WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: If Biden is smart, he’ll follow Nixon’s example.

As the nation’s capital broiled in the summer heat, the president found himself increasingly isolated in the Oval Office.

During his decades in politics, he had charted a career from the Senate to the vice presidency, though after two terms in the nation’s second-highest office, most believed his political career to be over. Even so, he shocked the political establishment by winning the presidency, largely by promising to return a sense of calm following a time of crisis and public protest.

Suddenly, however, the president found himself fending off calls from members of his own party to step aside, as the media monitored his every word for signs of what he may be thinking.

Yes, 50 years ago this month, Richard Nixon faced a remarkably difficult choice. (Who did you think I was talking about?)

Bill Maher believes that Biden should really make history rhyme: Bill Maher predicts the EXACT date Biden will step down for historic reason… before making hilarious comparison.

Bill Maher predicted the exact date that he believes Joe Biden will step aside in the presidential race as he issued an optimistic look at who could replace him.

The comedian, 68, rattled through possible replacements including Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer, as he insisted that ‘Biden is toast.’

He joked that ‘when’ the 81-year-old bows out, he will pick August 9 as the date – the same day that Richard Nixon became the only president to resign in 1974.

After Democrats transformed impeachment as something they originally sold the public in the mid-1970s as a once-in-a-lifetime punishment for the eeeeeevil Nixon (whom some on the left later came to grudgingly respect) to something to routinely deploy against presidents simply because they have an “R” after their name, Biden resigning 50 years after Nixon would add an excellent sense of symmetry to DC’s otherwise completely dysfunctional politics.

Related: Joe Biden, at a Dead End, Faces Richard Nixon’s Choice. “Like Nixon, Mr. Biden must now write his last chapter — for one way or another, he’s reached the end of the book.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: Defiant Hunter Biden Blows Off Subpoena, Bails on Congressional Testimony.

WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: How one-third of “The Watergate Three” got written out of journalism history.

In the spring of 1976, the Post’s Watergate team gathered for a private screening of a nearly finished cut. The men in the room saw themselves reshaped on screen into big-name stars. Robert Redford played Woodward; Dustin Hoffman played Bernstein. Three Post editors were portrayed by award-winning character actors: Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee, Martin Balsam as Howard Simons, and Jack Warden as Harry Rosenfeld.

Most of them were happy with their portrayals. (Robards won an Oscar playing Bradlee, despite barely 10 minutes of screen time.) But Simons was hurt deeply by the way the film made him seem like a mere functionary under Bradlee; in reality, Bradlee was only lightly involved in the story until months after the break-in. One critic noted that Simons “is made to sound like a fool who wanted them taken off the story” when in reality he was “the reporters’ strongest defender.” (Simons was later curator of the Nieman Foundation until his death from pancreatic cancer in 1989. At his memorial service, Woodward apologized for how Simons was portrayed in the movie.)

But [Barry] Sussman, the leader of the Watergate Three, wasn’t portrayed inaccurately — he just wasn’t portrayed at all. He’d been written out of the movie entirely.1 Filmmakers said they were worried that having three middle-aged white-guy editors on screen was already confusing for the audience, and four would’ve been too much.

But that it was Sussman they chose to cut — the editor most involved in the story from Day 1 — was galling to many, both in and out of the Post. When director Alan Pakula was doing his initial research for the film, both Simons and Rosenfeld had told him that, “if any one individual at the Post was deserving of a Pulitzer for the newspaper’s Watergate coverage…it was Barry Sussman.”

“Of all the filmmakers’ real and imagined derelictions, the elimination of Sussman as a character was the one that bothered Post staffers most,” Post film critic Gary Arnold wrote in his review. “Indeed, it has proved a more serious drawback than one might have guessed, because the picture needs a rumpled, avuncular, dogged editorial type to contrast with Robards’ flamboyant Bradlee and to supply some lucid updating and recapping of information as we go along.”

“As history, this is inexcusable,” wrote Jim Mann of The Baltimore Sun, “because it expunges from the record the editor who worked most intimately and directly with the reporters in the early days of Watergate.”

