Really Cool Stuff about Richard Nixon
1. Nixon, as most of you are already aware, was the first president to resign that office. “The mixing of his psyche with the presidency made for a poisonous brew, with tragic consequences, as he became the first president to be driven from office” (p. 1). “The extraordinary set of events that came to be called Watergate—named for the building complex where on June 17, 1972, a team of burglars with ties to the White House broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and culminating in Nixon’s being the first president to be forced to leave office—has often been described as the unraveling of a criminal conspiracy” (p. 98). Watergate, it turned out, was essentially a very serious constitutional crisis.
2. After high school, Richard had actually been accepted to Harvard on a full scholarship but couldn’t attend due to monetary considerations. “He [Nixon] had been offered a scholarship to Harvard but his parents couldn’t afford the other expenses of sending him there” (p. 6).
3. After reading about McCarthy since the Truman bio, I have found him rather interesting. What I discovered about him in the Nixon bio was even crazier. The author claims that Nixon, in a way, created McCarthy by passing him information…sort of like Frankenstein and his Monster. “Nixon, who had led the way, fed McCarthy material for his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1950, in which McCarthy claimed that ‘I have in my hand a list of 205…members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department’” (p. 11).
4. It was during his campaign for the Senate in 1950 that Nixon earned his “Tricky Dick” nickname. “In this campaign, he went even further than he had against Voorhis, and acquired the sobriquet ‘Tricky Dick,’ which would linger throughout his career” (p. 11).
5. Pat, who hated politics, was badly singed by the secret fund scandal of the 1952 presidential race. She hated politics so much that she made Richard sign a pledge that he would never run again. “Apparently, Pat Nixon never got over this event, which deepened her disdain for politics; in fact, she persuaded her husband to write her a pledge that after this campaign he would abandon politics. That pledge would soon be forgotten” (p. 15-16).
6. As unlikely as such a meeting would seem, Elvis Presley appeared in Washington DC desirous of seeing Nixon and of becoming a “Federal Agent-at-Large” in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. “He [Nixon] did, however, appreciate the popularity of Elvis Presley (no Woodstocker, no Janis Joplin), who unexpectedly turned up at the White House seeking a meeting with Nixon to discuss the drug culture and similar topics. The two men met—a famously photographed event—in December 1970” (p. 28).
7. The Senate voted down a couple of Nixon’s nominees to the Supreme Court which hadn’t been done since the days of Hoover. (Remember him?) “Enough members of both parties were opposed to the Haynsworth nomination that the Senate—despite Nixon’s strenuous efforts—voted it down on November 21, 1969, making Haynsworth the first Supreme Court nominee since 1930 to be rejected by the Senate” (p. 44).
8. The first Earth Day was promulgated under Nixon. “In April 1970 the nation celebrated Earth Day, Gaylord Nelson’s idea, in which millions of Americans participated” (p. 52).
9. While visiting Brezhnev in Moscow and in an unprecedented act, Nixon was even allowed to address the Soviet people. “In another first, Nixon addressed the Soviet people on television” (p. 86).
10. Nixon was the first president to visit Syria. “Yet two weeks after Kissinger’s triumph, Nixon visited all three countries involved—Syria, Egypt, and Israel—claiming another ‘first’ when he arrived in Syria” (p. 94).
11. The White House hired thugs to beat up antiwar protesters. “Thus the Nixon White House had its own ‘bully boys,’ its own ruffians, to physically assault opponents of his conduct of the war. This, too, was without precedent” (p. 104).
12. This was also the first time in history that there was an investigation of the federal government from outside the government. “There was no precedent in American history for a federal criminal investigation conducted independent of the executive branch” (p. 112).
13. Due to the Watergate affair, twenty-five White House officials would serve jail time. “In the end, the baleful record of the Nixon presidency was the twenty-five of his aides and associates were sent to jail. Another precedent was set” (p. 122).
Well Tricky Dick certainly lived up to expectations, at least, my expectations. In fact, the author goes to great lengths to divulge Nixon’s blacker side, including his penchants for temper tantrums, insane executive orders and rampant paranoia. Nixon is one of those presidents that I would like to do more research on, i.e. read more than one account of his life, because he’s rather a tough individual to track down. Here’s the problem I’m having: was Nixon as bat-shit crazy as he’s portrayed (by the author and Oliver Stone) or was he a powerful man, beset by the haunting demons of his past? While Ms. Drew skips over absurdly large portions of Nixon’s early life (which I had a feeling would happen), I’ve gathered that watching the deaths of his two brothers could not have been easy and would perhaps lead to some of his later “issues.” Also Drew herself believes that Nixon’s lifelong ‘disappointment’ was the overarching theme of his life and her book. She mentions that he was disappointed often, through girlfriend break-ups, through job situations (Wall Street), through other men’s conceptions of him, and through the general public reactions to his highest achievements and his lowest behaviors. I thought it was interesting that most people described Nixon as being respected but not popular. This assessment fits with Nixon’s loner personality and I find it extremely indicative that his own dog didn’t even fancy him. “Even his dog didn’t like him. The staff once laid a trail of biscuits to lure his Irish setter King Timahoe to Nixon’s desk in order to entice him to get closer to his owner. But the dog wouldn’t move” (p. 45). Sad, just…sad.
