Here is a major enemy of Bush. He gets to write a column about him every week in the Washington Post.
The Making of the President: The Nixon in Bush
By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, November 25, 2003; Page A27
The president tells aides he wants to "go over the heads of the reporters" in order to "circumvent" a "hostile press." He later describes his effort to "tell my story directly to the people rather than funnel it to them through a press account."
The year: 1969. The president: Richard M. Nixon.
Yet Nixon's words are eerily similar to those uttered last month by President Bush. "I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people," he said in an interview with regional broadcaster Hearst-Argyle in one such bid to circumvent what he perceives as a hostile press.
To Nixon historian David Greenberg, it is one of many similarities in style between the two men. From the way they structure their administrations to their many escapes to Camp David and the prominence of American flags on the lapel pins of aides, the likenesses are powerful.
"Ideologically, Bush is the son of Reagan; stylistically, he's the son of Nixon," said Greenberg, who teaches at Yale and just published a book on Nixon's image titled "Nixon's Shadow."
Reagan, of course, is a far more desirable comparison for Bush. His allies regularly compare him to the Gipper, and Bush himself has been regularly invoking the 40th president in recent events, hailing Reagan's "mandate for leadership" on Veterans Day, signing abortion legislation in the Ronald Reagan Building, and describing his Middle East policy as an extension of Reaganism in a major foreign policy speech on Nov. 6. Vice President Cheney routinely mentions that "our administration has delivered the largest tax-relief package since Ronald Reagan lived in the White House."
Poor Nixon hasn't had a presidential mention since February, and then only in the context of his piano playing.
In several ways, Bush does have more in common with Reagan than Nixon. Like Reagan, Bush leads with straightforwardness rather than with Nixonian nuance and complexity. Like Reagan, Bush is far closer to the conservative base than was Nixon, forever distrusted by the right because of his secret dealings with Nelson Rockefeller. And Bush, sunny and optimistic like Reagan, shows no sign of the Nixon paranoia.
And though Bush frets about leaks and his aides have boasted of a "leak-free White House," nobody has seriously accused Bush of the heavier-handed Nixon techniques such as wiretaps and Plumbers, nor the sort of dishonesty or lawlessness that caused the Watergate scandal.
But there are many similarities in their style.
Bush, for example, structures his White House much as Nixon did. Nixon governed largely with four other men: Henry A. Kissinger, H.R. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman and Charles Colson. This is not unlike the "iron triangle" of aides who led Bush's campaign and the handful of underlings now -- Cheney, chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr., national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and communications director Dan Bartlett -- who are in on most top decisions. Nixon essentially ended the tradition of powerful Cabinets in favor of a few powerful White House aides -- a model Bush has followed.
The most striking similarity is in the area of secrecy and what Nixon staffers called "managing the news." Nixon created the White House Office of Communications, the office that has become the center of Bush's vaunted "message discipline."
Then, as now, journalists complained about a lack of news conferences. In turn, the administration complained of "instant analysis and querulous criticism." Those words, from Vice President Spiro Agnew, were close to Bartlett's complaints about "analysis" and "commentary" in newspaper articles.
And while watchdog entities such as Congress's General Accounting Office and the Sept. 11 panel have complained of the Bush administration's withholding of information, a National Press Club panel accused Nixon, before Watergate, of "an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information."
Although the Bush White House has many Reagan and Ford officials, there are few Nixonians in the house. Still, the man guiding Bush's strategy came of age politically during the bitter late days of Nixon's tenure.
During the late days of the Watergate scandal, as "the White House mood grew funereal," Greenberg writes, a George Mason University student "circulated memos from the faux-grass-roots Americans for the Presidency, urging phone calls to the Judiciary Committee; congressmen, they warned, were getting "swept up by the lynch-mob atmosphere created in this city by the Washington Post and other parts of the Nixon-hating media."
The student was Karl Rove. Had young Rove succeeded in that effort 30 years ago, Bush today might well be celebrating Nixon for more than his piano skills.
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When it comes to the history of British-American relations, "things didn't start out too well," Bush said to laughter in his toast at Wednesday's state banquet in England. But things are different now. Earlier Wednesday, in a speech at Whitehall Palace, Bush gushed about the Special Relationship. "America is fortunate to call this country our closest friend in the world," he said.
Really? But he has said in the past that Israel has "no better friend than the United States," while Poland has "no better friend in Europe" than the United States and Turkey has "no better friend" than America. Have these friends been demoted?
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"During his presentation, Fleischer uses the same signature mix of humor and gravitas that made him one of our nation's most beloved White House press secretaries." -- From the Washington Speakers Bureau biography of Ari Fleischer.
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