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whose libraries enjoyed official govern- ment blessing. But, by the twenty-first century, Nixon’s daughter Julie came to see that the museum couldn’t survive un- less it became a part of the National Ar- chives, with the operating budgets that such membership affords. After a battle with her sister, Tricia, which divided the dwindling band of Nixon loyalists, the Nixon library went legit in 2007.

The library director chosen, academic historian Timothy Naftali, was commit- ted to unpoliticized scholarship. Despite some often-fierce resistance from the Nixon Foundation, as well as from old- guard archivists in Washington used to accommodating the Nixonites, Naftali succeeded in expanding the museum’s public programming and in writing and pushing through the new, historically credible exhibit. Though Naftali had to fight to get the display opened, what was remarkable about its ultimate reception was how little consternation it aroused. Some of the usual suspects carped, but no substantial opposition arose in the press, or from Congress, even under Republi- can control. The Nixon Wars, it seemed, were over—or coming to a close.

C ons e ns us a rou n d Nixon’s guilt, to be sure, is not a new phenomenon. Nixon’s resignation itself had marked a rare point of bipartisan agreement. But, for the next two decades, Nixon waged a vigorous comeback bid, and many people who should have known better began to parrot specious clichés—that Watergate was a third-rate burglary, that

tie publicly doubts Booker would dare to challenge him in 2013.

Booker’s pursuit of universal popu- larity has waylaid his grander ambitions, especially now that the White House probably no longer considers him a team player. But then again, President Obama never was one, either, as congressional Democrats were disappointed to learn. His 2004 convention speech is remem- bered not for its endorsement of John Kerry, or its attacks on President Bush, but rather for its post-partisan rhetoric. Thanks largely to aggressive Republicans, he seems to be thinking differently now, perhaps realizing that rejecting politics is not always the secret to successful gov- erning. In this sense, Obama offers a les- son that Booker might find useful.

John R. Bohrer

John R. Bohrer is writing a book on Robert Kennedy in the 1960s.

Even a year out from the 2013 election, Booker can’t help but muddle his party’s message. In January, Christie sought to shift the blame for his impending veto of a same-sex marriage bill by proposing a referendum. Democrats accused him of playing politics: The governor’s “let the people decide” sanctimony was con- tradicted by his actions in 2010, when he reined in the Republican votes that would have sent the bill to the waiting pen of Corzine. Christie responded by claiming, outrageously, “I think people would have been happy to have a refer- endum on civil rights rather than fight- ing and dying in the streets in the South.” Yet, when asked what the governor was up to, Booker replied: “In politics, unfor- tunately, we default to the most cynical view of what a person is thinking and so I don’t want to ascribe any machinations to the governor. He’s got a lot of difficult things on his desk.” It’s no wonder Chris-

ment schemes (some begun under his predecessor) and finished his first term with impressive drops in gun crime and homicides. Newark’s first murder-free calendar month in over 40 years occurred in 2010. The year ended with Booker get- ting buried in accolades for digging his neighbors out from a snowstorm. Al- though America may have wanted Booker to be its mayor, people in Newark were beginning to see things a bit differently. They had been there in the months be- tween the narrow-lens media events.

The real disappointments began in his second term—Booker had been re- elected after outspending his opponent 20 to 1—when the “Booker Team,” which arrived with him in 2006, lost control of the city council. Then there were crime waves and police layoffs. That November, 167 officers were let go in the largest re- duction since 1978 after Booker’s unsuc- cessful union negotiations. The dispute worsened because of a hole in the bud- get—a hole created by Booker’s failure to pass a bond-selling plan.

It seemed that motivational maxims did not make a legislative majority, and Booker’s refusal to get involved in nitty- gritty horse-trading doomed his crime- control agenda. Last year, 429 people were shot in Newark, down from 502 in Booker’s first year, but far from the “na- tional standard for urban transformation” to which he aspires.

Booker’s leadership style has seen its most disastrous effects in the mayor’s warm relationship with Chris Christie. When the Republican unseated Jon Cor- zine in 2009, state Democrats expected Booker to step up as their new champion— to exchange his rising-star status for standard-bearer. But, even as Christie emerged as a partisan sensation, Booker chose to bolster his holier-than-thou anti-politics brand. Not only did he work with the Republican; he used his high profile to undercut his fellow Dem- ocrats. The most egregious incident came early in Christie’s term, as the gov- ernor pushed a constitutional amend- ment limiting property taxes, forcing municipalities to downsize. On the day that no-name Democratic leaders in the state legislature rolled out their alterna- tive, Booker joined Christie at a Newark press conference with a banner blaring,

“property tax relief now,” and Chris- tie blasting “professional politicians in Trenton.” The mayor endorsed Christie’s constitutional amendment without even informing the city council. It was the be- ginning of a political pacifism that has endured through three years of Christie’s siege of state government.

