WWW.PRESIDENTS"R"US.COM

Man and mementos

The Associated Press presents Barry Landau as international man of mystery, dancing with queens and first ladies when he isn’t precociously worming his way into an Eisenhower White House invitation. Since then they claim he has been operating at the nexus, working the fulcrum, and in and of himself representative of the convergence of all we hold dear in politics and entertainment.

And snagging a lot of tchotskis over the years. Some of his collection will be reflected in “The President’s Table: 200 Years of Dining and Diplomacy,” first of a threatened three volumes of Presidentish stuff.

“He’s the kind of guy you may not notice in the pictures with celebrities. He is 59 and has been in the company of presidents for nearly 50 years. He is tall and bearded, with a home full of history and a head crammed with names, like boxes in an overstuffed closet ready to tumble out.”

One name that doesn’t tumble out in AP’s account is Hamilton Jordan.

Landau was supporting witness to allegations that Jimmy Carter Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan used cocaine during a visit to Studio 54, the New York nightclub which from almost any perspective symbolized everything wrong with America in the 70s.

Drugs were the least of their problems

Club owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager faced prison for tax evasion, and offered up Jordan’s name as plea bargain bait. Their attorney was sinister New York fixer Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s former counsel.

Cohn, clubbing.

The Special Counsel* appointed to investigate the allegations rejected them, and found Landau to be, shall we say, a questionable witness:

“There were only three people who claimed to have direct information concerning Mr. Jordan’s alleged use of cocaine in Studio 54: Rubell, Johnny C., and one Barry Landau. As witnesses, the most charitable thing that could be said about them was that they were utterly unbelievable….Landau claimed that on the evening of June 27, 1978, while at Studio 54, Mr. Jordan asked him for cocaine. Despite what he had said on the 20/20 program, however, when we pressed him, he did not claim to have any knowledge that Mr. Jordan in fact took cocaine that night. Landau said he did not hear Mr. Jordan ask Rubell or anyone else for cocaine, did not hear any other discussions about cocaine, and did not see Mr. Jordan or any other member of the Jordan group take cocaine. He also said that prior to August 24, 1979, he was never told by Rubell or anyone else that Mr. Jordan had taken cocaine in his visit. Landau declined to be interviewed by the FBI about June 27, 1978.20…Although Landau said that other persons were with Mr. Jordan that evening when Mr. Jordan asked Landau for cocaine, each of those persons explicitly denied that Mr. Jordan asked anyone for cocaine in his presence. I had very serious doubts about Landau’s credibility under any circumstances.”

None of this stops Landau on the book tour. He’s planning to hit the Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Bush Presidential Libraries, and for some reason doing both the Ford Archive and Ford Museum on separate days.

Somehow he is skipping the Carter Library.

*Youngsters may not recall, but one part of the hell that was the 70s was the appointment of Special Counsels at the hint of White House impropriety.

Jonathan Demme’s “Jimmy Carter Man From Plains” documentary thunders into the nation’s metroplexes October 26th, using Carter’s last [but not current] book tour to remind the nation once again how he came to be so loved and loathed. The trailer seems designed to push all the Right’s buttons at once: “the conscience of the world,” and the “”most admired man in the world”

Back in the 70s Director Demme had other interests, giving the nation perhaps our finest women in prison film with “Caged Heat.”

In anticipation of the coming wave of Carter gush, and as the bombers warm up for runs on Tehran, some voices are pre-butting Carter and readying fallback defenses for the possible Iran debacle to come.

It is, was, and shall always be Carter’s fault.

Apparently Carter stabbed the Shah of Iran in the back, put the Mullahs in power, and/or America felt so shamefaced about having backed the Shah we hid his rug.

Moonbattery warms up:

“Jimmah also saw fit to call Rudy Giuliani “foolish” for leaving open the option of one day defending ourselves from Iran, which has been at war with us since Carter pulled the rug out from under the Shah during his disastrous presidency a generation ago”

The Mayor of Beverly Hills says Carter not only dumped the Shah but brought in the Bearded One:

“he changed the whole dynamic of the Middle East by his backing of Khomeini, and that has had a whole ripple effect in the Middle East, which America is still trying to recover from.”

Sage of Arkansas Paul Greenberg brings the feisty, using the beloved Harry Truman to disparage, um, all of contemporary society?

Let’s travel back to a simpler time with Greenberg:

“About the only feature I remember from my earlier visit to the Truman Library was a huge Persian carpet that had been suspended from the balcony. We’d pass it more than once during our brief tour, and each time Mr. Truman would say, “Yeah, that’s a rug the Shah of Iran gave me.“

“Old Mossadegh found out that the Shah had given me the rug, and he was burned up.”

But then Greenberg knew sin:

“The rug is no longer in sight. Political correctness must have overtaken even this monument to Give ‘Em Hell Harry.”

Whatever is his point here? That America once proudly backed a Ruritanian kleptocracy, then lost interest in the burdens of empire?

A National Defense University paper on how Carter turned his back on the Shah:

“On September 10, President Carter, with the approval of both Vance and Brzezinski, called the
Shah to make public his continuing support and to bolster the shah’s confidence. This action was interpreted by the moderates in Iran as signifying Carter’s approval of the massacre and probably proved
counterproductive to later U.S. efforts to relate to moderate groups in Iran…By late December clear divisions in recommendations emerged between Vance and Brzezinski, with Vance still seeking to find an acceptable coalition that would let the shah remain and with Brzezinski ready to urge the Iranian military, if necessary without the shah, to assume full control and crush the dissidents. The shah, apparently earlier than any U.S. leader, saw the impossibility of saving the monarchy and was unwilling to initiate the bloodshed of the “iron fist” approach. “

The LA Times reports that many of those panting for Hillary Clinton documents from the Clinton Library will remain breathless for a considerable time.

This is presented as something of a novelty. And the other girls make Hillary look bad:

“About 75,000 pages of Rosalynn Carter’s records are publicly available, including scheduling and social office files. Both the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush libraries also said that some records covering former first ladies Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush were open”

The article does portray Library archivists working through the mountain of FOIA requests in the order received, with the aching slowness of the process attributed to staff shortages at the Clinton and all US President’s libraries.

But the flag goes up, and the usual suspects snap to with ominous muttering and rote denunciations of the liberal hypocrisy which somehow caused National Archive staff to decline under President Bush. Even sports bores rush to inform the world of her crimes.

.

Don’t let the Regan Legacy-ists hear, but there may be no Presidential dollar coin for Reagan.

According to the Fayette Observer, it’s all about Jimmy Carter’s refusal to leave the scene.

Coining Reagan may be twarted by the interaction of two laws.

The Observer reports that under current statutes, “a president must be dead at least two years before he can be featured on a U.S. bill or coin. The current dollar-coin program requires that the presidents be featured in the order they served. Skipping isn’t allowed. So if Jimmy Carter lives to at least 2014 — he’d be 89 — he won’t make it to a coin in this program since his would be due out in 2016.”

Result: Reagan shutout.

Which one is not like the other ones?

A Senate Committee has passed reporting requirements for Presidential Libraries, with living ex presidents caught up in the dragnet aimed at the Bush Library in waiting. The dead get a pass.

The House version does not go after the foundations of Libraries already part of the National Archives system.

Happy filing to the Clinton, Carter and Bush[1] entities!