“I’m Reading Their Hand”: LBJ, Nixon, and the Week Before the 1968 Election

Several friends recently passed along to me an article from The New York Times that appeared on New Year’s Eve, one sharing a bit of news regarding Richard Nixon’s actions during the final days prior to the 1968 presidential election when he won a narrow victory versus Hubert Humphrey. They did so both because they know about my ongoing “Nixon studies” and because there’s a small poker reference in the article, too.

The article is titled “Nixon’s Vietnam Treachery” and was written by John A. Farrell who is currently at work on a Nixon bio coming out later this year. The story being told in the article is not new at all, although Farrell does pass along some relatively unknown evidence regarding Nixon’s role in possibly preventing a peace settlement from occurring in Vietnam just prior to the election. (The evidence isn’t new, although it hadn’t gotten a lot of attention before.)

To give a little context, by mid-October 1968 outgoing president Lyndon B. Johnson was hopeful to find some way to end the war before leaving office. After months of negotiations, Johnson had a breakthrough of sorts when the North Vietnamese finally agreed to enter into talks with the South Vietnamese in Paris if the U.S. called a bombing halt. Such talks hardly meant peace would be imminent, but they represented an significant first step toward such an eventuality.

What’s been known for quite some time now (thanks primarily to some FBI-supplied evidence) is that high-level members of Nixon’s campaign team were communicating with South Vietnamese leader Colonel Nguyen Van Thieu at the time, urging Thieu not to enter any peace talks just yet while promising a better negotiating position once Nixon took office. Such a move is rightly regarded with suspicion, obviously motivated primarily by the fact that an announcement of peace in Vietnam on the eve of the election would serve as a last-minute boost to Humphrey in what had become a tight race to the finish.

In The Making of the President 1968, Theodore H. White recounts the day-by-day developments leading up to Election Day, telling how with just one week to go (on October 29) “the promised end of the war in Vietnam was beginning to leak from every news source around the world.” Two days later, on Thursday, October 31, Johnson announced the cessation of bombing “in the belief that this action can lead to progress toward peaceful settlement of the Vietnamese war” (as LBJ said).

The promising news remained atop the headlines for about a day before doubts began to creep back in to cloud the picture regarding peace in southeast Asia, and by Saturday The New York Times was reporting that the word from Saigon was that the South Vietnamese couldn’t participate in any talks. The way White reports it (sharing what was known at the time), it appeared President Thieu had agreed to the talks without having secured the support of his cabinet or the national assembly, and that once they objected the deal had been dashed.

White then introduces the mysterious Anna Chennault into the story, the Chinese-born widow of a WWII hero who became involved in politics and chaired a number of Nixon’s citizen committees during the ’68 campaign. Chennault had numerous connections throughout Asia, and (says White) had learned about the secret negotiations in October. Using her contacts (including some within the South Vietnamese government), “she had begun early, by cable and telephone, to mobilize their resistance to the agreement -- apparently implying, as she went, that she spoke for the Nixon campaign.”

LBJ found out about Chennault’s chicanery, and that weekend accused the Republicans of sabotaging the peace effort, including having a somewhat tense phone conversation with Nixon on Sunday regarding the matter. (You can hear that phone call, with a transcription, over on YouTube.)

All of this tumult during the final week before the election certainly had some effect on the outcome, but it’s hard to say how much.

The situation recalls the one surrounding the final days before the 2016 election. I’m referring of course to FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress saying the bureau would be investigating more of Hillary Clinton emails, a letter Comey delivered just 11 days before the election, then his announcement two days before Election Day that Clinton would face no charges regarding the messages -- a dubious two-step that also likely had some, hard-to-measure effect on a certain number of voters near the end.

As noted above, it has been known for a good while that members of Nixon’s team -- among them campaign director John Mitchell and vice-presidential candidate Spiro Agnew -- were talking with Chennault, which would explain how she could represent herself to the South Vietnamese as speaking for Nixon.

A few books have delved more deeply into the Nixon-Chennault connection, with William Bundy’s A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (1998), Jeffrey Kimball’s Nixon’s Vietnam War (1998), and Anthony Summers’s The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (2000) among the more earnest efforts. More recently Ken Hughes’s Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate (2015) looks even more closely at the story.

As with Watergate, the extent of Nixon’s particular involvement here has long invited much speculation and debate. Was Nixon directly involved with Chennault’s suggestions to the South Vietnamese that they not enter peace talks and wait for a Nixon administration to move forward? Or was this (as with the Watergate break-in and some elements of the cover-up) an example of some of his subordinates freelancing with a kind of vague endorsement from the top man? The new NYT piece sheds some additional light on the situation.

As Farrell shares, notes taken by Nixon advisor H.R. “Bob” Haldeman (later RN’s White House Chief of Staff and key Watergate figure) recount an October 22 telephone conversation in which Nixon advised him to tell others to do what they could to thwart LBJ’s efforts to negotiate the beginning of peace talks. “Keep Anna Chennault working on SVN,” Haldeman scribbled, a fairly direct-sounding directive from Tricky Dick. “Any other way to monkey wrench it?” added Haldeman, referring to Nixon’s ostensible desire to come up with futher means to scuttle the talks.

Such notes strongly suggest that despite Nixon’s later claims to the contrary, he was not only aware of what was going on behind the scenes with regard to those representing him while pressuring Thieu not to enter talks just yet, he was encouraging that effort. The NY Times piece concludes with a reference to another phone call between LBJ and Everett Dirksen, the Republican senator from Illinois who had served as Senate Minority Leader for nearly a decade -- one that can also be heard over on YouTube, if you’re curious.

That call came on Saturday, November 2 (a day before the call to Nixon), and finds LBJ speaking directly about the apparent sabotage. LBJ declares “this is treason,” complaining outwardly that “they’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war.”

Indeed, for Nixon -- then technically a private citizen -- to have anything at all to do with the country’s talks with a foreign power like this was obviously out of bounds, a violation of the Logan Act, a federal law forbidding unauthorized citizens from negotiating with other governments. (A few weeks ago I was alluding to another, much less outrageous example of this same sort of violation prior to my recent trip to Prague, one involving Frank Zappa’s dialogue with Václav Havel.)

Johnson encourages Dirksen to talk to his party colleagues, telling them how they “oughta keep the Mrs. Chennaults and all the rest of them from running around here” while threatening to go public with the information that the Nixon team was obstructing negotiations that would hopefully lead to an end for the war.

“I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important,” says Johnson. (The mind wanders toward a certain president-elect’s strange communications regarding a certain foreign power.)

Also tucked into that conversation is a poker metaphor, used by Johnson to refer to the fact that he is privy to what all sides have been up to, including what Chennault has been doing on behalf of Nixon.

“Now I’m reading their hand, Everett,” says Johnson, adding “I don’t want to get this into the campaign.” (The NYT piece shares that quote, too, near the end.)

Those conversations are fascinating to listen to, especially the one between Nixon and Johnson, both of whom were accomplished poker players. Understanding the larger context, it is clear both knew full well what the other “player” had in his hand, with both also obviously walking a fine line trying not to give too much away to each other.

Photo: Richard Nixon Foundation.

Going Over Their Heads

This week in my “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics” course the assignments include a viewing of Nixon’s televised resignation speech, delivered on the evening of August 8, 1974.