Post reporter Timothy Robinson told the Chicago Daily News he’d almost boycotted the movie because of Sussman’s omission. “The real hero isn’t even in it,” he said. “He was the guy who kept pushing and pushing that story.”

“When the celebrification of Watergate hit, Barry Sussman got cut out,” Mann, a former Post reporter, would say later. “If you take the hurt that Howard Simons felt, and you multiply that hurt by a thousand, you get to Barry Sussman.” In 1992, the Post itself would call Sussman’s omission “the most grievous example” of the movie’s “factual deficiencies.”2

After the film, the break between Sussman and Woodstein was total. Shepard describes the movie as having done “permanent psychic damage” to Sussman. Thirty years later, when she called Sussman to interview him about Woodward and Bernstein, his reply was: “I don’t have anything good to say about either one of them.”

* * * * * * * *

It’s more than a little ironic that Barry died less than two weeks before the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, a moment that will be endlessly mined for content. The scandal will likely be remembered at least as much through myth — Robert Redford questioning Hal Holbrook in a parking garage — as through reality. Hollywood wrote Barry out of Watergate; mortality wrote him out of its anniversary. There’s plenty for journalists to celebrate about that particular Story of the Century; let’s just remember the cast of characters wasn’t a short one.

As Max Holland wrote in the Weekly Standard right around this time in 2017 in “The Woodstein Tapes:”

The truth was that All the President’s Men was a fabulistic account of a newspaper procedural, part and parcel of what was then called the New Journalism. It presented a sanitized and often trivialized account of what had gone on inside and outside the Post—or what Barry Sussman described to Pakula as a “modified, limited hang out,” intentionally parroting John Ehrlichman’s infamous phrase about the tactic of presenting misleading information in order to divert attention from the real facts. In particular, Deep Throat was a fiction—not in the sense of a completely invented character—but in the motives attributed to him.

What Woodward and Bernstein conveniently left out of their explanation to Pakula—either because they were all-too-acutely aware of it or were inexcusably ignorant of it—was that this last rendezvous had coincided with [Mark] Felt’s abrupt departure from the FBI because he was suspected of leaking to the press. He had never talked to Woodward out of a concern for the office of the presidency or the bureau, much less the law or morality. He had leaked to damage the reputations of his rivals for the FBI directorship, which he coveted above all things. In May 1973, years of scheming had finally come to naught, and if he wasn’t experiencing a nervous breakdown that night he was close to one.

Woodward and Bernstein, of course, could hardly fess up: It would have been impossible to do so without providing Pakula with a serious clue to Deep Throat’s identity, and they were intent on keeping his name secret. More importantly, the mythology of Deep Throat-as-whistleblower had become central to their book and their reputations—and soon it would be central to the movie. So the duo kept up the pretense that Felt was a truth-teller and they had been in danger. Pakula faithfully recreated the paranoia in the film’s penultimate scene, careful, as Redford counseled, not to deliver the message “with hysterics.”

And “Woodstein” apparently didn’t mind a 138 minute gap in the film for Sussman, as well.

Related: From Glenn: Nixon’s Revenge. “But ultimately, that tolerance—and even the ruling class self-policing—was the product of deep-seated security in power. The liberal establishment of that era, which had crushed Sen. Barry Goldwater’s campaign like a bug, saw no one who might challenge it. This is why Nixon’s election was so traumatic for them. Like Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, the election of a Republican seemed somehow fundamentally wrong. Republicans in Congress could do things, and could even occasionally snatch a short-lived majority. But after four Roosevelt inaugurations, and a string of Democratic presidents interrupted only by Dwight Eisenhower, who could have had the nomination of either party and who showed no inclination to interfere with the post-New Deal federal gravy train, the presumption was that the Executive and the bureaucracy would stay essentially Democratic forever. Then, Nixon. Not the Camelot-redux hoped for with Bobby Kennedy, or even the party-establishment regime promised by Hubert Humphrey, but Nixon. A man from a small college instead of the Ivy League, a sometimes-awkward introvert, a fervent anti-communist when anti-communism was seen as declassé, Nixon was very much not our kind, dear.”

