It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.
On June 12, 1971, the daughter of President and Mrs. Nixon, Tricia Nixon married Edward Cox at a White House ceremony in the Rose Garden. It was a wedding celebrated by not only the Nixon and Cox families but by the entire nation. President Nixon said of the day "It was a day we were all just very happy" It was a truly magical event and one of five such weddings at the White House in the 20th Century.
The next day in a small article on the front page of the New York Times was a little story about a leak of confidential papers from a secret Pentagon study on the history of the Vietnam War. That little story was about an enormous leak of monumental proportions for our nation and its foreign policy. The thief, Daniel Ellsberg, had as good a secret clearance as anyone in Washington, he was married to an influential toy maker's daughter, and no one had any idea what else he had stolen.
While the papers themselves did not mention the Nixon Administration in any of the documents it did have appendices full of documents that the communist enemies around the world had intercepted coded versions of and now that the real ones were readily available they could match up and break our secret codes. That was a fact that could get people killed and was a fact the press either willfully ignored or flat out did not care about. In either case, they also did not report that information to the public.
Here was Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, with a strategic plan that included negotiating with the Soviet Union, the Communist Chinese, and we were at war and trying to negotiate with the North Vietnamese, and we were dealing with communist regimes in Romania, Czechoslovakia and Poland, plus dictatorships in Pakistan and other areas of the world in order to get their strategy in place and their plans to come to fruition. The release of the Pentagon Papers made it appear to all of these secretive, totalitarian regimes that we could not keep our secrets from the New York Times or, even worse, The Washington Post.
Nixon was red hot mad and had damn good reason to be. All the staff that worked at the White House called this the moment in which the Nixon Administration felt it had to take matters in hand to deal with leaks, subversives, and riotous protesters to keep our country from coming apart in a wave of violent upheaval similar to 1968.
It was extraordinary times and it would lead to events that would bring the Nixon Administration crashing down and leave our nation with a true question mark.
Is it right to remove one of our truly greatest leaders, in extraordinary times, because he may have broken the law in order to save the nation?
For a half century that question has still lingered and its consequence has set the nation on a calamitous course of extremism, cynicism, the criminalization of politics and the rise of widespread conspiracy theories that now 50 years later threaten the very foundation and core of the great American experiment in self governance.