Nixon begins the speech saying “This is the 37th time I’ve spoken to you from this office,” an opening move designed to suggest a kind of “transparency” that contrasted sharply with the whole idea of a “cover-up” which had led to the offenses listed in the articles of impeachment that had already been recommended by the House Judiciary Committee (obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress).

There is conflicting information out there regarding just how many times Nixon delivered televised speeches from the Oval Office -- some places agree with him and say 37 times, others list fewer. Most agree, though, of all the presidents of the television age, Nixon used the medium as much or more than anyone else, with Ronald Reagan the only one to challenge him for such a title.

Nixon considered such speeches a way for him to communicate directly with American citizens without having his words or ideas filtered through the interpretive lens of those reporting on him. Doing so enabled him to have more control over the response, or so he believed, and not have to rely on a press with whom he was on increasingly antagonistic terms as his career went along -- not to mention his steadfast belief in a bias against him shared by most media.

A few of these speeches represented examples of Nixon’s greatest political triumphs, going back to the “Checkers” speech of September 1952 on up through the famous “Silent Majority” address on Vietnam in early November 1969. They also now retrospectively appear as some of his most ignominious moments, such as the three Watergate speeches (given in April 1973, August 1973, and April 1974), each of which present evidence of Nixon delivering what were later conclusively shown to be blatant lies and intentionally deceptive statements.

In any case, Nixon always valued the idea of having what felt like a “direct” line of address to the American public. Writing about the “Checkers” speech and the role of television in politics in general in his 1990 book In the Arena, Nixon told of reporters then having “naturally found it very difficult to accept that by going over their heads to the country on TV, I had proved them wrong.”

That’s how Nixon viewed such televised addresses -- a way of reducing the power of the press by “going over their heads” and getting his message to the people without any interference.

Yesterday I couldn’t help but think of this notion of a president speaking “directly” to the people when reading president-elect Donald Trump’s barrage of tweets strangely calling into question the legitimacy of the election he won nearly three weeks ago.

You’ve no doubt seen or heard about the tweets. The most wild-eyed and crazed of them refers to how Trump believes he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” (Trump won the Electoral College, but Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over 2.2 million, according to the most updated counts.) In another he specifies Virginia, New Hampshire, and California (three states won by Clinton) as sites of “serious voter fraud.”

“Why isn’t the media reporting on this?” asks Trump in the latter tweet. “Serious bias - big problem!”

Trump provides no evidence to support such claims, nor does he refer to any sources that do. From the reporting of others it sounds as though Trump is repeating some unsubstantiated claims made shortly after the election by a conservative activist named Gregg Phillips (also delivered via Twitter) that were subsequently promoted on the conspiracy site InfoWars.

InfoWars is a site identified with conspiracy theorist and talk show host Alex Jones and has provided a means for him to advance various fictions about historical events -- e.g., that the Oklahoma City attack, 9/11, and the Boston Marathon bombing were all “false flag” operations conducted by the government to increase its power; that the Sandy Hook school shootings didn’t even happen, nor did the moon landing in 1969; that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States (an idea Trump promoted and used as a gateway for his entry national politics); that global warming is a fiction invented by the Chinese and Muslims in New Jersey publicly celebrated on 9/11 (ideas Trump has also repeated); and so on. Jones even argued Mitt Romney really won the 2012 presidential election.

Like Nixon, Trump’s antagonism toward media and its “serious bias” inspires his “going over their heads” to communicate directly with the public, although Trump appears to favor Twitter over television as a preferred medium. In his 60 Minutes interview the Sunday after the election, Trump described Twitter as “a method of fighting back” against “bad” or “inaccurate” reporting on him. (He also said he would be “restrained” -- or, rather, “do very restrained” -- when using it going forward.)

But what Trump is presenting as his own, “unfiltered” message about what he thinks to be true is itself a kind of reporting being presented by sources that aren’t just biased in favor of a particular ideology, but seemingly unbound by reality, free to manufacture “info” out of whole cloth.

Nixon lied and covered up and did all sorts of things an elected official -- never mind a president -- should never do. He often claimed he rarely bluffed as a poker player, but he bluffed a lot as a politician, including repeatedly at the very end when he was called down and went busto.

But as paranoid and delusional as Nixon could be, he at least operated within a largely recognizable, shared actuality with others. These aren’t even “bluffs” Trump is tweeting out -- they don’t even meet the minimum standard of credibility to be characterized as such.

I suppose some believe there’s a method to the madness, though that would be even scarier than what is more likely the case. It’s an instinctive response to Trump, I think, wanting to impose some kind of order on what seems utterly chaotic (and frightening, given the stakes in play).

Tim Murphy tweeted an interesting comment yesterday. He’s a writer for Mother Jones, I’ll hasten to add, so as not to sound like some who simply tweet “I hear” and leave it at that.

“People act like Trump’s playing like eight-dimensional wizard chess with his tweets,” began Murphy. In other words, for those who don’t understand the president-elect’s intentions, he is communicating “over their heads,” perhaps only to those who for whatever reason can follow what he’s doing.

“But the much more obvious explanation,” added Murphy, “is he’s unstable.”

Image: “Donald Trump” (adapted), Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The Unpredictable Leader

Among the various, repeated themes of this year’s presidential election has been the unpredictability of the Republican party’s unbelievable choice for a nominee.

Ever since he announced his candidacy in mid-June 2015, observers have been focused intently both on his strange, highly unorthodox campaign and his penchant for saying and tweeting out odd, often unexpected comments and criticisms -- statements made all the more strange-seeming given his status as a candidate and eventually the frontrunner choice of his party.

I mentioned just a couple of days ago my Richard Nixon course and how the current presidential campaign does (or does not) compare to ones from the past. In the course we discuss some of Nixon’s poker strategy, something he himself talked about at length in a few different contexts. There’s one quote in particular from Nixon that we as a class tend to go back to frequently when discussing both his poker playing and the strategy he’d employ in campaigns and while in office -- a quote about being unpredictable.

The quote actually comes amid a discussion of how poker and politics tend to overlap, so the advice Nixon is putting forward actually relates to both. Speaking in 1983, Nixon complains about what he calls “the almost insatiable tendency of American politicians to want to put everything on the table. Their inability to know when to bluff, when to call, and above everything else, how to be unpredictable. Unpredictability is the greatest asset or weapon that a leader can have.... And unless he’s unpredictable, he’s going to find that he loses a great deal of his power.”

To be fair, Nixon was speaking primarily of a president dealing with foreign heads of state, although the observation applies not only to poker but to other areas of political strategy. Nixon frequently in his campaigns made big “moves” or “plays” that were unanticipated by many of his opponents. As president he also often would be unpredictable, and liked to use televised speeches to make genuinely surprising announcements about Vietnam, the economy, various policies and initiatives, his trips to China and Russia, and later on, Watergate.

I wrote a little about this quote and its connection to the Republican candidate earlier this year, responding to a pundit who was congratulating him for being “the best poker player in the Republican field” and in particular being very good at being unpredictable.

I’ve taught the Nixon course a few times now, and during our discussions of the quote we’ve tended to agree with the idea that unpredictability may well be a good campaign strategy. We can also readily see how it might be a favored trait when dealing with foreign powers, especially when in conflict with them.

