The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

We were a couple of reporters back in 1972 just trying to make sense of Richard Nixon, and he leveled all the bitter might of the presidency at us and let fly. Neither I nor John Osborne, then of the New Republic, felt a thing. Nixon's memo of condemnation emerged just the other day from the 267,500 pages of personal papers released by the National Archives. It is a real zinger.

"What we have to realize is the cold fact that both Sidey and Osborne are totally against us," Nixon dictated to Aides Bob Haldeman and Ron Ziegler on April 14. "They are not honest reporters. Both have spoken in the most vicious derogatory terms of RN in the place where you really find out what the people think -- the Georgetown cocktail parties . . . From now through the election, neither Sidey nor Osborne is to be included in the news summary regardless of what they write, positive or negative . . . I am now ordering . . . that Osborne and Sidey be cut off in as effective a way as possible. This means that their calls simply don't get returned, etc. . . . There is no appeal whatever -- I do not want it discussed."

Rats. Dropped out of the White House daily news synopsis, denied discussions with John Dean on ethics in government, losing those jolly sessions with Haldeman and John Ehrlichman on presidential duty and honor.

But if memory serves, and it probably does, there were so many people around the White House willing to talk to anybody that Osborne and I never caught on. Being a man of the far 'burbs, I am mystified about the dark mutterings of Georgetown cocktail parties. But then Nixon and a lot of others often used Georgetown as a handle for the source of any evil that sprang up.

The President probably meant the old Federal City Club, rendezvous of White House correspondents for hilarity and bad food. After another of those miserable Ziegler briefings, the gang would trudge across Lafayette Square giving the anatomy of Andrew Jackson's rampant bronze horse an insult or two, then pull up in the club dining room and on evil days have a martini, maybe two. About then our natural leader, Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News, would shout, "Okay, boys, let's cut 'em up." There followed golden hours of bombast, insult, vituperation and disparagement aimed at Presidents, editors, academics, clergymen, members of Congress and little old ladies in tennis shoes. Osborne, the courtly Southerner, was heard on somber occasions to say "darn." Thus cleansed, we returned to duty -- and, as we now know, banishment. One of Nixon's gumshoes must have reported the proceedings.

Nixon's paranoia about the press was world class, as the released memo shows. But not a one of the men who sat in the Oval Office in recent years was without such anger. John Kennedy thought TIME got too personal and ordered the entire Executive Branch not to speak to anyone from the magazine. That ban collapsed within eight hours: Attorney General Robert Kennedy took my call and talked my ear off. When he was President, Lyndon Johnson stalked me around a table roaring, "You're nothing but a whore for the Republican Party!" I'm sorry I could not get him to compare notes with Nixon. I hope one of them is wrong.

When I wrote that Jimmy Carter's ban on booze in the White House was a religious fixation and the President ought to encourage good cheer some evening with a martini, he was sore at me for months.

But enough of these sweet musings. There is a worrisome development in the Reagan White House. I have not been able to get through to the President since November, when I phoned about the Iran scandal and he called the press "sharks" and I quoted him. Could be I have been dropped from the White House news summary once again and haven't been told.