The Nixon tragedy: A man of unsurpassed courage and outstanding intelligence but without vision. An opportunist who missed his greatest opportunity.
Eric Hoffer
For the sake of attempting to cover up a politically inspired burglary in a presidential election that the Democrats were busily throwing away, Nixon in 1972 embarked on a cover-up that eventually destroyed his Presidency, with his resignation in disgrace coming in August of 1974.
Greek tragedy is too mild a term to apply when discussing the presidency of Nixon. Dealt a bad hand in Vietnam, he extricated the country from Vietnam while building up the South Vietnamese military to the extent that they could hold their own against the North Vietnamese, as long as supplies kept flowing from the US and their ground forces were supported by American air power. His diplomatic opening to Red China was a masterful, if fairly obvious, strategic win over the Soviets. Talks with the Soviets helped lower the temperature of the Cold War. Domestically Nixon was the liberal Republican he always was, with wage and price controls and an expansion of the Federal government.
The ironic thing about Nixon is that he was hated by liberals and the elite media, yet on domestic policy questions he was in virtual lockstep with them, including on abortion which he was privately in favor of, although he publicly opposed it. The intense hatred went back to Nixon’s early political career where he used anti-communism to win both his House seat and his Senate seat. Nixon also committed the unforgivable sin of being right about Alger Hiss being a Soviet agent.
Compared to many of his Democrat predecessors, Nixon’s crimes were fairly commonplace. LBJ got into the Senate in 1948 by stuffing the ballot box and who probably elected Kennedy in 1960 by doing the same in Texas. There was no crime that Nixon did that LBJ had not done, usually with more skill. Victor Lasky’s It Didn’t Start With Watergate (1977) demonstrated that the main difference between Nixon and preceding Democrat presidents from FDR, who had the IRS audit political foes, forward is that he didn’t have a protective press. Nixon was the first Republican president since the Great Depression, Eisenhower not really counting because of his national hero status. That made him illegitimate already in the eyes of most of the media that had grown up in a world where the Democrats controlled the Federal government. Nixon’s mile long streak of paranoia helped his enemies ultimately get him, but even paranoids can have real enemies and that was the case with Richard Nixon. If Nixon had made a clean breast of things after the Watergate break in he would have survived politically and doubtless have won re-election, but it was not in him to expose his neck to his enemies like that and trust to the American people.
Getting Nixon’s scalp was a classic Pyrrhic victory for his foes. His destruction weakened his wing of the Republican party and paved the way for the rise of Ronald Reagan and a much more conservative GOP which has proven a much more successful adversary against the Democrats than the party that Nixon led.
Bonus: Ben Shapiro rates the Presidents. Sometimes wrong but always interesting:
He was not a man of unsurpassed courage. (He was, against his mother’s wishes, willing to forego a deferment during the 2d World War). Nixon was exceptionally intelligent. The careers of Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Nixon all suggest one thing: in many endeavours (politics especially), ‘g’ is over-rated.
Nixon at his inauguration in 1969 had never before held an executive position. That, and his esoteric issues, animated the administration’s conduct. He hired sketchy characters who in turn hired other sketchy characters. Which is how you end up with a rogue like Gordon Liddy on the payroll of his re-election committee.
“a much more successful adversary against the Democrats than the party that Nixon led.” Don’s being funny here.
The problem is the Republican party members were / are more conservative but the people they elect are not. They generally run to the classic Republican positions but once in office don’t go anywhere near those positions.
See https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/14/the-republican-party-sucks/ and https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/26/unsucking-the-republican-party/
By electoral success JFK and the atrophy of the liberal wing of the party there is no contest between the Nixon Party and the Reagan Party. Before Reagan conservatives were a barely tolerated wing of the party. Now they are the party. On the state level the Republican party became dominant in a way that had not been seen since 1928. Republicans tend to be long on self flagellation and circular firing squads and short on a knowledge of a history of the party.
His destruction weakened his wing of the Republican party and paved the way for the rise of Ronald Reagan and a much more conservative GOP which has proven a much more successful adversary against the Democrats than the party that Nixon led.
Nixon did side with the Rockefeller wing over the Goldwater wing, but I think I’d want to see receipts before I came to the conclusion there was anything but a sense of expediency driving that. Alternative interpretation: Nixon’s options were structured by the political discourse of the time, by the opinions of available appointees (who themselves were commonly under the influence of the kultursmog), and by his own perceptions and misperceptions of the lay of the land. Suggestion here is that Nixon was Mitt Romney, a man for whom issues are fungible.
Note in this vein Gerald Ford’s peculiar decision in 1974 to install Nelson Rockefeller in the vice presidency and put him in charge of the White House domestic policy task forces. Two explanations: Ford actually sided with the Rockefeller wing of the party or Ford fancied the Rockefeller wing was a great deal more influential and vigorous than in fact they were.
Consider the number of Rockefeller Republicans elected to Congress de novo after 1982 was close to nil. You had relict characters like Mark Hatfield hanging on, but almost no new blood. Susan Collins has been a temporizer and a problem for party whips, but she doesn’t have a liberal voting record; arrayed on a spectrum right-to-left, people like her were somewhere around the 70th percentile of the Republican caucus ca. 1973, but she’s been around the 95th percentile her entire time in Congress.
That’s consistent with a thesis that very few people born past a certain date were attempting to build a political career as a liberal in the Republican Party. The ward heelers and labor hacks that people like John Anderson found so repellent had by a certain point retreated enough to make the Democratic Party an attractive option for the young aspirant politician. Now look at the last set of liberal Republicans elected to congress Congress: Lincoln Chafee was born in 1952, Christopher Shays in 1946, Connie Morella in 1933, Sherwood Boehlert in 1936, Claudine Schneider in 1947.
Which brings you to a consideration of Republican voters. Note in 1984 that Ronald Reagan was regarded favorably by 94% of the Republican voters polled, in spite of the fact that he was (unlike the Bushes) never a man to pull his punches in his public remarks. Nixon had similar approvals in 1972, as did George W Bush in 2004, as did Donald Trump in 2016. Gerald Ford and George Bush the Elder had notably lower approval ratings at a similar point (75%), which suggests that Republican voters are not difficult to satisfy if you don’t do things which are demotivating, and that this has been an abiding feature of the Republican electorate. Richard Nixon as a promoter of policy was plenty demotivating, so we might posit that the Republican electorate was more tolerant of that in 1972 than later. At the same time, Republican voters remained willing to accept what was served them. The liberal Republican option was no longer being served and the voters most interested in opting for it were more in tune with the newer cohort of Democratic pols coming down the pike. The idea here is that the actuarial tables took out the liberal Republican dispensation, and they did so quite rapidly. John Anderson won 12% of the ballots in the 1980 Republican nomination contest; hardly any liberal Republicans have attempted a run in the years since; the last one who did was Arlen Specter, who gave up before a single ballot was cast.
Nixon as a liberal on domestic policy – yes and no. Economically, yes, although Reaganite thinking wasn’t even on the radar in his era, so we might judge him too harshly. In terms of law and order, he initiated the Drug War, and Chief Justice Burger was at least a good effort if not a win compared to the Warren Court. Again, pre-Reagan, there was a kind of argument that no one even had thought of making.
Nixon opened America to China. The deal looks like the worse elements of an ARM and /or balloon payment mortgage, the effects of which we are currently dealing with.
Again, pre-Reagan, there was a kind of argument that no one even had thought of making.
Edward Banfield, Milton Friedman, and Reagan himself were making these arguments in 1970.