The Past Catches Up Fast

This morning another entry in my “Poker & Pop Culture” series went up over on PokerNews, this one discussing a few connections between poker and the Cold War.

This new one will be the last politics-themed entry in the series (for a while, anyway), as the next several deal with much lighter fare. Here are the recent ones:

“That Time Harry Truman Let Winston Churchill Win”

“Tricky Dick Talks Poker in the White House”

“Joseph McCarthy Overplays the Red Scare Card”

“Bluffing With Bombs During the Cold War”

I’ve been loosely following a chronological structure with these, although at this point with the story having reached the 20th century there is going to be a lot of jumping back and forth as the columns are organized around various subcategories of culture. It just so happened that the last month has been taken up with stories about politicians and (in these last couple) Cold War confrontations involving the United States and former Soviet Union.

In these columns I haven’t explicitly referenced anything going on currently involving the new administration and the fast-moving crisis suddenly consuming it (and us). I did mention the new president entering the White House at the start of one of the columns, but otherwise I have kept my focus squarely on the past while avoiding the present. I’ve had a couple of reasons for doing so.

One is simply to avoid unnecessarily opening doors onto ongoing (and highly-charged) political debates raging on all sides at the moment. That’s not a goal of the columns, really, even if it could be enlightening now and then to draw connections between events that happened before and what is going on now.

The other is that it’s just too darn difficult to make such connections succinctly, given how different the present is from the past I’m discussing in those articles listed above (which mostly range from the 1920s through the 1970s).

As I mentioned here a little over two weeks ago in a post titled “The Maniac at the Table,” the instinct to compare the current crisis at the top with the protracted scandal that ultimately forced Richard Nixon from office has been irresistible to many. Lots of commentators are now evoking certain moments on the path that led toward the impeachment hearings in the summer of 1974, recognizing similarities that have already emerged less than a month into the current president’s tenure.

But while there are certainly parallels, there’s a lot that is different, too, not the least of which being the strange, singular relationship with Russia the current administration has adopted and consequently tried to force upon the U.S.

As you no doubt have heard, the president’s national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned late Monday night just a little over weeks after taking on the role. Ostensibly he did so because he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about conversations he’d had with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. in late December regarding sanctions imposed on Russia by Barack Obama’s administration.

Those sanctions had been imposed following multiple intelligence reports revealing Russia had attempted to affect the 2016 election via various “hacking” methods. “Russia’s cyberactivities were intended to influence the election, erode faith in US democratic institutions, sow doubt about the integrity of our electoral process, and undermine confidence in the institutions of the US government,” was the White House’s statement at the time as the Obama administration sanctioned Russian individuals and entities while jettisoning 35 Russian diplomats from the country.

Russia quickly retorted they’d be taking similar action in response, with Russian President Vladimir Putin quoted having told reporters there was “no alternative to reciprocal measures.” That same day (it has been revealed), Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador about the sanctions. The very next day Russia announced it would not reciprocate in any fashion, but rather wait for the new administration to take office.

The president-elect then brazenly tweeted “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) - I always new he was very smart!”

As we all know, the current president’s natural mode is to attack and bully, something he has demonstrated almost without exception over the last two years -- during the campaign, after the election, and during these three-and-a-half weeks in office.

He has been almost entirely indiscriminate with his criticisms, including targeting the nation’s traditional allies, high-ranking Republicans, U.S. intelligence agencies, and others whom even those who voted for him probably wish he’d refrain from vilifying. He’s also mixed in lots of knee-jerky attacks on television shows, media figures, particular businesses, and anyone else he believes has offended him.

His attacks are also often delivered without regard to political implications, something his supporters appreciate. Indeed, he seems almost entirely unconcerned about appearances or what others are going to say about his outbursts.

I keep repeating that qualifier “almost” because there has been a consistent, blatant exception to this pattern. The president not only resists criticizing Russia or Putin, he unwaveringly adopts an entirely uncharacteristic stance of passivity and non-resistance. Instead he commends, he celebrates. He acquiesces, always.