Richard Nixed The Watergate wars just ended.

I n March 2011, the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, opened its new Watergate Galler y—the portion of the museum devoted

to the constitutional crimes for which President Nixon will always be known. For years, visitors had seen an extended apologia for Nixon, which absurdly suggested that Democrats planned to impeach him in order to make House Speaker Carl Albert president. That ex- hibit, drawn up with Nixon’s involve- ment, was always best understood not as credible historical interpretation but as a campaign in the former president’s lifelong quest for rehabilitation. But now, in its place, stands a meticulously researched and beautifully displayed multimedia exhibit that draws upon re- cently videotaped oral histories, newly unearthed archival documents, and ex- cerpts from the roughly 4,000 hours of tape recordings that Nixon surrepti- tiously made as president. The exhibit traces an array of White House–spon- sored crimes that began well before and extended well after the famous break-in of June 17, 1972, the fortieth anniversary of which occurs this month.

The extirpation of the old Nixonian propaganda came about because of an irony of history. Nixon had tried to ab- scond with vital records of his presidency and, after he lost a legal challenge, was excluded from the club of presidents

Th e N e w R e p u b l i c J u n e 2 8 , 2 0 1 2 7

legitimacy of the Watergate investiga- tion by retaining Sam Dash—counsel to the Ervin Committee—as his ethics ad- viser, although the plan backfired when Dash quit in protest over Starr’s behavior. Ann Coulter, then an enterprising young right-wing lawyer, leveraged the Clin- ton impeachment into fame and fortune with a book that claimed Clinton’s trans- gressions outstripped Nixon’s, likening Watergate to a “staffing problem.”

Clinton’s defenders cited Watergate, too—to argue that his offenses fell short of the impeachment standard. At the House hearings, Representative Zoe Lofgren, who had worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate, quoted from the committee’s 1974 find- ings: “Not all presidential misconduct is sufficient to constitute grounds for im- peachment. . . . Only . . . conduct seriously incompatible with either the constitu- tional form and principles of our gov- ernment or the proper performance of constitutional duties of presidential of- fice.” Clinton’s witnesses included famous Watergate heroes: Robert Drinan, Eliza- beth Holtzman, Richard Ben-Veniste. By acquitting Clinton of the charges, Con- gress—reflecting public opinion—thus rejected the argument that Clinton’s crimes rivaled Nixon’s. Indeed, Clinton’s acquittal implicitly repudiated the notion long advanced by Nixon’s defenders that

“everybody does it.” No, not every presi- dent does what Nixon did.

Clinton’s ordeal hurt Nixon in another way, too. As the consummate expression of take-no-prisoners partisanship, the im- peachment reminded the nation of the dangerous reach of the anything-goes politics that Nixon had fostered a genera- tion earlier. In the Nixonian view, no trick was considered too dirty, no blow too low, no law too sacrosanct to stand in the way of partisan gain. And, where Nixon had embodied those dark ideals for one gen- eration, George W. Bush would exemplify them for the next.

The Bush years dredged up memories of Nixon’s lawless style. Bush was charged with resurrecting Nixon’s “imperial pres- idency.” Like Nixon, he played politics with national security to silence critics of a military adventure that was losing pop- ular support. Both men brandished flag pins on the lapel and patriotism as a cud- gel. Both were secretive in the extreme, isolating themselves from the news media, rigidly prescribing what staffers could say to the press, raging about leaks, de- viously trying to control the news. Both men honed a conservative populism that vilified academics, journalists, bureau-

other scandals were somehow worse, that Nixon’s crimes should not over- shadow his accomplishments.

Then, at Nixon’s funeral in 1994, the world’s statesmen gathered in some- thing re s embling re verence. Pre si- dent Bill Clinton was joined by Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Sr., and pundits praised Nixon for his diplomatic accomplish- ments—détente, the opening to China— hailing him as the foreign policy sage that he had yearned to be. Clinton led the way, declaring a national day of mourning and, then, at the funeral, urging that the time of “judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.” That carefully worded state- ment was classic Clinton: ambiguous enough to be read differently by differ- ent audiences. But people took it as ab- solution. If only Nixon could go to China, only Clinton could go to Yorba Linda.

