History has a habit of changing its opinion of people, not very quickly – it turns more slowly than a battleship in a narrow strait – but all the more interesting for that. Settled wisdom on historical characters is often wrong, because they are seen through the filter of propaganda, false memories and irrelevant prejudice. These vanish only as distance replaces memories. Then reputations change.
For instance, there have only been five US Presidents since President Lincoln who have been seriously concerned with civil rights: Grant, Harding, Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon. All of them left office with low ratings among academicians and for many years afterwards, historians have dutifully kept them in the gutter when it was time to draw up their annual ratings of the good, the bad and the ugly Presidents.
Yet, strangely, one by one, these five Presidents have begun to rise through the ranks years after they have left office. Truman was first, rising in polls of historians from a low rating to “Near Great” status beginning in the early 1970s. Since the mid-1990’s, President Grant has risen in polls from the very bottom to the midranks of Presidents and in a recent book of essays ( Profiles in Leadership, edited by Walter Isaacson), the leftwing (but scrupulously honest and always valuable) Sean Wilentz makes a very strong case that Grant belongs near the top of the list of great Presidents.
I believe that Richard Nixon’s turn will be next. When Nixon took office, his two predecessors had bequeathed to him the weakest hand of any President since Abraham Lincoln. The country was riven by riots, a divisive war and an economy already heading for the cellar. The USSR was out to exploit the weaknesses it saw and the media began to believe for the first time in American history that being patriotic was a crime against the trade of journalism.
Somehow, in the course of his six years in office, Richard Nixon stabilized events. He ended the war and if it hadn’t been for the act of Congress denying it ammunition, South Vietnam would have had a good chance of surviving. Nixon improved relations with the Communist world in a manner that set the stage for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China. America’s cities were no longer in an uproar.
Neither were the campuses. Nixon instinctively knew something about the Baby Boomers that very few people in power did: they weren’t against the war by and large, they were just too self involved to fight in it. I entered the University of Wisconsin – Madison in the fall of 1972. That spring, I visited the campus the day after a demonstration of close to 10,000 students. I met a friend, an apolitical sort who was gushing about how much fun anti-war demonstrations are. You meet all sorts of chicks, he told me, and the cops are cool: they ask if you want some tear gas so that you can say you were gassed. That summer, I turned 18 and got my draft card, which became obsolete almost immediately as President Nixon ended the draft. When I returned to Madison in the fall, the war was still being fought, but without the draft, the Boomers didn’t care. The only anti-war demonstration I saw consisted of about 25 hippies dragging their banners behind them.
But President Nixon’s successes also go way beyond those he is credited with. For some reason, his most significant successes have been downplayed by both allies and enemies alike. While liberals like Joan Hoff and Tom Wicker have grudgingly conceded that in the realm of civil rights, he was “One of Us” (to borrow Wicker’s phrase), in some respects, Richard Nixon’s achievements in the area of civil rights exceeded those of any other President. President Johnson obtained the enabling legislation and judicial orders to force the integration of schools in the South, but true to form, he left the implementation to his successor, expecting the sort of warfare that plagued South Boston a few years later. Instead, Nixon, exploiting the South’s concern about the ravaged cities of the North and the collapse of law and order, quietly went about integrating Southern schools with a minimum of fuss, combining racial equality with rhetoric of conservative values (“watch what we do, not what we say” he told insiders), thus not only peacefully integrating the schools, but delivering the South to the Republican Party for good.
Today, race relations are better in the South than in the North, where liberals pretend to care, but don’t. A prominent liberal law firm was sued for race discrimination awhile back and its office manager’s defense was that they didn’t discriminate because they had plenty of blacks in the mailroom. Meanwhile, the brightest lights on the Republican right are a black Congressman and an Hispanic Senator, both from the State of Florida. Nixon, who was always sympathetic to civil rights can be credited with that.
