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      The Destructionists review: brilliant study of Republican rage pre-Trump

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      The Destructionists review: brilliant study of Republican rage pre-Trump Dana Milbank of the Washington Post does not fall victim to false equivalency. He knows the GOP is a threat to democracyAfter Joe Biden’s fiery speech in defense of democracy last week, most of the Washington press corps responded with another stream of fatuous false equivalencies.Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer with a horse, new book saysRead more“The Two Parties Finally Agree on Something: American Democracy Is in Danger”, was the headline in the New York Times. A Washington Post editorial declared the president was “wrong to conflate upholding the rule of law with his own partisan agenda, which he called ‘the work of democracy’”.In his brilliant new book, Dana Milbank, a Post columnist, does not offer any of the squishy-soft judgements to which most of his Washington colleagues have become sadly addicted.He comes straight to the point that eluded the authors of that Times story and that Post editorial: “Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy. There’s a perfectly logical, if deeply cynical reason for this. Democracy is working against Republicans” who have only carried the popular vote once in eight presidential elections since 1988.As America “approaches majority-minority status”, Milbank writes, “… white grievance and white fear” have driven “Republican identity more than any other factor – and drive the tribalism and dysfunction in the US political system”.Working as a political columnist for the last 16 years, Milbank has had “a front-row seat for the worst show on earth: the crack-up of the Republican party, and the resulting crack-up of American democracy”.The book has four roughly equal sections: about the Clinton presidency (“defined by the slashing style of [Newt] Gingrich”), the George W Bush presidency (“defined by the dishonesty of Karl Rove”), the Obama presidency and the era of Trump.This is meticulous history, showing how the Republicans have spent a quarter of a century “hacking away at the foundations of democracy and civil society”, conducting “their war on truth, their growing exploitation of racism and white supremacy, their sabotage of the institutions … of government, and their dehumanizing of opponents and stoking of violence”.Milbank traces the Republican love affair with racism back to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in his 1968 presidential campaign, and dates the beginning of government dysfunction to the four disastrous years from 1995 to 1999 when Gingrich did as much as he could to blow up the federal government when he was speaker of the House.By showing with minute detail “how extensively Republicans and their allied donors, media outlets and interest groups have been pulling at the threads of democracy,” Milbank makes it clear that the Trump presidency was far from an aberration. It represented the real Republican party, without any of the camouflage of compassionate conservatism.There was nothing new about Donald Trump’s 30,573 documented lies as president. Gingrich’s Republicans were “saturated with wild, often unsubstantiated allegations. Whitewater. Troopergate. Travelgate. Filegate. Furnituregate. Fallen Clinton aide Webb Hubbell fathered Chelsea Clinton … commerce secretary Ron Brown’s death in a plane crash … was a Clinton-arranged hit”. And so on.It was Gingrich, the Clinton special prosecutor Ken Starr, his aide Brett Kavanaugh, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh who showed Trump “the political power of an endlessly repeated lie”.The crassness also started with Gingrich.“I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” Gingrich told college Republicans way back in 1978. “You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power.”Eleven years later, Gingrich told the reporter John Harwood (who last week left CNN after calling Trump a “demagogue”) Democrats were “grotesque”, “loony” and “stupid”.Milbank is especially strong about Ralph Reed, “a crucial figure in the perversion of the religious right into an entity more ‘right’ than ‘religious’.” There is also a long recounting of the gigantic lobbying scandal centered on Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, a former top aide to House majority leader Tom DeLay. Scanlon and Abramoff “defrauded Indian tribes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars” by telling them they were promoting their casinos. They also got Reed to mobilize evangelical Christians to oppose gambling projects that competed with his own gambling interests.Another long section reminds us that the administration of George W Bush actually did even greater damage than Trump, by promoting the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and leading America into the completely unnecessary and utterly disastrous war in Iraq.Milbank’s book is in the fine tradition of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, the 2012 book by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann which was the first to point out the uselessness of the Washington press corps’ attempts to be “fair” to both parties.‘Donald kept our secret’: Mar-a-Lago stay saved Giuliani from drink and depression, book saysRead moreMilbank quotes from it: “The Republican party has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”Herein lies the tragedy of Washington journalism. Ten years after Ornstein and Mann made those astute observations, Milbank is one of just a handful of reporters who have incorporated their wisdom into his work. As a result, he is almost alone in treating the pronouncements of the Republican party with the contempt they invariably deserve.As Ornstein tweeted on Saturday: “Tragically our mainstream media have shown that they are either AWOL in this battle or have opted on the side of the authoritarians by normalizing their behavior and minimizing their intentions.”
