There are  plenty of opinions flying around about NPR's decision to fire Juan Williams. The Washington Post editorialized against NPR's decision, arguing in part that Williams "undoubtedly spoke for many Americans who are wrestling with similar feelings" about seeing Muslims in airports. (Williams was worried primarily about those in "Muslim garb.") Former Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, now at the  Daily Beast website, called it a "blunder of enormous proportions."

What I found most puzzling, though, was this passage from Williams' commentary that appeared on FoxNews.com:

Daniel Schorr, my fellow NPR commentator who died earlier this year, used to talk about the initial shock of finding himself on President Nixon’s enemies list. I can only imagine Dan’s revulsion to realize that today NPR treats a journalist who has worked for them for 10 years with less regard, less respect for the value of independence of thought and embrace of real debate across political lines, than Nixon ever displayed.

I don't know what Schorr might have said to Williams, but I suspect he may have pointed out that in the most infamous case, Nixon had CIA agents trailing Jack Anderson, a reporter he despised, and they were plotting ways they might kill him. (Mark Feldstein's recent book explaining the history was excerpted on NPR's website.) That seems worse to me. A lot worse.

Blogger Jonathan Schwarz (A Tiny Revolution, 6/24/09) has noted that when "CBS ran a story about the latest batch of Nixon tapes made public... they included a section of a February 21, 1973 conversation with Billy Graham that showed Nixon at his psycho best," addressing anti-Semitism thus: "This has happened to the Jews, happened in Spain, it happened in Germany, it's happening, and now it's gonna happen in America if these people don't start behaving. It may be they have a death wish."

But the real problem comes in CBS's quote of the Graham response: "Well, they've always been through the Bible at least, God's timepiece. He has judged them from generation to generation and yet used them and they've kept their identity." Schwarz asks us,

What do you think about Graham's response there? True, he didn't stand up to Nixon's rambling insanity, but at least he deflected it. He comes out looking pretty good!

Too bad this is how the conversation actually went (mp3):

Graham: Well, you know I told you one time that the Bible talks about two kinds of Jews. One is called the Synagogue of Satan. They're the ones putting out the pornographic literature. They're the ones putting out these obscene films.

[three minutes of talking]

Nixon: It may be they have a death wish, that's been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.

Graham: Well, they've always been through the Bible at least, God's timepiece. He has judged them from generation to generation and yet used them and they've kept their identity.

Schwarz closes with a further "P.S.": "CBS is also wrong that Nixon was talking about anti-Semitism being generated by the shooting down of the Libyan plane. Nixon was actually responded to Graham being angry about a rabbi criticizing a new attempt at widespread evangelism." But this is all part of a great tradition in the U.S. press: Corporate media have diligently worked to clean up the good reverend's image for just about as long as he's been around.

At a screening of the film Frost/Nixon, Fox News Channel's Chris Wallace defends George W. Bush against the assertion--which doesn't seem to have been made by anyone present--that Bush's crimes were worse than Richard Nixon's (Salon, 12/2/08):

It trivializes Nixon's crimes and completely misrepresents what George W. Bush did. Whatever George W. Bush did was after the savage attack of 9/11, in which 3,000 Americans were killed, it was done in service of trying to protect this country. I'm not saying that you have to agree with everything he did, but it was all done in the service of trying to protect this country and keep us safe. And the fact is that we sit here so comfortably, and the country has not been attacked again since 9/11.

Of course, Nixon would have argued that everything he did was in the service of trying to protect America from enemies. (In fact, if I remember correctly, he does make this argument in the theatrical version of Frost/Nixon, which draws heavily from transcripts of actual interviews.) The enemies the U.S. faced then were much better armed than the ones it faces now--and they never attacked us, so, hey, Watergate must have worked!