However, we’ve also recognized that we don’t necessarily like our leaders to be too unpredictable with us. We need to be able to count on presidents not to say or do things that don’t at least conform with our idea of what we expect of them (never mind wildly oppose that idea). Even if they present ideas or courses of actions we hadn’t specifically anticipated, we need those ideas and courses of actions to fit with our earlier “read” of the person whom we’ve chosen to lead us.

That’s because even though it may be hard to remember when we think about our relationship to our elected leaders, we aren’t their opponents. At least we shouldn’t be.

The unpredictability of the Republicans’ current leader -- earlier heralded as savvy and strategic -- has become much less celebrated over recent weeks. It has also become a genuine cause of concern for those contemplating what his presidency might be like, including among many of those formerly enthused about his unpredictability.

What happens next? It’s hard to say. And yeah, that’s unsettling.

Image: “I wonder if #TheDonald reads every tweet about him” (adapted), Steve Baker. CC BY-ND 2.0.

Debate and Switch

I’ve mentioned here a couple of times how I’m once more teaching an American Studies class called “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics.” The class covers Nixon’s drama-filled political career, with a bit of emphasis (especially early on) on his poker playing.

We end up spending a fair amount of time in the class remarking upon how tactics used in campaigns and/or while serving in office often can resemble or at least recall poker strategies. The course additionally provides a detailed introduction to American political history from just after WWII to the mid-1970s -- the start of the Cold War era up through the end of the Vietnam conflict. And since during that period Nixon was a vice president for eight years, ran for president three times and won twice, and served as president for five-and-a-half years, there’s a lot of focus on the White House and the presidency’s centrality to American politics.

I’d never taught the course during a presidential election, and so had been looking forward to the chance to do so this fall semester. We’ve had some kind of uncanny moments already, such as when I happened to have assigned a viewing of the first debate between John F. Kennedy and Nixon the same week the of the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

There have also been opportunities to discuss some of the references to Nixon that have come up both in coverage of the campaigns and even from representatives of each major party. Of course, any comparison of a candidate to Nixon is understandably meant as a criticism, especially when the comparison comes from the Democrats or Republicans.

For instance, not long ago Trump was attempting to liken Clinton’s email saga to Watergate. Meanwhile Democratic VP candidate Tim Kaine compared Trump’s apparent encouragement to the Russians to hack the Democratic National Committee’s servers to the Watergate break-ins, too.

There have been other moments when we’ve been encouraged to bring up the current race when discussing things like Nixon’s early hard-fought campaigns (and their “dirty tricks”), the Alger Hiss spy case, the “fund crisis” and Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, and the ’60 campaign and election. (We’re only now getting to 1968.)

The whole “#TrumpTape” craziness over the weekend -- and rumors of additional tapes -- again somewhat evokes what became the major issue of Watergate, namely the revelation of the secret White House audio recordings and subsequent, protracted legal battle to force the Nixon administration release them.

But truthfully, most of the parallels tend to feel more than a little forced, I think. Why? Because thanks to the Republicans’ unbelievable choice for a nominee, this year’s presidential race is essentially sui generis, meaning any comparison tends to fall apart as we try vainly to pretend Trump even faintly resembles the weakest “real” candidate ever put forward by a major party.

As you might imagine, when my students watch and comment on the 1960 debate between RMN and JFK they are noticing many, many differences with what they are seeing today. Indeed, the contrast couldn’t be more stark, starting with the respect shown between the candidates, the civility of the proceedings, and the generally elevated level of discourse.

If you’ve never seen any of the four debates from 1960, go watch the first 10 minutes of the first one to see what my students are talking about when listing these differences. Then think about the unpleasant, badly moderated, stress-inducing and mostly useless ordeal a lot of us endured last night.

I mean, they call them “debates,” and for the sake of convenience I guess that’s what we have to refer to them as, too. But that’s obviously not what they are.

Future historians will inevitably point back to 2016 and show how what we ended up with this year could be traced back to that first televised debate on September 26, 1960, the night “style” began to challenge “substance” in a more vivid, conspicuous way than had been realized previously when it came to presidential politics. Might be easier to show the connection a half-century from now, although some are already working on making the argument, I’m sure.

Meanwhile for those of us living through 2016, it’s getting harder and harder to see any connection with the past -- never mind worrying about what the future holds.

Photos: “Presidential seal,” Ted, CC BY-SA 2.0; Kennedy-Nixon First Presidential Debate, 1960, JFK Library.

When Nixon’s Ace in the Hole Turned Into a Blank

Following last night’s debate between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, CNN aired what will be the first of a series of shows called Race to the White House looking at past elections, in this case focusing on the 1960 race between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon.

I’m currently teaching my course “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics,” and in fact we were just reading about and discussing the 1960 race, including watching lengthy excerpts from the first JFK-RMN debate. I made sure to let my students know about last night’s program, then, for a couple of reasons.

For one, since we had only just gotten through discussing the race I thought they’d find it interesting to compare what we’d learned with what was included in the hour-long show. Secondly, I like reminding them how even though we’re studying people and events from a half-century ago, many are still interested in these things and believe them to be relevant today -- as indicated by CNN giving an hour of prime time to the ’60 race.

The ads for last night’s show made it seem as though the focus would be on the historic first debate (of four) between Kennedy and Nixon that took place on September 26, 1960, a notion furthered by the fact that the show was being paired with the Dems’ debate. In truth, though, the debate only earned a tiny bit of attention during the hour, fleetingly discussed for just a few minutes during the latter half of the show.

The rest of the hour was spent covering the respective candidates’ campaigns via commentary from a few academics and others, the showing of numerous clips from 1960, and some fleeting reenactments employed to enhance the story. Kevin Spacey -- evoking his House of Cards role as U.S. president -- is the narrator for the series, and was heard at the start of the hour suggesting (somewhat misleadingly) that Nixon was hopelessly outmatched by Kennedy as a politician and campaigner.

“You think you know the rules,” he says as we watch an actor portraying Nixon in shadowy profile. “But what happens when you discover you don’t even know how to play the game?”

Following such a line, it isn’t surprising to see a lot of emphasis thereafter on Kennedy’s right moves and Nixon’s wrong ones during the campaign. That said, the show provides some balance as well, illustrating in a necessarily cursory way pros and cons for both candidates. Near the end it is emphasized that JFK was as adept as RMN was when it came to “dirty tricks,” although the show doesn’t really dwell on too many examples (other than alluding to possible voter fraud in Illinois and Texas tilting the election JFK’s way).

Nixon’s eagerness to debate Kennedy is correctly presented as a misstep. During the quick presentation of the first debate, Nixon’s five-o’clock shadow and flop sweat is of course highlighted, and in fact there’s even a quick pre-debate clip of Nixon saying “think I better shave.” The much-repeated line about those listening on radio thinking Nixon “won” the debate while TV viewers favored JFK is uncritically repeated again, something that started as a few anecdotes and got blown up into some sort of ultimate signifier of not just the debate but the entire campaign and election.

Other more meaningful moments from the 1960 campaign are highlighted, including JFK’s address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Martin Luther King’s arrest in Georgia and JFK’s phone call to Coretta, and a couple of Nixon’s “bad luck” moments including being hospitalized for two full weeks at the end of August and beginning of September.

