Judging Richard Nixon

Judging Richard Nixon

(c) Copyright (2016) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

We base our politics on what we think we know, but our assumptions are so often partial or prejudiced or ideological or simply wrong. Sometimes we get a surprising look under the hood by keeping an open mind to new presentations of old material. Fourteen years after Richard M. Nixon resigned as president, he visited Newsweek magazine. Ever-prepared by prior research, Nixon commented to Newsweek employee Evan Thomas, "Your grandfather was a great man." This apparently run-of-the-mill compliment actually is rather extraordinary because that grandfather was the American Socialist leader Norman Thomas.

Evan Thomas's new biography of Nixon, Being Nixon:  A Man Divided,  full of similar surprises, fleshes out a man rather than sketches out a caricature. Evenhanded and dispassionate, the book balances Nixon's many accomplishments, personal courage and resolution, and actual good deeds against his failures in the interpersonal realm. These failures led to Nixon's protecting his cronies by covering up their crimes rather than acting like a president and firing them for their misdeeds. Nixon's brilliance about policy and politics did not protect him against his own interpersonal ineptitude that included a dread of confronting cronies and an inability to surmount his hatred of his many enemies.

While Nixon did destroy himself, he had help. Thomas agrees with Nixon that Nixon's critics and the press applied a double standard that demonized Nixon while it exculpated his Democratic opponents, and Thomas asserts that they were out to get Nixon and that Nixon was not paranoid. But, in Thomas's view, Nixon reacted unwisely to the perceived threat.

Shakespearean in its ironies and tragic resolution, the story of this brilliant, intellectual (in spite of his odd comment "I am not educated, but I do read books"), bitter, and very strange man fascinates endlessly, especially Americans who were politically aware in the late Sixties to middle Seventies. Anyone my age or older immediately snaps to attention at the mention of Nixon.  No one, friend or foe, reacts indifferently. His is a galvanizing legacy.

In 1973-1974, I watched the televised Ervin Committee [Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities] hearings and then, in 1974, the Rodino Committee [House of Representatives Judiciary Committee] hearings about Watergate.  I saw Nixon's resignation speech in August 1974, as well as his maudlin goodbye to the assembled White House staff.  In 1977, I watched TV interviewer David Frost's series of four interviews with the former president. 

 

Since these observations of the real Richard Nixon, I have seen Nixon portrayed by several actors.  In "Secret Honor," Robert Altman filmed Philip Baker Hall as a drunken, rambling Nixon defending his honor after his resignation--a liberal/Left interpretation of Nixon's rise and fall, like Oliver Stone's surprisingly sympathetic "Nixon" starring Anthony Hopkins. Hall gets the man's oddity, awkwardness, and unending rage but not anything of his intelligence or political acumen.  In "Frost/Nixon," Frank Langella captures Nixon's social awkwardness, introversion, brilliance, and reflexive combativeness.  

Besides observing real and pretend Nixons (some would dispute any distinction between the two), I have read a great deal about Nixon's life and career.  As an author, he shadowboxes his way through Six Crises, always testing his own toughness and resolution and his capacity for self-exhaustion. The Best Year of their Lives: Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in 1948 by Lance Morrow presents fascinating character analyses of the three future presidents based on their activities in 1948. Stephen Ambrose's biographies cemented in my mind the perception of Nixon as haunted by his early upbringing in a struggling working-class family.

I found most illuminating treatments of the Alger Hiss case that made Congressman Richard Nixon famous and led to his being chosen as a vice presidential running mate in 1952 by Dwight Eisenhower. One was Sam Tanenhaus's excellent biography of Whittaker Chambers, the former Soviet spy who exposed Hiss as another Soviet agent.  Chamber's own memoir, Witness, is an extraordinary autobiography by a man beloved of the Right who yet perceived Joseph McCarthy's reckless witch-hunts as disastrous for anti-communism. I have never read any clearer explanation than in Witness of why some Americans became communists.

Although Nixon often failed to distinguish Americans holding unpopular but constitutionally protected opinions from actual traitors, Nixon was right about Hiss, and Nixon foresaw and helped to create a post-communist world.  With the passing of my generation of baby boomers, judgments of both Johnson and Nixon will become more balanced, despite being weighed down by Vietnam and Watergate.   

Nevertheless, the legacy of Vietnam (and Cambodia) is a heavy one, not least because of South Vietnamese allies left behind after the fall of Saigon.  Last Days in Vietnam, a new documentary directed by Rory Kennedy, concerns the evacuation of US and South Vietnamese personnel and their families as the fall of Saigon neared. This very interesting documentary depicts how several US officers/officials in defiance of orders chose to save many lives. The film points out that the fall of Nixon emboldened the North Vietnamese to break the accord and invade the South, which they otherwise would not have done.

Evidence confounds easy answers and easy judgments.  Say what you will about Nixon, he had the courage to fight for his beliefs and decisions. For, according to Richard Nixon, "A man is not finished when he's defeated; he's finished when he quits."

first published in The Woodstock Independent