Bernstein, O’Rourke, Politics, and Zero Sum Games

Had Richard Nixon in mind yesterday, the anniversary of the “Checkers” speech. Was thinking about Nixon again today thanks to a visit to the campus of UNC-Charlotte by Carl Bernstein and P.J. O’Rourke. The pair appeared as part of UNC-C’s Chancellor’s Speakers Series, with the event called “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House.”

Bernstein, of course, is half of the famed journalist team with Bob Woodward heavily involved in reporting on the Watergate case as detailed in their All the President’s Men and depicted in the film of the same name. O’Rourke, meanwhile, also has a four decade-plus career writing about politics, dating back to the early 1970s when he was part of the National Lampoon.

O’Rourke was there with Nat Lamp when they were doing a fave of mine, the National Lampoon Radio Hour, which ran from late 1972 through the end of 1973, a period exactly corresponding with the evolving Watergate scandal. Thus did the NLRH often feature Nixon and Watergate-related material, with The Missing White House Tapes LP (released in early 1974) compiling some of the best bits.

The presentation was pretty wide-ranging, and while I was disappointed there was very little said about Nixon or Watergate during the 75 minutes, there were a lot of interesting points made by both, most of which concerned contemporary politics and the current presidential race.

O’Rourke arrived late, actually, which gave Bernstein a chance to talk about Pope Francis’s current U.S. visit and contrast his message of humility with the “grandiosity” of current politics. Once O’Rourke showed up, though, he grabbed a lot of attention with various one-liners such as “I’m not stupid, but I’m a student of stupidity... I’m a political reporter.”

Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton got a lot of attention during the discussion. Bernstein’s latest book was a biography of Clinton, and so he had a lot to say about her “server issue” (although made no comparisons to Nixon and the tapes, which many others have). Meanwhile O’Rourke made the point that Trump can’t be called a demagogue, because “a demagogue is someone with a bad idea who is good at selling it, and Trump has no idea.”

The only time Watergate came up at all was after a questioner asked how the scandal would be covered today amid all of our social media, the internet, and other differences since the 1970s.

“The web is a fabulous reportorial platform,” said Bernstein (with some surprising optimism), who describe the current era as a “golden age of investigative reporting.” O’Rourke’s rejoinder was that while there’s a lot of reporting being done, it has become harder to decide about how authoritative it is. O’Rourke also added that if Watergate happened today, he guessed the scandal might have been discovered sooner since “the conspirators would have been more leaky.”

O’Rourke made one other point about politics I found interesting, describing it somewhat cyncially as a “zero sum game” in which no one benefits without someone else suffering. “What I got is something you can’t have,” is the phrase he used to describe the politician who has earned a vote or some other bit of power via whatever means are at his or her disposal. Nixon most definitely thought of politics in this way -- as a “zero sum” game -- which for me makes it all the more inviting to compare Nixon’s politics with his poker playing (as I have been doing in earnest for some time now).

Bernstein wasn’t as ready to give up hope when it comes politics and the possibility of good leadership, even though he largely agreed with O’Rourke that the crop of presidential candidates at present leaves a great deal to be desired. And in the end Bernstein’s liberal leanings and O’Rourke’s conservative coloring were mostly balanced out, which made for a thought-provoking afternoon on campus.

Nixon Was a Five-Card Man

My “Poker in American Film and Culture” course includes a couple of readings I’ve written about here on Hard-Boiled Poker before -- a 1932 short story by the humorist James Thurber called “Everything Is Wild” and a 1963 essay by the historian John Lukacs titled “Poker and American Character.”

The Thurber story I discussed once in a post titled “Hold’em’s History Makes a Good Mystery.” The story involves a “dealer’s choice” game in which a few different variants are called -- including some made-up ones -- and one of them suggests elements of hold’em which led me to share that as an early, not necessarily reliable bit of evidence regarding hold’em’s origins.

I also many years ago included “Everything Is Wild” in Episode 13 of the Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show, if you fancy hearing a reading of the very funny story.

Meanwhile the Lukacs essay received lengthy treatment in a couple of different posts, which if you go read them kind of add up to my lecture about the article. Here’s Part 1 of that discussion, and here’s Part 2.

All I want to say about the readings today is to point out a parallel between the main character in Thurber’s story, Mr. Brush, and Lukacs, both of whom express distaste with any variant of poker that diverges from what Lukacs calls “classic” poker.

In the story, Brush gets stuck playing a game in which others all want to play variants involving wild cards, and he “hated any silly variation of the fine old game of poker.” In the essay Lukacs also complains about poker being corrupted (in a sense) by the introduction of wild-card games, in which (he says) “the human factor is weakened and the factor of chance is correspondingly increased.”

Both Brush and Lukacs see wild-card games as indicative of bigger problems with society, in fact, with the way they tend to favor luck over skill suggesting a kind of immaturity among the thrill-seekers who favor them. Lukacs explicitly links wild-card games with a more general “erosion of the American national character,” something you can read more about, if you like, by following those links above.

Richard Nixon was another one who favored “straight” or “classic” poker over any variants including wild cards or anything diverging from traditional games. Five-card stud was his favorite game, and the one he played the most while taking thousands off fellow soldiers in the Pacific during WWII -- money he in fact would use to help fund his first Congressional campaign in 1946.

Many years later on September 7, 1972, then President Nixon had some visitors stop by the Oval Office just before noon -- the former governor of Texas John Connally (at the time heading up the “Democrats for Nixon”) and John and James Roosevelt, sons of FDR. The meeting was recorded, and while the audio is choppy and at times indistinct, Nixon’s disdain for wild-card games is nonetheless clear.

Nixon tells the Roosevelt sons about the home he owns in San Clemente, the famous “La Casa Pacifica” he bought from the widow of financier Henry Hamilton Cotton in 1969. Speaking of FDR, Nixon notes how “Cotton was a great supporter of his, of course” and how FDR even stayed there one night, something the sons sounds as though they might not have known.

“There was a rumor they were all supposed to play cards or something one night... poker, probably” Nixon continues animatedly, well knowing that FDR was a card player just like himself. “What did he play?” he asks John and James of their father. “Did he play five-card or did he like wild cards?” Before they can answer, Nixon declares his position on the issue: “I’m a five-card man, I like it.”

One of the sons -- it’s hard to tell which -- says something about how “once in a while one or two of the others would want to go play a wild game.” People are talking over one another, with other ambient noise making it hard to distinguish every word being spoken. But you can hear Nixon’s response pretty well:

“Wild cards is not poker,” Nixon says. “When you’ve got five cards, you know just what the odds are.”

It isn’t surprising to hear Nixon -- like Mr. Brush and Lukacs -- voicing a negative opinion regarding wild-card games. It also isn’t hard to think of Nixon when Brush spitefully invents his own wild-card games in Thurber’s story (e.g., “Soap-in-Your-Eye”) -- games for which he is making up the rules as they go and thus his opponents cannot possibly win.

Makes me think of the old sketch from the National Lampoon Radio Hour in which Nixon plays Monopoly (the 1/26/74 episode):

RMN: “All right, Bebe. You get Baltic Avenue. Now I’m the banker so give me $500 for the deed.”
Bebe: “But Mr. President, Baltic doesn’t cost $500. It’s only $60.”
RMN: “Ha.. well, Bebe, let’s just ask Chuck and Fred Buzhardt here. Fellas, what do you say? You’re my advisors...?”
Chuck & Fred (in unison): “The President’s right, Bebe. Give him $500 for Baltic.”
RMN: “Now... my turn...”