      The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, is published in the US by Doubleday
      TopicsBooksRepublicansDonald TrumpNewt GingrichGeorge BushRichard NixonThe far rightreviewsReuse this content More

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      What does ‘Watergate’ teach us 50 years on?: Politics Weekly America

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      50 years ago, police in Washington DC arrested five men for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. What followed was the unravelling of a web of scandals that ultimately ended Richard Nixon’s presidency. What can today’s January 6 hearings learn from Watergate? And had it happened in today’s political climate, would it have played out the way it did? Jonathan Freedland speaks with Garrett M. Graff, journalist and author of Watergate: A New History

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      Archive: All the President’s Men – Warner Bros, The Nixon White House Tapes – Richard Nixon Presidential Library Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Trump’s bid to cling to power ‘beyond even Nixon’s imagination’, Watergate duo say

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      Trump’s bid to cling to power ‘beyond Nixon’s imagination’, Watergate duo sayBob Woodward and Carl Bernstein write in new book foreword that bid to overturn election made Trump ‘our first seditious president’ Donald Trump was the first seditious president in US history, surpassing in his efforts to hang on to power beyond even the criminal imagination of Richard Nixon, according to the two political reporters who were instrumental in securing Nixon’s downfall.In a new foreword to their celebrated 1974 book on the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein accuse Trump of pursuing his “diabolical instincts” by zeroing in on the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory by Congress on January 6 last year. In the authors’ assessment, Trump’s unleashing of the mob that day, culminating in the violent attack on the US Capitol, amounted to “a deception that exceeded even Nixon’s imagination”.Capitol attack panel to unveil new evidence against Trump at public hearingsRead moreThey write in their foreword, published by the Washington Post, they write: “By legal definition this is clearly sedition … thus Trump became the first seditious president in our history.”Woodward and Bernstein’s comparison of Trump and Nixon carries singular weight, given that as young Washington Post reporters they helped to uncover Nixon’s campaign of political spying and cover-up that led in 1974 to the only resignation of a president in American history. In separate capacities, the two journalists have also reported extensively on the Trump presidency, with Woodward doing so in a series of three books: Fear, Rage and Peril.The timing of their analysis is also potent. It comes just days before the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection stages the first of at least six televised hearings in which they will attempt to show the American people that Trump acted corruptly in his efforts to stop Biden’s certification.Woodward and Bernstein suggest that the two presidents had much in common, despite the almost half a century that stands between them. Nixon’s belief that it was for the greater good that he stayed in power whatever the means was “embraced by Trump”, they write.“A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits,” Nixon told himself in 1969. That informed Trump’s campaign to hold on to power through falsehoods even in the face of defeat.Misinformation also unites the diabolical pair. “Both Nixon and Trump created a conspiratorial world in which the US constitution, laws and fragile democratic traditions were to be manipulated or ignored, political opponents and the media were ‘enemies,’ and there were few or no restraints on the powers entrusted to presidents,” Woodward and Bernstein say in their new foreword.The reporters also explore the differences between the two men, notably that Trump attempted his electoral subversion in public. Pulling no punches, they call the January 6 insurrection “a Trump operation” and predict that the House committee has an abundance of evidence to prove that point in the upcoming hearings.Though Nixon’s criminal misdeeds tend to be remembered through the lens of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on 17 June 1972, and the cover-up that followed, the authors remind their readers that his core purpose was to subvert that year’s presidential election. They rehearse some of the extreme measures that Nixon’s team of operatives took to derail the presidential campaign of his main Democratic rival, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.Those measures included writing fake letters on Muskie stationery alleging sexual misconduct by other Democratic candidates and stealing Muskie’s shoes from outside his hotel room where he had left them for polishing in order to spook him out. Muskie ultimately lost the Democratic nomination to the liberal senator George McGovern of South Dakota.Trump, the reporters argue, pursued equally ruthless tactics designed to undermine credibility in the 2020 presidential election. They reached a pitch on January 6 with the violent mob breaking into the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence” against Trump’s vice-president who was proceeding with certification of the election results.In the last analysis, Woodward and Bernstein ask themselves why two such powerful men would embark on parallel efforts to destroy democracy. They have one overriding answer.“Fear of losing and being considered a loser was a common thread for Nixon and Trump,” they write.TopicsDonald TrumpBob WoodwardCarl BernsteinUS Capitol attackUS politicsRichard NixonWatergatenewsReuse this content More

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      ‘I’m living in the bubble’: the man who helped bring Nixon down, 50 years on

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      ‘I’m living in the bubble’: the man who helped bring Nixon down, 50 years on John Dean speaks on the 1972 Watergate break-in and why he has never been more concerned about US democracy than now“I’ve never escaped Watergate,” says John Dean, as once again he allows the years to melt away, the old faces to crowd in and the secret tapes to whirr in his mind. “There’s just no choice. I’m living in the bubble. It’s become a fact of life.”America has never escaped Watergate either. The biggest political scandal of the 20th century, and the only one to cause a presidential resignation, has become a byword for lost innocence and lost faith in institutions. Along with the Vietnam war, it marked the end of an era in which a president’s words were met with automatic trust rather than default scepticism.Republican primaries offer look into future of Trumpism without TrumpRead moreSuch is the notoriety that the “-gate” suffix has been applied to dozens of controversies, from Sharpiegate (Donald Trump showing a map altered using a black marker pen) to Deflategate (allegations that Tom Brady’s New England Patriots used deflated footballs) to Partygate (British prime minister Boris Johnson’s social gatherings that flouted Covid-19 restrictions).Today the luxury Watergate hotel’s phone number ends in 1972 – the year of the burglary – and callers are greeted by a message that begins: “There’s no need to break in,” as well as recordings of President Richard Nixon. This month’s 50th anniversary of the break-in is being marked by books, exhibitions, TV dramas and a four-part CNN documentary series, Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal, narrated by Dean himself.In it the man who helped bring Nixon down draws a direct line from the Watergate break-in on 17 June 1972 to the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, taking stock of a half century that has seen the media fragment, the Republican party embrace authoritarian tendencies and presidents become less accountable. Dean has never been more concerned about American democracy than he is now.