Another major achievement of President Nixon (usually handled in a footnote even by those historians who treat him fairly, such as Mark Feeney in his insightful Nixon at the Movies) is his actions during the Yom Kippur War where he single-handedly saved Israel from defeat by ordering a massive airlift of munitions. President Nixon was under fire over Watergate in the fall of 1973 and could have used that as an excuse to abandon Israel. Nixon was aware that the Arab states would throw the country into recession with an oil embargo if he acted. But act he did, stripping the U.S.Army of regiments of armor and equipment to ship it to Israel. He fought against the military who understandably didn’t want to see their own forces denuded. He fought against the State Department and other government bureaucracies who favored Islamic states. He fought the Democrats who accused him of staging a coup d’état. He even fought his own Administration (“Get off your fat ass and get those planes in the air, Henry,” Feeney quotes Nixon as telling Henry Kissinger.) It is fair to say that if it weren’t for Nixon, there would have been no Camp David Accords; there may not even have been an Israel.
Even on his economic policy, which admittedly failed, he managed to discredit Keynesian economics for thirty years. He did this by following the leading liberal advice of the day. Abandoning the gold standard, imposing wage and price controls, he gave the left what it wanted and when what it wanted proved to be a bust, they preferred to blame him instead of their theories. But Nixon won the long war: today only the robber barons and their enablers on the left – politicians, public unions, professors and the press – push for Keynesian solutions, antagonizing the rest of us (for good reason, given the appalling track record of those solutions).
Ah, but there was Watergate, historians will tell you. Shortly after Watergate, when William Safire documented Democratic crimes in his It Didn’t Start with Watergate, the standard response became “Ah, but Nixon got caught.” Well, of course, it is always easy to get caught when the media is gunning for you and easy to escape when they aren’t. But in the curious amnesia that strikes liberal historians, the break-ins, buggings and harassments ordered by Herbert Hoover, FDR, JFK and LBJ are forgotten, all of which are arguably worse than Watergate since they used government officials to commit the crimes (the Office of Naval Intelligence in the case of Hoover and the FBI and the IRS in the case of the others). Today historians would want you to believe that Nixon alone committed these sort of acts.
When Nixon told David Frost “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,” he was being sincere. He was simply stating what had become the de facto Constitutional powers of the Presidency. Every President in his adult life had engaged in nefarious activities without damaging their reputations (Truman and Ike didn’t spy on their fellow citizens – not the innocent ones anyway – but they engaged in overseas activities of a questionable nature). In 1971, we were in the midst of a war and the burgling and the bugging were not designed to provide bedroom reading for him, the way JFK’s did. Rather they were designed to find out who was leaking secrets that were killing American soldiers.
Nor has anything changed on the left wing of American politics since 1974. Since Watergate, President Clinton’s sale of military secrets to China in exchange for campaign contributions (let alone his own bugging of Newt Gingrich) were treated with a “boys will be boys” attitude on the left and President Obama’s distribution of healthcare waivers to supporters don’t even raise an eyebrow on the collective face of the media. We know now that “Deep Throat,” who brought Nixon down, was Mark Felt, the senior career officer at the FBI who was angry that he wasn’t named Director because Nixon, worried that the Agency had become the “rouge elephant” that the Democrats claimed it to be, wanted to create civilian oversight over its activities. If Nixon had been a Democrat, all else (China, the end of the war, etc.) being equal: The New York Times would have argued that he had been toppled by a coup d’état.
Somehow, Nixon stands alone among historians as the able politician with a dark side, as the tragic figure with a “paranoid” nature. But something is wrong with that idea. Although he won the most votes (and even more of the legitimate ones) in 1960, he never challenged the outcome of the election, ordering his aides to cease all opposition to the fraudulent election results. The clear theft of the electoral votes of Illinois, Missouri and Texas, which would have given him the election, could have been challenged, but he said “You don’t steal the Presidency of the United States,” giving JFK the honeymoon with the country which he promptly squandered with the Bay of Pigs, the Vienna Summit and the Berlin Wall. And in 1974, instead of fighting his impeachment, he resigned rather than put the country through another protracted battle.
