Making of the President: The Nixon in Bush*

By Dana Milbank

The president tells aides he wants to "go over the heads of the reporters" in order to "circumvent" a "hostile press." He later describes his effort to "tell my story directly to the people rather than funnel it to them through a press account."

The year: 1969. The president: Richard M. Nixon.

Yet Nixon's words are eerily similar to those uttered last month by President Bush. "I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people," he said in an interview with regional broadcaster Hearst-Argyle in one such bid to circumvent what he perceives as a hostile press.

To Nixon historian David Greenberg, it is one of many similarities in style between the two men. From the way they structure their administrations to their many escapes to Camp David and the prominence of American flags on the lapel pins of aides, the likenesses are powerful.

"Ideologically, Bush is the son of Reagan; stylistically, he's the son of Nixon," said Greenberg, who teaches at Yale and just published a book on Nixon's image titled "Nixon's Shadow."

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11581-2003Nov24.html

Nixon was a piker

And though Bush frets about leaks and his aides have boasted of a "leak-free White House," nobody has seriously accused Bush of the heavier-handed Nixon techniques such as wiretaps and Plumbers, nor the sort of dishonesty or lawlessness that caused the Watergate scandal.

and that paragraph made me :puke:

'cause maybe I'm chopped liver, but I have certainly accused this WH of being heavier handed than Nixon.

These guys do a lot of it right out in broad daylight – with impunity.

said he was wearing his "Nixon" jacket!!

<Bush, for example, structures his White House much as Nixon did. Nixon governed largely with four other men: Henry A. Kissinger, H.R. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman and Charles Colson. This is not unlike the "iron triangle" of aides who led Bush's campaign and the handful of underlings now -- Cheney, chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr., national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and communications director Dan Bartlett -- who are in on most top decisions. Nixon essentially ended the tradition of powerful Cabinets in favor of a few powerful White House aides -- a model Bush has followed.

The most striking similarity is in the area of secrecy and what Nixon staffers called "managing the news." Nixon created the White House Office of Communications, the office that has become the center of Bush's vaunted "message discipline." >

....One can only hope the present cabal meets the same fate as the last.

Nixon was smart, and capable of doing his own thinking, which has to mean a different dynamic in the Oval Office. Nixon even had vision, if often warped.

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