Never an admirer of Nixon, but this interview from 1982 illustrates how good he was at sizing up other political players. Note that Nixon mentions the first volume of Robert Caro’s magisterial biography of LBJ. Forty-one years later the final fifth volume has yet to be publish as 87 year old Caro races with the Grim Reaper.
In his book “Men in Black” about the Court, Mark Levin recounts a question Nixon asked Harry Blackmun when he was vetting him for SCOTUS, “What kind of woman is Mrs. Blackmun?” Understandably, Blackmun was taken aback by the question. Nixon explained his reason for asking the question that Georgetown social circuit was very powerful in wooing the wives of justices to their point of view and that can have a negative effect on their husbands and their decisions on the Court. Given what Justice Blackmun is now famous for, Nixon’s question was insightful.
No matter how powerful the Georgetown socal circuit is all persons especially women must think for themselves.Faith is gift from God. Religion is man’s response to the gift of Faith from God. A true Catholic might be ousted from the Georgetown social circuit.
What is the picture up at the top? Nixon looks really young so I’m thinking this picture must be from the 1940s, or early 50s at the latest. Are the older couple his parents?
This was on a trip to Gettysburg in the Fifties to honor an ancestor who fought there in the Army of the Potomac.
Thanks Don. It’s easy to forget that when Nixon ran for POTUS in 1960, and appeared to be the “old and stodgy” candidate when compared to John F. Kennedy, he was 47 years old — only 4 years older than JFK, and practically a spring chicken compared to more recent presidential candidates.
It may have been ‘insightful’, but Nixon’s appointments to the court were sh!t, Wm. Rehnquist excepted. If you read John Dean’s account of how nominations were floated and vetted, you can see that Nixon himself had indifferent judgment and entrusted crucial tasks to lunkheads.
One thing about Nixon in January of 1969 is that he had zero experience with having anyone working under him bar a staff whose function was to serve him. If you read Richard Nathan’s book on the administrative presidency, and some of the Watergate-era literature, what you see is a late middle-aged man who does not belong in management. Also, while he wasn’t the stew of psychopathology his detractors tried to portray, he was an introverted man with anxiety issues who could not conduct ordinary business conversations with aught but a few people. Henry Kissinger said it was quite refreshing with Gerald Ford came on board because you could have unscripted conversations with the President and others. Ronald Reagan was both an experienced public executive and a natural at it.
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