THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT Read Online Free PDF Page A

colors the Nixon legacy. Even if Nixon looks no better, his enemies don’t seem quite as pure. Now, Taylor says, people are more likely to notice the vindictiveness and the sheer partisan glee that are bound to shadow any presidential impeachment.
    There’s a lot you can crib from the Nixon library, Mr. President. Just substitute the name Clinton for the name Nixon in the following text from the Watergate exhibit: “Nixon himself said he made inexcusable misjudgments during Watergate. But what is equally clear is that his opponents ruthlessly exploited those misjudgments as a way to further their own, purely political goals.”
    One caution, Mr. President: the Nixon library can sometimes seem a little defensive. In the LBJ library, a visitor’s view of history is complicated by the presentation of both sides of the Vietnam dilemma. It’s an emotional place, but it still operates within the language of good old-fashioned civics—a president and constituents loudly agreeing to disagree. The Nixon library asks, You want facts? We’ll give you some facts! And, oh, by the way, grow up, because you’re not going to like any of them.
    Recalling the Nixon library’s exhibit marking an anniversary of the deaths of four students at Kent State, Taylor asserts, “Thanks to the Neil Young song, thanks to the way that event is generally packaged in the media and in history, one rarely hears about it from the perspective of Richard Nixon. But when you hear President Nixon talking in our presidential forum about what a dark day that was for him, it challenges the prevailing thought that he was callous and unfeeling towards the families of those who had died. In fact, he says in this museum and says in his memoirs that it was the darkest day of his presidency. And he includes Watergate when he makes that calculation. At the same time, however, you also learn, when going through the museum, that President Nixon had to weigh the lives of those four innocent young people against the lives of innumerable South Vietnamese and American soldiers whose lives were saved as a result of the incursion of Cambodia, which was the proximate cause of the demonstration at Kent State, which got out of hand and led to the deaths.”
    President Clinton, perhaps you’re wondering if the Nixon library changed my mind about anything. You’re wondering if citizens who shook their fists at your face on TV might someday drop in on a building with your name on it and maybe give you a break.
    All I can tell you is that I still think Watergate’s a horror and Vietnam was wrong. But I do find it useful to remember that those decisions, even the most deadly ones, were made not by a supernatural monster but by a real man whom we elected, a man who at least believed he was right. And that is not nothing.
    In fact, the Nixon and Johnson libraries were my favorite ones to visit because they deal with quarrelsome subjects. Once, years ago, I was at the LBJ. I was walking away from a copy of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 toward a photo of a serviceman who had been killed in Vietnam. In the ten seconds it took to walk from that law to that face, a song from a nearby pop music exhibit started playing: “Louie Louie.” And I felt like all of America was in that ten seconds: the grandeur of civil rights, the consequences of war, and the fun, fun, fun of a truly strange song.
    Mr. President, Americans like contradictions. We elected you, didn’t we? So in your library, own up to your failures, but don’t stop trying to win us over. In other words, just think of it as running for president forever.

God Will Give You Blood to Drink in a Souvenir Shot Glass
     
    A few years ago, I was in Paris, taking a walking tour of the French Revolution, because that’s how I spend my vacations. I also took another walking tour on the Fourth of July about Thomas Jefferson’s Paris years, because I celebrate the Fourth of July—I do—but I take walking tours, I and the other