Nixon’s hospitalization resulted from an infection that resulted from his banging his knee on a car door during a stop in Greensboro, NC in mid-August, part of his foolhardy effort to visit all 50 states during the campaign -- something he insisted on doing even after his injury and hospitalization.

In his discussion of the 1960 campaign in Six Crises (written shortly afterwards), Nixon concludes with a list of 16 things he “should have” done, all decisions which in his mind likely contributed to costing him the election. He does not include campaigning in all 50 states among the list of items, though he does lead it off with “I should have refused to debate Kennedy.”

For the second item on the list, and perhaps the second-most important one in retrospect, Nixon says “I should have used Eisenhower more in the campaign.” There is brief reference to Ike having been largely absent from the campaign near the end of the CNN program. With less than a week to go before the election, Spacey’s narration suggests the Nixon campaign had been cleverly waiting to use Eisenhower at the very last to produce a greater effect.

“Nixon has one last card to play,” he says, “his old boss, ex-General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Despite the card-playing metaphor, no indication is made to the fact that both Ike and Nixon were poker players.

We see shots from the ticker tape parade of November 2nd in which Ike finally appeared with Nixon, an event which is said to have given Nixon a late boost as Election Day drew near. I anticipated another turn in the story here -- one explaining how this “one last card” wasn’t nearly as effective as it might have been. But the program moved in a different direction.

This might have been the biggest omission from the show, actually. Not only was Eisenhower mostly absent from the campaign, but in late August 1960 (just a week after Nixon bumped his knee in Greensboro), Eisenhower infamously concluded his weekly press conference with a line that would greatly hurt RMN in the weeks leading up to the debate.

“We understand that the power of decision is entirely yours, Mr. President,” began a reporter, leading up to what would be the last question of the presser. “I just wondered if you could give us an example of a major idea of his [i.e., Nixon's] that you had adopted in that role, as the decider and final, uh....”

About to leave, Eisenhower said “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.”

Afterwards Eisenhower would say he didn’t mean to suggest he actually needed a week to come up with an idea of Nixon’s his administration had found useful. Rather he was just referring to the fact that he’d be giving another press conference a week later and they could continue the discussion then.

But the damage was done. In fact, in that first debate a month later Nixon would be asked early on about Eisenhower’s statement, putting RMN on the defensive right away. And not long after that, the Kennedy campaign built a television ad around Ike’s line -- take a look:

I was a little surprised CNN didn’t touch on this part of the story of the 1960 campaign, the moment when Nixon’s “ace in the hole” suddenly turned into a useless blank. Still, for those unfamiliar with the 1960 race there was enough in the program perhaps to whet your appetite to learn more.

Image: Graphic from CNN advertisement, Race for the White House, 3/6/16 episode.

Trump and the Poker Analogy

A friend forwarded me this new article appearing over on the Time magazine website over weekend, one offering to explain Donald Trump’s unorthodox campaign strategy (a topic I was discussing here last week).

The key to unpacking the mystery of Trump is suggested in the title: “How Poker Explains Trump’s Campaign.” The mildly clever piece has a couple of good moments, and author Alex Altman does demonstrate a good enough knowledge of poker strategy to speak knowledgeably when pursuing the politics-and-poker analogy.

Nothing super novel here, of course, as politicians and campaigns have been likened to poker for, oh, two centuries or so. I did enjoy going through the list of poker strategies, though, and recalling how practically every one of them has already come up in the course I’m teaching again this semester, “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Politics, and Poker.”

The article starts out hailing Trump as “the best poker player in the Republican field.” Then -- with a nod toward Trump’s casino-owning background -- it goes on to catalogue some of the moves he’s “ripped from the poker player’s handbook.”

The very first one -- “Be unpredictable” -- was a cornerstone of Nixon’s own strategy as a poker player, in his campaigns, and while in office.

In our class we are constantly quoting Nixon in an 1983 interview complaining about various traits leaders lack, including the understanding of how valuable it can be to keep one’s next move hidden.

“One of the problems... in foreign affairs particularly, in dealing with great leaders abroad, particularly those that are adversaries,” says Nixon, “[is] the almost insatiable tendency of American politicians to want to put everything out on the table. Their inability to know when to bluff, when to call, and above everything else, how to be unpredictable.”

That last point then earns some extra emphasis from Nixon.

“Unpredictability is the greatest asset or weapon that a leader can have.... And unless he’s unpredictable, he’s going to find that he loses a great deal of his power.”

Nixon’s campaigns were full of such “surprise” moments (and “dirty tricks”), as was his presidency with his frequent announcements and “big plays.”

The rest of the list about Trump’s poker-like tendencies on the campaign trail reads in a similarly familiar way, highlighting aggression, being able to “change speeds,” and fearless boldness. Regarding the latter, Altman includes the quote “In order to live, you must be willing to die,” attributing it only to poker players generally and not to the late Amir Vahedi (whom I think many of us would probably first think to credit with line).

There is one item on the list that seemed at first glance to be suggesting something a little different (and not a strategy on Nixon’s list) -- “Play in position.” But the explanation by Altman actually has nothing to do with position or acting last, but rather being selective when it comes to getting involved and vying for pots (such as when opting out of debating, as Trump did last week). “Tight is right” would probably have been a better header for this section.

In any case, I wouldn’t suggest Trump’s apparent poker sensibilities as he’s being attributed with having in the Time piece make him more like Nixon. Rather they make him more like practically every other politician who has ever gotten involved in the vote-getting game.

Image: $5 trump taj mahal donald trump casino chip atlantic city new jersey, Amazon.

Talking Nixon, Movies, Sports & Horses On the Thinking Poker Podcast

Quick post today to report the latest episode of The Thinking Poker podcast is now online (Episode 154), and your humble scribbler is the guest. No shinola!

After the usual strategy talk comes about an hour-long conversation between myself and co-hosts Nate Meyvis and Andrew Brokos. We ended up covering a number of different topics, starting out with my two college courses “Poker in American Film and Culture” and “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics.”

Since I just wrapped up teaching the Nixon class for the first time, I talk for a while about Nixon and his poker story. Donald Trump came up in there, too, along with some discussion about how politics and campaigning has changed over the last half-century or so.

Then we moved over into discussing in a more general way poker’s place in American culture before circling back to the “Poker in American Film and Culture” course and some talk about A Streetcar Named Desire, The Odd Couple, and John Wayne movies.

Toward the latter part of the hour we focused a bit on sports and the rise of analytics, moved over to chat about horses and farm life (and parallels between dressage and poker), and then I espoused the much underrated virtues of cleaning stalls.

If you’re curious, get started on those New Year’s resolutions early and go for a walk or jog, and while you do give the show a listen. And if you do, you can let me know what you were thinking when listening to the Thinking Poker Podcast.

Thomas Mallon’s Watergate

Finally got around to reading Thomas Mallon’s 2012 novel Watergate, an exercise in historical fiction that manages to pull together most of the details of the complicated and fascinating political scandal that cut short Richard Nixon’s second term as president. As the genre allows, Mallon adds a number invented details as well, including significantly fleshing out a few characters and their backstories and introducing a couple of new figures (both love interests) not actually part of the real-life saga.