For several years afterward, some pun- dits and scholars started to praise Nixon with surprising frequency and enthusi- asm—although often in terms that nei- ther his enemies nor his boosters would have recognized. The New Nixon of the 1990s was not the familiar, divisive lib- eral-hater, but, improbably, an innova- tor in domestic policy and an activist steward of the Great Society—and the last of the big-spending liberals. It was the relatively conservative political cli- mate of the Reaganized ’90s (compared with that of the 1960s and 1970s) that triggered this reassessment. It became a reflex to proclaim that Nixon was more progressive than Clinton; when Clin- ton unveiled his market-based health care reform plan, or passed into law a welfare overhaul, observers noted that Democrats would surely have preferred policies like those Nixon had proposed two decades before. “Nixon advanced far more expansive social policies,” wrote Jacob Weisberg in 1996, summing up the reigning vie w, “than any Demo- crat would dare suggest today.” Journal- ists from E.J. Dionne to Michael Barone looked back with admiration on Nixon’s farsighted policies toward Native Amer- icans, worker safety, and the arts.

This reevaluation began to change during the impeachment drive, which returned Nixon to the spotlight. As his- torian David Kyvig noted in his intriguing book, The Age of Impeachment, Repub- licans and Democrats alike invoked Wa- tergate: Some of Clinton’s antagonists seemed to be motivated in part by histor- ical grievance, seeing a chance to balance the partisan scales. Independent Counsel Ken Starr tried to shroud himself in the

Pu bl i sh er a n d e ditor-i n-c h i ef Chris Hughes

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e ditor Franklin Foer l it er a ry e ditor Leon Wieseltier e x ec u t i v e e ditor Rachel Morris

se n ior e ditor s Jonathan Cohn, John B. Judis,

Adam Kirsch, Alec MacGillis, Timothy Noah, Noam Scheiber, Jason Zengerle l ega l a f fa i r s Jeffrey Rosen

e x ec u t i v e e ditor / t h e bo ok Isaac Chotiner dePu t y e ditor s Cameron Abadi, Chloë Schama

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f i l m s Stanley Kauffmann a rt Jed Perl

m usic David Hajdu Poet ry Henri Cole

da nc e Jennifer Homans t h e at er Robert Brustein

a rc h it ec t u r e Sarah Williams Goldhagen nat iona l cor r e sPon de n t

Walter Kirn sPec i a l cor r e sPon de n ts

Mariah Blake, Thomas B. Edsall, T. A. Frank, Eliza Griswold, Charles Homans, Ed Kilgore, Joshua Kurlantzick,

Walter Shapiro, Gabriel Sherman, Jesse Zwick con t r i bu t i ng e ditor s

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Justin Driver, Gregg Easterbrook, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Ruth Franklin, William Galston, Nathan Glazer, Jack Goldsmith,

Anthony Grafton, David Grann, David Greenberg, Yossi Klein Halevi, Robert Kagan, Lawrence F. Kaplan,

Michael Kinsley, James Kirchick, Charles Krauthammer, Enrique Krauze, Eli Lake, Damon Linker, Ryan Lizza,

Jeremy McCarter, John McWhorter, Abbas Milani, Evgeny Morozov, Sherwin B. Nuland, Steven Pinker, David Rieff, Maggie Scarf, Sacha Z. Scoblic, Judith Shulevitz, Ronald Steel,

Alan Taylor, E.V. Thaw, David Thomson, Helen Vendler, Michael Walzer, Sean Wilentz, Alan Wolfe, Robert Wright

con t r i bu t i ng a rt i sts Jack Coughlin, David Cowles,

Brooks Kraft, Vint Lawrence, David Schorr a rt/ de sign di r ec t ion Joseph Heroun + Christine Car

