Dick Nixon Has Risen From the Grave

When will we be finally on our own?

Everywhere you look, Richard Nixon is there.

Newly pried-free government documents reveal that back in September 1972 President Nixon formed a terrorism study group that included a young Rudolph Giuliani. Years earlier than anyone thought, Nixon was working the anti-terror angle and feared what an anti-terror conflict might mean.

Nixon pressed then-Secretary of State William Rogers for the ability "to act quickly and effectively in the event that, despite all efforts at prevention, an act of terrorism occurs involving the United States, either at home or abroad."

Even the concept of a nuclear-spiked dirty bomb was discussed, as well as the hijacking of commercial aircraft as negotiation chits for Middle Eastern conflicts, or for the purpose of mass murder. Clearly, the concept of 9/11 did not surprise America's permanent security vanguard; it was the execution of such a plot that everyone had thought impossible.

The terror possibilities of 30 years ago also swirl around the new Sean Penn flick The Assassination of Richard Nixon. The film builds on the real-life obsessions of one Sam Byck, a man who mailed his taped rantings to conductor Leonard Bernstein (among others) and plotted to hijack a plane and fly it into the Nixon White House. The currency of that idea is fairly plain.

And from Ohio comes word of the death of a principal character in the Watergate drama, former Nixon secretary Rose Mary Woods, age 87. Woods' continued devotion to Nixon, no matter what, was taken by many Watergate observers to be the personification of naivety manipulated to secret, Nixonian ends.

In 1973, during the days Congress found out about the existence of the White House taping system and demanded the tapes from the president, Rose Woods took care to send upbeat mail to Nixon while he was in the hospital with pneumonia. Yet just a few months later Woods found herself grilled in public for days by Watergate investigators after a mysterious 18-minute gap in the tapes was discovered. The White House, and by extension Nixon, blamed Woods. Her own attorney blamed the White House and Al Haig blamed "some sinister force."

Former Nixon chief of staff H.R. Haldeman later blamed Nixon, but Rose Mary Woods never did.

Even the passing of Johnny Carson has a Nixonian element. The two men seem forever linked. Carson's merciless nightly riffing on Watergate, Bebe Rebozo, and Spiro Agnew amplified and reflected the public's unease with those in power. Might Nixon have survived if Johnny had played Watergate soft? Who knows, but it is fair to wonder if Carson could have sustained his position as witty truth-teller-in-chief for almost two more decades without the evil Nixon doppelganger lurking just off-stage.

All this could be shrugged off as so much coincidence except for the nagging feeling that Nixon will always be with us, that his deep, troubled intellect, not to mention his passion to fight for years to keep all his records secret, will keep tossing off revelations for some time. Certainly the tendency of critics of George W. Bush to identify Bush with Nixon will keep the Nixon years hot for a little while longer.

However, there are limits to the usefulness of this comparison. Bush has not simply resurrected secretive neocon tactics from their Nixon-era disgraces to serve a new Dark Lord. The truth is more complicated than that. Nixon, don't forget, was critical of Ronald Reagan's tough approach toward the Soviet Union. His 1983 book Real Peace urged a "deal" with the Soviets, and some neocons, like his old speechwriter Bill Safire, went into orbit over the suggestion. In sum, Bush's policies are less Nixon III and more a synthesis of both Nixon-era and Reagan-era will to dominate all foes.

But it is hard to ignore that the Pentagon's newly revealed Strategic Support Branch exists primarily to route around the operational restrictions and oversight requirements imposed on the CIA in the wake of the Church Committee hearings. Those hearings were triggered by, of course, Nixon's use of the CIA in a novel and extra-legal fashion, both domestically and abroad.

There is also the obvious parallel of second-term presidents embroiled in limited shooting wars as part of a much larger campaign against a global threat. Consciously or not, the Bush team seems well aware of the dangers of becoming almost totally obsessed with foreign policy and letting domestic policy run on auto-pilot. In Nixon's case auto-pilot was wage and price controls, first on then off in that fateful summer of '73.

Bush's intention to remake Social Security cannot be completed on auto-pilot and perhaps cannot be done at all, but what chance it has turns on an engaged, wheeling and dealing chief executive, the exact opposite of the carpet-pounding caricature of the Nixon Bunker. This finally gets us to the big question, the reason Nixon looms over all second-termers: Will Bush screw up? Will he also find his way into an Iran-Contra confusion? A Monicagate? (No on the latter, perhaps just Iran proper on the former.)

Nixon himself once declared That second terms are usually "disastrous." Let's hope he stays dead wrong on this one.