The book is highly engaging and aside from its literary merits actually could work as a decent introduction to the story of Watergate for those unfamiliar with it. I say that somewhat hesitantly, though, and in truth as I think about the college course I’ve been teaching this semester -- “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics” -- I realize I probably wouldn’t want to assign the novel as the fictionalization disturbs the historical truth just enough to create too many complications.

It’s hard enough trying to relate what actually happened, I wouldn’t want to give myself the additional task of sorting out where Mallon has creatively filled gaps -- in some cases quite literally, such as when he reveals what was said on those missing 18-and-a-half minutes (as well as how it got erased).

There’s much I like about the book, including some of the small, deftly chosen details like the reference late in the book to the “Watergate centrifuge,” at once evoking the maelstrom of the scandal and the unique, swirling shape of the complex (pictured below). Many have noted before how the actual story is “Shakespearean” in its scope with a “tragic hero” at the center of it falling in the end, although Mallon’s book is actually often more comedic and even light than tragic and dark.

Nixon himself recedes into the background for much of it as a minor player, in fact, portrayed somewhat sympathetically as having been led down a difficult path only partly of his own choosing. Mallon gives a lot more attention to others, including two important ones from the actual story -- Howard Hunt and Fred LaRue. He also cleverly highlights the fascinating octogenarian Alice Roosevelt Longworth (daughter of Theodore) who was friends with Nixon throughout his career.

The presentation of Hunt’s crazy life including the plane crash death of his wife Dorothy is quite effective (I shuddered a little at the relation of that event, as I think any frequent flyers might). Mallon also delves deeply into LaRue’s past and the death of his father in a hunting accident, thought perhaps to have been the fault of LaRue himself. Mallon actually allows that mystery to muscle its way into the becoming the novel’s primary plot, particularly during the latter half of the book, strangely making the mysteries of Watergate secondary. (He does, however, create a neat -- maybe too neat -- connection between LaRue’s backstory and the later scandal that serves in a way to present an invented “cause” for how Watergate got started.)

I mentioned my course, the title of which suggests that while the focus is Richard Nixon’s life and career, we use poker as a kind of guiding metaphor throughout. Nixon himself was an avid player, particularly during his young adulthood, and had much to say about the game later on, including about the many parallels between poker and politics. I’ll admit this interest of mine blinkered my reading of Watergate somewhat, causing me to hope for more talk of betting and raising and bluffing and folding than actually turned out to be the case.

My hopes that poker might actually be a kind of thematic motif in the book were raised right away during the Prologue. Mallon makes an early reference to Nixon’s decision after having renewed bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong to mine Haiphong Harbor just a couple of weeks before the first Moscow summit at the end of May 1972. The move is described as having put the whole summit at risk, and when it wasn’t cancelled Nixon is said to have arrived in Moscow “with a stronger hand” as a result.

The prologue then ends with Nixon in Moscow having a brief daydream about his days winning at poker as a Naval officer while waiting out the end of WWII in the Pacific. As it turns out, this will be the only poker reference in the book that explicitly refers to Nixon’s actual playing of the game.

“But something in the dream was wrong,” goes the description. “He was winning too much; he had too many chips in front of him. He didn’t know how he’d gotten them, but he knew he had to get rid of them fast. But how?”

Coming just as the story was starting, I thought perhaps Mallon was setting himself up for later references to Nixon sitting behind an imagined stack of chips, eventually switching over into a mode of trying desperately to preserve them as opponents attacked him from all sides. And once Watergate began to evolve from a minor irritation to an “affair” to a full-blown scandal, we would see Nixon bluffing madly as his “hands” got worse and worse.

That doesn’t happen, though. There are a few more incidental references to poker here and there, as well as some passages that a biased reader like me might argue imply something of the poker-politics parallel. But poker isn’t really part of this attempt to tell the tale.

A couple of weeks before the 1972 election, Nixon writes a letter to Alice Roosevelt Longworth in which he notes “I know, as you do and your father did, all victories are temporary, but we’ll soon be celebrating together -- not just the election, but a peace agreement.” Then after Nixon wins he feels a letdown, in part because by winning what was necessarily his last election “it meant, after all, no more politics.” “But he didn’t suppose there was much logic in giving thanks to politics to putting an end to itself.” Such references make politics sound a little like poker, with Nixon here having managed to beat a final opponent to leave himself alone at the table (temporarily, anyway).

A little later it’s inauguration day (January 20, 1973), and Nixon is shown talking with White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman about ways to spin the story of the burglars having tried to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The old story of Lyndon B. Johnson’s adminstration having bugged the Nixon campaign airplane in 1968 is mentioned, though tempered by LBJ’s increasingly grave health (he’d be dead two days later). “I don’t know if it would be worth it or not to play the plane card once he’s gone,” Nixon says to Haldeman.

Another character (LaRue) is later described as pondering “the love of the game” of politics. He later refers to his own role in Watergate (as the bagman), saying “Money may have been my whole part in it, but you can’t name me one other political scandal where nobody had money as his motive, at least at the start.” Again, poker is well in the background here, only barely suggested by the many connections between poker and politics (money).

Later in July 1973 Nixon is in the hospital with pneumonia and his new White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig comes for a visit. Just a few days removed from Alexander Butterfield’s revelation of the secret recording system during his testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee, Nixon and Haig discuss the idea of destroying the recordings, something Nixon would never quite bring himself to do despite the encouragement of others, among them John Connally who’d been Nixon’s Secretary of Treasury and who after heading the “Democrats for Nixon” during the ’72 campaign had recently switched over to the Republican Party.

“Inertia would win,” writes Mallon, articulating the president’s thoughts regarding the tapes. Nixon wouldn’t destroy the tapes, but rather “he would fight for them in court, however hopelessly, rather than trigger a vast convulsion -- and maybe impeachment -- by their destruction.” He then goes on to bring up a characteristic of Nixon I’ve always linked with his poker playing -- his love of surprising, dramatic moves or what in poker we might call the “fancy play.”

“He himself had always loved the big play, the bold move” writes Mallon, “but he didn’t have the courage to light Connally’s bonfire.”

The passage reminds me of what Nixon once said in an interview when talking about his poker strategy. “If the odds are great against you in a small pot, get out,” he explained. “But while you should be cautious in the small ones, be bold in the big ones. Be willing to risk all to gain all.” Again, though, I’m forcing these connections into the text somewhat, as the novelist himself is making no explicit reference to poker.

Another character is later described as “eager not to overplay her hand” when meeting with Howard Hunt. The embattled Spiro Agnew is once described as a “bluff, manly character” as he is about to be ousted as vice-president.

Pat Nixon is one of the more likable characters in the novel, and while I’m not too sure I like one choice Mallon made when adding an invented detail to her story, I think he does well to make her come alive in the book. That said, he does have her deliver a short speech to Nixon that sounds less like actual dialogue than a kind of pale version of a Shakespearean soliloquy given to a minor character as a way of telling the audience something important about the tragic hero.

“I hate your enemies, but you love them,” she says. “You love their existence; they’re what gives you your own.” Again, one could talk about the existential crisis of a poker player who needs opponents in order to survive.

By the spring of 1974 it’s clear Nixon’s presidency very likely is going to be cut short, and Pat is made to think how “she and Dick and Rose and all the rest of them had spent their full allowance of life and now could only bounce checks against the past.” In early March the “Watergate Seven” are indicted with Nixon also named as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” that latter bit of information described as “a card that Jaworski” -- i.e., Leon Jaworski, the new Special Prosecutor -- “can play how and when he wants.”

