So I was going to post about finding what would have been my favorite Nixon moment yet, something more to nurture my enthusiasm for believing that Richard Milhous was the closest thing America has had to a Caesar -- somewhere between Tiberius and Nero, but less the "minnows" and plus a lot more carpet bombing. I had stumbled upon a blog post (here on the Fredösphere) about stretches of the White House Tapes in which Nixon exposes his inexplicable hatred of French composer-conductor Pierre Boulez and plots to use another French avant-gardist, Olivier Messiaen, as "a 'wedge' who could be used to divide and confuse his enemies." It was all too delightful and impossibly, fiendishly petty, and I thought sure I could make an interesting post out of it.
But! Wanting to see the primary documents for myself, I looked in vain on the Nixon Library's site for mention of either Messiaen or Boulez. So I listened to audio excerpts of the White House Tapes from the precise days that Nixon was supposed to have made plans to break into the Darmstadt School, or mock Boulez with aide Charles Colson. And all I heard about was worthless George McGovern, because the author of the post that got me so excited had just substituted names and made up a phony context for the altered tape transcripts. Shenanigans called -- but well played, and I with an eggy face.
Oh well, dream deferred, but an object lesson in always checking your footnotes, even if there aren't any.
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1 comment:
My evil misinformation campaign succeeds!
(Actually, I was counting on the part at the end--where P. Boulez is thwarted in an attempt to become president of France--to make it obvious what was going on. Maybe that was too plausible.)
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