But what really proves his mettle was that, at the height of the anti-war demonstrations in 1970, he slipped out of the White House, alone except for a single (unarmed) aide and mingled with the demonstrators who were pledging to kill him. He had a long conversation with students near the Washington Monument while the Secret Service frantically ran around the White House trying to locate him. There was no precedent for this. When Martin Luther King held a far friendlier rally in Washington, JFK hid in the Oval Office and pretended not to be home. When President Obama has his Town Hall Meetings, all the riff-raff (i.e. anyone who doesn’t agree with him) are screened out. The only precedent for Nixon’s act that comes to mind is Abraham Lincoln’s carriage ride through Richmond in 1865, and even there, Honest Abe was accompanied by a troop of U.S. Cavalry.
Nixon wasn’t a paranoid, he was a populist, together with Harry Truman the only legitimate populist President in the Twentieth Century. That rankled the left which drew its own paranoid conclusions about him, launching an increasingly irrational element into liberal politics which have chased an increasing percentage of the population to the right. “I gave them a sword,” Nixon told Frost, but it was really a matter of the Democrats giving it to the right wing of the Republican Party. Nixon was a liberal, with a raft of environmental acts to add to his other achievements, and by taking him down, the Democrats allowed the Republican right to abandon him, paving the way for Ronald Reagan. Liberal Republicanism ceased to exist because of Watergate. By contrast, when Clinton’s crimes became too much to ignore and the Republicans launched an impeachment, the Democrats carefully steered the controversy away from his real high crimes and misdemeanors to the more manageable Lewinsky affair. It is because of the sheep-like behavior of Democrats in Congress that President Obama is floundering today.
The reason Nixon fell has nothing to do with any act of his, but with the blunders of his predecessors which pulled us into Vietnam. The coup against the Ngo Dinh Diem sponsored by JFK in 1963 made our involvement in the Vietnam War inevitable and probably made our defeat there inevitable as well. By the time Nixon took office, we had become such a polarized country that, by comparison, today’s contretemps seem like a picnic. The country was more divided in 1968 than at any time since the Civil War, maybe more so, since no one clarified the battlelines by seceding in 1968. Nixon’s theme was Bring Us Together, based on a little girl’s placard he spotted while campaigning, and that was his goal.
He ended the war but the bitterness and the irrational hatred of the left was too strong. In James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, an anthropological survey of myths and legends around the world, the author mentions a legend found in many parts of the world of a threatened people who turn to a king to save them. After he does so, he is murdered by the tribe he saved, as a sort of sacrifice. Something like that happened to Richard Milhous Nixon. Forcing his resignation is the way we put Vietnam behind us and allowed us to turn our backs while our enemy butchered millions of innocent people It all happened in a country far away and the left didn’t care, so the bitterness was redirected to poor Dick Nixon, the only guy left in America who gave a damn.
Such an outcome was almost predictable on Election Day 1968, no matter who won. Richard Nixon’s fate, then, is not a tragedy but the unjust penalty for saving the country. The real tragedy is not 1974, but 1960. If he had taken office eight years earlier, there would have been no Vietnam, because he was far too intelligent and far too contemptuous of the Establishment to allow The New York Times to bully him into murdering an ally, destabilizing all of Southeast Asia and forcing US troops to prevent a collapse. He wouldn’t have gummed up the Bay of Pigs by trying to “keep the noise level down” as JFK did. He would have pressed civil rights legislation far more vigorously than JFK and with Nixon’s lifelong encouragement of minority businesses, civil rights would be more than just the sad story of black elites leaving the black community to join white businesses serving the white community.
In 1932, there were six black owned, black operated banks in Richmond, Virginia alone. Today, there is only one. That is not the sort of “progress” Richard Nixon would have tolerated.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
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