It has been impossible not to notice this exception. It’s also impossible not to entertain what seems an obvious explanation for it. The U.S. president is seriously compromised, and so is much of the team surrounding him.

The president himself might be hamstrung to speak or act against Russia because of his business interests (hidden in those undisclosed tax returns) or even past personal conduct (alluded to in that infamous dossier) or both. More definitively, he and many of those around him are unmistakably compromised by their communications with Russia during the campaign and the interregnum period between election and inauguration.

The president cannot speak out against Russia, at least not directly. Nor can he act in the nation’s interests when Russia chooses to violate a decades-old arms control treaty by deploying a new ground-launched cruise missile as was reported yesterday. (The administration has not responded to this violation yet, stating that it “is in the beginning stages of reviewing nuclear policy.”)

I’m recalling attending a presentation in September 2015 given by Carl Bernstein and P.J. O’Rourke, both of whom reported extensively on Nixon and Watergate as it unfolded more than four decades ago. The discussion was more about the then-upcoming campaign and election, and not so much about Watergate. There was one question, though, regarding how the earlier scandal would be covered today, what with the change in technology, the rise of social media, and so on.

Bernstein declared that “the web is a fabulous reportorial platform,” adding that we live in what he believes to be a “golden age of investigative reporting.” O’Rourke was a little more measured, recognizing how hard it can be sometimes to sort out the wheat from the chaff amid all of the reporting being done. He also said that if Watergate happened today, it would have taken a lot less than two-plus years to unfold since “the conspirators would have been more leaky.”

The current administration is especially leaky, that’s for certain. And when combined with the web’s rapid-fire “reportorial platform” things are escalating at a dizzying pace.

I tend to believe that the exhausting blitz of executive orders, memoranda, statements, and actions of the new president upon taking office occurred not just because of his naturally agitated state, his insatiable hunger for the spotlight, and/or his neglect (or ignorance) of “normal” politics and procedures of government.

I think the president and his team hit the ground running because they knew these things might well catch up to them, and quickly. That the power he enjoyed on January 20 was temporary, vulnerable to become eroded before such measures could be implemented.

That the past was going to catch up to them, and perhaps sooner than later.

Image: “Trump,” IoSonoUnaFotoCamera. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The Maniac at the Table

It’s easy to overreact.

A new player sits down at the table and immediately starts opening every pot, consistently raising two or three times the “norm.” He’s betting and raising after the flop, too, instantly disrupting the game’s previous rhythm and causing a kind of temporary paralysis to take over many players at the table.

He’s kind of a jerk as well, it turns out, making rude comments to the dealer and wait staff, and even directing a few unfriendly, terse judgments toward others at the table.

You gradually start to adjust to this newcomer -- or to tell yourself you’re adjusting, even if you’re still folding every hand to his raises while keeping mum. “I’ll find a spot,” you think to yourself, convinced this new, reckless-appearing style can’t possibly be effective over the long term.

Since the inauguration a week-and-a-half ago, the president of the United States and his team of advisors have heightened fears among many that his tenure in office will create lasting damage to the nation’s welfare and standing in the global community. Whether they will succeed in transforming the country’s core values -- equality, liberty, individualism, justice, the common good, diversity and unity -- is less certain, although those, too, are obviously under siege.

Indeed, through a hastily delivered series of executive orders and presidential memoranda, numerous erratic and hair-raising statements (including threats) by himself and his team to various groups including the press, and the continued advancement of an overall impression of instability and startling unpredictability, it appears damage has already been done that will take many years and likely multiple subsequent administrations to repair.

Unlike at any other time I can remember -- save, perhaps, the days following the attacks of 9/11 -- the country and its organizing principles feel genuinely threatened. Every single day since January 20 has presented new evidence to suggest that life as we know it both here in the U.S. and elsewhere is swiftly transforming into something less certain and more potentially destructive. Those among us who are not overtly supportive of the president and his team will suffer the most and the most directly, although even many of the most ardent red hat-wearers are going to find themselves significantly hurt as well.

