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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes Erwin Chemerinsky, The Case Against The Supreme Court
Thanks for chatting today!
I like all these ideas. But I wonder why my favorite SCOTUS reform is omitted from your list: packing the Court. Why couldn’t a landslide-elected president (we might actually have one in 2016) with a complacent and newly-elected Senate and House of the same party, simply add eight Justices to the Court? Were it in my hands, I’d name the bill after Rehnquist and Roberts, who have both complained mightily about their Associates’ workloads. Just load up the Court with liberals (and maybe a moderate or two) and get them all confirmed, as Job One in the new administration.
Since the Constitution sets no specific number of Justices, this seems to me to be the easiest brute-force reform that’s possible under our current, practically-gridlocked, no-Amendments-possible political system.
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
Thanks to all for a wonderful Salon. This was lots of fun!
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
Okay, we’re at the end here, so I’ll tell my Rehnquist Choice story. It was college night at Langley High, and my pals and I were rotating through admissions officers every fifteen minutes, like speed dating for the rest of your life. As I recall, we were at Amherst when the principal came into the library and called Jim Rehnquist out of the room. He returned, beaming, to say, “Guys, the president is gonna name my dad to the Supreme Court!” Several of us had spent hours locked up in RFK the previous month, due to Rehnquist’s recommendation for dealing with the demonstrators in DC — and we said, with one voice, “But, Jim — your dad’s not SMART enough to be on the Supreme Court.”
Little did we know how many years that chorus would come to haunt us all, and America.
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
Mr Dean,would you have conducted Ronald Reagan’s Iran/Contra defense any differently than it was done (pardons aside, I suppose)?
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
As did Nixon.
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
It is not only a compelling story, it was instructive later on when Iran held American hostages during a presidential election.
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
I recall hearing a tape recently (I think Rachel Maddow played it, quite obsessively) of Nixon talking with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, maybe Kissinger as well, about how “nice girls don’t swear.” That struck me as a particularly limited viewpoint of women, and one that might have ended with Nixon. I don’t think Gerald Ford became President with such illusions.
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
I think there’s a lot of “courtesy holdover” in DC, and may have been more back then. I recall being so surprised long after Rummy had left Bush’s Pentagon to read he still had an office there, which he went into daily. Perhaps Felt had a similar arrangement in 1973, and picked up the info he needed to pass along?
Still and all, it was a surprise to me too.
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
Recall too, Peter, that Bob Woodward was a White House naval attache not long before the tale we’re telling.
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
Ehrlichman’s and Haldeman’s moral compasses have always seemed entirely inscrutable, if not downright absent, in this tale.
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
Pat, jail? LOL
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
One very permanent lesson about Watergate, for me personally, was how instructive it was about the Presidential Bubble: how those close to Nixon were able to maintain their own deniability, even to themselves, up until the very end. While those of us far outside (I was in McLean VA, one week after a high school graduation marred by Nixon White House intervention) knew immediately something was wrong: I recall very clearly picking up the Washington Post with my breakfast that morning — and announcing, perhaps precociously, that these burglars were doing Nixon’s work and would bring him low. I doubt very much anyone in the White House had that insight that morning, but I doubt my viewpoint was unique outside the Beltway.
When Howard Baker asked “what did the president know and when did he know it?” official Washington hung on every answer, but I think a lot of Americans knew full well.
The “cancer on the Presidency” was this knowledge, wasn’t it? And didn’t that inform future presidencies, faced with felonious staff action? Didn’t Ronald Reagan’s team learn a tremendous amount about what went wrong with Watergate, enabling St Ronnie to say “in my heart I know we didn’t trade arms for hostages?”
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
(To be fair to the media, though, Professional Book Tourists tend to feed the hype when presenting their chats together in the form of 18.5 minute alternating Q&A sessions, as I understand you and Mr Perlstein did not so long ago this summer….)
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
Good evening again Mr Dean and hello Mr Robenalt. Thanks so much for chatting today; I’ve not read the book yet but looking forward to returning home to find it waiting for me.
I’m fascinated to learn that attorneys’ ethics classes are informed by John Dean’s Watergate experience: it’s amazing to think lawyers who weren’t even born when the Nixon White House came crashing down can learn about the core of its ethical dilemma from a primary source.
I’m interested to know how you’d respond to a young lawyer who posed this question in your ethics class: should Richard Nixon have followed the advice of Pat Buchanan (then a young up-and-coming White House aide as well) and burned all the tapes ‘on the White House lawn’ before they all became subpoenaed, protected evidence?
Would that have saved the Nixon Presidency? Would it have saved the Republic? What lessons would we be teaching young attorneys about ethics if Buchanan had had his way?
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
Great chat today! Thanks to all involved in today’s wonderful Book Salon. Looking forward to seeing you at Powell’s on September 7th, Rick!
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
I also wanted to commend you on your choice of title: when I first heard of it, knowing the Nixon and Reagan quote-canon myself pretty well, I wondered whence it came. Using a Khrushchev quote as the title of a book about Nixon and Reagan: sheer brilliance.
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
I loved how you ended the book, with the NYT’s reference to his career-ending bid to beat Ford, universally thought to be too old for the presidency in the future.
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
Rick, can you bring us current on Don’t-Call-Me-Shirley, in the last few minutes here today? Where does Craig’s poorly documented ‘plagiarism’ lawsuit stand now? Will your publisher back you up? (Maybe your lawyers have said not to talk about it, in which case apologies….)
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
Your description of the POW groups rang very true. When we moved to NoVa, my mom befriended the lady in the house behind ours in our new subdivision. Her brother was a POW, and their family was riven, as many were then: she opposed Nixon’s war, and her sister-in-law supported the president. That’s when my family first became aware that Team Nixon played for keeps: lots of noise on their phone line, black sedans, monitoring their mail.
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Teddy Partridge commented on the blog post FDL Book Salon Welcomes Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
Ford led the effort to impeach Justice Douglas, which almost got traction in the House.
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