I have been re-reading Sir David Frost's book "I Gave Them A Sword", which is an extraordinary record of the television interview he conducted in the late 1970's with Richard Nixon.
The book is a fascinating study of the events surrounding the interview and details the reactions of the ex-President. It describes the difficulties of setting it up following the two million dollar book deal that Nixon had just completed. With filming of the discussion taking place over a number of days, it is an account of not just what Nixon said but also of his unpredictable responses and emotions when recalling events.
Everyone, from the film crew to Nixon himself, was tense and edgy throughout the filming.
Much of what was said by Nixon and Frost resonates today.
I want to take, for the purposes of this diary, extracts from just four of the three hundred and twenty pages of the book. They offer astonishing parallels to events some thirty years later in the White House during the run up to the Iraq invasion, including the distrust by Bush of the CIA, the willingness to use suspect sources such as Chalabi and "Curveball" and the rejection now by Bush, Blair and Cheney of the idea that people have been deliberately misled.
Frost describes the topic he had arrived at in his questioning of Nixon:
Next on our agenda was Chile, a subject which had outraged world opinion probably even more than it had domestic opinion. The way that the Nixon administration had played havoc with the internal politics of a smaller country had stirred almost universal concern, a concern that we all shared.
Frost began by challenging Nixon on his attitude to President Allende. Nixon claimed that his demands that the economy of Chile be made "to scream" were justified by Allende expropriating property. Frost reminded him that these US policies were premature as Allende had not even been voted into office by the Chilean Congress at the time that these were formulated.
Caught in what Frost describes as "a web of his own obfuscation", Nixon began to cast around for other justification:
Nixon then went on to read a short litany of Allende's allegedly repressive acts: running a Marxist program on the government owned station, cutting back advertising in private papers he didn't like, shutting down the UPI office in Santiago for a short time, closing the newspaper El Mercurio for a day. .
Frost describes how he would have dearly liked to dwell for a moment on the subject of El Mercurio, a paper notorious for having been heavily subsidized by the C.I.A., but he was anxious to get Nixon's reaction to a comparison of such mild actions of Allende with what was to follow from the right-wing dictator Pinochet.
Nixon backed off a bit. "That's right. . . I am not here to defend and will not defend repression by any government, be it a friend of the United States or one that is opposed to the United States. . ."
He then made the one argument for his cause of at least colorable validity. "But in terms of national security, in terms of our own self-interest, the right-wing dictatorship, if it is not exporting its revolution, if it is not interfering with its neighbors, if it is not taking action directed against the United States, it is therefore of no security concern to us. It is of a human rights concern. A leftwing dictatorship, on the other hand, we find that they do engage in trying to export their subversion to other countries. And that does involve our security interests."
True enough in the abstract, I thought. But totally absurd when applied to Allende.
"In fact," I responded, "what they have now with Pinochet is a right-wing dictatorship. What they had with Allende was a leftwing or Marxist democracy. It was never a dictatorship."
NIXON: Let's understand. . .
FROST: Was it . . . was it though?
NIXON: No, I don't agree with your assertion whatever. I . . . oh. . . I would. . .
FROST.: It was not a dictatorship, was it?
NIXON: It was. . . you said it was not a dictatorship, and my point is Allende was a very subtle and a very clever man. . ."
Dictatorship, Nixon added, was Allende's ultimate goal. .
This sounds very familiar today. Allende was not a dictator? " Well, maybe not, but in time he could have been". Weapons of mass destruction? "Well, maybe there weren't any, but in time there could have been".
Next comes an explanation of his actions by Nixon that is almost word for word being mirrored by Bush:
FROST: But the CIA reported shortly before his [Allende's] death that he was not a threat to democracy. He wasn't planning to abolish democracy. And he was going to lose in the next election.
NIXON: Based on the C.I.A.'s record of accuracy in their reports, I would take all that with a grain of salt. They didn't even predict that he was going to win this time. They didn't predict what was going to happen in Cambodia. They didn't even predict that there was going to be a Yom Kippur War. . .
Frost goes on to describe the shifting reasons provided by Nixon for the actions against Allende, reasons that change just as those justifying the Iraqi war have changed as each one has come under challenge:
This was tenuous ground for Nixon. He had begun the discussion by making his case for his Chilean actions by hypothesizing a Cuba-Chile axis. When that didn't seem to work, he had moved on to Allende's anti democratic actions inside Chile. Then he had moved onto Chile's alleged attempts to export revolution, but that had made little headway. So now he was reduced to grousing about the C.LA. again, an all-purpose defense to any flawed policy. But the implications there were disastrous to his cause. If a President can't rely on the intelligence provided by his own intelligence agency, does he simply sit at his desk and follow blind intuition?