Many commentators have suggested a few analogies between the present administration’s wrecking ball approach to governance and the damage inflicted during the five-and-a-half years of Richard Nixon’s presidency. It’s a logical step to make, given that there are some parallels. It’s also kind of an assuring one, in a way, suggesting as it does (at least indirectly) that what is happening right now isn’t necessarily as bad as it seems since, well, the world didn’t end with Nixon.

That’s what a friend of mine was telling me just last Friday after I commented to him how “exhausting” it was following the coverage of yet another crisis or three having been introduced by this administration. I brought up to him Nixon’s famous “Saturday Night Massacre,” that remarkable, turning-point moment in the Watergate scandal when the president’s willingness to abuse his power became much clearer to many and the idea of impeachment became a lot more concrete.

In May 1973, Nixon had his Attorney General Elliot Richardson appoint a Watergate Special Prosecutor to investigate improprieties related to the ’72 election, and Richardson appointed Archibald Cox. In fact Richardson had only been made A.G. immediately before making the appointment, and during his confirmation hearings had assured the Senate he wouldn’t use his authority to dismiss Cox without there being sufficient cause to do so.

In July came the public revelation of the White House taping system, and Cox soon was asking for copies of tapes of some of the recorded conversations about the break-in and its subsequent handling. The White House refused to hand them over, and Cox responded by serving a subpoena for the tapes. The resistance continued with Nixon continuing to refuse to hand over tapes, claiming “executive privilege.” By October Nixon and his staff came up with a compromise plan to have a senator listen to and summarize the tapes, but Cox refused to agree with such a compromise.

The next day -- Saturday, October 20, 1973 -- Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused to do so, referring back to his promise to the Senate, and resigned in protest. Nixon then ordered the Deputy A.G. William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, and he also refused the order and resigned. Finally the next in line, Soliticor General Robert Bork, did fire Cox.

News coverage of that night is interesting to follow, and gives a sense of just how strange and scary it all seemed at the time. There is two hours’ worth of audio that compiles TV networks’ reporting from that evening and just afterward available over on archive.org. You hear anchors breathlessly describing the developments as “stunning” and “dramatic” and “unprecedented,” with talk of a constitutional crisis like nothing they had ever witnessed before.

To my friend I remarked that every single day last week felt like what those anchors were describing when reporting on the Saturday Night Massacre. It began with the president’s dark, divisive inauguration speech and absurdist one-man show before the CIA where his primary message concerned his “running war with the media.” Then came the feverish first performance by his press secretary in which he threatened to “hold the press accountable” while (1) strangely insisting upon statements about the inauguration crowd sizes that were verifiably false, and (2) not taking any questions himself. (It was more out there than anything Ron Ziegler ever did as Nixon’s sometimes combative and accusatory press secretary.)

The next day the Counselor to the President infamously defended “alternative facts,” helping encourage Orwellian-inspired commentaries. The various executive orders and memoranda then came raining down over the next several days (I won’t summarize all of them), fueling the fire of discontent in very deliberate-seeming ways. Finally on late Friday afternoon came the E.O. titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” which suspends the U.S. Refugees Admissions Program for 120 days while also prohibiting entry into the country of anyone from seven countries, all of which have overwhelmingly Muslim populations.

Chaos and confusion followed that last one, including protests and ugly scenes at airports all over the U.S. In the days since details have surfaced regarding the non-standard procedures followed by the president and his team to produce the order, including failing to consult with administration officials and his own party’s legislators before the order was signed.

As I say, I had already been reminded of the Saturday Night Massacre a few days before. But then last night everyone was reminded of it when the current Attorney General Sally Yates chose to defy the president in a manner that somewhat echoed Richardson’s action, even if the circumstances are quite different, when issuing a directive to the Justice Department not to defend the executive order. The president swiftly fired Yates (adding -- as he cannot avoid doing whenever he does anything -- a bitter, personal social media message about her).

