a nixon for our time: J.D. Vance

      In his five-volume 1905 treatise, “The Life of Reason,” Spanish-American philosopher/author George Santayana famously wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

      The above aptly describes J.D. Vance, the wet-behind the ears, supremely glib and confident 41-year-old Vice President of the United States who before his elevation once called Donald Trump unfit to be president, but who now seems to wallow in the bottomless corruption of America’s worst president.

      Vance spoke during an appearance this past week at the Richard M. Nixon presidential library in Yorba Linda, California, and offered this bit of wisdom to his audience: 

      “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”

      Vance also downplayed the Watergate wiretap/hush money/enemies list scandal that forced Nixon to become the first (and so far only) U.S. president to resign. If Watergate happened today, J.D. opined, it would be “like a 12-hour news story.”

       Then he added, “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

      Funny, I covered Watergate for the New York Daily News for two solid years and don’t see it that way at all. And I have plenty of company. Timothy Naftali, former director of the Nixon library who helped put together its display on Watergate, bluntly told The New York Times following Vance’s remarks:

      “If the vice president is saying this, he is saying something that really indicts our current moment because what he’s saying is the F.B.I. would not investigate a federal crime in the Trump era if the White House was involved.”

      A little bit of history that Vance not only seems to forget, but deliberately mangles: 

      In June 1972, a group of five burglars—bankrolled by Nixon re-election campaign money—broke into the Watergate Office Building headquarters of the Democratic National Committee to set wiretaps so they could illegally eavesdrop on the political opposition and gather intelligence. (They operated under the aegis of a White House-authorized group dubbed “The Plumbers” to seek out the source of embarrassing leaks of confidential information, including the largest leak of all: the Pentagon Papers, an unvarnished official history of the Vietnam War.)

      Nixon himself might have floated above all this sordidness had he not had a secret taping system installed in the Oval Office that recorded him personally authorizing the payment of thousands of dollars in hush money to the Watergate burglars.

      The tapes revealed oh so much: how Nixon tried to use the C.I.A. to block the F.B.I.’s investigation into the break-in, the existence of a White House “enemies list” of supposed political opponents, including journalists, and the proposed use of punitive tax audits to silence them. In describing Vance’s willful whitewash job, Naftali said he was struck by the willingness of Vance—a presumed 2028 presidential candidate—to compare his administration to a president who directed the C.I.A. to subvert the Constitution.

      “It’s not as if it’s a matter of partisan interpretation. The evidence is overwhelming,” Naftali said. “If [Vance] does know all of this, he’s telegraphing the kind of president he hopes to be.”

      Smiling, his pale blue eyes alight, Vance in Yorba Linda compared himself to the disgraced Nixon: 

      “Young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media,” Vance said. “It kind of sounds like J.D. Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”

      Postscript: Worth remembering in the case of the twice-impeached Donald Trump: Faced with the evidence against him and told that the votes were there to convict him during an impeachment proceeding, Nixon resigned rather than face the ignominy. Trump, with even less of a moral core than Nixon, might have no such qualms—even assuming now-spineless congressional Republicans turn on him.

      And presumably a shameless J.D. Vance wouldn’t have them either.

      Frank Van Riper is a Washington-based documentary and fine art photographer, journalist and author. He was in the New York Daily News Washington Bureau for 20 years—White House correspondent, national political correspondent and Washington Bureau news editor. He was a 1979 Nieman Fellow at Harvard.