Just as he resigned from office, President Richard Nixon said to his White House staff in his farewell address, “Remember, always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win, unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.” These are not only good words for anyone to follow, they also sum up his career, and I feel that this may be the real reason why his presidency failed.
I have always had a soft spot for Nixon. I remember Watergate clearly, and I have seen his presidency from the very beginning, and I knew he wanted our involvement in Vietnam to end, so he hired a brilliant diplomat, Henry Kissinger, to accomplish this task. While he did this, he slowly reduced the number of troops from half a million in 1969 to under 100 thousand in 1972.
What has largely been forgotten is that in his first term, he set up a vast network of federal grants to social programs to state and local governments, for them to help the less fortunate in their own localities. As for the environment, he helped to establish the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate air and water emissions, for pollution was a very serious problem back in the late sixties and early seventies. Another agency, OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, was set up to protect workers from the hazards of their jobs. Back then, “Nixon Republicans” meant working class people, as opposed to the Republican party of today representing the wealthy.
Nixon tried to go further in similar programs, but Congress wouldn’t support him. Nixon tried to establish a living wage for all working families, so they can earn a decent living. He even tried to establish a national health care plan before the concept was popular, by proposing to provide government insurance for low-income families, require employers to cover all their workers, and set standards for private health insurance. Today, he would be considered a radical, supported by Liberals and despised by Neo-Conservatives, quite the opposite of what he was during his administration.
Nixon had a foreign policy, one of the best in his time, that commanded the respect of leaders world-wide, and his crowning achievement was to open up China, then closed, to the world.
As a politician, he was a man of great resilience who never let a defeat finish him, as he won the presidency in 1968 after suffering a defeat against Kennedy in 1960 and another defeat for governor of California in 1962. No one can debate the fact that he never quit.
How will history judge him?
I believe that now, 20 years after his death, all the facts about him are now available, and in spite of Watergate, people will no longer be able to think of him as a liar, a scoundrel, a hater, a bigot, or just another politician. He was all these things, yet so very much more that his life became one of the great tragedies of his time.
It was a tragedy because Nixon had many enlightening qualities that could have taken this country on a road avoiding the many problems that are prevalent in our society today, such as health care and poverty, had Congress allowed him to proceed with his proposals. Had Nixon decided to make peace with his opponents and win them over, he might have accomplished more of what he wanted. He simply had to be willing to see eye to eye with more of these people.
Early on in his career, Nixon was hard working, studied Law diligently and received all A’s in his academics. He was very dynamic, and had high contacts with many other political figures, including John Kennedy.
How then, after Watergate broke out, did he allow himself to become involved with such corrupt men like Haldeman, Erlichman, Mitchell, Dean, Colson and the rest of the White House “plumbers”? He knew the law and the consequences for breaking it, yet he allowed his staff to lie, cheat, and bribe people into silence, and cover up a burglary, even when the courts and Congress started to look into the matter. How could he have revealed that he had tape recordings of the cover up, and not destroy them to protect himself? Most of all, how could he have allowed all this to happen in the first place, in order to win an election that he was going to win anyway?
Had Watergate not occurred, Nixon would have won in a landslide, which he did, against any opponent, including Ted Kennedy. Nixon, during his first term, had an obsession about Ted Kennedy, fearing that he would run and defeat him. This fear was unnecessary. Ted Kennedy slipped when Chappaquiddick occurred in 1969, where he drove off a bridge, drunk, resulting in the drowning of his secretary, Mary Jo Kopechne, and then running away from the scene. In 1972, Ted Kennedy decided that he would not run for the office.
Nixon had his faults, his racial prejudices, and was very paranoid. In spite of all this, he managed to accomplish a great deal. He had enemies, many of whom protested his handling of Vietnam, but he went ahead and withdrew troops, 25,000 in 1970, then 35,000, 50,000 and 100,000. He sent troops into Cambodia and Laos to counteract the Viet Cong and their supply lines. He used all this as bargaining chips to withdraw, get the South Vietnamese to fight the war themselves, and have the U.S. save face, leaving Vietnam without appearing to be defeated.