I wake up this morning to more headlines sounding the alarm, and I brace myself like many others are for the next threat to emerge.

The argument over “who’s worse” between Nixon and Trump is an interesting one, though perhaps of limited practical value at such an early stage.

Nixon is the past. His presidency caused significant trauma to this country, weakening both the office and the American government in serious ways. After Nixon became president and especially starting near the end of his first term in office, he explored methods to remake government entirely, in particular to increase the overall power of the executive branch either by reducing constraints upon it or by exploiting weaknesses in the system of checks and balances. He and his reelection committee additionally engaged in outright criminal activity.

The Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up (and, as importantly, the attempted cover-up of the cover-up) would not only overwhelm Nixon’s ability to continue as president, it would obscure deeper, more significant corruption and illegality both in his campaign and his administration, not to mention the usurping of power that enabled him to order intervention in Cambodia without Congressional approval and similarly to continue the Vietnam War by evoking his title as Commander-in-Chief of the military.

However the “system” did manage to remove him from office (thanks both to some good fortune and strategic missteps by Nixon himself). And, as my friend reminded me, the country and its government did survive him.

Now this new jerk has come to the table. Some of us actually invited him. And within just a few hands it’s obvious that he is clearly doing everything he can to ruin the game. I’m reminded how I pursued this same analogy nearly a year-and-a-half ago, right after the first G.O.P. debate, in a post titled “America Is In Serious Trouble.”

Whatever his intentions might truly be, it’s clear he wants both to provoke us all and to keep us all fixated on him and him only. Eventually everything we do or say (he hopes) will necessarily be influenced by him. He’s not just playing to win, but to make it impossible for anyone else ever to win again.

Sure, it’s easy to overreact. Then again, against certain opponents whose actions are themselves wildly, crazily disproportionate, what feels like overreacting is simply responding in kind.

Images: “Trump signing order January 27” (top), Staff of the President of the United States, Public Domain; front page of the New York Times (October 21, 1973), Fair Use.

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.

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.

Looking for a Way to Make the Story Hold Together

On page 831 of RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, the story of the former president’s life has reached March 1973, the point where “the Watergate affair” (as Nixon often referred to it) had suddenly bloomed into an all-consuming crisis for the administration. By the way, when you reach page 831 of RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon and you are reading an old, used paperback version of the 1100-plus page book, the book starts to fall apart like the one pictured at left.

It’s really quite symbolic, given what is discussed during the last few hundred pages.

It’s at the bottom of that page Nixon begins a new section with the interesting line “It was already clear there was not one truth about Watergate.” From there he identifies no less than four “truths,” sounding a bit like a philosopher for a moment stepping back from the increasingly unpleasant situation he’s been describing to reflect more broadly on epistemological questions.

“There was the factual truth,” he begins, “which involved the literal description of what had occurred. But the factual truth could probably never be completely reconstructed, because each of us had become involved in different ways and no one’s knowledge at any given time exactly duplicated anyone else’s.”

Indeed, whether one reads Nixon’s own blinkered account or that of others who have tried to chronicle the labyrinthine story of Watergate, it’s a bewildering drama filled with players contradicting one another regarding practically every detail of the break-in, the subsequent cover-up, and everything else even tangentially related to the “affair.” This New York Times article from a decade ago states that 69 different government officials were charged with crimes, with 48 of them ultimately serving time.

Nixon’s account unsurprisingly focuses on the most prominent among those group, and as he notes everyone involved had a particular perspective that necessarily excluded the possibility of full awareness of the complicated “factual truth.”

“There was the legal truth,” Nixon continues, “which, as we now understood, would involve judgments about motive. There was the moral truth, which would involve opinions about whether what had been done represented an indictment of the ethics of the White House. And there was the political truth, which would be the sum of the impact that all the other truths would have on the American people and their opinion of me and of my administration.”

It’s kind of a stop-and-make-you-think passage, although soon after it concludes we jump back into the minutiae of meetings and the ever-growing web of entanglements in which Nixon and so many others were to become ensnared. The descriptions of those meetings illustrate that in fact each of these three latter “truths” (as Nixon fashions them) could more accurately be considered strategies for obscuring the factual one.