“I was never worried about the country and the government during Watergate but from the day Trump was nominated, I had a knot in my stomach and, until he left, I never got rid of it,” Dean, 83, tells the Guardian via Zoom from a Washington hotel. “He just discovered late in his presidency the enormous powers he does have as president. He wants them now. He knows he can hurt his enemies and help his friends.”He adds: “Nixon, who was very bright and understood how the government operated and what the levers of power really are was somebody who also could experience shame and accepted the rule of law. When the supreme court ruled against him, that was it. I can’t imagine, in a similar situation, Trump complying with a court order from the supreme court saying turn over your tapes.”Dean was working for the justice department when he was recruited to the Nixon White House. But he soon discovered that John Ehrlichman would remain the president’s top legal adviser. “As White House counsel, I got the title – I didn’t get the job,” Dean says wryly. “It was frankly too good a title at 31 years of age to pass up, although I knew I would be doing the grunt work.”It also did not take Dean long to discover that the Nixon administration was doing things differently. It kept an enemies list. It had approved a September 1971 burglary of the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the defence analyst who leaked the secret history of the Vietnam war known as the Pentagon Papers.Dean himself had to intervene to squash an outlandish plan to firebomb the Brookings Institution, a thinktank in Washington where classified documents leaked by Ellsberg were being stored. “I did not know that the president had authorised the Brookings operation but I thought it was insane, whoever had authorised it,” he says.Dean was out of the country on the day of the Watergate break-in but instantly guessed who was behind it. Five men had been arrested in the bungled operation to bug and steal documents from the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex – a dirty tricks operation aimed at sinking would-be challengers to Nixon in that year’s presidential election.At first the incident seemed comically inept and inconsequential but, when it emerged in court that the lead burglar, James McCord, had worked for the CIA, journalists such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post sprang into action. Gradually they and others would trace a complex web that connected operatives known as “the plumbers” to the Committee to Re-elect the President (Creep) to senior White House officials and, finally, to Nixon himself.But it was not until after the president won re-election in November 1972 that Dean felt himself sucked into the cover-up, arranging hush money for the Watergate burglars. He recalls: “[White House aide Chuck] Colson brings a recording he’s made of Howard Hunt, who was one of the managers of the burglars, and Hunt wants to be paid and if he doesn’t get paid, people are going to start talking.“I knew enough of the criminal law to know this is either extortion or bribery. Now, my reaction is kind of interesting. I had just gotten married and I said, ‘Holy cow, we’re in trouble!’ So I decided then I’ve got to make the cover-up work and that’s when I dove in with both feet. It was foolish.”He adds: “It’s only later [in March 1973] when Hunt starts extorting me personally for money that I said the same thing’s going to happen to everybody – it’s going to follow us the rest of our lives. There’ll be no end to it and Nixon has got to get out in front of it and we all have got to stand up and account for the mistakes we’ve made.”Dean went to see Nixon in an effort to convince him that the cover-up would destroy his presidency. In later testimony to Congress, Dean explained: “I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed that the president himself would be killed by it.”Dean has since been able to listen back to the conversation thanks to Nixon’s secret recording system at the White House. “The quality of the tapes in general is just awful but I’m sitting right over one of the little microphones that had been bored into the desk, so my voice is crystal clear. I can actually hear myself sigh at times, exasperated with the reaction I’m getting.“I took him through every problem he had and, to my amazement, he had an answer for everything I thought was a problem. I can hear my frustration with this man and I’m waiting for his fist to come down on the desk.“Finally, at the end, when it’s clear he is going to do nothing, I say, ‘Well, Mr President, people are going to go to jail for this.’ He says, ‘Like who?’ To bring it home, I say, ‘Like me!’ So he knows his White House counsel thinks he’s on his way to jail. I hope that will turn him but all it does is turn him against me because now I’m radioactive.”What were Dean’s impressions of Nixon the man? “He wasn’t who I thought he was. He clearly wanted to engage in criminal behaviour and he would blame everybody but himself. What surprised me most is he spent a lot of time conspicuously trying to impress me.”On one occasion, Dean recounts, Nixon told him that he was reading a book about President John’s F Kennedy’s ruthless streak. “I’ve often thought he did that to impress upon me that all presidents are ruthless to a degree because I’m the one who had blown up the the plan to firebomb the Brookings Institution. He knew that and he was worried, maybe, I thought presidents shouldn’t do things like that. He was trying to do a little tutorial on me.”Wary that he would be turned into a scapegoat, Dean began cooperating with Senate investigators. At the end of April 1973, with the walls closing in, Nixon aides HR Haldeman and Ehrlichman resigned and Dean himself was forced out.He then publicly turned against Nixon by testifying to the Senate Watergate committee – becoming the first White House official to accuse the president of being directly involved in the cover-up. The blockbuster hearing in June was watched by millions on television. But first Dean got a haircut.“It was a barber I had never been to and it was last-minute. I had done an interview with Walter Cronkite and my hair was curling over my shoulders. I said that is just not a good look; I’d better get that neck cleaned up or my mother will be all over me. In the barbershop, he just put a bowl on my head and cut it so it was much shorter than people were used to: ‘Oh, he’s changing his image!’“The same thing with the glasses. I had actually scratched my cornea. I had worn contacts during the Cronkite interview and noticed I was just blinking madly. I have never really worn contacts since I had that experience.”Dean read from a mammoth prepared statement that took almost the entire first day. “If I had been told in advance I was going to have to read it all, it would not have been 60,000 words. It may have been 6,000 at max. But it’s much easier to write a long statement than it is a short one so I just let it flow. It took eight hours to read it.”Later that year Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, was disbarred and served four months; he was in the witness protection programme so never went to prison. Meanwhile Alexander Butterfield, Nixon’s deputy chief of staff, had testified that there was a recording system in the White House.The supreme court ordered the release of a “smoking gun tape” confirming Dean’s claim that Nixon told aides to order the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation into the burglary. Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and, facing impeachment, resigned in August 1974. The president gave a final victory sign on the South Lawn before a helicopter spirited him away.Dean, who happened to have his molars removed that day, cannot recall any particular emotion. “I didn’t feel vindication or anything of that nature. We’d been at battle. It’s very lucky that the system worked as it was designed.”He continues: “It’s very hard to look at Watergate without looking through the lens of Trump where it didn’t work, or hasn’t yet. It’s not over. If Trump gets through with zero accountability, then the system is deeply flawed and a lot of that is probably traceable to the Ford pardon.”When President Gerald Ford granted Nixon a full pardon in September 1974, Bernstein exclaimed to Woodward: “You’re not gonna believe it. The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch!” (Woodward has more recently praised Ford’s act as one of courage.) Dean’s initial reaction was different.