(Bumped.)

WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: Matt Taibbi: Shouldn’t Hillary Clinton Be Banned From Twitter Now? Trial testimony reveals Hillary Clinton personally approved serious election misinformation. Is there an anti-Trump exception to content moderation?

Last week, in the trial of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis asked ex-campaign manager Robby Mook about the decision to share with a reporter a bogus story about Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank. Mook answered by giving up his onetime boss. “I discussed it with Hillary,” he said, describing his pitch to the candidate: “Hey, you know, we have this, and we want to share it with a reporter… She agreed to that.”

In a country with a functioning media system, this would have been a huge story. Obviously this isn’t Watergate, Hillary Clinton was never president, and Sussmann’s trial doesn’t equate to prosecutions of people like Chuck Colson or Gordon Liddy. But as we’ve slowly been learning for years, a massive fraud was perpetrated on the public with Russiagate, and Mook’s testimony added a substantial piece of the picture, implicating one of the country’s most prominent politicians in one of the more ambitious disinformation campaigns we’ve seen.

There are two reasons the Clinton story isn’t a bigger one in the public consciousness. One is admitting the enormity of what took place would require system-wide admissions by the FBI, the CIA, and, as Matt Orfalea’s damning video above shows, virtually every major news media organization in America.

Read the whole thing. As David Frum puts it in his 2000 book How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse: 

Some blame Watergate for this abrupt collapse of trust in institutions, but not very convincingly. For one thing, the decline in trust begins to appear in the polls as early as 1966, almost a decade before the Watergate was known as anything more than a big hole in the ground alongside the Potomac River. For another, the nation had managed unconcernedly to shrug off Watergate-style events before. Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater’s apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II—and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation’s sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions.

President DeSantis is going to be doing a lot of housecleaning when he takes office.

Flashback: Deep State, Deep Trouble — America’s woke generals and the Military-Industrial Complex must be purged to save the nation.

WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN. Andrew Klavan: Journalists’ Hatred for Trump is Destroying Them.

WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: In the Weekly Standard, Power Line’s John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson review “Truth,” Robert Redford’s ironically-named new movie, in which Redford looks to immolate what little is left of his reputation in much the same way that Rather eviscerated himself a decade ago.

WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: Robert Redford’s new Dan Rather biopic “Truth,” Rathergate, and George Orwell’s Minitrue, from Neo-Neocon:

…Sure, let’s base a movie about one of the most egregious journalistic errors/frameups/hitpieces ever run—which had as its aim the defeat of a president running for re-election—on the memoir of one of its self-serving perpetrators. And let’s call it “Truth.” Why not? After all, the vast majority of the young people we can reach with this revisionist “history” were kids in 2004, when it occurred. They will think that our history is the reality, our truth will become their truth. We will certainly reach far more young people than the real story, the details of which have faded into distant memory for most people, and never were heard of by the generation coming of age.

It’s been done by Hollywood many times before, most notably by Oliver Stone.

Robert Redford became a Hollywood superstar portraying a journalist who set Richard Nixon on a path towards eventual career destruction. In his twilight, he’s portraying — and defending — the television newsreader who destroyed his own broadcast career using Nixonian methods.

RELATED: When you’ve a lefty who’s lost Les Moonves…

THE FRAUD IN “GUNGATE” IS REAL, AND SHOULD END KATIE COURIC’S CAREER.

Speaking of which, when you’ve lost the Washington Post…:

[Writer/producer/director Stephanie Soechtig — Couric is credited as executive producer — explained away the edit by claiming] “My intention was to provide a pause for the viewer to have a moment to consider this important question before presenting the facts on Americans’ opinions on background checks. I never intended to make anyone look bad and I apologize if anyone felt that way.”