Near the end in June and early July 1974, Nixon would make final trips abroad to Europe, the Middle East, and once more to the Soviet Union. While never weaker at home, he ironically is received especially well at many of those stops, something he’s shown anticipating in the book when he tells Haig that each of the countries would have “the red carpet out for him.”

“The region was suddenly a casino,” adds Mallon (narrating Nixon’s thoughts), “and he was running the table.”

The line is well placed, but totally misses the chance to circle back to the poker metaphor that would have special meaning for Nixon. In fact there’s something almost jarring here about the line’s recalling other casino games (e.g., craps). Even so, we have Nixon at the end of the chapter “thinking how the game might still be won,” even if the Supreme Court ruled (as it would) he’d have to give up the tapes.

The Watergate story ends with the resignation and pardon, then the novel includes an epilogue govering the next several decades. We get one last scene with Nixon during his final months after Pat’s death and just before his own. Here we get one last internal monologue that includes another accurate observation about Nixon’s character, but one more missed opportunity (I think) to have reprised the poker motif.

“He massaged his left temple and reflected upon a tendency to see only bad luck, never good, operating in his own life. Bad luck was the source of his defeats, whereas his achievements had come from his own skill and nerve.”

This sentiment does reflect how Nixon often spoke and wrote about his career, and fits well inside this final scene before Mallon’s character drifts off to sleep (and out of the story). It would have been nice to connect that talk of skill-versus-luck with poker, noting how what was really kind of a blind spot for Nixon (i.e., his overvaluing of luck when losing and skill when winning) might have been traced back to those days playing poker on Green Island.

Sure, he won a lot off his fellow officers -- many thousands (and enough to help fund his first Congressional campaign). But how much of it was skill and how much having been dealt some fortunate, well-timed five-card stud hands? Nixon tells a story from those games of once being dealt a royal flush -- it’s the most memorable hand he ever played. That could’ve come into Watergate somewhere, I’d think, perhaps even here at the end.

These are small quibbles, though, here idiosyncratically shared by a person with a special interest in Nixon the poker player. I enjoyed the novel greatly, and would recommend it to anyone wanting to be guided through this incredible real-life political tragicomedy.

Negative-EV: Nixon’s “Last Press Conference”

My “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics” class is going well so far. We’re about halfway through the semester, and as the course is organized chronologically to follow RMN’s life and career we’ve now arrived at the tumultuous year of 1968 when Nixon completes what was really a most improbable comeback to win the presidency.

After losing a very close election to John F. Kennedy in 1960 (Nixon’s first political defeat), then getting soundly beaten by Pat Brown in the 1962 California governor race, it seemed very likely Nixon would be moving on from politics, probably using the law degree he’d earned from Duke University to move over into a legal career. Indeed, he and his family would soon move to New York City where Nixon would become a senior partner in a law firm, spending the next few years hovering at the political periphery (and eventually plotting his return).

In terms of American political history, Nixon’s comeback was almost unprecedented. That is to say, only once before had a major party’s candidate run for president and lost, then managed to run again subsequently and win. But that was Grover Cleveland way back in 1892, and he’d actually been president for a term once before (from 1885-1888) and in fact had won the popular vote in 1888 though lost the electoral vote to Benjamin Harrison.

So really no one who hadn’t previously been president before had ever run in the general election and lost, then later run again and won (as a major party candidate, that is). Several had tried, including William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Dewey, and most recently Adlai Stevenson (who lost to Eisenhower in both 1952 and 1956). But none had managed to pull it off.

But the odds seemed even longer for Nixon. After all, he had lost another race in between for a lesser office. Not only that, after conceding the ’62 race, Nixon then delivered a spiteful series of comments directed toward the press, ending with a sarcastic reference to how they’d lament his absence going forward.

“As I leave you I want you to know -- just think how much you’re going to be missing,” he said. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

A couple of months back a poker player I follow tweeted out a reference to this moment, alluding to it as he described himself petulantly leaving a cash game in which he’d lost. I wish I could remember who the player was and find the tweet again, but essentially he was self-deprecatingly chiding himself for behaving badly, having said something like “you won’t have me to kick around anymore” as he left the table.

It seems like an entirely negative-EV play for Nixon to have made, regardless of his future plans. In his memoirs he reports that Murray Stans (then an advisor, later Nixon’s campaign finance chairman and one of the many implicated in Watergate) “told me he thought it would cost me $100,000 a year in new legal clients.”

Meanwhile in the wake of the “last press conference,” many pundits leaped in to pronounce Nixon’s career finished. In fact within the week ABC aired a special called The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon, kind of figuratively throwing dirt on his coffin. The show even featured a couple of Nixon’s formerly defeated foes, Jerry Voorhis (whom Nixon crushed in ’46 in a race for Congress) and Alger Hiss (whom Nixon accused of being a Soviet spy and successfully pursued a perjury conviction that earned Hiss time in prison).

Characteristically, Nixon thought differently about his performance, saying how he “never regretted what I said at the ‘last press conference.’” In fact he spun it into a positive, claiming that “it gave the media a warning that I would not sit back and take whatever biased coverage was dished out to me,” claiming it was “partially responsible for the much fairer treatment I received from the press during the next few years.”

“From that point of view alone,” he concludes, “it was worth it.”

For Nixon, the press was essentially an opponent. In the “last press conference” he notes to the reporters how he “welcomed the opportunity to test wits with you,” underscoring the way he viewed their interactions as antagonistic -- as a competition, even, with the potential to win or lose.

But if the press were an opponent, they were especially difficult to “play” against. No matter how many times Nixon thought he was putting in the last bet, they just kept on calling and/or raising to continue the hand.

The “Checkers Speech”: When Nixon Bet and Dared Eisenhower to Call

Fifty-three years ago -- September 23, 1952 -- California senator and vice-presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon went on national television for a full half-hour to defend himself against accusations that he had inappropriately used campaign funds for his personal use. The presentation was positively received by the American public, and as a result thoughts about replacing Nixon with another VP candidate on the Republican ticket were swept aside.

Early on in the half-hour Nixon tells how an independent audit had been ordered to examine the fund and that it had determined no improprieties to have existed regarding it. He then provides numerous details about his personal finances, sharing practically every bit of trivia regarding his modest upbringing and the money he and his wife Pat had made and saved over the years, right down to exact amounts owed in mortgages and loans, details regarding his life insurance policy, and the fact that he owned a 1950 Oldsmobile.

It’s quite a tale, this financial autobiography provided by a politician on a national stage. Nixon omits one interesting item, though -- the money he won at poker while a Naval officer serving in the Pacific during the latter stages of WWII. He does mention how at the end of the war he and Pat had about $10,000 saved with which he was able to launch his first Congressional campaign, but in truth some (perhaps even most) of that total came from his having cleaned up in games of stud and draw on Green Island.

After defending himself, Nixon goes on the offensive, speaking about the Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s own campaign fund (bigger, and less well monitored), then moves on to praise the candidate at the top of the Republican’s ticket, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He concludes the speech with an invitation to viewers to send their judgments to the Republican National Committee, and as noted the response was quite favorable, showing that Nixon’s defense had succeeded.