“At the time I thought it was right and it was understandable because I knew he couldn’t govern with Watergate hanging over him. Every day would be a new decision as to what he does and doesn’t turn over from the Nixon archive.“It would have consumed his presidency but so I understood it, but in the long run it codified the memo that was prepared then re-prepared during the Clinton presidency, that a sitting president can’t be indicted. Well, a post-president can’t be indicted when he’s pardoned.”Dean went into business for a while and tried to leave Watergate behind but a 1991 book that alleged he and his wife, Maureen, masterminded the cover-up prompted him to take legal action. This led to years of research, immersing himself in the tapes and making peace with the subject. He has written several books, including two about Watergate, and teaches a Watergate-related course for lawyers.He has also been called upon by the media and Congress to provide expert analysis during scandals in the Clinton and Trump administrations. Now a grandfather living in Beverly Hills, California, he quips: “My speciality, I guess, is presidents in deep trouble.”But if something like Watergate happened in the 2020s, he does not believe it would necessarily bring down a president again. “It would be very different today, primarily because of Fox News, which would be mounting a fulsome defence of him. We are far more polarised today than we were. We were polarised during Watergate but not to the degree we are today.”Dean will be watching this week’s January 6 hearings on Capitol Hill intently but reckons that Republicans, at least, face less accountability than they once did. “Trump is a poster boy for authoritarianism and the authoritarian followers just fell in line. They just absolutely did what authoritarian followers do: click their heels, salute, ‘Yes sir!’”That leaves him fearing for the future of American democracy. “Not so much Trump but now the whole Republican party has shifted into this authoritarian stance. Not all the Republicans I know are that way but too many of them now think authoritarianism is just dandy because it works, it’s efficient. Well, Mussolini ran the trains on time, didn’t he – but at some expense.”TopicsWatergateRichard NixonUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Dwight Chapin on his former boss: ‘Richard Nixon was not a crook’

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      InterviewDwight Chapin on his former boss: ‘Richard Nixon was not a crook’David Smith in WashingtonThe former secretary to the disgraced president talks about his new memoir and what it was like to go to prison for Nixon He was at the side of the American president on one of the most important diplomatic trips in history, enjoying sumptuous banquets as a guest of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong.Three and a half years later he was in prison after becoming first person to go on trial in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, despite protesting his innocence.Carl Bernstein: ‘Our democracy, before Trump, had ceased to be working well’Read moreBut half a century on, Dwight Chapin is not bitter and does not blame Richard Nixon for his fall from grace. On the contrary, he believes that the jowly-faced 37th president – who resigned in shame in 1974 – was a brilliant man and is still misunderstood.“Richard Nixon was not a crook,” says Chapin via Zoom from his home in Riverside, Connecticut. “Sometimes the term ‘evil’ is used: that’s not what the man was about. In his heart, he was not only a patriot but an incredible public servant. He was in the arena serving the public for half a century.”Challenging baked-in perceptions of Nixon was the main motivation for Chapin, now 81, to write a memoir, The President’s Man, which delves into the thousands of hours they spent together, from small hotels in New Hampshire to the Forbidden City in Beijing.They first met in 1962 when Chapin was a 21-year-old student and Nixon – narrowly defeated for the presidency by John F Kennedy two years earlier – was running for governor of California.Chapin recalls: “Mr Nixon had been a congressman, a senator, vice-president for eight years and then had all that notoriety running against Kennedy, so he was a commanding figure. When he was in a room, you knew it. His presence was very strong.”He worked as a field organiser on the 1962 campaign then as Nixon’s personal aide during his successful run for president in 1968. At the White House he was appointments secretary, with a door that opened into the Oval Office, and deputy assistant to the president, responsible for the planning and logistics of his public appearances.But he does not claim to have been Nixon’s friend. “I knew him so well; but as I have continued to discover through the decades, in many ways I barely knew him at all,” Chapin writes wistfully.Despite his relative youth he served as acting chief of protocol when, 50 years ago this week, Nixon became the first US president to visit China. It was a leap into the cold war unknown: China was closed to the west and the US refused to recognise its communist government.The Washington Post newspaper wrote in an editorial at the time: “If Mr Nixon had revealed he was going to the moon he could not have flabbergasted his world audience more. It is very nearly mind blowing.”Such was the cultural impact that it inspired an opera by John Adams. Chapin reflects: “History should remember the trip as the single most significant and dramatic foreign journey by any American president ever. The world stood still while Nixon went to China.”He writes that Nixon relished the meeting of adversaries as a unique opportunity to demonstrate diplomatic and strategic expertise. “He loved planning this trip. Loved it … Here was Richard Nixon, the leader of the free world, marching off to the darkest, and most mysterious, part of the Communist empire.”Nixon was accompanied by three Americans, including national security adviser Henry Kissinger, during his meetings with Chairman Mao, while Chapin and the rest of the delegation remained at a guest house. “When he got back, the president reported to us that it had gone well,” he recalls. “I would use the word elated.”Not that Chapin had time to be bored. He writes: “The banquets kept coming. At each banquet there were toasts and more toasts and toasts of the toasts. Between banquets there were meetings and tours. Six months earlier I had known nothing about the Forbidden City. At this point, if it had been necessary, I could have conducted a tour myself.”At a banquet in Shanghai, Nixon offered a toast that he had scribbled on one of his yellow legal-sized notepad in his suite, declaring: “This trip was the week that changed the world.”Chapin writes: “In retrospect, yes, it was ‘the week that changed the world’, but as Chairman Mao had proclaimed, ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’. What a prairie fire of aggressiveness, influence, and trade, reaching around the world, was ignited by that week fifty years ago.“Looking back I have a special appreciation for Nixon’s prophetic prediction that ‘Within fifty years, the United States and China will be adversaries, and we need to be able to talk with one another.’”But today the wisdom of Nixon’s outreach is questioned. China’s rise as a global power has become a defining principle of Joe Biden’s presidency as he warns of a struggle for the 21st century between autocracy and democracy, rival systems competing to show which can better deliver for its people.The communication channel with President Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao, remains open but relations are strained. China is flexing military muscles and threatening Taiwan. The US staged a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics over human rights abuses.Chapin reflects: “Any official American involvement there is missing and you have the the Russians and the Chinese together. I think Nixon would have been handling that differently. Nixon would be thinking of this in a very strategic sense. He would be wanting to do anything besides having a war or conflict and he would be looking for diplomatic answers.”But just four months after the historic China trip, the seeds of Nixon’s – and Chapin’s – downfall were sown.A break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, which involved wiretapping phones and stealing documents, was traced to officials at Nixon’s re-election campaign committee. Although the president comfortably won re-election later that year, White House attempts to conceal the scandal began to unravel.A key whistleblower was Mark Felt, a senior FBI official who secretly fed information to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Felt was immortalised as “Deep Throat” by their book All the President’s Men, which became a Hollywood film. But five decades later, he is no hero to Chapin.