The “legal” truth omitted or reduced the relevance of facts to their potential status as evidence to support accusations of criminal behavior. The “moral” truth viewed those facts through still another lens, one guided by judgments of right and wrong (or, as Nixon and his men often would overlay on top of such a distinction, what was “good” or “bad” for the country). And the “political truth” -- by far the most important one for the administration through the 1972 election and even into the first part of 1973 -- only considered facts insofar as they could potentially affect Nixon’s ability to govern.

In other words, all of these latter “truths” were themselves particularly motivated interpretations of the factual truth which was itself only partially known and understood by each.

I’ve been preoccupied lately pursuing poker analogies to help explain and understand not just Watergate, but other events in Nixon’s fascinating life. The Watergate affair, it seems to me, existed as a complicated collection of “partial information” heads-up matches being played by Nixon with others and between others all around him. As in poker, there’s the factual truth that no one can possibly know comprehensively, then there are the other “truths” each player imposes on what he or she knows (or thinks he or she knows). And of course, with Watergate, the stakes started small and then got bigger and bigger.

It’s one method of trying to make the story hold together, anyway.

What Did They Know, and When Did They Know It?

“Quarterback says he ‘didn’t alter the ball’?”

So said Vera to me a short while ago, reading in a questioning tone a headline appearing on the CNN website this evening. (I’d give the link, but I’m kind of loathing the new design at CNN, never mind the autoplaying Esurance commercial. Oh, and the sensationalized, SEO-driven, tabloid-y approach to reporting news.)

Vera isn’t a huge sports fan, and so hasn’t really been following the story of the 11 deflated footballs used by the New England Patriots during the first half of their drubbing of the Indianapolis Colts in last Sunday’s AFC Championship game -- a story that picked up renewed vigor today after the press conferences of coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady.

I’m not going to rehearse all of the details of the story here. If you’re like Vera and haven’t heard all about it yet, it’s easy enough to read further online. And if you’re like me and have, well, then you don’t need a summary.

I’ve been having some fun this week tweeting various comparisons between the situation -- predictably dubbed “Deflate-gate” -- and Watergate, given how both involve allegations of cheating against heavily favored entities with histories of “dirty tricks.” And with today’s twin denials of knowledge by Belichick and Brady and the relentless nature of the continued questioning and swirling suspicion, the idea of some kind of “cover up” is now in play as well to further the analogy.

“I had no knowledge whatsoever of this situation until Monday morning,” said Belichick. “I have no knowledge of anything... I have no knowledge of any wrongdoing,” added Brady. Statements that the chorus of doubters responding afterwards -- some especially indignant -- don’t seem ready to accept.

There’s a lot of emphasis on the “integrity of the game” being threatened by the episode (again, not unlike the integrity of the electoral process back in ’72). Even if New England trounced Indy 45-7 (like Nixon trounced McGovern 520 to 17), thereby making any ball-altering shenanigans seem less meaningful from a results-oriented perspective, it surely isn’t fair for one side to run its offense with balls inflated more favorably (i.e., well under the league-determined level) than the other, right?

To draw a poker analogy, it sounds a little like someone playing the first half of a heads-up cash game session knowing there were only three aces in the deck. Sure, both are playing with the same deck, but one has more accurate knowledge about that deck than the other. Depending on how the other 51 cards were dealt, it could matter greatly or not at all.

With today’s pressers the story has moved from the sports pages onto CNN and other news sites, with non-football fans like Vera now asking football fans like me what the deal is with the Super Bowl-bound QB denying cheating allegations. Brady didn’t say “I’m not a crook” today, although he did have to respond to the question (posed somewhat within a hypothetical) “Is Tom Brady a cheater?” with the statement “I feel like I’ve always played within the rules.”

