I constantly find myself thinking of Richard Nixon these days. When looking back, it’s hard to place my memories in a timeframe: from a break-in at the Watergate complex to a growing news story, to televised hearings, Nixon’s resignation before impeachment proceedings could begin, to All the President’s Men giving us a concise and backward look at how the story unfolded over time, to the post-Watergate years when we found out more about how Nixon the man grappled with the downfall of Nixon the president. It’s all woven so deeply together in my thoughts that it seems to have happened all at once. But of course, it took years to get a fleshed-out perspective of the story.
I know that I’m lucky to have had one parent with a keen sense of history and another with a passion for politics. Sometimes I wonder how I remember those hearings, but they took place over the summer when I wasn’t in school. The networks took turns televising them, and my mother was glued to the proceedings. I have vivid memories of watching John Dean testify, with his seemingly serene wife sitting behind him. It was the best daytime drama ever, with my mother playing the Greek chorus to help me process what we were watching. I decided for myself who the heroes and villains were. When several of those villains reappeared in subsequent administrations, their return to the national stage always tainted those administrations for me. I called them The Thugs. Years and a lifetime later, when G. Gordon Liddy came to the bookstore where I was working to sign some stock of whatever book he was promoting, I could understand my manager’s excitement–he was a figure in a riveting part of US history, after all, and again, my father had instilled in me an appreciation of history. But from my viewpoint, what Liddy really wanted to be was a celebrity, and I’m very picky about the celebrities I admire. Simply being famous has never been the only reason a person can appeal to me. Especially when he was one of The Thugs.
But Nixon… However I regard his actions, Nixon stays in my mind as a tragic figure of the kind found in literary classics. Only he was real and part of a larger world than that of a small-town Alabama girl. I loved politics, I loved First Ladies, I loved presidential children. I loved that Nixon’s emergence on the public stage reached back to a general who was part of my own father’s World War 2 history–and Nixon’s daughter married Eisenhower’s grandson while Nixon was in the White House. After the tragic orphaned children of the Kennedy White House, we had sweet Lady Bird and her two daughters who married while Johnson was president, and then came the Nixon daughters’ moments. So the fall of Nixon wasn’t just the tragedy of a man to me. His wife seemed equally tragic, and his daughters’ loyalty to their father was unwavering and reportedly part of the reason it took him so long to resign, right up to the eve of impeachment proceedings.
It was only later that we learned from biographers how tortured Nixon was during his long nights of introspection. It’s one of the key words that always resonates for me about Nixon: introspection. He thought deeply about his soul, his conscience, his actions, his legacy. Unfortunately, maybe the alcohol, whatever medications he was taking, his paranoia–these all acted to prevent the step that is necessary for greatness of words and actions to emerge from introspection. Looking inward and judging ourselves is only part of a process that must end with choosing right action, noble behavior, a sacrifice of one’s baser instincts to the greater good that is IMPERATIVE in a leader. And this is why Nixon was never one of The Thugs in my view. He had the foundation, or the center, to be greater. His course was set early on in his bitterness at the loss to Kennedy…but he NEVER HAD TO DO, OR APPROVE, OR TO COVER UP ANY OF WHAT BROUGHT HIM DOWN. He had a mandate from the American people in 1972 despite massive social upheaval. He had some dramatically successful moments in foreign affairs and with the economy. Had he kept his focus on easing us through our domestic problems and getting us out of an unpopular war, his story could have been so different. But he let The Thugs highjack his presidency, and history was written.
Politics is no longer fun for me. It has become, quite frankly, torture. The feelings our… I can’t say leaders. They aren’t leaders. They are selfish, greedy, small people who betray us daily for reasons we’ll know eventually. The sooner the better. They are worse than The Thugs. They are The Traitors. I see actions every day that can be classified as nothing less than treason, a betrayal of our republic. And no matter what that horror in the White House does, he creates diversions and smokescreens and whoever these people are who believe him and support him are the tragic ones to me. He is a nasty package of autocrat, megalomaniac, narcissist, lazy-minded, dishonest carnival barker without a moral compass. He’s Shakespearean only in the sense that he is “an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
He’s not a patriot. He’s not a Republican. He’s not a conservative. There are an increasing number of those (including John Dean, my TV fixation of the summer of 1973) who denounce him daily. I doubt he has even a moment of introspection any day or night, much less the character to turn any accidental shred of self-awareness into action that benefits anyone but himself and the equally criminal members of his family.
My father once said he wanted to live long enough to cancel out his vote for a president who became a grave disappointment to him (it actually wasn’t Nixon). He did get a second chance to vote for someone else. I often hear myself mentally hoping I can live long enough to look back on all this as the memory of a horrible course the American people corrected.
