The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson spent Richard Nixon's 90th birthday at the Nixon archives. A curator told him to pluck a random tape from the collection, and the one Ferguson chose contains a few conversations in the Oval Office on April 9, 1971. It's such good stuff that I'm going to quote at length. The first exchange is between Nixon and his former Treasury secretary, David Kennedy, and Al Haig. The topic is the Agency for International Development, of which RN is not a fan:

"Goddammit, Al, I told them I wanted that AID budget cut! It's not the money, it's the personnel. Get those bastards out of there! You got all these young whippersnappers [actual word--Ed.] running around Asia knocking our policies. Get. Them. Out. Of. There."



"Yes, sir!" Haig says. "Should have been done already!"



"I'll tell you, we got to break some china around here. We need hard-headed, tough guys, not this usual State Department way of doing things. All these guys over there--they're weak. They go to these goddamn Eastern Ivy League schools and they're not pro-American."



Kennedy goes on to mention unflattering reports he'd heard about Peace Corps volunteers.



Nixon's feet hit the floor. "Goddamn them, Al! That's another thing I told those bastards to cut! I've never seen a place where the Peace Corps was worth a damn. Am I right? Oh sure, it's great for the kids. They're going to a nice Eastern college, they want a nice little vacation. Well, send them to the goddamn Congo then!"

The next conversation involves Len Garment and Nancy Hanks, a hapless member of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund who has come to talk to Nixon about the arts. RN starts in on movies:

"Now, Nancy, it turns out, 52 percent of the movies we see here in the United States were made abroad. What I want to do is find a way to keep these damn foreign movies out. Oh, I know they're supposed to be so damn great and so forth. To tell you the truth, I don't see many movies. Saw 'Love Story.' 'Patton.' But my point is, I will not have America slip to number two in the world when it comes to movies."



Mrs. Hanks protests that the popularity of foreign movies is owing to their superior quality.



"Well, then, here's what I want you to do. I want you to take it to the movie industry. You tell 'em, You've got to start producing good movies. Say: No more of this weird stuff! Shape up! The family movie is coming back, you know. People don't like arty. They don't like offbeat. But the film industry, they're trying to reflect the intelligentsia"--the word drips with venom--"and that is their big mistake. Following the intelligentsia is where they always go wrong. Look at these film schools today. All they do is the weird stuff. They produce weird movies. They produce weird people."



But Hanks and Garment have come to talk not about the movies but about the government's grandest current project for the arts, the construction of the Hirshhorn Sculpture Museum on the National Mall.



"Is this going to be some of that--that modern art?" Nixon asks suspiciously.



"It is, Mr. President," Mrs. Hanks replies, in her Rockefeller voice. "It's one of the finest collections of modern sculpture in the world." In the wuld.



"Oh yeah?" Silence. Then: "Don't let it be one of those horrible modern buildings, all right? 'Cause if it is, we're not going to do it."



Garment and Hanks try to explain that the plans have already been approved. Nixon's voice deepens. "I will not have the Mall desecrated with one of those horrible goddamn modern atrocities like they have in New York with that, what is it, that Whitney thing. Jesus H. Christ. If it looks like that, it--will--not--happen." Silence.



"And I don't want 'controversial,' either. All right? Now this list for the board or whatever. Am I stuck with these names?" Garment assures him the list for the museum's board of directors can still be changed.



"Good. I'm taking all the Easterners off of here. Got that? Every single one. And this name--what's--some Harvard name. Know him. Part of the Eastern Establishment. Rich guy, but he'll never lift a finger to help us. Well, the hell with him. Am I right?"



Nixon mentions names of California donors he would like placed on the Hirshhorn board. "Just put 'em on the list," he says. "I mean, why not? Think they'll make the thing a disaster? They can't make it a disaster because it's a disaster already!"



"No, no, Mr. President," Mrs. Hanks scolds. "It will not be a disaster!"



"Oh, come on, Nancy," Nixon says quietly. "I've seen the plans."



Another silence. "Well," he says at last, "I wash my hands of the damn thing. Just make sure I don't have to see it when I look out this window."

"And there it is," writes Ferguson, "an entire administration in miniature." Nixon never stopped hating "the Eastern Establishment," and they hated him right back.

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