I’m no great fan of the Pats or Belichick or Brady -- my ambivalence towards N.E. tracing back to their dramatic last-second Super Bowl win over my Panthers over a decade ago -- which means I’m kinda sorta enjoying all the nonsense on a certain anarchy-loving level only available to those of us on the sidelines without a specific rooting interest.

But I also think that unlike Watergate, there’s not much to this silly sideshow at all. My answer to Vera’s question, then, wasn’t really an answer.

“It’s all anyone’s talking about right now,” I said to her, shaking my head. And then we talked about something else.

“I Hate Trusting Anybody”

Ben Bradlee, the longtime executive editor of The Washington Post who became a nationally-known figure for his role managing the paper’s reporting on Watergate, has passed away at age 93.

Like most, my knowledge of Bradlee and his career has been mostly confined to that period during the early 1970s when he guided Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting on the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up, although as the many remembrances being published this week show his influence and significance in journalism extends well beyond that important period in American history and politics.

If you’ve seen the 1976 film All the President’s Men, you’ll recall Jason Robards played Bradlee -- excellently, as Robards was in everything. In fact he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for what was really a small part, though perfectly pitched with the gravitas appropriate to someone in Bradlee’s position of authority.

I liked the character of Bradlee -- both in the film and in real life (in the context of reading Watergate, where I’ve mostly encountered him). Via Robards he comes off as partly a parental figure, partly a tough-minded coach, possessed of both the relevant experience and unassailable intellect to make sound decisions. I think I like the character so much mainly because of my own experience both as a teacher and as an editor, roles that require not just being able to pull out the red pen and use it unhesitatingly, but to be willing and able to assume responsibility for others when required.

I also like the character for all the great lines he delivers, such as the one that punctuates the scene when Bradlee gives the pair the go-ahead to run their story:

The line “I hate trusting anybody” doesn’t appear in Bernstein and Woodward’s 1974 bestseller, I don’t believe, although the sentiment is there in the way the authors present their editor. And Bradlee articulated the same position again and again in various contexts subsequently, such as in 1995 when he told 60 Minutes “I just do not believe the first version of events in this city,” referring to the nation’s capital and how inside the Beltway people “don’t tell the truth a hundred different ways.”

Not accepting what you are told (or what you see) at face value is obviously a skill great poker players cultivate, their training to do so advanced by the consistency with which opponents “don’t tell the truth a hundred different ways.” Inspiring such skepticism and inquisitiveness -- something I like to think I’ve been able to do here and there as a teacher and perhaps outside of the classroom occasionally, too -- is a good legacy to leave.

Nixon’s Big Fold, Forty Years Later

I have mentioned my “Nixon studies” here often enough now that people sometimes bring it up to me, including a couple of instances in the last few days as the 40th anniversary of Richard M. Nixon’s resignation from office approaches this Saturday.

For a long time now I’ve been compiling lots of anecdotes and other information related to Nixon’s poker playing, building toward what I am planning to be a short book about the subject. Many don’t even know “Tricky Dick” played poker. Those who do perhaps are aware of the much-repeated story of his supposedly learning the game as a Naval officer when serving in the Pacific during World War II. Some even know that he won enough during those games against fellow officers to help fund his first Congressional campaign in 1946.

The truth is Nixon learned poker well before his military service, and also played the game afterwards as well. Poker comes up constantly in Nixon’s story as well during his campaigns, in his speeches and writings, and throughout his political career up to and including the Watergate scandal and his resignation.

There’s enough there, I think, to make for an interesting book, one that not only would share more details about Nixon’s poker playing than are generally known but also explore how his political thinking was often shaped by poker-like strategy, sometimes overtly.

The more I read about Nixon (and of his own writings), the more I’ve come to understand his “zero sum” mindset whereby practically everything he did or said had political implications, with every word or action supporting his view that in practically every context one person’s gain necessarily depends on another’s loss. Such was how he personally interacted with others, I think, and also, of course, how he conducted himself in campaigns and when governing.

Looking at his presidency in such terms thus causes his role during Watergate to resemble that of a stubborn poker player unwilling to let go of a losing hand, blundering through it with a sequence of poor decisions, then finally -- well after having committed essentially all of his chips -- letting go of his cards.