Although Nixon is undeniably one of those people we love to hate, he really did some good stuff as president also. Not only were there amazing breakthroughs in foreign policy, such as opening China and détente with the Soviet Union, but, domestically, Nixon shone as well. I mention a few interesting things about this in the list above and regardless of his motivations, Nixon pushed through some very positive legislation. “Nevertheless, by the end of his presidency, the number of Americans living below the poverty level had dropped, and aid to the poor had increased considerably” (p. 56). “And so, rail as he did against ‘big government,’ in particular the Great Society, in the end Nixon accepted its premise: that the federal government can do good things for the people” (p. 59).
Have you ever heard of the recency effect? Basically the idea here is that we tend to remember things last we heard or saw rather than anything in the middle. I think that justifications for the recency effect are pretty obvious but the reason I bring it up is to describe not only Nixon’s reputation today but also the sheer impact of Watergate on it. There is no doubt that Watergate was a bad thing for any president to have hand in—after all, Watergate was just the tip of a very rotten iceberg—but unfortunately, Nixon’s persona cannot be divorced from it. Coming at the end of his presidency (because it was the end of this presidency duh), Watergate has cast a looming shadow over absolutely everything Nixon did in the past and would do afterwards. Although he lived nearly twenty years (20 years!!!) after that infamous burglary, I couldn’t have told you one good thing he accomplished in that time. (Actually I couldn’t have told you anything he did during that time…In fact, I didn’t realize he lived that long!) I think that most students of American history can tell you that Nixon was the perpetrator of Watergate and nothing else and I can’t be sure if that’s a bad thing or if it’s fair. Hmmm…
Nixon and Kissinger (I don’t care that he won the Nobel Peace Prize) also did some boneheaded things that severely tarnished America’s reputation abroad. After reading this bio, I completely understand why, to some extent, Americans are viewed as such pariahs the world over. It’s not only due to the ham-fisted handling of the oil embargo in the Middle East but during the Nixon administration, we helped enflame a number of global issues. For instance, we got involved between the Kurds and Iraq…and not in a good way. “Also at the urging of the Shah, who wanted to harass the Iraqis, the Nixon administration encouraged the Kurds in northern Iraq to rebel against Saddam Hussein’s regime and, despite the misgivings of the State Department and the CIA, sent them funds to do so—and then abandoned them when the Shah reached an accommodation with Iraq, leaving the Kurds subject to brutal retaliation by Saddam” (p. 95). How about our involvement down in Chile? “The administration, through the CIA and large corporations with business interests there, worked to undermine the Chilean economy and encouraged a military coup…The successful coup on September 11, 1973, in which Allende was killed, led to the brutal, murderous regime of General Augusto Pinochet” (p.95). Great, guys, great. And then we had to meddle in Indian affairs. In the India/Pakistan conflict, the United States chose Pakistan’s side because 1.) Nixon already didn’t like Indira Gandhi and 2.) we were using Pakistan as a conduit to China. “Without telling the secretaries of state or defense—or the public—Nixon ordered a naval task force to the Bay of Bengal to threaten the Indians; the task force arrived there one day after India and Pakistan had reached a tentative peace agreement” (p. 96). What a farce!
Well I guess that’s Nixon in a nutshell. Now I don’t mean to leave this analysis on a bad note about Nixon (because that’s what you’ll remember) but really that was the way the author left her book on him. Here’s what Ms. Drew says on the matter. “The events that caused Nixon’s downfall commenced as soon as he became president and came from within his soul. The traits that led to it—the paranoia, the anger, the determination to wreak revenge, the view that the opposition should be destroyed, even the excessive drinking—cannot be excised from the Nixon presidency. Their effects on Nixon’s behavior caused a great deal of national turmoil and not a little, or unwarranted, fear that a democratically elected government was out of control, defying the limits of the democratic system. His actions were far outside the bounds of governing; they were often illegal but, beyond that, they violated constitutional restraints” (p. 150-51).
What would be really interesting would be a biography of Nixon written by someone not alive during the Watergate crisis. Judging by that last paragraph alone (see above), I really feel that Ms. Drew’s thoughts on the subject may be tainted with the recency effect of that event.
No comments:
Post a Comment