“It’s disgraceful that the number two man at the FBI is leaking material regarding an investigation,” he says, evidently still rankled. “I met with the FBI and I told them the truth and I told them everything and two days later it’s on the front page of the Washington Post because Mark Felt got the report and leaked it.“I have nothing but disdain for somebody that took an oath to the constitution to follow the rules of the land. This leaking by FBI is so outrageous and goes way back into the J Edgar Hoover days. Part of the culture of the old FBI was leaking stuff and I happen to feel that’s wrong. Mark Felt is a real sleazebag and a disgrace to the FBI.”Chapin acknowledges that Nixon “made mistakes” and the White House did not “come clean” early. But he argues this was because the president had not been told exactly what happened or why. “He was treating it like a public relations problem.”As the walls closed in, Chapin was among several staff who, in December 1972, learned that they would be fired. “My eyes welled with tears,” he writes of a decision he found profoundly unfair. “Everyone was expendable. But me? Processing what I had been told was very painful.”Announcing the shake-up two months later, Nixon declared: “There can be no whitewash at the White House.” But despite further purges, there was no escape. A drip-drip of damaging headlines led to high-profile congressional hearings and bombshell testimonies.The courts forced Nixon to surrender tape recordings that confirmed he had tried to use the CIA to divert the FBI investigation – an abuse of presidential power and an obstruction of justice. The “law and order” president had behaved as if he was above the law.Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and in August 1974, facing almost certain impeachment, became the first and still only US president to resign.Chapin maintains his own innocence, insisting that he had nothing to do with the break-in or cover-up. But his earlier decision to hire an old university friend, Don Segretti, a political dirty trickster who would eventually serve four months in prison, was his undoing.Chapin was indicted on four counts of making false statements to a grand jury, charges that he still adamantly denies. He was found guilty on two counts and spent nine months in a low security federal prison in California.“I was fortunate that I could go to a minimal security place so there were no cells, no doors that slammed,” he recalls. “There was more of an army barracks type situation. Now, I’m not saying it was pleasant because you’re losing your freedom and I was being punished. I always viewed this as a political thing, not that I was a criminal.”Two or three weeks in, Chapin got hassled by two younger inmates. He went to see an older inmate, “Big Mike”, who happened to be keenly interested in politics and used his influence to ensure that Chapin never got bullied again. “When he put out the word, nothing was going to happen to me.”Chapin believes incarceration changed him and proved one of the most valuable learning experiences of his life. “When I was going off to prison, a friend said, ‘Dwight, it can get the best of you, or you can make the most of it.’ That was a wonderful piece of advice. I kept myself very busy. I read constantly.“I was probably in better physical shape than ever in my life. I started a programme for other prisoners that were getting ready to go back out into society. I had a desk and a little office and I helped them write letters and find jobs they could go to. I tried to make myself productive there and that helped make the time go faster.”But did he not feel abandoned and betrayed by Nixon, who was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, and escaped criminal prosecution?“He couldn’t help me out,” Chapin says. “Richard Nixon was president of the United States. He had to resign so he went through his own hell, different than mine, but equally traumatic, maybe even more traumatic than what I went through, particularly for such a proud man, such a good man.“What he made it possible for me to witness and be a part of so outweighs any of the negatives of Watergate. I’m very proud of what we accomplished and I think he did a great job. There’s no question I was heartbroken, there’s no question I went through hell, but so did he.”Some readers may find Chapin’s praise of Nixon hard to swallow and draw comparisons with the blind loyalty of former aides to another Republican president, Donald Trump. But Bernstein is among those who have observed that while Nixon was a crook, liar and media hater, Trump is infinitely worse: an authoritarian who staged an attempted coup.Chapin, an admirer of Ronald Reagan who seems reluctant to talk about Trump, found his footing when he regained his freedom. He was a magazine publisher, held a senior position at a public relations company and managed his own consulting firm. He has put his prison time behind him and, at 81, written his first book so his children and grandchildren can understand his version of history.“Things happen to people all the time and it’s important that individuals realise that their life is not over,” Chapin reflects. “Time is a great healer, and I try to make the point in my book that I was able to recoup from this.“I was happy it happened to me as a young man and not like with some of the older guys where it was the capstone of their career. For me, it was at the start of my working life and I’ve been able to do many other interesting things with my life since then.”
      The President’s Man is out now
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      Top 10 books about US presidents | Claude A Clegg III

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      Top 10 books about US presidentsFrom the anguish of Lincoln to the showbiz of Reagan and Obama’s introspection, these books show the power and helplessness of America’s commanders-in-chief The US presidency was supposed to be something different, something novel, compared with the fossilised monarchical rule that it supplanted after the American revolution. Born of Enlightenment theory, settler colonialism and 18th-century warfare, the US constitution gave the chief executive primarily an enforcement role, with the authority to lead armed forces in the event of foreign encroachment or domestic unrest but stripped of the capacity to legislate or issue judicial decisions. The architects of the new republic meant for the president to preside over a citizenry well-endowed with rights, not to rule over cowed subjects.Chief executives from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan have been sorely tested by both the responsibilities and the limitations of the country’s highest, loneliest office. Through civil war, economic catastrophes, foreign misadventures, social upheavals and plagues, the presidency has endured, but it – and the 45 men who have occupied the job – has been moulded and often humbled by the promise and perils of the office.Is the US presidency – indeed, American democracy – equal to the dire challenges of the 21st century? One could certainly argue that it isn’t, based on the ongoing bungling of the Covid-19 response, the horrifying (and presidentially inspired) insurrection of 6 January 2021 and the glacially slow and fickle efforts to address everything from climate change to widening social inequality. If the founding fathers meant to circumscribe the power of the presidency out of a well-founded fear of kingly abuses, then they would surely comprehend the creeping threat that authoritarianism and political extremism present to the US system of government today. Nevertheless, they probably could not have guessed that the hard lessons that they had learned about the fragility of democracy would be so fiercely resisted or blithely ignored more than two centuries after they beseeched a patrician general from the Virginia countryside to preside over their fledgling experiment in government by the people.Of the many works that I have found useful in thinking about the history of the US presidency and for writing my newest book, The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama, these 10 have been among the most helpful. They are a mix of biographies, memoirs and reportage which, taken together, represent some of the best writings by and about the small group of powerful people who have occupied the White House.1. Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (2017)Dunbar’s important book is less a biography of George Washington, Martha Washington, or Ona Judge, the runaway enslaved woman whom the first couple made such extraordinary efforts to recapture, than a look into the power and privilege of a slaveholding elite forcing its way through a new republic rhetorically committed to liberty. The relentless pursuit of Judge by the Washingtons after her bold flight from the new US capital in Philadelphia is expertly told by Dunbar.2. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (2008)This history of overlapping, intertwined families vivifies the world around Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, while skilfully making more legible the travails and aspirations of the enslaved people on his storied estate at Monticello. The decades-long relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of the Black women he owned and who bore several of his children, occupies the core of the book, but Gordon-Reed manages to craft a complicated and often contradictory history that extends far beyond the tangle of race, gender, and status that marked the Jeffersons and the Hemingses’ commingled journey through US history.3. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2005)This book follows the intersecting biographical tributaries of the powerful, ambitious men whom Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s 16th president, was able to steer toward the rushing river of his own turbulent civil war presidency. Lincoln as political strategist and savvy tactician is the frame that Goodwin points up most dramatically. But the book also succeeds at conveying Lincoln as a beleaguered and empathic head of state whose mettle is tried time and again by those around him and news from the battlefield.4. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant (1885-1886)Rightly considered by many historians and literary critics as among the best of presidential autobiographies, this book was completed a generation after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox as Grant succumbed to a slow strangulation by throat cancer in the 1880s. The memoirs provide a vantage point on the nation’s bloodiest and most defining conflict that only a soldier elemental to the war and its aftermath could offer.5. Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris (2001)As the best biographical volume on America’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, Morris’s book draws bold-coloured portraits of outsized historical figures, with equally knowing shades of nuance and frailty. Morris has the contextual eye of the historian and sets scenes that are alive and convincing. He also conveys mood and meaning as well as any novelist.6. Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 by William Leuchtenburg (1963)Dated, frayed, and surpassed by newer research and more eloquent storytellers, Leuchtenburg’s volume on the first two presidential terms of Franklin Roosevelt still stands the test of time as a scholarly, well-researched, and jargon-free narration of arguably the most consequential presidency of the 20th century. It is the tale of the rise of the liberal welfare state against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the gathering clouds of world war. Leuchtenburg tells the story well and sets the standard for future researchers.7. The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore White (1961)White’s fascinating chronicle of the 1960 presidential race is the starting point of quality, book-length journalistic coverage of modern American politics. Writing in the moment, White had an eye for discerning the essential character of men such as John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon who sought the country’s highest office, even as the media ecosystem of his day made such discernment more difficult to achieve.8. Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years by Haynes Johnson (1991)Johnson captures the zeitgeist of the 1980s by juxtaposing the countervailing forces of American optimism – or the desperate need of many Americans to again believe in their scandal-wracked government – against the greed, corruption, militarism and debt that threatened to unmask the soothing myths of American exceptionalism. At the centre of Johnson’s story is a self-made man, an actor by training and temperament who through force of will, theatrics – and a good dose of luck – led the country through domestic and external perils whose ramifications are still being felt today.Top 10 books about the Roman empire | Greg WoolfRead more9. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (1995)Of Obama’s autobiographical writings, this one provides the best understanding of his origins and burgeoning sense of self. His early and more frank ruminations on race are present here, and the book is not encumbered by the exigencies of political campaigning. At once a memoir, travelogue and deeply introspec­tive meditation, it is a fluent self-study of his efforts to reconcile himself with his eclectic lineage and to discover his place and pur­pose in the world.10. Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (2010)The essential volume on the 2008 presidential primaries and general election. Heilemann and Halperin had generous access to many of the historical players – including Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin – and their staffs. It is a fast-paced, even breathless read, and anyone who paid even casual attention at the time to the historic events chronicled here will recognise its richly drawn characters, plotlines and twists of fate.
      The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama by Claude A Clegg III is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from the Guardian bookshop. Delivery charges may apply.
      TopicsHistory booksTop 10sPolitics booksUS politicsAbraham LincolnFranklin D RooseveltJohn F KennedyRichard NixonfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Chasing History review: Carl Bernstein’s pre-Watergate world

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      Chasing History review: Carl Bernstein’s pre-Watergate worldBefore he helped bring down Richard Nixon, the reporter grew up in a school of hard knocks. His memoir is a treasure Few reporters are synonymous with their craft. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post is one, his former partner, Carl Bernstein, another. Together, they broke open the Watergate scandal, helped send a president’s minions to prison and made Richard Nixon the only man to resign the office. On the big screen, Robert Redford played Woodward. Bernstein got Dustin Hoffman.These days, Bernstein is a CNN analyst and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Chasing History, his sixth book, is a warm and inviting read.Now 77, he writes with the benefit of hindsight and the luxury of self-imposed deadlines. His prose is dry and reflective even as it draws in the reader. This is his look back and valedictory, with a fitting subtitle: “A Kid in the Newsroom.”He describes life before the Post, in pages marked with politics – and haberdashery.“I needed a suit.” So the book begins. Shortly thereafter: “My mother and father, in the early 1950s, had taken me with them to join the sit-ins at Woodward & Lothrop to desegregate its tea room.”