Richard Nixon, Opera Superstar

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

Photography Tim Matheson

Most modern operas get performed and then forgotten—but not Nixon in China. This treatment of president Richard Nixon’s famous meeting with Mao Tse-tung, composed by Pulitzer Prize-winner John Adams and written by Alice Goodman, wasn’t performed in North America for almost two decades after its 1987 premiere. But suddenly, everyone wants to do it. The Vancouver Opera gave the work its Canadian premiere last year, and in February, it will debut at both the Canadian Opera Company and the Metropolitan Opera.

James Wright, Vancouver Opera’s general director, told Maclean’s that its production “sold more tickets than expected,” and it may rent its version to other companies. What was once dismissed as a “CNN opera” is doing better than CNN.

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Nixon and counter-Nixon

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 12:50 PM - 36 Comments

I had an interesting companion on my recent trip to California: Poisoning the Press, Mark Feldstein’s new book about the quarter-century feud between Richard Nixon and columnist Jack Anderson. Anderson lived until 2005, but is now quite forgotten, even though he once had a near-monopoly on investigative political journalism in the United States and has (along with his mentor Drew Pearson) no conceivable rival as the creator of the form.

If scruples were a breakfast cereal, Nixon and Anderson couldn’t have come up with a spoonful between the two of them. Anderson, a pure entrepreneur who syndicated his own work and had no editor, recognized hardly any ethical limits to his professional activity. Could one say that he was not above stealing secret documents, committing blackmail, spreading sexual slurs, perpetrating bribery, and publishing unfounded speculation? That would be like saying that a surgeon is not above cutting people open. Yet Anderson probably did more good than harm until his bundle of instincts and tricks began to fail him in his fifties. To some, the Washington press still seems purblind without him.

Nixon and Anderson were both products of California, and were branded by it. Both came from dirt-poor families who belonged to religious minorities, and who found disillusionment rather than the American dream in the far West. Nixon, a Quaker, was actuated in everything he did by a superego with a terrifying, suffocating grip; he wasn’t personally a god-botherer, but the “fear of God”, an omnipresent God of correction and retribution, is a good metaphor for the dominant element in his psyche. Anderson, by contrast, was an observant Mormon of stiffly upright personal habits who used a network of powerful Saints to help get scoops.

When Nixon, as president, needed to find a job for his lazy nitwit brother Donald, his people chose to lean on Mormon hotel magnate J.W. Marriott. Nixon was soon horrified to learn that Don, whose shady dealings with Howard Hughes had landed Nixon in Pearson’s column long before and arguably cost him the presidency in 1960, had arranged for a face-to-face meeting with Anderson. Thanks to some eleventh-hour spin, Anderson’s article ended up helping to insulate the administration, representing Donald as a freelancing, happy-go-lucky goofball whose brother had washed his hands of him. I reached this point in Feldstein’s book in the lobby of the L.A. Marriott, reading the tale under the watchful eye of old J.W. himself.

The California of today endows its citizens with complacency, optimism, and tolerance; the people I rapped with around the state wouldn’t recognize Nixon, or Anderson, as belonging to their species of humanity. The pair were creatures of a cruel, barren pre-aqueduct California that turned them loose on America like rodents in a sea of cheese. Feldstein’s outstanding book makes their confrontation seem inevitable, almost Shakespearean.

Anderson was the great thorn in the side of the Nixon cause until he blew the Watergate story (despite having it virtually gift-wrapped; he knew several of the burglars, and actually bumped into them at an airport while they were en route to the break-in). One of the more notable features of Poisoning the Press is that it takes the story that Nixon ordered Special Counsel Chuck Colson to plan the assassination of Anderson more seriously than previous Nixonologists have. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, Feldstein points out, confirmed each other’s claims that they had orders from Colson to kill Anderson and that they actually put him under surveillance for the purpose. Liddy is widely seen as an absurd right-wing curio nowadays, but his testimony about the shady stuff he got up to as the leader of Nixon’s “Plumbers” has usually been borne out.