So editing out a crucial segment of interview dialogue is an artistic pause for audience reflection? Why didn’t Rose Mary Woods think of that defense?! But then, as with Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes before them, Couric (Rather’s successor for a time at CBS) and Soechtig have just discovered that whom the gods destroy, they first make Nixonian.

Related: Katie Couric “did more faking in that one hour documentary than I did my entire first marriage…”

Heh, indeed.™

WHOM THE GODS DESTROY THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: When does reporting become breaking and entering?

You probably recall this story from February, though it didn’t seem to have much of a lifespan in the mainstream press. New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi was found to have gone into the home of Corey Lewandowski when he wasn’t there and taken a picture as part of a story she was working on. There may be a lawsuit or criminal trial coming out of that as a result, but the details remain unclear. It should seem obvious to one and all that Nuzzi did something wrong, but precisely how wrong was it?

That’s the question Joan Vennochi at the Boston Globe is tackling this week, and to my great surprise, she appears to find some sort of gray area. Sure, it was a crime. But was it a crime crime (to adapt a phrase from Whoopi Goldberg about rape)? She’s even able to find some experts to back up the idea that there might be a different, more flexible standard of justice for special people like reporters.

I’m old enough to remember when a “third-rate burglary” was the stuff of impeachment, if it benefitted a Republican. In contrast, “Liberals need to stop trying to get us to call them ‘progressives’ or whatever word it is this week,” Kathy Shaidle once wrote. “They should just get brutally honest with themselves and with the rest of us and rename themselves the ‘It’s Different When We Do It’ Party.”

As Glenn noted last month, “Trump’s superpower is his ability, just by existing, to bring out the deep and pervasive rot in America’s institutions and the people who run them.”

MEANWHILE, BACK IN OLD MEDIA: Stacy McCain and Forbes have “Grim News in WaPoVille:”

Washington Post, it sucks to be you:

The Washington Post Co. reported its first-quarter earnings on Friday, and the news coming out of the newspaper division was mostly grim. The unit lost $22.6 million in the quarter, with revenue down 8% and revenue from print advertising specifically falling 17%.
Meanwhile, the Post just reported one of the biggest circulation drops of any major newspaper with the lucrative Sunday edition selling 5.2% fewer copies and the daily edition skidding almost 10%. Oh, and newsroom leaders are so distressed about the way the business decline is affecting them, they held a secret meeting with the paper’s president, Steve Hills — without inviting executive editor Marcus Brauchli.

Click over to Stacy’s blog for details of that “secret meeting,” and some thoughts on the future of journalism (more on the latter in a moment).

There’s equally grim news coming out of the other end of the Northeast Corridor, where New York Times journalists “fight for [their] pensions, paper be damned,” an editorial at the Washington Examiner notes, with an embedded video that’s a series of cris de coeur from veteran Timespeople, a video that Walter Russell Mead quipped watching could cause the rest of us to have “Uncontrollable gales of laughter stemming from excessive levels of schadenfreude [that] may cause spilling and staining.”

Here’s more from the Examiner:

“What am I gonna do? Am I gonna eat cat food? Am I gonna move in with my kids? Am I gonna commit suicide?”

These complaints come not from a laid-off auto worker or a victim of foreclosure, but from longtime New York Times reporter Donald McNeil. His alarming quote expresses his fears that the New York Times Co. will freeze its defined-benefit employee pension plan and make the transition to a defined-contribution system. The Newspaper Guild, the union, which represents McNeil and other Times journalists, released his complaints and others in an Internet video as a protest against the 401(k) plans used by nearly every new worker in America who has retirement benefits.

We’ll leave it to the Times, its employees and its shareholders to settle the dispute. As spectators, we find it mind-boggling that journalists from a leading national newspaper would vigorously resist a trend they have been chronicling for years. What’s good for the rest of us is evidently not good enough for toplofty Timesmen.

In the real world of the private sector, defined-benefit pension plans have been going the way of the dinosaurs for decades. The Social Security Administration reports that between 1980 and 2008, the share of private sector workers in defined-benefit pension plans fell from 38 percent to 20 percent. By some estimates it stands at just 15 percent today. In 1985, 89 of the companies in the Fortune 100 offered traditional defined benefit plans. In 2011, only 13 did so. In the same period, the number of Fortune 100 companies offering only defined-contribution plans increased from just 10 to 70.

