Tags
1968, Aquarius, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Richard Nixon, Vietnam
It’s been slow going, but I’m still working through the episodes of Aquarius. For the first half of the second season, the focus was more on typical cop-show fare than the grand-sweep of the Sixties. Duchovny’s Hodiak deals with personal issues while investigating fictional murder cases. As a period show, the plot needs to be fixed in time and place, but not uniquely so. At the same time, every episode ominously foreshadows the necessary endpoint of Aquarius‘ Manson Family theme using differently-colored flash-forward scenes from the 1969 Sharon Tate murders. We are, however, reminded that we are still more than a year away.
About mid-season, a handful of episodes delve back into Forrest Gump mode. Most notably, Hodiak is not only present for the Robert Kennedy assassination, but he actually is the one who makes the decision* to take Kennedy through the hotel kitchens rather than through the crowd. In the next episode, the interweaving of the 1968 election continues as one of the major characters becomes responsible for the effort to derail the Paris peace talks. Now, the show goes on to add a gay-sex component to it all because, after all, everything in Aquarius seems to need a sexual angle. Let’s not get distracted by the prurient and focus back on the Logan Act for a moment, shall we?
In that earlier discussion about Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War, I mused a bit on the recently-published information which may have driven Burns to conclude that Nixon was inarguably guilty of treason. This episode of Aquarius (aired July 14th, 2016) precedes both The Vietnam War and the book, Richard Nixon: The Life, which published the new information. Nevertheless, Aquarius follows the same thread and even specifically suggests, in a conversation among conspirators, that what they plan to do will be in violation of the Logan Act.
To be clear, the accusations are not new. Johnson, himself, concluded that Nixon’s actions were treason (although he felt he lacked absolute proof). Then-Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford cited the Logan Act when claiming Nixon was engaged in illegal activity. Nevertheless, even at that time, it seems that prosecution under the Logan Act should have appeared an unlikely avenue for seeking justice.
A decade before Aquarius came out, the Logan Act had surfaced in an episode of The West Wing, airing April 23rd, 2006. Nothing too strange about that. A TV series about the inner workings of a fictional White House tosses around some fairly esoteric and archaic law and that seems par for the course. It would have passed by unnoticed, save perhaps for the writers from Aquarius, except that one conspiracy theory says that it was noticed. It was noticed by someone who could use it to shape policy.
Let us go to a meeting in January of 2017, in the real White House this time. Note that this is before the release of Richard Nixon: The Life or the airing possibly-related assertions in Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War, but after the West Wing and Aquarius references to the Logan Act. Then-FBI-agent Peter Strzok records that then-President Obama is discussing an investigation of future-National Security Advisor, former-General Michael Flynn. Strzok notes that then-Vice President Biden raised the Logan Act as a potential way to prosecute.
The theory, passed among the darker corridors of the internet, says that Joe Biden got the idea from The West Wing**. On its face, this is a bit of a stretch. Maybe he got it from Aquarius? Maybe he had read up on the election of 1968?
The evidence for this theory is backed by Joe Biden’s own tendency to “borrow” his ideas from others, including the career-wrecking speech lifted from Welsh MP, the Baron Neil Kinnock. The smoking gun, if you will, is the assignment of the Obama administration’s cancer initiative to then-Vice President Biden and Biden’s apparent lifting of some motivational words from a January 2002 West Wing episode.
It’s hardly proof, but if we know Joe Biden gets his ideas from old episodes of The West Wing then it makes a connection that much more likely. In the more general case, it appears that a fictional interest in Nixon’s possible treasonous actions, coinciding with an upcoming 50-year anniversary thereof, seeped into the consciousness of the children of the Humphrey supporters of 1968. With it came the hope that the Logan Act was one way to rid the world of the scourge of the Orange Man.
Wasn’t this easier when we stuck to cop drama?
*The decision was that of Kennedy campaign aide, Fred Dutton.
**A more coherent explanation of the theory, with credit is given where credit is due, can be found here.