There is no tape or document that confirms Nixon’s knowledge of any plot to kill Anderson, but then, there’s no signed paper that says Hitler ordered the Holocaust. Would Colson have balked at killing a journalist? Today’s Jesus-freak Colson would be the first to admit that the answer was “no”; he’s the guy who wanted to firebomb the Brookings Institution. Could Colson have talked Nixon into giving him tacit approval to do it? Goading Nixon was practically his job description, and his skill at that job shaped American history. A full generation after Watergate, we’re still exploring the outer limits of what John Mitchell called the “White House Horrors”.

The Commons: Repeat after Rona

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 25, 2010 at 6:35 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. To his credit, Christian Paradis did not avoid the House this afternoon. No doubt knowing he would face a new round of questions about the latest in an unfortunate series of circumstances, the former minister of public works and current minister of natural resources took his seat along the front row all the same.

No doubt knowing he would not have to rise to answer a single one of these questions, he surely did so quite comfortably.

“Mr. Speaker, in September 2007, one week before it closed, the request for proposals for renovation of the West Block North Tower was amended and the qualifications needed to bid dramatically downgraded,” Liberal Marcel Proulx said first, reviewing the newest revelation for the benefit of the House. “Experts in the construction industry have said this would have benefited only one bidder, LM Sauvé.”

Nearly every other day of the last month has brought some new curiosity such as this—another clipping to tape to the wall in search of connections. Were it not for Richard Nixon, it might all be the stuff of whispered conversations around the booths at Hy’s. As it is, 38 years after those two-bit burglaries, we sit around the press gallery wondering how properly to attach the suffix “gate” to the situation.

Once more it is difficult to know whether to curse or thank the 37th president of the United States. Continue…

Apropos of whatever

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at 4:13 PM - 10 Comments

Charlie Brooker considers politicians.

The exciting conclusion is here.

Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 27, 2009 at 9:30 AM - 1 Comment

So a blond walks into a courtroom

Mississauga, Ont., native Jordan Wimmer cleared more than $1 million last year working for Nomos Capital, a London-based hedge fund. But all was not a bed of roses for the attractive, 29-year-old blond financier. Indeed, her blondness is at the heart of her $7-million wrongful dismissal suit against her multi-millionaire boss Mark Lowe. Sexist jokes, piggish behaviour and even an attempt to run her down on the street were part of a campaign of harassment, Wimmer testified last week. She told a London employment tribunal that Lowe made cutting personal remarks, emailed sexist “dumb blond” jokes throughout the office and cavorted in front of her with a stripper, causing her to suffer depression and an eating disorder. Lowe accused Wimmer of “gross distortions,” though he admits “entirely as a joke” to calling her “decorative” and a “dumb blond.” As for his emailed gag about a blond confusing a Corn Flakes box with a jigsaw puzzle, he says that “feeble joke” wasn’t told at her expense. Depending on the tribunal’s sense of humour, the joke may be on Lowe. Continue…

Dick Cheney and the lessons of Watergate

By John Parisella - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at 7:00 PM - 79 Comments

It will soon be 35 years since President Gerald Ford pardoned his disgraced predecessor, Richard Nixon, on September 8, 1974. It was the first and only time in American history that such an extraordinary act took place. Historians have rendered a mixed judgment on the wisdom of such a move. Some believe it mined the goodwill Ford was shown following Nixon’s resignation and conclude it was a deciding factor in his loss in 1976 to Jimmy Carter. Others look back on Ford’s action as a gesture of healing that permitted America to move beyond the dark chapters of Watergate and Vietnam. I subscribe to both interpretations—it was not the best move in the short term, but we have come to recognize that, whatever Ford’s motives were at the time, a prolonged process may have been more traumatic for the nation. Among some of those who lived through the Watergate travails as politicians or political operatives, a third interpretation took root. To them, Ford’s pardon amounted to a weakening of the executive branch of the United States government. One of those who believed this was Ford’s chief of staff, Dick Cheney.

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What's eating Stephen Harper?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, July 24, 2009 at 1:33 PM - 77 Comments

Gerald Caplan considers Sarah Palin, Mike Harris and Richard Nixon in an attempt to understand Stephen Harper and that outburst in Italy.