Produc t ion a n d i .t. di r ec tor Bruce Steinke Produc t ion m a nager Henry Riggs

m a nagi ng e ditor / t h e bo ok Hillary Kelly a ssi sta n t e ditor s Esther Breger, Eliza Gray a ssi sta n t l it er a ry e ditor Laura Bennett

r ePort er-r e se a rc h er s Nathan Pippenger, Molly Redden,

Thomas Stackpole, Simon van Zuylen-Wood digita l m e di a f e l loW Pierce Stanley

i n t er ns/on l i n e Lane Kisonak, Meenakshi Krishnan,

Tonya Riley, Jose DelReal i n t er n/ bo ok s a n d a rts Emily Holland

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c h i ef f i na nc i a l of f ic er Allen Chin di r ec tor of Produc t Shant Mesrobian

di r ec tor , digita l st r at eg y Dennis Loney a ssi sta n t to t h e Pu bl i sh er Genevieve Powers

editor i a l a ssi sta n t Nora Caplan-Bricker m edi a r el at ions m a nager Annie Augustine

sta f f accou n ta n t Menelik Mekonnen

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a sso c i at e Pu bl i sh er Kate Kristoph

accou n t m a nager Caroline Black, 202-508-4462 ([email protected])

a dv ert i si ng sa l e s a ssi sta n t Lauren Zoltick, 202-508-4442 ([email protected])

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t h e n e w R e P u b l i C A d v i s o R y b o A R d

William A. Ackman, Soraya Darabi, Laurence Grafstein, Jonathan Jones, Martin Peretz

The New Republic (ISSN 0028-6583), Vol. 243, Number 10, Issue 4,925, June 28, 2012. (Printed in the United States on June 8, 2012.) Published bi-weekly (ex- cept for skipped publication dates of January 19, March 29, May 3, June 21, July 26, August 16, September 6, September 27, October 18, and November 22 & 29, 2012) at 1400 K Street, NW, Suite 1200, Washington, D.C. 20005. Telephone (202) 508- 4444. Yearly subscriptions, $79.97; foreign, $119.97 (U.S. funds); Canada, $99.97 (U.S. funds). Back issues, $8.00 domestic and $10.00 foreign/Canada (includes postage & handling). © 2012 by TNR II, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at Washing- ton, D.C., and additional mailing offices. Rights and permissions: fax (202) 204- 4871. Indexed in Readers’ Guide, Media Review Digest. For hard-copy reprints, call (202) 508-4444. Microform, Canadian Periodical Index, and CD-ROM are available through ProQuest, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Telephone (800) 521-0600. Postmaster: Send changes of address to The New Republic, P.O. Box 15818, North Hollywood, CA 91615-5818. Send letters and unsolicited manu- scripts to [email protected]. Poetry submissions must be e-mailed to poetry@tnr. com. For subscription inquiries or problems, call (800) 827-1289, or visit our website at www.tnr.com/subscriber-services.

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welcomed him back, out in the land, his name remained a synonym for presiden- tial corruption and crime. What should have been apparent all along had finally been recognized.

One person who seems to have known this was Nixon himself. For all his labors in the field of post-presidential image- making, Nixon would confess in candid moments that he doubted their efficacy. In 1990, after he had published one of his many forgettable memoirs, he sighed to his research assistant that the book had failed to change his public reputa- tion or blot out the stubborn fact that no other president ever directed a crim- inal conspiracy from the White House.

“None of the other stuff in there, like on the Russians or the other personal stuff, made it into the news or even the re- views,” he despaired. “Watergate—that’s all anyone wants.”

David Greenberg

crats, and professionals as out-of-touch elites, and politicized areas of the govern- ment once deemed the province of non- partisan experts.

That all these Nixonian traits showed up in the political style of the Bush ad- ministration was not a coincidence. It was an inheritance. Several of Bush’s key aides learned their politics from Nixon’s men. Karl Rove ran the College Republi- cans during Watergate. In 1970, Rove had surreptitiously gained entry to the cam- paign headquarters of a Democratic can- didate for state office in Illinois, filched campaign letterhead, and sent out fake fliers aiming to discredit the Democrat— a classic Nixonian dirty trick. During Watergate itself, Rove used a sham grass- roots outfit (another favorite trick of Nix- on’s) to gin up ostensibly organic support for the embattled president. The swift- boating campaign against John Kerry in 2004 also had its roots in the Nixon years, when the president and his thuggish aide Chuck Colson sought to discredit the young spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In the scholarly world, meanwhile, the man-bites-dog novelty of the “liberal Nixon” was wearing off, and new books were more likely to empha- size Nixon’s abuses of power once again.