“Woodies”, a department store, closed in 1995. In the 50s, rather than testify before the House Un-American Affairs Committee, Bernstein’s mother invoked her right against self-incrimination. His father suffered for past membership in the Communist party. The FBI of J Edgar Hoover was an unwelcome presence in the Bernsteins’ lives.Still in high school, Bernstein worked as a part-time copy boy for the Washington Star. “Now that I’d covered the inauguration of JFK, Mr Adelman’s chemistry class interested me even less,” he confesses.He barely scraped out of high school, flunked out of the University of Maryland and lost his deferment from the Vietnam draft. He found a spot in a national guard unit, removing the possibility of deployment and combat. Chasing History also includes a copy of Bernstein’s college transcript, which advertises a sea of Fs and the capitalized notation: “ACADEMICALLY DISMISSED 1-27-65.”On the other hand, before he was old enough to vote, Bernstein had covered or reported more than most journalists do in a lifetime. The 1960 presidential election, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy assassination, desegregation and Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. All were part of his remit.The integration of DC’s barber shops, a race-fueled brawl at a high school football game, the death of a newspaper vendor. In a nation in upheaval, all captured Bernstein’s attention.He is one of the last of his breed, a national reporter without a degree. Chasing History reminds us that by the mid-1960s, newsrooms were no longer dominated by working-class inflections. Carbon paper, hot lead typesetting, ink-stained fingers and smocks would also give way, to computers and digitization.The Ivy League emerged as a training ground of choice. Television would outpace print. Rough edges would be smoothed and polished, a premium placed on facts. Hard-knocks, not so much.“A big generational change was occurring in the journalism trade,” Bernstein writes. “Editors wanted college graduates now. My view was that you might be better prepared by graduating from horticultural school than from Yale or Princeton.”The kicker: “At least that way you could write the gardening column.”Emphasis on the word “might”, though. Woodward went to Yale. To this day, they count each other as friends.Chasing History is more about gratitude than grievance. For 10 pages, Bernstein recalls the names of his “young friends”, their “remarkable paths”, his intersection with those who would emerge as “historical footnotes” and his “teachers and mentors”.Lance Morrow, formerly of Time and the Wall Street Journal, makes it on to the dedication page. They were housemates and worked at the Star. Later, their careers flourished. Morrow, according to Bernstein, “occupies a unique place in the journalism of our time” and has been an “incomparable joy” in the author’s life.Likewise, Ben Stein – and his appearance as an economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in 1986 – earns more than a passing shoutout. The fact Stein and his father served in the Nixon administration did not dent Bernstein’s fondness. They grew up nextdoor to each other in the DC suburbs. In junior high, the boys founded a “lox-and-bagel/Sunday New York Times delivery service”. The two see each other yearly.Bernstein also pays his respects to David Broder, the late dean of the political press corps. On 23 November 1962, as a copy boy, Bernstein took dictation from Broder, who was in Dallas that fateful Friday afternoon. Years later, Broder provided a useful tip that helped shape the path and coverage of “Woodstein’s” Watergate reporting.One mentor of particular note was George Porter, a Star bureau chief to whom Bernstein refers respectfully as Mr Porter and who regularly gave Bernstein a ride to the office. During the Democratic primaries in 1964, Porter dispatched Bernstein to cover George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor. Wallace never had a chance but his candidacy was newsworthy. Think Donald Trump, prototype.Why the US media ignored Murdoch’s brazen bid to hijack the presidency | Carl BernsteinRead moreLyndon Johnson, a Democrat, was in the White House but Wallace got nearly 30% in Indiana. When Wallace turned to Maryland, Bernstein was there on the ground.It was the first time he’d “seen a demagogue inflame the emotions of American citizens who I’d thought were familiar to me”.Wallace lost but netted 40% and a majority of white votes. In defeat, he blamed Black voters, except he chose a word that began with “N”, and an “incompetent press”, for failing to recognize his appeal. The church, labor unions, Ted Kennedy and “every other Democratic senator from the north” were also subjects of Wallace’s scorn.Chasing History is part-autobiography, part-history lesson. Amid continued turbulence, Bernstein’s memoirs are more than mere reminiscence.
      Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom is published in the US by Henry Holt & Company
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      Bob Dole obituary

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      Bob Dole obituaryLongstanding Republican leader in the US Senate who lost the 1996 presidential election to Bill Clinton0In late 1995, one of the US’s shrewdest political observers, Michael Barone, wrote of Senator Bob Dole that he “towers over everyone else in the political landscape, even the president”. Less than 12 months later, Dole, who has died aged 98, had given up his prized leadership of the Republican-controlled Senate to run one of the most inept presidential campaigns in modern US history. It ended with his hard-won reputation as a master politician in tatters and his opponent, Bill Clinton, becoming the first Democratic president to be voted a second term for 52 years.By the time Dole felt obliged to surrender his Senate seat in a desperate effort to revive his flagging campaign, he had represented Kansas on Capitol Hill for 36 years, the longest Republican incumbency of his generation.He served first, for eight years, in the House of Representatives. His election in 1960 had come after a long apprenticeship making himself known to all levels of the deeply conservative society of the rural midwest. He reached Washington only after service in the Kansas state legislature and eight years as a county prosecuting attorney in his small home town of Russell. Elected to office as a staunch conservative, he retained that view for the rest of his political life.As a young man, he had been hit by a shell during wartime service in Italy. The shoulder injury, from which he nearly died, became the overriding influence on the rest of his life. The determination he had mobilised to fight his disability was harnessed to his political career and early on he revealed two characteristics that were to mark his campaigning style – readiness to fight a deeply partisan battle and the acerbic wit he often employed to further his cause.During his four terms in the House of Representatives Dole carved out a solid enough reputation to secure him victory when he ran for the Senate in the watershed year of 1968, amid the turmoil of the Vietnam war and the social cataclysm set off by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. It was a good year for the Senate Republicans, who gained seven seats from the Democrats, but they still did not control the chamber.Dole soon found himself mounting a vigorous defence of Richard Nixon as the new president settled in to face a hostile Congress. It was plain that the two men had much in common, both politically and personally. In short order Dole was fighting the Democrats’ effort to stop US military action in Cambodia and coming under fire for procedural manoeuvres that the chairman of the Senate armed services committee said “bordered on the ridiculous”.It won him enough points in the White House, however, for the president to appoint him chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1971, his first rise to national prominence. He carried out the role assiduously, building up the party in preparation for the 1972 re-election battle, until obliged to fall on his sword in 1973 when Nixon needed something for George HW Bush, newly replaced as UN ambassador, in the post-election reshuffle. That proved an unexpected blessing for Dole as the Watergate scandal unravelled and Bush found himself forced to defend the indefensible.It may have been this relative obscurity that narrowly saved the