Why is Harper such a troubled man? Why are those who disagree with him enemies, not opponents? No one has a clue what’s eating him deep down. He’s not a small-town nobody as Mike Harris had been. He wasn’t an outsider in his own universe the way Richard Nixon was. He seems to have had a happy, typically middle-class upbringing. In fact, he grew up one of the luckiest human beings on earth, with privileges that only a fraction of humankind has ever enjoyed, and has remained lucky and privileged ever since. Yet he’s such an angry man.

Stephen Harper seems incapable of suppressing resentments that are unfathomable to the rest of us but that lead him to the most outrageous and self-destructive partisanship. His dismissal of socialists and separatists is just conservative boiler-plate. But his loathing of liberals/Liberals surpasses all understanding. No doubt he is a very smart man about some things. But for such a smart man he sure does some troubling things.

Because it worked so well for Prime Minister Dion

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 1:14 PM - 31 Comments

Adam Radwanski laments that Michael Ignatieff’s side isn’t sticking closer to the high road.

The Conservatives have frequently and not undeservedly been accused of dumbing down this country’s political debate. It bears noting that not once but twice this week, Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals didn’t just dumb down debate – they actively played dumb.

About those tapes

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 12:30 AM - 13 Comments

Michael Ignatieff’s scrummed response to the Prime Minister’s statement during QP, directed at the opposition leader, about “all the tapes I have on him.”

Question: Mr. Harper said he has tapes on you.

Michael Ignatieff: Yes, that’s the other thing. He said, he said in the House that he had tapes on me. That is the most Nixonian of Mr. Harper’s many remarks. Every day that goes by, he’s more like Richard Nixon. We are in the middle of the most serious crisis, economic crisis since the second world war and the Prime Minister of Canada is wasting his time listening to tapes of me. And then, not content with that, he says it in the House of Commons so he’ll intimidate me. I will not be intimidated by the Prime Minister. I’ve got a job to do which is to hold him to account. The public finances of our country are in free fall and he’s wasting time with tapes of me? It’s a joke.

Welcome to Canada, Mr. President

By Rachel Mendleson - Tuesday, February 17, 2009 at 7:27 PM - 1 Comment

Since Barack Obama will be in Ottawa this week, we thought it timely to look back at some previous presidential visits to our nation’s capital.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: August 1943
The city proclaimed a half-day holiday to mark the first-ever U.S. presidential visit to Ottawa. About 27,000 people jammed Parliament Hill to hear FDR’s public address. During his car tour of Ottawa, spectators held up black Scottie dogs as a show of support for his dog Fala.

Harry S. Truman: June 1947
While in Ottawa, Truman met with Mackenzie King and Governor General Alexander. During his parliamentary address, Truman praised Canada for achieving internal unity. When he was finished, politicians thumped their desks in approval. Truman’s trip to the capital included lunch at the Chateau Laurier, a tree-planting and a state dinner at Rideau Hall. He also traveled to Montebello, where he fished for trout. It was his second trip abroad after the Second World War.

Dwight D. Eisenhower: November 1953, July 1958
Both visits to the capital included a parliamentary address. In 1953, more tickets were sold to the House of Commons gallery than there were seats, and some spectators had to be turned away. In 1958, Ike drew fire for his virulent defence of U.S. trade interests in his speech. It was during his second visit that he and PM John Diefenbaker agreed to set up the Canada-United States Committee on Joint Defense. While in Ottawa, Ike played a round of golf at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club and took a trip to Gatineau Park.

John F. Kennedy: May 1961
When JFK and Jackie arrived on Parliament Hill, there were reportedly 50,000 people there to greet them. It was their first post-inauguration trip. Jackie looked on from the visitors’ gallery during the President’s Parliamentary address, during which he famously said: “Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies.” He even tried to articulate a few sentences in French — albeit poorly. And he hurt his back while planting a tree on Parliament Hill.

