"You've gotta join one caucus or another to protect your seniority so I've said I'd caucus with the Democrats. But I'm gonna be very independent."

"He [Chris Dodd] has been a disappointment... He says he's gonna bring a food taster to our first lunch meeting. I'm gonna bring Michael Corleone.

There’s a taboo in American politics against using the “N”-word—comparing a politician to Richard Nixon. But after spending five years writing a book on Nixon, I couldn’t help but notice some similarities with Connecticut’s junior senator—and I don’t just mean the mystery of how Joe Lieberman spent the mysterious $387,000 his campaign listed as “petty cash” in the days before the August 8 primary.

I’m not the first to point out Nixonian traits in Lieberman. There’s an ad going around the Internet that shows clips from a Nixon speech on Vietnam, then similar words from Joe Lieberman. The senator has commented of it, “that’s not the kind of debate we ought to have.” But speaking as one who knows Richard Nixon backwards and forwards, I believe that’s exactly the debate we ought to have. As a historian, I find the ad fair—uncannily so.

By 1969, most Americans wanted out of Vietnam. So many, in fact, that on October 15, 1969, an astonishing 2 million—Democrat and Republican, young and old people—took the day off from work and school to hit the streets to beg President Nixon to end the war. One of them was Tom Seaver, star of 1969’s “Miracle Mets.” He said, “If the Mets can win the World Series, the U.S. can get out of Vietnam.”

Both notions seemed like miracles. Everyone knew Nixon was a hawk. He would say things, as the war was ramping up in the mid-’60s, like “We are fighting in Vietnam to prevent World War III.” Running for president in 1968, he pledged that “new leadership will end the war and win the peace.” By the fall of 1969, few believed him. The war was still raging, less popular than ever.

And so, two weeks after that largest antiwar demonstration in U.S. history, Richard Nixon gave a speech to the nation pledging that he was anti-war, too.

This is the speech that shows up in the new anti-Lieberman ad. Promising, “I want peace as much as you do,” he pledged an eventual withdrawal, while simultaneously warning that everyone else’s plans for withdrawal would lead to “defeat and humiliation.”

It was a thoroughly fudging performance. Nixon started making token troop withdrawals—and made up for it by escalating aerial bombardment. The following April, he dangled this sweet enticement before the American people: “we finally have in sight the just peace we are seeking. … we can say with confidence that all American combat forces can and will be withdrawn.” Ten days later, American troops invaded a second, neighboring country: neutral Cambodia.