It’s definitely possible to get carried away with the analogy, but I think there’s some genuine insight to be gained from looking at Nixon’s life and career through the lens of poker. As I was remarking yesterday, poker is endlessly interesting, even to many who don’t even play the game. And Nixon is just plain fascinating, with no end to the amount of material available for those pursuing such “studies.”

Let me share one small anecdote. While the hearings of the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee were televised, with PBS actually showing everything from mid-May 1973 right up through early August, there isn’t a lot of footage floating around aside from certain highlights. (Video exists, but isn’t just a click away.) But full transcripts of all 250 hours or so are readily available for those curious about such things.

One of the first witnesses to testify was James McCord, one of the five arrested on June 17, 1972 during the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel. A former longtime CIA employee, McCord had been tried and convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping, and during his lengthy testimony was entirely forthcoming about his involvement in both break-ins (they were only caught during the second one) and his understanding of higher-ups’ endorsement of them.

McCord was asked repeatedly by various senators why he would involve himself in what he well knew to be a criminal activity, and his response was that he understood the break-ins, photo-taking, and wire-tapping to have been okayed by then Attorney General John Mitchell -- and, by extension, by Nixon, too. “The Attorney General, the White House itself, and in my personal opinion, the President of the United States, I felt, had set into motion this operation,” says McCord.

While McCord admits that others would have had political reasons for wanting to gather information from the rival campaign’s headquarters, he understood the operation to have been motivated by national security, prompted by concerns about demonstrations occurring at the upcoming conventions in Miami and suspicions that the Democrats may in fact have been “working closely with violence groups.”

Reading from a memo he prepared titled “Sanction of the Watergate Operation,” McCord shares how the Committee for the Re-Election of the President’s mission included “obtain[ing] information regarding not only political intelligence but also regarding violence-oriented groups who would be planning violence against the committee in Washington, and later at the August convention site, thereby endangering the lives and property of the committee and its personnel.” The riots at the 1968 DNC in Chicago were “uppermost in everyone’s minds” he says, as were more recent threats and actual attacks, thus making the threat more “realistic” than “theoretical.”

The memo also includes an acknowledgement of the political motive, however, noting in particular how the Republicans believed the Democrats were gathering intelligence on them, thus casting their efforts as simply a response in kind. McCord doesn’t ever present that argument as a justification for his own participation in the break-ins, but rather shares it to help round out the larger picture for the Senate Watergate Committee regarding why the break-ins occurred.

“Now, we also had word from CRP sources alleging that the McGovern committee had ‘a pipeline’ directly into the offices of the Committee To Re-Elect the President in Washington,” explains McCord. “Allegedly, they were feeding out, on a regular basis, policy position papers, that is, plans and strategy, which were rather important to the success of a candidate's campaign.”

McCord then punctuates that observation with an analogy.

“If the other side is reading your poker hand, he can negate your plans.”

The comparison suggests how the gathering of “political intelligence” was looked upon as being not unlike a game of poker in which an opponent has demonstrated a willingness to cheat, thus making it imperative to defend against such cheating and perhaps to cheat oneself in order to be able to compete. Nixon would make a similar point subsequently when commenting on Watergate during his post-Presidency, pointing out how other administrations had performed similar acts of political espionage as a kind of justification of what happened during his own.

That’s one of a few references to poker that come up during the hearings. They come up quite frequently on the tapes, too, including during exchanges between Nixon and Henry Kissinger in which the President encourages his National Security Advisor to bring up Nixon’s prowess as a poker player when negotiating with the North Vietnamese. Such references and analogies arise during various speeches, too, often very deliberately -- the list goes on and on.

The project has been delayed somewhat thanks to another possible book I might be writing -- one even more ambitious that may be happening sooner than later (stay tuned for that). In the meantime, I look forward to reading others’ reflections this week as we approach the anniversary of the biggest fold a U.S. president ever made.