What caught the zeitgeist was Frost/ Nixon, an unlikely hit. Political plays rarely succeed, but this account of Nix- on’s 1977 interviews by the British TV personality David Frost—which origi- nated in London in 2006, came to Broad- way in 2007, hit the big screen in 2008, and notched an Oscar nomination for Best Picture in 2009—enjoyed both com- mercial and critical acclaim. It starred, appropriately enough, the former Drac- ula, Frank Langella, as Nixon. Although it had its flaws—it wrongly suggested that Frost had extracted an apology from Nixon in those interviews—the play (and film) nonetheless revealed the essence of Tricky Dick to a new generation, which viewed it, inescapably, through the lens of Bush’s high-handed exercise of presi- dential power. In the play, as in the real- life interviews, Nixon’s telltale line came when he said, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Audi- ences roared. It was hard to hear such a line in the late Bush years without sum- moning to mind the expansive view of executive prerogative repeatedly ex- pressed by the president and his staff. Frost/Nixon, moreover, endorsed an opinion that’s seldom heard in journal- istic commentary but that increasingly seems beyond dispute: Nixon was never really rehabilitated. Even during the early Clinton years, when Washington

Jubilee Girl Elizabeth II, you rule.

On e you ng Englishman was exhilarated by the queen’s Diamond Jubilee, as he had been ten years earlier when the Golden Jubilee had celebrated her first half-century on the throne. Then twelve years old, he had written to his mother: “P.S. Remember the Jubilee,” fol- lowed by a series of letters begging to be taken to see the great event. They were signed, “Your loving son Winny.”

That Golden Jubilee of Queen Victo- ria, in the summer of 1887, had seen Eu- ropean royalty gather in Westminster Abbey, while across the land, bonfires were lit. In A.E. Housman’s words:

Look left, look right, the hills are bright, The dales are light between, Because ’tis fifty years to-night That God has saved the Queen.

By the time of the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, Second Lieutenant Winston Churchill of the 4th Hussars—as little

“Winny” had become—was on leave in England, but his festivities were inter- rupted by riveting news. A force was being raised by General Sir Bindon Blood (a name only the rashest author of imperial yarns would confer on a char- acter), and Churchill was attached to it as a correspondent. He rushed back to India, where he wrote newspaper re- ports and then quickly produced his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, telling of how this expedition had

meted out condign punishment to the Afghan tribesmen.

Astonishingly enough, 55 years later, when Victoria’s great-great-granddaugh- ter succeeded to the throne in 1952, the young Queen Elizabeth II was greeted by a 77-year-old prime minister: Churchill himself, in his rather eerie last phase at Downing Street. He was enchanted by the young queen. In a broadcast to wel- come her, he said tellingly that his own youth “was passed in the . . . tranquil glo- ries of the Victorian Era,” though not ev- eryone thought the era merely glorious even at the time, and it was scarcely tran- quil. In between, there had been another celebration, the Silver Jubilee of George V in 1935, which became a great national street party, as “English people, very sen- sibly,” in AJP Taylor’s words, “turned the Jubilee into a personal tribute to a king who, in a modest conservative way, had a better record as constitutional sovereign than any monarch since William III.”

So it was this month. To the impotent rage of malcontents, the country has been swept with delight in the Jubilee and af- fection for the queen. Every town and village seems to have been swaddled in bunting and Union Jacks, while the splen- did flotilla coming down the Thames was watched from the banks by more than a million people, despite the rain (damn it all, this is England). Just as in Housman’s lines, the hills were bright with bonfires, including a fine one in our village, and all culminating with the great service in St. Paul’s Cathedral, where Victoria’s pro- cession had stopped in June 1897. Amer- icans might find this enthusiasm hard to understand, but Churchill provides a clue: The queen and her husband are one of the last surviving links to what “Winny” called our finest hour.

At 86, Elizabeth II is sprightlier than Victoria at 78, when her Diamond Jubilee fell. And yet, if you look back at the low ebbs of her reign—from the “annus hor- ribilis” of 1992, with the separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales, to “Diana Week” of 1997, with its incontinent syn- thetic mourning for the dead princess and Rupert Murdoch–inspired hostility to the queen—her latest sky-high popu- larity ratings (and the monarchy’s) might perplex even our sovereign. But then she could already have noticed how affec- tionate recent theatrical and cinematic portrayals of the monarchy have been. Alan Bennett, no reactionary royalist, gave us an engaging look at our present queen in A Question of Attribution. The King’s Speech was wildly unhistorical but served as almost a mash note to George

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