senator’s bacon after Nixon’s unprecedented resignation. He had to fight for his seat in a deeply hostile mid-term election which saw the Democrats in Congress achieve a large enough majority to override any presidential veto, the first time that had happened for nearly 40 years.Two years later, the 1976 general election found the unelected President Gerald Ford under siege not only because of the circumstances of his arrival at the White House and his decision to pardon Nixon but because his own Republican right thought him too soft. He won the party nomination by a majority of only 4% over Ronald Reagan and, in an effort to appease his opponents and unify the party, chose Dole as his running mate.It was a disastrous move. Dole’s combative style in the campaign soon had the country in a furore, particularly after he had characterised the century’s two world conflicts as “Democrat wars”. Jimmy Carter squeaked into office with just 50.1% of the popular vote – a margin of 1.6m in a total of just over 80m – and Dole was widely blamed for the outcome.However, as the country swung to the right in the Reagan years, Dole’s reputation recovered. He was chairman of the Senate finance committee during the White House tax-cutting campaign of 1981 and demonstrated his exceptional skill at managing the intricate legislative process.But he was far from happy about the budgetary consequences of the measures and successfully manoeuvred an offsetting bill through the Senate the following year in an attempt to stop the federal deficit ballooning uncontrollably. The clumsily named but effective Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act led the then fiery young congressman Newt Gingrich to dub Dole “the tax collector for the welfare state”.But, generally speaking, Dole’s legislative record was poor: he was a manager rather than an innovator. As leader of the Senate Republicans for more than a decade his unrivalled talent, of inestimable value in a constitutional structure designed to reduce intransigence to deadlock, was to wheel and deal until common ground had mysteriously surfaced from the party quagmire.Among the fruits of his efforts were such laws as those extending food stamp relief for very poor people, the 1982 Voting Rights Act, and important new federal support for disabled people.But his lack of specific ideological aims repeatedly undermined his wider ambitions. His first bid for the presidency ended abruptly in 1980 with a derisory vote of 607 in the New Hampshire primary. His second attempt in 1988 appeared at first to be going far more smoothly until George HW Bush’s spin doctors successfully induced Dole to lose his temper during a televised debate in New Hampshire and snarl at his opponent “stop lying about my record”. Bush romped through the subsequent primaries.In 1996 Dole secured the Republican nomination but seemed wholly unable to mount a credible campaign against an ostensibly vulnerable Clinton. The president had a poor legislative record and there was a host of allegations of sexual and financial misconduct. But Dole’s electioneering was marked by poorly delivered speeches whose content baffled many of his audiences. He seemed to have no clear electoral strategy and constantly reshuffled his staff in the effort to develop one.In the final stages, with the opinion polls swinging steadily towards the Democrats, even his own party gave up the fight to sit resignedly awaiting the inevitable defeat. That dismal 1996 campaign persuaded only 49% of eligible voters to turn out (the second lowest figure in US history) and Dole’s failure to address issues important to female voters proved to be critical. While he and Clinton each secured 44% of the male vote, Dole could attract only one third of women’s ballots.Born in Russell, Kansas, Robert was the son of a small dairy retailer, Doran Dole, and his wife Bina (nee Talbott). There were few indications in his early life that he would emerge from the pack. His formative years were spent in that disastrous period of the 1930s when poor farming methods had turned the Great Plains into a dust bowl and the Depression had limited the few alternative ways of making a living. Government relief was the only lifeline for many families, a deeply traumatic experience for homesteaders whose principal creed was self-reliance.The six members of the Dole family kept going by moving into their basement and renting out the rest of their house to an oil prospector, but they were obliged to pinch and scrape for years. Doran gave up the dairy business for the more secure post of managing a grain storage unit and his mother sold sewing machines door-to-door.Robert, who had shown himself a formidable athlete during his school career but not much of an academic, nonetheless gained the financial support of a local banker to enrol at the University of Kansas. He wanted to become a doctor but the US was pitched into the second world war and the 18-year-old student found himself in the US army, fighting in Europe.On 14 April 1945, three weeks before the end of the European campaign, he was leading an assault on a German machine gun position in the Po valley in Italy when a shell smashed his spine and tore his right shoulder apart, leaving him temporarily paralysed. On his return to Russell, local people raised a fund to send him to Chicago for treatment by one of the leading neurosurgeons of the day, Hampar Kelikian. During the three-year course, for which the doctor refused payment, Kelikian became one of Dole’s closest friends and eventually persuaded the young man that he would have to cope with the permanent disablement of his right arm.The occupational therapist brought in to train him for this disability, Phyllis Holden, became Dole’s first wife in 1948, and they had a daughter, Robin.Under the spur of the doctor and the therapist, Dole settled down to cope with the pain he would endure for the rest of his life. He resumed his university career but diverted to a law degree. Since he was still unable to write with his left hand, his wife sat with him to take lecture notes and write out examination answers to Dole’s dictation.To outsiders the young man seemed to overcome most of his physical problems, but this was really because of a great deal of backstage manoeuvring. As he embarked on his political career his wife padded his suits to disguise his injured arm and shoulder and arranged for his food to arrive ready cut at public functions. Dole took to carrying a pencil permanently in his right hand to avert the agony of anyone trying to shake it.In 1950, at the age of 27, he became one of the youngest state legislators in the history of Kansas. In an overwhelmingly Republican state he naturally ran as a steadfast conservative. He also began to show the obsession with every aspect of politics for which he later became renowned. He was far from the favourite in the 1960 Republican primary for the first congressional district, covering about three-quarters of Kansas, but eventually won the election, embarking on a Washington career that would last nearly four decades.After standing down as a senator, and his defeat in the 1996 presidential election, he did not seek public office again. It was a sad ending at the age of 73 to a career in which he had served his country well in war and in peace. Many of his most significant contributions were made well away from the public eye. In the words of one of his staff, “people never just knew what Bob Dole achieved late at night in the Senate”.He wrote a number of books, including a memoir of his second world war experiences, One Soldier’s Story (2005). The only former Republican nominee to endorse Donald Trump, he was awarded the Congressional gold medal in 2018 for his service as “soldier, legislator and statesman”. In 2019 Congress made him an honorary colonel.His first marriage ended in divorce in 1972. Three years later he married Elizabeth Hanford, who – as Elizabeth Dole – became a leading political figure in her own right, serving in the administrations of Reagan and Bush Sr, and later as a senator. She survives him, along with his daughter. Robert Joseph Dole, politician, born 22 July 1923; died 5 December 2021TopicsUS politicsRepublicansUS CongressBill ClintonRichard NixonGeorge HW BushSecond world warobituariesReuse this content More