July 25, 2006
Richard Nixon Reconsidered II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:20 PM EST Oh, dear. Once again Joshua Zeitz and I agree, this time about Richard Nixon. This is getting scary. Grasping the essence of Richard Nixon’s character is indeed difficult. As I suggested, we need a Shakespeare to fully capture it, and Shakespeares are always in very short supply. Nixon will never rank high in the presidential ratings that come out periodically (the most recent that I know of is Presidential Leadership: Ranking the Best and the Worst in the White House, edited by James Taranto, to which I contributed the chapter on Martin Van Buren). But he will rank high, probably very high, in the biography index. And what, you may well ask, is the biography index? It’s a thought experiment. Imagine that it’s the year 2106. Stack up all the biographies that have been written about twentieth-century Presidents and compare the stacks. The first one, Theodore Roosevelt (McKinley barely made it into the new century, so we’ll ignore him), will have a very big stack, due both to a highly successful Presidency and to one of the most extraordinary personalities and lives in American history. William Howard Taft will have a much smaller one. His Presidency was largely a failure (although he later made a very successful chief justice, a job he vastly preferred), and no one has ever accused him of having an extraordinary personality. Wilson will have a large stack because of the events during his time in office, despite his schoolmarmish and self-centered nature. FDR will have an enormous stack, of course, and Calvin Coolidge not much of one. (Told of Coolidge’s death, in 1933, The New Yorker writer Dorothy Parker is said to have replied, “How can they tell?”) Among more recent Presidents, Jimmy Carter will, I predict, have a very small stack. His Presidency was largely a disaster and his personality whiny and humorless. Ronald Reagan will have a massive stack. And so will Richard Nixon. Like all politicians, Nixon was motivated by a yearning for power. But like Bill Clinton and unlike Ronald Reagan, he had no clear, articulated philosophy he wanted to govern by. What strikes me about Richard Nixon above all is two things. First, there was his utter determination to reach the White House despite numerous political handicaps. He wasn’t good looking, he wasn’t naturally gregarious (indeed just the opposite), he was buttoned-up to a fault—remember the picture of him walking on a California beach wearing a suit and tie—and he had a mean streak that he couldn’t, and often didn’t try to, hide. Second, he had a self-destructive impulse that was truly Shakespearean. Over and over again he made a giant step in the direction of his goal, and time after time he came close to disaster by his own actions. Plucked from relative political obscurity by Eisenhower to be his running mate, only the famous Checkers speech saved his place on the ticket when a slush fund scandal broke. Nominated for President in 1960 he ran a very bad campaign, and Kennedy barely squeaked out a victory. (Memo to Al Gore: One could argue that Nixon’s refusal to contest his very close losses in Texas and Illinois, where fraud was almost certainly involved, was his finest and most unselfish hour.) He lost the governor’s race in California in 1962 and held a maudlin press conference where he said that the press “won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore.” Yet six years later he became the only man in American history who, having lost his first run for the White House, went on to win it in a second try. Four years later he carried 49 states in a landslide. He had reached the mountaintop of American politics. And then came Watergate. Named for a luxury Washington office and apartment complex (and a singularly ugly one, I might add), Watergate was by orders of magnitude the greatest scandal in American political history. Indeed it was so great—so all-consuming of media attention at the time, for month after month after month—that it has entered the language not just as a word, but, far more impressively, as a suffix. Today Merriam-Webster defines -gate as indicating a “political scandal often involving the concealment of wrongdoing.” Forced by his own gross mismanagement of the scandal to become the only President to resign the office—for impeachment had become certain in the House, and conviction near certain in the Senate—his life’s ambition was in irretrievable ruin. Nevertheless Nixon picked himself up, dusted himself off, and spent the last two decades of his life in a successful effort to build a reputation as a foreign-policy sage. Richard Nixon may not have been likeable or even admirable in many ways, and he will carry a scarlet W down through eternity. But he was never boring, which is why historians—and, I hope, some future Shakespeare—will be writing about him for a very long time.
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