August 11, 2007
Goodbye to Richard Nixon Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:40 PM EST Last week, the American Heritage blog let slip by without mention the anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation as President on August 9, 1974. Here’s a modest attempt at correcting the oversight. By far the more lurid account of Nixon’s decision to step down came from Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the award-winning journalists who cracked the Watergate story for the Washington Post. In their second collaborative book, The Final Days, they recounted a late-night summit between the President and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, that took place in the Lincoln Sitting Room, a small alcove on the second floor of the southeast side of the White House, then furnished with Victorian period pieces and appointed with a gray marble fireplace. Portraits of Abraham Lincoln lined the walls. Nixon sat off to the corner in his leather armchair—the only comfortable seat in the room—in close proximity to a stereo and two five-foot shelves that stored his classical records. It was clear to Kissinger that Nixon had been drinking. Other sources noted that the President enjoyed cranking up the air conditioning and lighting the fireplace, even in the dog days of summer, but Bernstein and Woodward didn’t mention that detail in their contested version of events. “Will history treat me more kindly than my contemporaries?” the President asked his Secretary of State. Kissinger nodded yes and joined Nixon in a long recitation of the administration’s foreign policy achievements: ending America’s military involvement in Vietnam, reaching détente with the Soviet Union, opening diplomatic relations with China, forging landmark agreements on arms proliferation and economic trade. Though the former Harvard professor assured his Commander-in-Chief that future generations would judge him by these accomplishments, and not for a third-rate burglary, Nixon was inconsolable. “It depends on who writes the history,” he observed. Since 1974, historians have changed their tunes considerably on Richard Nixon. Early accounts tended to emphasize self-destructive continuity throughout Nixon’s career, from his reckless partisanship in the 1940s and 1950s to the take-no-prisoners approach that led to such rampant criminality in his administration. In the 1990s, a new generation of policy historians revisited the Nixon Presidency and concluded that whatever his personal shortcomings may have been, he was, by and large, a political moderate who presided over effective foreign and domestic policies. The problem with this revisionism is that it confuses moderation for competency. Yes, Richard Nixon was no Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan; he signed or pressed into law several important environmental and civil rights measures and oversaw an expansion of social spending, even as he forged a détente with the Soviet Union and established diplomatic relations with China. But he also prolonged the Vietnam War at great human cost, ultimately accepting terms in 1973 that were largely identical to those he could have accepted in 1969, and he bore considerable responsibility for over-heating the economy in 1972 in order to aid his reelection campaign, thus igniting the hyper-inflation of 1973–1974. This isn’t to say that he was anywhere near as incompetent as a certain President who followed him, many years later. But if Nixon’s legacy is to be salvaged by focusing on his policies, it’s important not to conflate the term “good” with “moderate”/”liberal,” and equally important not to confuse “conservative” with “bad.” As many of us have recently come to appreciate, there’s just no substitution for competency, and it’s still not clear that Nixon was especially competent or incompetent. He may well have been average. In which case, Watergate continues to matter.
|