Nixon had a great love for his country, and did not want to see it suffer it’s first defeat and humiliation. He had many qualities which amazed both his friends and foes alike. He stood up to his enemies, near and far, was very anti-Communist, yet was able to reach out to those leaders from behind the Iron Curtain and win them over as friends. He played the China card against the Soviet Union, and opened up a closed and isolated giant to the world. He no doubt changed the course of the Cold War for the better, commanding world-wide respect for the U.S.
No future historian can argue that even after Nixon left office, he managed to overcome his disgrace of resigning from the presidency, write books on foreign policy, and revisit China, six times, along with Russia, again to promote U.S. leadership, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union. Many important officials did listened to his views of events that were unfolding after the Cold War. One journalist quoted that “Nixon is running for elder statesman, and winning.” This may have been his supreme victory.
But, for all his accomplishments, there is one vice that Richard Nixon suffered that will prevent any history book from accepting him as a great man. It was not the vice of vanity, which, when all is said and done, many a great man has suffered. It wasn’t his hard driving and ruthless ambition, for that has carried many leaders to the top in times gone by. It wasn't his political tactics, or “dirty tricks,” that outraged so many of his contemporaries, but is common practice in campaigns today. It wasn’t even his talking to portraits of past Presidents in the White House late at night and drinking heavily in the last days of his presidency while sinking into defeat, because what else was there to do?
The vice which Nixon suffered, in which all history books will undoubtably blame him, was his sheer hatred and his strong desire and attempts to destroy any and all of his political opponents. That was his great crime. It was this hatred, and paranoia, that led to Watergate, the cover-up, and the creation of his enemies list. It was this hatred that led him to authorize the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, before Watergate, in order to obtain information to embarrass Ellsberg. Most of all, it was Nixon’s hatred that caused his enemies to turn on him, leading up to his downfall and forcing him out of office.
During the Cold War, Nixon was staunchly anti-Communist, yet he went over to China in 1972, shook hands with Chou En Lai (who remembered being snubbed by John Foster Dulles when he offered to shake hands) and became friends with Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, and visited him again in 1976. He did the same in the Soviet Union with Leonid Brezhnev, along with other leaders behind the Iron Curtain.
Nixon was once a close friend of John Kennedy, and even in 1960, John Kennedy’s father, Joe, decided that if his son didn’t win the Democratic nomination for president, he would go over and support Nixon. Kennedy, however, won the election, and Nixon had never forgiven him, even though he himself won the presidency in 1968. In addition, he was determined to “get even” with those who did not support him during his elections. He simply would not let go.
George McGovern, Nixon’s opponent in 1972, once stated in an interview that two days after his landslide victory, Nixon flew into a rage over his opponents. McGovern was amazed how Nixon could have felt like that after winning his greatest victory in his career.
We will never know why he could not have simply try and win over his political rivals. Had he done so, perhaps he would have accomplished much more of what he wanted, Watergate would never have occurred, he would have completed two full terms of office, and maybe even gone down as one of the great presidents in history.
But, as it turned out, the man who could make friends with his enemies abroad would not reconcile with his enemies here at home. So his very quote at the beginning of this essay was self fulfilling and when Nixon said it, he knew that it applied to him, but it was too late.
It was his hatred and attempts to destroy his opponents, to retaliate against those who did not support him, all of which finally led to his own self-destruction, for which history will not forgive him.
Author’s Note: I got the inspiration to write this essay from the epilogue of another biography, “The Reich Marshal: A Biography of Hermann Goering,” by Leonard Mosley, Dell Publishing Company, paperback edition, New York, 1975, pp. 431-434. Some of these lines in this essay were taken out of context. I have read this epilogue many times, and have always felt inspired, that I wanted to write something similar about Richard Nixon. Mostly, this is in my own words, but a few lines were copied because I couldn’t say it any better. All these facts I’ve pointed out about Nixon, however, are true.