Lyndon B. Johnson: May 1967
While in Canada for Expo 67, Johnson spent some time at the prime minister’s official retreat on Harrington Lake, where he met with Lester B. Pearson. As the story goes, a security stopped PM Pearson on his way to the bathroom to ask him who he was and where he was headed. “I’m the Prime Minister of Canada and I’m about to go and have a leak,” he reportedly answered.

Richard Nixon: April 1972
Vietnam War protestors greeted Nixon when he arrived in Canada. Despite his infamously acrimonious relationship with Pierre Trudeau, he opened speech to the House of Commons with a joke about Ottawa’s weather, and cheered Canada for being a fine neighbour. “The Canadian-American example is an example for all the world to see,” he said. The Great Lakes Pollution clean-up agreement was inked during his visit.

Ronald Reagan: March 1981, April 1987
During Reagan’s address to Parliament in 1981, NDP MPs sported black armbands to indicate their opposition of the U.S. involvement in El Salvador. Though his relationship with Brian Mulroney was much warmer than it had been with Trudeau, Reagan only visited Ottawa once while Mulroney was in office. When Reagan spoke in the House of Commons in 1987, he was interrupted by MP Svend Robinson, who implored the president to “Stop Star Wars now.” During their time in Canada, Nancy Reagan urged students at Ottawa’s Brookfield High School to “say no to drugs.”

George H. W. Bush: February 1989, March 1991
George and Barbara traveled to Ottawa less than a month after Bush’s inauguration. While the President met with Mulroney, Barbara read to local students at a nursery school in  Fern Hill. Among the pupils was the PM’s son, Nicholas.

Bill Clinton: February 1995, October 1999
Jean Chrétien, with whom Clinton had a close relationship, took the President on a tour of the Centre Block while Hillary skated on the Rideau Canal. During his first address, Clinton touted Canada as an example “of how people of different cultures can live and work together in peace, prosperity and respect,” and spoke of the “ties that bind the United States and Canada.” In 1999, he came to Ottawa to dedicate a new Embassy building.

George W. Bush: November 2004
Though George W. was scheduled to address Parliament in May 2003, he cancelled the trip, citing the war in Iraq. Others suggested that the President’s relationship with Chrétien, which had become strained, was to blame for the change in plans. When he did arrive in Ottawa in November 2004, some 5,000 protestors demonstrated against the Iraq war. The first couple visited a Gatineau archival presentation centre, where they reportedly set eyes on Shania Twain’s songbook, and one of the earliest baseball rule books.

Now, the unadulterated Frost/Nixon interview

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, December 5, 2008 at 11:33 AM - 1 Comment

Writing this on a flight to Vancouver, en route to the Whistler Film Festival. And on this momentous day of prime ministerial prerogative—the proroguing of Parliament—I’ve just witnessed another famously devious politician wriggling on the pin of history: former U.S. President Richard Nixon. I’ve been watching Frost Nixon: Watergate, a newly released DVD of David Frost’s landmark interview with Nixon about his complicity in the Watergate cover-up. This is not to be confused with Frost/Nixon, the Ron Howard movie that opens this week, adapted by screenwriter Peter Morgan from his own Tony-award-winning play. (To read my review of that, go to: Still the interview of the century)

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Giornolism 101

By Paul Wells - Thursday, July 10, 2008 at 12:50 PM - 0 Comments

From the print edition, my 2700-word attempt to explain the turmoil at the PMO this summer:

Twice before, Stephen Harper overhauled the team around him as he prepared to meet a new challenge. In November 2001, as a candidate for the Canadian Alliance leadership, he fired the high-priced professional campaigners he had put on the payroll only three months earlier and turned the campaign over to his inexperienced but highly motivated friends. In July of 2005, as an Opposition leader who had failed to bring down Paul Martin’s minority government, he replaced his chief of staff and fired much of his organization. The first overhaul, according to the Harper camp’s household mythology, made him a party leader. The second made him prime minister.

And now he is doing it again.

The rest after the jump…

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Megapundit: Le voyage de Babar

By selley - Tuesday, June 24, 2008 at 1:53 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Don Martin and James Travers on Harper and the Green Shift; Conrad Black on a dreadful Nixon biography.

