Taylor: Start the Feud With Jonathan Alter Without Me


In his new collection of his Newsweek columns since the 1990s, Between the Lines: A View Inside American Politics, People, and Culture, Jonathan Alter revisits the Bushes, the Clintons, Jimmy
Stewart
, Frank Sinatra and Rush Limbaugh. John Taylor, who left as executive director of the Richard Nixon Library N Birthplace Foundation in Yorba Linda to become an Episcopalian priest in Rancho Santa Margarita, was not only surprised to learn he turns up in the Alter tome but that he was apparently a friend of the author's yet is no longer speaking to him.
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Writing on his Episconixonian blog, Taylor notes that Alter reprints his April 1994 Nixon obit “and writes in a blurb that some had accused him of spitting on
RN's grave. He adds that the director of the Nixon Library, 'the friend
I tapped to bring Nixon to Newsweek
in 1988,' had never spoken to him
again.” Taylor apologizes if he did not get the passage entirely
correct, word for word, noting that he did not buy Alter's book. But
you get the gist, and the gist “confounded” Taylor.


“First
of all, I wouldn't say Alter and I were friends,” Taylor writes. “We went to the same
prep school, but he's three years younger, so our paths barely if ever
crossed. When I was working for President Nixon in New York City in the
1980s, we talked a few times, though my recollection is that it was
always in connection with his duties at the magazine. We had lunch
once, too.”

Taylor has a different recollection on how Nixon made his way into Newsweek, crediting Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham with tapping the former
president for magazine's famous “He's Back” cover, although Alter did write
the story. Taylor also did not remember ever reading Alter's 1994 obit, and, “As
for my never talking to Alter again, I don't know why I necessarily
would have, since we didn't have a social relationship.”

That matters not because Alter and Taylor did speak again, a year or two after Nixon's death, when they debated each other on cable television, Taylor writes. “I expected the
conversation to be reasonably friendly, since we did know each other,
but Jonathan had a better understanding than I of the emerging
etiquette of cable news channels,” Taylor recalled. “He ripped into Nixon and taunted me
personally for defending him. If Alter means I hadn't talked to him
since that episode, he's right. Actually, I've always assumed that he
wouldn't have wanted to talk to me.”

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