The most famous passage of the speech comes at the very end of that catalogue of items regarding personal finances, beginning with Nixon saying “One other thing I should probably tell you, because if I don’t they will probably be saying this about me, too.” He describes the family having been given the gift of a dog, a cocker spaniel, while on the campaign trail. He explains how Tricia, their oldest daugher (then aged six), named the dog Checkers.

“You know, the kids, like all kids, loved the dog,” says Nixon. “And I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.”

It’s certainly an attention-grabbing moment in the speech. It’s jaw-droppingly maudlin, too, and one of several points during the half-hour that seem almost comic in retrospect. It’s part of a somewhat complex rhetorical strategy employed during the presentation, a stirring of the emotions to go along with the more rational-seeming presentation of facts and other attempts to establish credibility so as to persuade the audience that Nixon was not at fault, was honest, and could be trusted going forward.

Incidentally, the reference to a dog in a defensive political speech had a precedent, something Nixon was well aware of at the time. Exactly eight years before, on September 23, 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had responded to accusations that during a tour of the Pacific -- right after Nixon had left, in fact -- he had left his dog (named Fala) on one of the islands and had ordered a destroyer to go back to get it (at great expense).

The story was false, and FDR jokingly talks about how he personally didn’t mind the Republicans attacking him, but that his dog was much more sensitive. “His Scotch soul was furious... he has not been the same dog since,” Roosevelt cracked, adding that he felt it incumbent on him “to object to libelous statements about my dog.”

Given that he was speaking on the anniversary of the “Fala speech” and was making a pretty deliberate allusion, I can’t help but think Nixon had his tongue in cheek somewhat with his decision to highlight Checkers in a similarly humorous bit of self-justification. But the move meant more in Nixon’s speech, and came to be remembered much more vividly thereafter when people throughout his career would point back to the “Checkers speech.”

One aspect of the speech I find fascinating is how it can be viewed as a strategic move by Nixon in a conflict not against the Democrats or the press who were raising concerns and attacking him for the fund, but rather a part of a kind of “heads-up match” between himself and Eisenhower -- also a fine poker player, as it happens, although there are no stories of Nixon and Ike ever actually playing against each other.

Eisenhower -- a five-star general and war hero, but not really a politician -- was being led by his advisors, who had suggested he choose Nixon as his VP, then were suggesting he find a way to remove him from the ticket once the “fund crisis” broke. In fact, Ike’s advisors likely helped make the crisis bigger than it should have been insofar as they didn’t encourage the presidential candidate to step in and defend Nixon early on when talk of the fund first arose.

How, then, to move forward? Ike didn’t want to ask Nixon to step off, preferring instead that Nixon make the decision himself. But Nixon didn’t want to be the one to make the decision, either -- he wanted Ike to decide.

They had reached impasse, and by going on TV and asking the American public to weigh in, Nixon cleverly forced Eisenhower’s hand (so to speak). It was as though Nixon made a big bet on himself and was daring Ike to call it.

I like how Garry Wills describes the situation in his 1970 book Nixon Agonistes. Says Wills, Nixon “knew this was not what it appeared -- Nixon against the press, or the Democrats, or the people. It was Nixon against Ike -- a contest that... no one can be expected to win” because of Eisenhower’s enormous popularity. Nixon, explains Wills, “was reaching out across [the viewers’] heads to touch swords in a secret duel with Ike.”

When I watch and consider the “Checkers speech,” then, I think not of the board game after which the cocker spaniel was named, but the card game both Nixon and Eisenhower played successfully. And how early in his career Nixon found a way to win this particular, crucial pot.

Early Polling, First Levels

Watched some from those GOP debates last night. I had the early “undercard” on for the last half-hour, kind of passively following. Then I watched more attentively the second one -- the one with 11 candidates all vying with one another for air time -- for an hour-and-a-half or so before growing weary enought to shut down the teevee for the night.

Thanks in large part to this “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics” course I’m currently teaching, I’ve been more aware than usual of parallels between poker and political campaigns. Thus did I sit up for a moment after Scott Walker tossed out that line that he’d “love to play cards with [the president]... because Barack Obama folds on everything with Iran.”

That’s a line the Wisconsin governor’s been using for a while now, and it didn’t necessarily earn him much in the way of “chips” last night, given how several other candidates immediately stepped on it by, pleading “Jake! Jake” to get moderator Jake Tapper to pick them next.

Meanwhile -- thanks again to the class -- I continue to be more focused on the presidential races from 1960, 1968, and 1972 than on the 2016 one.

In 1968 Nixon won the presidency with 301 electoral votes, not a lot more than the 270 needed to be elected. Hubert Humphrey finished with 191 and George Wallace 46; if those two had picked up a couple of states between them, Nixon would have come up short and the decision would have been thrown to the House of Representatives.

The popular vote was also close between RMN and HHH, with Nixon finishing with about 31.78 million to Humphrey’s 31.27 million, while Wallace picked up about 9.9 million votes.

The polls were kind of remarkable during the last few days leading up to the 1968 election, with Nixon leading relatively comfortably until Lyndon B. Johnson’s “October surprise” announcement of a halt on bombing in North Vietnam on the Wednesday before the election.

For a day or two, the prospect of peace seemed imminent, and Humphrey surged. Then all was thrown into doubt when word emanated from South Vietnam that they weren’t necessarily on board with the agreement. “Saigon Opposes Paris Talk Plans, Says It Can’t Attend Next Week” went the headline in The New York Times that Saturday. Voters didn’t know what to think.

(Nixon, of course, is alleged by many to have had a direct role in South Vietnam’s sudden about-face, with Nixon campaign contributor Anna Chennault acting as an agent in what LBJ would describe as a treasonous act by RMN.)

The polls went kind of wacko from day-to-day, with Nixon up, then he and Humphrey even, then Humphrey even up briefly before Tuesday arrived. If the poll numbers were extrapolated to estimate the ultimate number of votes each would receive, the totals would resemble chip stacks at a tournament final table, with each enjoying the edge briefly until the vote finally froze the “stacks” once and for all.

The analogy only works, really, if we think of these final “players” as engaged in a cash game from which they have to leave at a preappointed time, with Nixon having finished up just enough to be declared the game’s winner. It’s hard not to resist thinking of the race in tourney terms, though, with one player effectively finishing with all the chips (even if that player doesn’t even enjoy a majority of the popular vote).

Right now the Republicans have 15 players left. (There are more declared candidates, but it appears only 15 have “chips” at present, with several of those on very short stacks.) Meanwhile Democrats have five candidates who are being recognized as “in the game,” with Biden sounding as though he may be taking a seat after all.

That’s still multiple tables’ worth of players. It’s the early levels, though, and so, like in a tournament, the stack sizes don’t mean very much as yet.

The Angle Shooters of the NFL

Am I ready for some football? Yessir.

Will be right there with everyone else tonight to see the New England Patriots host the Pittsburgh Steelers. I have picked the Pats tonight, the first of 256 picks I’ll be making in the Pigskin Pick’em pool.

Why the Pats? Two reasons. One, I saw the Steelers look only so-so in their last preseason game versus the Panthers. And secondly, I always pick the Pats.

