Dicky Tricks

Watergate would not be a story at all now, and I flatly refuse to believe that anyone was really shocked by it at the time, although one does have to mourn the passing of a culture in which they at least felt obliged to pretend that they were. So another complete non-story, which everyone has always known and which makes no difference to anything, has had to be dredged up in order to discredit the Civil Rights sympathiser, in marked contrast to Kennedy, who suspended the draft, who pursued détente with China, and who ended the Vietnam War along with Gerald Ford, an old stalwart of the America First Committee (as, to be fair, was JFK).

No one must ever know that that was once the Republican Party. No one must ever know about the Republican calls for Europe to revert to pre-1914 borders and thus end the First World War. No one must ever know about those Republicans who resisted entry into the Second World War until America was actually attacked by either side. No one must ever know about Eisenhower's ending of the Korean War, his even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, his non-intervention in Indo-China, and his denunciation of the military-industrial complex.

No one must ever know about Reagan's withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983, and his initiation of nuclear arms reduction in Europe. No one must ever know about James Baker's call to "lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel" and to "foreswear annexation, stop settlement activity". No one must ever know about Republican opposition to the global trigger-happiness of the Clinton Administration. No one must ever know about Bush the Younger's removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia after 9/11, thus ensuring that there has been no further attack on American soil.

And no one must ever know that there was once a President, a Republican President, who believed in wage and price control as surely as in the Clean Air Act and in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, as surely as in the War on Cancer and in the War on Drugs, as surely as in Title IX and in the desegregation of schools in the Deep South, and as surely that the United States should launch no war over the Soviet Union's treatment of its Zionist dissidents.

Those have turned out to have been just as unpleasant, in their own way, as were many other categories of those who happened to dissent from the Soviet regime. And they now constitute a significant obstacle to peace in the Middle East, where they are busily engaged in denaturalising both the indigenous Christians and the Haredi Jews.