"Not quite" is Frost's answer to his own question as Nixon continues the interview with an explanation that involves a character that is a chilling precursor of Chalabi and Curveball today:
Nixon was ready with a new source of wisdom, this time "an Italian businessman" who came calling on the White House months before Allende's 1970 election.
Nixon: "And he said, if Allende should win the election in Chile and then you have Castro in Cuba, what you will in effect have in Latin America is a red sandwich. And eventually it will all be red. And that's what we confronted."
A red sandwich"? What an outrageous piece of Cold War hyperbole, I thought.
FROST: But-but that's madness of him to say that. I mean, how...
Nixon: It isn't madness at all. It shows somebody saying, cutting through the hypocritical double standard of those who can see all the dangers on the right. . .
FROST: No . . . no . . . but surely, no . . .
NrXON: . . . and don't look at the dangers on the left.
.FROST: No, but surely, Mr. President. . . there's two. . . you've got little Cuba and little Chile, and all those enormous countries in between, It's like. . . If it's a red sandwich, it's got two pieces of bread here [I raised my arms as far apart as possible] and an enormous bit of beef in the middle. I mean, are you really saying that Brazil should feel itself surrounded by Cuba and Chile?
Nixon was fighting to hold his temper. Though I didn't know it then, We [edited] were warned days earlier that the former President had a short fuse on the subject. Getting rid of little left-wing upstarts-or at least trying to - was something of a minor sport among American Presidents, a bit like falconry to the medieval English princes. Look at Ike and Guatemala, J.F.K. and Castro, Johnson and the Dominican Republic. And now, just because it was Richard Nixon, people are up in arms. Well, screw 'em.
"All I can say is that as far as Brazil is concerned, as far as Argentina is concerned, the other countries in that part of the hemisphere. . . I have visited most of them-in 1958, for example -and I can testify to the fact that many of their governments are potentially unstable. I can testify to the fact that also they do have a problem of subversion. . ."
No, he was not saying that Argentina or Brazil need fear an invasion, or Venezuela an amphibious assault, but "Castro has caused plenty of problems to his neighbors," and, with Allende in Chile, the threat was doubled.
So his Italian friend had not been a madman. "Well, he's mad like a fox, because what he's doing is taking the historical view, and that is, he knows the nature of Communism. . ."
I find this repeat pattern of behaviour in the White House creates in me an icy despair. During the Watergate hearings, men such as Ehrlichman and Haldeman, when asked about the legality of the actions of which they were being accused, responded with a breath-taking nonchalance that they saw no illegality in what had been done. As other commentators have noted, this is extraordinary when viewed from an objective perspective. It is indicative of the knowledge Ehrlichman and Haldeman must have had about the behavior of previous administrations and suggests a worrying climate created by historical precedent.
It is easy to see how the past allows Bush, Blair and Cheney to convince themselves, or deceive themselves, of their rightness in the actions that they have taken and why they now express such outraged indignation at accusations of them having fabricated evidence and misled a country into war .
What this suggests is that it is not just simply the current administration that is at issue as a threat to the proper democratic processes of our societies. This cancer has roots that go way back beyond 2001 and it helps explain why the people of our two countries hear these things and shrug their shoulders in a sort of cynical disillusionment at what they now consider the normal exercise of power. It shows the size of the task that we have to confront.
The title of David Frost's book comes from the famous quotation during the interview when Richard Nixon said "I gave them a sword. And they stuck it in. And they twisted it with relish. And I guess, if I had been in their position I'd have done the same thing". Well, we appear not to have used that sword effectively enough to cut these abuses from out of our democracies. Bush and Blair have handed the sword back to us. We must try and make sure that we wield it this time in a way that lasts longer than a single generation.
("I Gave Them a Sword" : behind the scenes of the Nixon interviews / by David Frost was published New York, Morrow, 1978. It is now out of print. As I find that I have two copies of the book, I would be happy to donate one free of charge to a library that allows student access. Please contact me [kbarratt at rya-online.net] if you are interested).
Cross posted from ePluribus Media