Was today reading ESPN’s big investigative feature from a earlier this week, “Spygate to Deflategate: Inside what split the NFL and Patriots apart,” which does a fairly substantial number on New England’s frequent skirting the edges of what’s allowed when it comes to competitive fairness over the last decade-plus.

I’ve mentioned my current American Studies course, “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics.” Just this week we were starting to get into Nixon’s image and reputation, and how everything is necessarily colored by the lens of Watergate and the resignation. All of the many episodes from Nixon’s life and presidency -- including his poker playing -- is practically impossible to think about without thinking about his terrible judgment, abuse of power, and the disgrace caused by his spectacular fall from power.

In making that point, we of course had to observe how the “-gate” suffix is now readily employed to create abbreviated terms standing for any scandal. It’s a way of communicating something complicated and difficult to explain in a single, made-up word -- handy, but usually obfustactory and often full of prejudice, making it seem as though guilt or innocence is as easily applied to the figures involved.

That ESPN’s headline contains not one but two examples of such usage is impressive. I’m referring not to the headline writer (who didn’t coin either term) but that the Patriots have managed to be at the center of two such scandals. Heck, there’s a lot else in the story that recalls Watergate, in particular the systemic nature of the Pats’ shenanigans which reminds me a little of the various “operations” in effect (with varying degrees of commitment and/or effectiveness) during the Nixon administration.

But my takeaway is hardly to say the Patriots are cheaters, even with all of the unsavory evidence compiled to suggest as much. I was writing earlier in the week about poker terminology turning up in non-poker contexts. Here’s a place where I think a poker analogy would be especially appropriate to employ -- that is, to refer to New England as “angle shooters” rather than cheaters.

Like Nixon, they’ve employed “dirty tricks” that some would readily describe as unethical, others unsportsmanlike, and still others outright illegal and thus deserving of punishment. But to me all of it falls under the heading of the angle shot, which in poker sometimes can be regarded as unethical, sometimes unsportsmanlike, and sometimes against the rules (if the floor is called over and decides in that direction).

I like our friend Robert Woolley’s pair of articles over in the PokerNews strategy section outlining various examples of sort of angle shooting, “Seven Dirty Poker Tricks (and How to Fight Back)” and “Still More Angle Shooters, and How to Defeat Them.”

The actions described in those articles are the analogues to what the Patriots have done over the years. And what others could have tried to do, too, if they wished to play the game that way.

From the Editor’s Desk

At the moment I am mostly up to my eyeballs in Nixon-related tasks, trying to finish up the last bit of pregame work for my American Studies course that begins in a little under two weeks.

I mentioned the class here last week -- “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics” -- and how it uses the angle of Nixon’s poker playing to explore his super-swingy political career that took him from the deepest valley to the highest mountain and back (to paraphrase his own words).

I’ve been preparing some videos to show the students, including some in which I’ve had a chance to work on my iMovie editing skills. In one video I’ve compiled a number of political ads from 1968. In another I’ve strung together some clips from the White House tapes, including transcripts to read as they go by. (I may at some point share some excerpts from some of the material I’ve created here.)

Today I was experimenting with pulling together another short video cutting back and forth between clips of Nixon talking about his poker strategy and much more familiar moments from various speeches (e.g., “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” “I am not a crook”).

I’ve always loved editing -- all kinds. Can be incredibly immersive, too, as I toil away carving something down to fit exactly with my idea for what it should be.

As a writer, I’ve often found revision nearly as rewarding, and sometimes even more so, than the initial drafting. I play guitar and bass and used to do a lot of recording with a four-track, and that, too, was always enjoyable, especially when I got around to working with some audio editing software. Editing video is fun as well, especially with a program like iMovie that allows for easy manipulation of clips and transitions.

The editor is so incredibly powerful when it comes to managing the ultimate message that gets conveyed, regardless of the form and content. Such a truth was acutely illustrated to me today as I spliced together a clip of Nixon saying “I knew when to get out of a pot; I didn’t stick around when I didn’t have the cards” with another of him declaring “I have never been a quitter.”

Now that I think about it, Nixon himself intensely engaged in editing throughout much of his career and afterwards, too.

Poker and the Debates

I’ve been pretty immersed in presidential campaigns this summer. I’m not talking about the ones for 2016. Rather, the ones from 1960, 1968, and 1972.

That’s because I’m continuing to prepare for a class I’ll be teaching in the fall, kind of an offshoot from the “Poker in American Film and Culture” one that I taught (and have written about here) for about four years or so in the American Studies program at UNC-Charlotte. Gonna take a break from that for a bit to try a different course this fall, one called “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics.”

The main focus of the new course is obviously Nixon and his three-decade long odyssey of a political career, with much discussion along the way of the Cold War, Vietnam, and Watergate (natch). We’ll use Nixon’s poker-playing background as a starting point for the class, subsequently linking many of the strategies he employed in the context of campaigns, domestic policy, and international diplomacy (and war) with what he had to say about poker.

I’ll share more about the class later on. Today, though, I am thinking about how even though we’re 15 months or so away from the 2016 presidential election, the “race” (as it were) has already begun in earnest, it seems, with the Republicans having the first of what I assume will probably be two dozen or more debates before the G.O.P. finally decides on a candidate.

In fact, there are two debates today -- a kind of “undercard” one involving seven candidates this afternoon, then the prime time one tonight with 10 more. Seems crazily early for it, but four years ago the G.O.P. started up with the debates even earlier, the first one having happened in May 2011 (pictured above).

The 1960 election turned heavily on the debates between Nixon and John F. Kennedy, of course, with the first of the four having the greatest impact and Nixon’s “five o’clock shadow” becoming an iconic image much referenced thereafter. There’s a lot more to the story of the JFK-RMN heads-up battle that year, although I will say I am greatly looking forward to having students watch that first debate and discussing with them some of the moves both players make in it.

Some may not realize there were no debates again until 1976, at least among the presidential candidates. Lyndon B. Johnson was such a prohibitive favorite in 1964, he easily saw how debating Barry Goldwater would be of little value to him -- only a way to lose “chips.” For similar reasons, Nixon opted not to debate George McGovern in 1972, although he’d say he was too busy visiting China and Moscow and running the country to stoop to campaigning (or scrutinizing the criminal activities of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President that would eventually contribute to his downfall).

In 1968 the race was much tighter, and while Hubert Humphrey did challenge Nixon to a debate, the latter opted against doing so, in part because of what had happened in 1960. There was one debate between Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy on June 1 that year, three days before the California primary. RFK won California, and during his victory speech challenged McCarthy to another debate just moments before sadly being gunned down by an assassin and dying early on June 6.

Looking back on those earlier campaigns, while there was certainly maneuvering happening 15 months out, announcements of candidacies and the engagement of campaigns were all still a good ways off -- never mind anyone actually talking about or having debates.

It’s nonetheless curious to consider the scene at present, including the current position of Donald Trump, the celebrity candidate whose current frontrunner status in G.O.P. polls can only be negatively affected by any direct engagement with his opponents, including in the context of a debate. There’s a kind of funny article on Five Thirty Eight this week ticking off “potential threats to Trump” which is, in fact, merely a list of the necessary stages of the campaign between now and the Republican National Convention in July 2016.

In other words, it seems more or less clear this is a game Trump can’t possibly win. Even so, it’s also clear he will probably continue playing it for as long as he’s able to keep rebuying.