“Screw everybody”
Stéphane Dion just wants to save the planet, people. Why must you complain?

Sun Media’s Greg Weston claims that at $40 per tonne (which would be the price of carbon in four years, not immediately), the Green Shift “would slap a whopping tax of $1.1 billion” just on Ontario’s five fossil fuel-burning electricity generating plants, “increasing the cost of operating them by a staggering 80% or more” and raising Ontario Power Generation’s overall operating costs by “at least 20%.” “By coincidence,” he sneers, “the one province where electricity bills won’t be touched by Dion’s plan is the one with all that hydro power—Quebec. Imagine that.” (Indeed, we’ve long suspected Dion simply invented the idea of anthropogenic global warming as a way to win Papineau back.)

“Dion’s puckishly labelled Green Shift is complex, vulnerable to unintended consequences and may prove beyond his limited powers to explain,” says the Toronto Star‘s James Travers. (“Puckishly labelled”? Really?) But by responding with his patented mixture of “defensiveness and aggression,” he says Stephen Harper is doing him a huge favour. “To dismiss it so crudely is to underestimate global determination to tackle climate change as well as pent-up domestic willingness to accept collective responsibility and, within reason, pay the price,” Travers believes.

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The Commons: A wee battle

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 5:22 PM - 0 Comments

Smilin’ Jim Flaherty and Squeaky Omar Alghabra have at it in a rhetorical smackdown

The Scene. Perhaps because they are both barely tall enough to ride most roller coasters, the lively scrap this week between Liberal backbencher Omar Alghabra and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has largely escaped notice. Of course, there have been a few controversies to distract one’s mind.

“The world is being turned upside down,” thundered the Bloc’s Michel Guimond on Thursday. “This is through the looking glass.”

He was referring, apparently, to the government’s allegedly dodgy approach to election financing.

A moment later, Jack Layton was up. “It’s smelling like a recession soon,” he observed, raising any number of questions about what odour exactly an economic downturn generally emits.

Next, the Liberals were outlining all the ways in which this Prime Minister is exactly like Richard Nixon.

But let’s not again get off track.

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Weekend Notes (Vol. 1, No. 15)

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 3:09 PM - 0 Comments

When Parliament was last in session (after a week off, it returns on Monday), Ken Dryden made a valiant, if clumsy, attempt at invoking Richard Nixon and Watergate to Stephen Harper and the Chuck Cadman affair. Dryden tends to overplay his hand. To use another sports analogy, he’s comparable to a strike-out prone slugger in baseball (Rob Deer, perhaps). When he connects, it’s mesmerizing to behold. But a lot of times he’s going to swing hard and miss wildly, embarrassing himself in the process.

Not that there isn’t a Nixon comparison to be made. Here, for instance, a pair of Canadians make the connection much more convincingly. In the pages of a British paper at that. The kicker: “Canadians should rightly wonder why their head of government has such a problem with so many Canadian institutions.”

Jeet Heer, in a previous life, was an arts writer at that well-known socialist rag, the National Post.

-To the massive conspiracy against Stephen Harper—which, at last count, included the RCMP, Elections Canada, the CBC, the Liberal Party of Canada and the Supreme Court of Canada—you can now add the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. Obviously.

-Oh, also the Conservative party’s own candidates.

-Simon Hoggart on the British Tory leader: “Being assailed by David Cameron must be like losing a pillow fight.”

-The National Post declares: “The war for control of the Liberal Party of Canada is back on.” Apparently that war they, and others, have been obsessively detailing for the last year and a half ended at some point recently.

-Some speculation on the next Supreme Court justice can be found here. Best line: “It’s time for Peter MacKay to stop prancing around in Afghanistan and get down to business on behalf of his alma mater.”

-And, finally, Esquire pays tribute to the rhetoric of city politics. (This clip, from the chambers of Toronto city council, made the rounds not so long ago.) If nothing else, this should serve to remind how much worse discourse in the House could yet get.