This week marked what would have been the 100th birthday of America’s 37th President, Richard Milhous Nixon. In an essay summarizing the breadth of Nixon’s remarkable life and career, John Aloysius Farrell points to the man’s frequently neglected virtues:
Americans, at their best, are romantics. As was Nixon. He dreamed of noble triumphs in international affairs; asked to use Woodrow Wilson’s desk in the Oval Office. He was sworn in as vice president on a Quaker Bible opened to the beatitude: Blessed are the Peacemakers. “We are asking you to join us in a great venture,” he told congressional leaders in 1972, after his second historic trip that year, to sign a nuclear arms treaty with the leaders of the Soviet Union. “We may change the world for a while.”
He embodied, too, another great American virtue: pragmatism. His was the last progressive Republican presidency, his White House manned by bright young men (and women) who devised forward-thinking reforms for health care, poverty, civil rights and affirmative action, the treatment of American Indians, the advancement of women and protection of the environment.
He could be achingly, clumsily kind. In 2012, his alma mater, Whittier College, settled a decades-long dispute with the National Archives and opened more than 300 oral histories it had conducted among Nixon’s friends and family to historians. In one of them, a classmate at Duke Law School recalls how a fellow student, a victim of polio, needed to be carried up the stone steps of a building to class, and how it was Dick Nixon who assigned himself the task.
Which simply shows how we are all complicated. I remember when he died being in a hotel room in New York City, about to go out on the town (those were the days). I switched on the television and they were broadcasting the Frost-Nixon tapes. You would think that hour after hour of interviewing a highly unattractive, defensive politician would be mind-numbing. Instead, I couldn’t pull my eyes off him. I was still sitting there in the early hours, riveted by this simmering human volcano of rage, hate, self-hate, resentment, some remnants of conscience, and kindness.
This was a criminal who betrayed the core of American democracy, lied to the people, persecuted those dedicated to free speech, ordered robberies and cover-ups, and laid the ground work for some of the best innovations of the time – like the EPA – and the worst – price controls. For one generation he will always be evil. For the next he may be more complicated. Still a crook and an enemy of the Constitution. But complicated.
The Dish 