In Defence of Richard Nixon

50 years ago this week, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency

The caricature will be familiar to anyone who grew up watching The Simpsons. The shifty, beady eyes, the hunched back, the devious personality. Without knowing much about Richard Nixon, this was my image of him, enforced not just by his semi-regular appearances on The Simpsons but by other films and TV shows.

But a few years ago, I read a fascinating biography of Nixon by John A Farrell. They say there is a danger that a biographer can fall in love with their subject, but I think the same can be said of an biography reader. Of course, Farrell will have had biases and may have tried to present him in as good a light as possible, but reading his work I found Nixon likeable and engaging. He was a little bit strange; never quite cool enough to join the elite clubs at school or in later life, prone to sulking when he was rejected by them, often cutting a forlorn figure in a way that could alienate his peers. But what also came through was that he was studious, hard-working, a fighter who overcame those setbacks to claw his way to the top. Might I even say that I concluded that Nixon was basically a decent man?

You don’t have to like him, but you have to respect the sheer tenacity he showed throughout his eventful life. He was born in 1913, not quite into poverty but into a family with not much to show for their industry, in Yorba Linda, which is now on the outskirts of Los Angeles but back then was in the middle of nowhere. He constantly tried out for his school and university football teams, despite the fact that he was never quite good enough. He had to decline the offer of a scholarship at Harvard because his parents needed him to work and care for his siblings. Enrolling at Whittier instead, he was rejected by the cool, all-white social club on campus, so formed his own club and admitted black members. After serving in the navy during the second world war, he became a congressman, then a senator and was selected as Dwight D Eisenhower’s running mate for the 1952 election, clinging on when there was pressure from party bigwigs to drop him from the ticket. He lost the presidential election in 1960 and looked to be done, but engineered an incredible comeback to win the top job in 1968. 

He was also a more thoughtful politician than people give him credit for. He sought to reduce cold war tensions with the Soviet Union and China, signed a treaty with the Soviets to reduce nuclear weapons, and launched the Environmental Protection Agency (an agency that ironically played a huge role in The Simpsons Movie).

To be sure, there are black marks on his record – he wasn’t nicknamed ‘Tricky Dick’ for nothing. The success of his early campaigns was built on a sheer ruthlessness that not many people are comfortable exercising.  He freely admitted his misrepresentation of the beliefs of Jerry Voorhis, his Democrat opponent in his 1946 congress race, and famously coined a ‘pink lady’ slur at his 1950 senate opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas. But were these tactics really any worse than other political dirty tricks we know about? Nixon simply considered any critics of his methods to be naïve – as he explained to one of Voorhis’ aides, ‘the important thing is to win.’

Nixon was comfortable employing these tactics because he had no doubt that his opponents would do the same. That may or may not have been true, but this psyche explains a lot about his actions in the infamous Watergate scandal that would bring him down. He was scarred by his loss in the 1960 presidential election to John F Kennedy – the epitome of the wealthy, east-coast, liberal elite Nixon so resented – and was convinced that the Kennedy campaign had engaged in some dirty tricks of their own (interestingly though, Farrell records that Nixon and Kennedy had been good friends when they were young congressmen in the 1940s). Nixon resolved to never let himself be outdone again.

A Simpsons depiction of Nixon’s famous TV debate with JFK in 1960 - Nixon is depicted as sullen and hunched, in contrast with the smooth Kennedy (image from youtube)

Related to this was Nixon’s concern about being undermined by a Washington elite who never really accepted him. You simply cannot understand Richard Nixon without understanding that he always saw himself as the poor boy from rural California who had had to work relentlessly to make it in politics, compared with the children of wealthy families who had breezed into Congress. He was not the type of character who could ignore the slights he had received, the sniggers from the other politicians, the hostility of the liberal press. He had taken it all to heart and considered himself to be in a constant battle with those opponents.

There was definitely some truth in this. He had been slighted by more socially accomplished politicians throughout his career. The liberal press really did have it in for him from the start. But what he failed to appreciate is that by 1972 none of that really mattered. He had won a huge victory in 1968, and every opinion poll had him miles in front of his Democrat opponent, George McGovern, for the 1972 election. But Nixon had worked himself into such a state of paranoia that he simply could not quell his fear that some nefarious opponents in Washington would sweep away everything he had worked for. So it was that he commissioned a group of operatives – his ‘plumbers’ – to carry out various missions, including break ins at offices of his political opponents. One such office was at the Watergate hotel, where Nixon’s men were caught red handed in June 1972.

As for the scandal itself, I don’t think we have to make excuses for him. As much as I am sympathetic towards Nixon, and as much as I think other presidents have been guilty of worse offences, there is still no justification for the President of the United States commissioning a group of goons to break into the offices of his opponents, and then commission a cover-up. I would not be surprised if other presidents have commissioned similar operations, but they weren’t caught. Nixon was. And he had to face the consequences.

So, I don’t have a problem with the scandal bringing him down. But I do have a bit of an issue with the popular presentation of him as an unusually malign actor in American politics.

Again, we don’t have to canonise him, and I am conscious of some of the more serious accusations against him – for example, that he purposefully torpedoed Lyndon B Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968 to ensure that the Democrats did not have a pre-election bounce. There is also the fact that he ordered the carpet bombing of Cambodia. To my mind, these are far more serious accusations than anything that Nixon was involved in during Watergate.

But these are not the terms on which he is villanised. Without wishing to trivalise it, pretty much every post-war American president has been guilty of war crimes, and popular culture is happy to sweep these under the carpet for other past presidents. Kennedy ordered an illegal invasion of Cuba. Reagan presided over the Iran-Contra scandal - a far more serious scandal than Watergate. Living past presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama are still lionised by the American media despite presiding over war crimes in the middle east. So, while Nixon’s war crimes are no less awful, you cannot say that they are the reason he is so damned in popular culture. He is villainised predominantly because of Watergate, and the image the whole scandal conjures of him as a despotic, criminal President.

The scandal was serious, and he deserved to lose the presidency for it. But I object to the way it allowed such an unflattering caricature of him to be made; a caricature solidified in popular culture by the very liberal establishment that despised him long before anyone had heard of Watergate. Richard Nixon was flawed. But a uniquely evil president? I am not so sure. I suspect he just wasn’t cool enough for people to ignore his flaws.

(Cover Image from Atlas Obscura)