This President's Day

Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Trump — I knew them all.

Today is President's Day—a Federal holiday. This was originally celebrated as the birthday of our first President, George Washington. In 1968, it was proposed that Washington’s Birthday be renamed Presidents’ Day to honor the birthdays of both Washington (February 22) and Abraham Lincoln (February 12). Congress initially rejected this name change. After the new Federal law went into effect in 1971, Presidents’ Day became the commonly accepted name, due in part to retailers’ use of that name to promote sales and the holiday’s proximity to Lincoln’s birthday.

It is with some sadness that I note that on this day, according to multiple public reports, President Jimmy Carter, who survived more years than any President, lies near death in a Georgia hospice. Although he was not a great President, Carter is a good man and true Christian who, like Richard Nixon, eschewed any money-making opportunities in his former presidential years. The same cannot be said for his contemporaries. To his credit, after the revelations of the Church Committee regarding the abuses by the CIA, Carter cleaned house at the agency with the appointment of Admiral Stansfield Turner.

On this day, I also give thanks for the fact that Hillary Clinton is not celebrated on the list of Presidents. If Donald J. Trump did nothing else for his country (in addition to building the most robust economy in our history, rebuilding our military strength, recalibrating our international trade deals to be more beneficial to the United States, appointing scores of conservatives to our Judiciary, reforming our criminal justice system, withdrawing our troops from the endless foreign wars in the Middle East without causing the collapse of our allies while starting no new wars), he kept this epically corrupt, short-tempered, foul-mouthed, entitled, kleptocrat from the White House. 

While I have written 'The Clinton's War on Women', a book harshly critical of President Bill Clinton and his wife, I respect the fact that President Clinton put partisan considerations aside and reached out to former President Richard Nixon in his post-presidential years to seek his sage foreign policy advice regarding U.S. relationships with both Russia and China. I also appreciate the warm words I exchanged with President Clinton regarding President Nixon when we met in the receiving line at President Nixon's funeral in 1994. President Clinton's eulogy at Nixon's funeral is well worth reading.

This President's Day, I also reflect on my relationship with President Richard Nixon. I also lament that Nixon's greatest accomplishments such as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreement he reached with the Soviets, the end of the war in Vietnam, the end of the military draft, the desegregation of the public schools, the saving of Israel from annihilation in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and, of course, his opening to China, are entirely lost in the ashes of Watergate. 

Those today who blame Nixon for the rise of Communist China as a world power are uninformed. Nixon  decided to recognize the Chinese in a successful gambit to play them off against the Soviets in order to secure the SALT agreement. At the time, China was a backwards, impoverished, agrarian society. There was no way to foresee that the Bushes would extend Most Favored Nation Trading status to the Chinese or that the Clintons would actually sell our military secrets to them for campaign contributions — the two actions which led directly to them being the threatening superpower they are today.

Those who criticize Nixon for taking the nation off of the Gold standard and for imposing wage and price controls are accurate in their criticism. I have been critical of both presidential actions in the two books I have written on our 37th President. How ironic, however, that it was Treasury Secretary John Connally who talked Nixon into both disastrous actions over the objection of Nixon's free market economic advisors such as Herb Stein and Paul McCracken, who both served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to President Nixon. 

Having worked for President Nixon, I had long harbored an overly partisan and distorted view of President John F. Kennedy. After writing my book on the Kennedy assassination, 'The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ,' in which I accurately fingered Vice President Lyndon Johnson as the chief suspect in Kennedy's murder, I was forced to revise my view of President Kennedy. In retrospect, I now recognize that Kennedy - much like Trump - was a disrupter, and although he was a darling of the media, he posed a deep threat to what President Dwight Eisenhower called the "military industrial complex" or what today we would refer to as the "Deep State." 

Although an ardent anti-Communist, Kennedy recognized the folly of war with Soviet Russia to the consternation of both the Pentagon and the CIA. Kennedy also enacted deep tax cuts later emulated by President Reagan, and at the time he was murdered, was insisting on a silver backed dollar, drawing the ire of the U.S. and International banking community. Kennedy's failure to fulfill his promises regarding civil rights during the three years of his presidency were due largely to the relentless advice of his Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who insisted that the "Old Bulls" in the U.S. Senate, Southerners  

who chaired all of the key committees would kill Kennedy's domestic programs if he moved forward on civil rights. 

In fact LBJ, a lifelong segregationist who as Senate Majority Leader had killed every significant piece of civil rights legislation through the 1950's and who watered down the 1958 Civil Rights Act, was preserving this historic role for himself. LBJ also knew that pushing and signing landmark civil rights legislation would give him greater license with liberals within his own party to go deeper into Vietnam. The best account of President Kennedy's failure to take action on civil rights can be found here.

I also had the privilege of working for one of our greatest Presidents, Ronald Reagan, in 1976, 1980 and 1984. Having spent substantial time with Reagan prior to his election in 1980, I can accurately say that he was one of the few political figures I worked with who was exactly the same in private as he was in public; easy-going, genial, optimistic, even-tempered, thoughtful, and slow to anger. He was also deeply principled and because he came from the world of acting, extremely focused on his performance as both candidate and President- understanding the need to inspire his supporters and the Nation through his confidence and leadership. Asked near the end of his presidency whether his background as an actor rather than a professional politician had hindered his ability to be an effective President, he said, "I don't know how a guy who wasn't an actor could ever do this job." Reagan, of course, restored America's confidence, rebuilt our economy, brought back our military strength which had been allowed to atrophy under Carter, and restored the respect of our allies and the fear of our adversaries.

I am among the first people in the country to urge Donald Trump to seriously pursue a candidacy for the presidency as far back as 1988. I recognized in Trump the strength, independence, and stature to be not only a great presidential candidate but a truly historic President. No President, indeed no human being, is perfect — and Trump, like all Presidents, has his flaws. The difference is the media's role in concealing the flaws of his predecessors and exaggerating Trump's imperfections. In fact, no other Republican could have defeated the Clinton machine in 2016 and no other President could have achieved the remarkable economic, military, criminal justice, and foreign policy triumphs of his presidency.

I celebrate all of our Presidents on this historic day of remembrance.

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