. of the ailing Shah of Iran (yet another American supported dictator) which led immediately to the hostage taking of U.S. diplomats in 1979 and the continuing animosity and tension between America and Iran. I saved this piece of bad judgment till last because it of a piece with Kissinger’s latest excursion into playing the great statesman by pushing folly.

So what would Dr. Kissinger have us do now? Well, according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Kissinger has sent a letter to President Obama “urging him to commute the prison term of Jonathan Pollard, who is serving life term for spying for Israel.” Kissinger claims that he has consulted with others such as former Defense Secretary Weinberger, former Secretary of State George Schultz and former CIA Director Woolsey (all of whom are supporters of Israel) and found their “unanimous support for clemency compelling.” Kissinger’s letter follows on a lobbying effort by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has made an official request to Obama for the same granting of clemency. Here is what Netanyahu had to say, “Both Mr. Pollard and the Government of Israel have repeatedly expressed remorse for these actions [of spying], and Israel will continue to abide by its commitment that such wrongful actions will never be repeated.” There is something almost childish in this approach. Caught with Israel’s hand in the cookie jar, the spies and their handlers say ‘Oh I’m sorry. If you commute the punishment we promise to be good from now on.’ Actually, in the world of espionage, such promises aren’t worth the paper they are written on. Thus, in 2004 the FBI caught another government employee,, spying for Israel and using the Zionist American lobby AIPAC as the conduit through which to pass the stolen information. So much for promises of future good behavior.

What Kissinger and the rest Pollard’s supporters seem not to find compelling, or even noteworthy, is the fact that ever since the 1987 trial that sent Pollard away for life, the career officers in the American intelligence services have quietly threatened mass resignation if this Zionist spy went free. Keep in mind that ever since George W. Bush and his neo-conservatives wrecked havoc with the CIA in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, the one Kissinger so obligingly supported, the intelligence agencies of this country have found their morale at the sub-basement level. If Obama commutes Pollard’s sentence it will be yet another blow to their professional well-being.

But what does Dr. Kissinger care about a bunch of government employees? In his realpolitik version of reality neither government servants nor ordinary citizens are worth much. Here are a couple of Kissinger quotes to show what I mean. Having helped condemn the Chilean people to 16 years under the murderous rule of Ernesto Pinochet, Kissinger rationalized the decision this way, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” And, as to the career analysts in the various intelligence agencies, most of whom really are experts in the countries they study, Kissinger just dismisses that expertise as inconsequential. “Most foreign policies that history has marked highly,” he tells us, “have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.” Well, that is all the “experts” except Dr. Kissinger.

The real Henry Kissinger, who implausably received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, borders on being a war criminal. That should tell us what his advice is really worth. President Obama would be a fool to listen to a man whose blood stained career should have long ago come to an ignoble end.

www.tothepointanalyses.com, 9 March 2011

March 13, 2011
New Address, Same Politician

Op-Ed Contributor

By ROGER MORRIS

Published: April 25, 2009

Ellijay, Ga.

Illustration by J. Abbott Miller; Photographs courtesty of the Library of Congress

“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

April 26, 2009
Barack Obama Is No Jimmy Carter. He’s Richard Nixon.

THE NEW REALISM

By Michael Freedman | NEWSWEEK

Published Apr 25, 2009
From the magazine issue dated May 4, 2009

Republicans have been trying to link Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter ever since he started his presidential campaign, and they’re still at it. After Obama recently shook hands with Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, GOP ideologue Newt Gingrich said the president looked just like Carter—showing the kind of “weakness” that keeps the “aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators” licking their chops.

But Obama is no Carter. Carter made human rights the cornerstone of his foreign policy, while the Obama team has put that issue on the back burner. In fact, Obama sounds more like another 1970s president: Richard Nixon. Both men inherited the White House from swaggering Texans, whose overriding sense of mission fueled disastrous wars that tarnished America’s image. Obama is a staunch realist, like Nixon, eschewing fuzzy democracy-building and focusing on advancing national interests. “Obama is cutting back on the idea that we’re going to have Jeffersonian democracy in Pakistan or anywhere else,” says Robert Dallek, author of the 2007 book, “Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power.”

Nixon met the enemy (Mao) to advance U.S. interests, and now Obama is reaching out to rivals like Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the same reason. “The willingness to engage in dialogue with Iran is very compatible with the approach Nixon would have conducted,” says Henry Kissinger, the architect of Nixon’s foreign policy. “But we’ll have to see how it plays out.” Hillary Clinton has assured Beijing that human rights won’t derail talks on pressing issues like the economic crisis, another sign of Nixonian hard-headedness. And echoing Nixon’s pursuit of détente, Obama has engaged Russia, using a mutual interest in containing nuclear proliferation as a stepping stone to discuss other matters, rather than pressing Moscow on democracy at home, or needlessly provoking it on issues like missile defense and NATO expansion, which have little near-term chance of coming to fruition and do little to promote U.S. security. Thomas Graham, a Kissinger associate who oversaw Russia policy at the National Security Council during much of the younger Bush’s second term, says this approach by Obama, a Democrat, resembles a Republican foreign-policy tradition that dates back to the elder George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, and then even further to Nixon and Kissinger.

It’s hard to know if such tactics will work, of course. But Obama has made clear he understands America’s limitations and its strengths, revealing a penchant for Nixonian pragmatism—not Carter-inspired weakness.

© 2009

Source: Newsweek, Apr 25, 2009

April 26, 2009