Taken aback
People Are Talking About one paragraph in a New Republic piece on the journalist Seymour Hersh.
To put it in a callow way, this stuff is cool. It’s also very masculine. Almost every person in Hersh’s memoir is a man—a sign of the time and the industry. But there’s an interesting moment that Hersh did not have to include. In 1974, he writes, Hersh heard that Nixon’s wife Pat was in hospital after being punched by her husband. It was not an isolated occasion. He did not report on the story, he told Nieman Foundation fellows in 1998, because it represented “a merging of private life and public life.” Nixon didn’t make policy decisions because of his bad marriage, went the argument. Hersh was “taken aback” by the response from women fellows, who pointed out that he had heard of a crime and not reported it. “All I could say,” Hersh writes, “is that at the time I did not—in my ignorance—view the incident as a crime.”
People are also asking if maybe Melania Trump’s need for kidney surgery was because Donald punched her in a kidney. Perhaps, they speculate, that could explain her disappearance from public view ever since.
In any case it’s always fascinating to see how violence against women just………doesn’t……..count.
This is, quite simply, journalist malpractice. Anyone doing such a thing as Hersh did is guilty of aiding and abetting, and journalists should be called to task for collaborating with a criminal.
Well, you see, he didn’t see it as a crime.
Hell, even if he didn’t think it was a crime, wasn’t it at least a reflection on Nixon’s character? The kind of thing that shouldn’t be done by the leader of a party that, even back then, was already branding itself as the party of morality and good character?
Amazing to think that, until at least 1992, having smoked pot was believed to disqualify you from the Supreme Court or the Presidency — and even Clinton hedged his bets with the “I didn’t inhale” thing — but beating your wife wasn’t.
Well your wife belongs to you, you can do whatever you want with her/it. I’d wonder what Hersh would have thought/done if Nixon had punched someone else’s property.
Perhaps part of the same protective instinct/bias that prevented reporters from reporting on JFK’s womanizing?
YNnB – That actually occurred to me, too, and I think it’s partly that. But…JFK having an affair (if it’s consensual) does no harm to the woman. It’s just…consensual sex, and while it might be immoral and unfair to his wife and children, etc, it is not illegal (although, who knows, there have been laws in the past that made adultery illegal, and it may still have been by the early 1960s).
But thinking it isn’t anyone’s business if the President physically punches his wife hard enough to hospitalize her? That’s in another dimension totally. And even back then, there were laws against beating your wife, so why didn’t the hospital do something? Probably same reason reporters didn’t…many hospitals just accepted whatever story the woman came up with, and moved on, even if they didn’t believe it.
And the names of ordinary men who beat up their wives was often in the police section of the paper, so I don’t buy that Hersh thought it wasn’t a crime.
It’s also sinister that Hersh considered it “private life”…you know, like what kind of sex they liked, what color their underwear was, whether or not they said grace before dinner.
Nixon’s deranged drunken behavior seems to have been kept dark as well. To the point that his aides were genuinely terrified of what he might order in the dead of night. The domestic violence could be swept under the rug as well, rather than face the issue of alcohol.
@8 – we have a habit of hiding truths we don’t wish to see. Such as the fact that FDR was in a wheelchair. The fact that Reagan probably had senile dementia or Alzheimer’s before he left office. The fact that Wilson was incapacitated while in the White House.
Drunken derangement is just another of those things…as is Trump’s increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior. We would rather look the other way when problems arise than do the work to fix it, and risk admitting that there are extreme weaknesses in any democratic system (we willingly stare into the weaknesses in monarchies, such as the extreme fascination with Mad King George and the sexual behavior of Henry VIII, as well as modern royals).
The media has a lot of practice at feeding people what the White House wants them to hear, and putting out just enough negative to make the people think they are doing their job honestly. Trump has made that easy…there is so much, and they can focus on things like Stormy Daniels while the day-to-day corruption is hidden in plain sight. Oh, yes, places like this and people like us discuss it, but it’s my experience that there are about as many who know that Trump is irredeemably corrupt as there are that know that Jesus wasn’t always a sweetheart preaching love to everyone.