When not haggling over retirement plans, Stacy McCain’s post concludes with a reminder to journalists to endeavor to “write for the reader:”

This seems so obvious to non-journalists that it feels stupid saying it so simply, but too many people in the news business completely lose sight of the fact that the reader is their customer, and is under no obligation to consume your product. You must try to write something that people actually want to read, and try to keep the readership in mind. Your boss is ultimately not the editor, but rather the guy who drops 50 cents in the newspaper box.

But that can be awfully hard to remember, let alone take to heart, if you’re like so many in the MSM who “loathes the public,” as the Wall Street Journal’s David Gelernter wrote, in a snapshot that perfectly sums up the insular nature of the MSM  vis-à-vis their customers in 1996, just before first Matt Drudge and then the Blogosphere broke open the formerly closed feedback loop that was old media:

Today’s elite loathes the public. Nothing personal, just a fundamental difference in world view, but the hatred is unmistakable. Occasionally it escapes in scorching geysers. Michael Lewis reports in the New Republic on the ’96 Dole presidential campaign: ‘The crowd flips the finger at the busloads of journalists and chant rude things at them as they enter each arena. The journalists, for their part, wear buttons that say ‘yeah, I’m the Media. Screw You.’ The crowd hates the reporters, the reporters hate the crowd– an even matchup, except that the reporters wield power and the crowed (in effect) wields none.

The balance of power has shifted considerably in the years since, but that underlying attitude — “Yeah, I’m the Media. Screw You” — hasn’t changed. At the base of Bill Keller’s rants about Fox News is his anger that millions of viewers enjoy the channel (especially in middle America, which another prominent Timesman publicly referred to last year as “the dance of the low-sloping foreheads”), and have written the Gray Lady off as hopelessly out of touch with their day-to-day lives. (See also, video referenced above.)

Similarly, a recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review, the house organ of what Hugh Hewitt once dubbed “The Media’s Ancien Régime,” spends its time instructing old media journalists on “the right way to cover Joe the Plumber,” a man the MSM itself empowered by spending more time in the fall of 2008 vetting than they did the winner of the presidential race.

Finally, back in 2005, I once wrote that in the wake of RatherGate, Dan Rather had morphed into his bête noire, Richard Nixon.  (Whom the Gods Destroy, They First Render Nixonian.) Today, as he makes the rounds promoting his autobiography, Rather is reduced to sounding like a stock Scooby Do villain — I would have gotten away with it, if it hadn’t been for all you meddling bloggers!

UPDATE: Michael Malone emails in a rather prescient Silicon Valley Insider column he wrote in 2005: “Newspapers Nearing Death?”

I can’t precisely place the moment when I stopped reading newspapers, but it was sometime during the dot-com boom. My family went off to Africa for a couple months one summer, cancelled our newspaper subscriptions, and when we got home never really got around to re-subscribing. Eventually, perhaps three months later, we did start again — but by then the bloom was off.

First to go was the Times. That one was easy. I didn’t write for it anymore. The kids kept me too busy on the weekend to read it. My colleagues always pointed out the interesting articles. And, most of all, because I didn’t trust the Gray Lady’s reporting anymore.

Next was the Merc. I found that the only thing I even looked at in the paper was the headlines in the business section — and I could get those stories in other places. That, and the movie listings — and when I needed those I could just drop four bits into a local newspaper rack. A few weeks ago, when the paper reprinted a column of mine in its Sunday Perspective section, I had to depend upon my 85-year-old mother to cut out the article. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even have a hard copy.

Then came the Chron. Of all of them, that was the one I noticed most. I missed the arts section, especially the old Sunday pink section, and the columnists. But after a month or so, I didn’t even notice.

That last paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, had the opportunity to break real news in early 2008, and chose to bury it instead. Try and guess why.