#43 The Enduring Fascination of Richard Nixon

*This is a longer version of an article that originally appeared in The Critic.

Do you remember
your President Nixon?

So asked David Bowie on the title track of his 1975 album Young Americans. Given that Richard Nixon had resigned from the presidency in disgrace only the previous year, presumably only the youngest of Americans did not remember him. For the rest of the nation the man was impossible to forget, however much it might want to. Thanks to the sprawling Watergate scandal, which had brought to light White House culpability for the eponymous burglary and numerous other illegal acts, Nixon had left office as the most infamous US president in history: a man who had abused the powers of the highest office in the land to an unprecedented degree (unprecedented, as far as anyone knew). This was a president who, if not for Gerald Ford’s pardon, would likely now be in jail. Playwright Arthur Miller expressed the feelings of many when he said Nixon “marched instinctively down the crooked path”. So did historian Henry Steele Commager, when he called Nixon ”the first wicked and dangerous president.”

The disgrace of Watergate so overshadowed Nixon’s positive achievements that they were comparatively little discussed, considerable though they were. The most significant of them were the reshaping of the global economy through the 1971-73 abolition of the Bretton Woods system (forestalling a massive currency crisis and the depletion of US gold reserves), and, in 1972, the audacious opening to China, ending over two decades of isolation and hostility. The latter was Nixon’s proudest feat to the end of his life. But he well understood that, however much it had furthered the stability of Asia and the world, the public would likely never regard his China initiative as more significant than Watergate. Shortly before he died in 1994, Nixon observed:

”I will be known historically for two things. Watergate and the opening to China ... I don’t mean to be pessimistic, but Watergate, that silly, silly thing, is going to rank up there historically with what I did here.”

Downplay it though he might, the shabby Watergate debacle was as much a reflection of the man Nixon was as the daring rapprochement with Red China. That his was a multifaceted, seemingly contradictory personality was underscored by his penchant for reinvention. Adlai Stevenson, 1956’s Democratic presidential nominee, was among those who reacted to the appearance of a “new Nixon” with suspicion:

”We keep hearing of a ’new Nixon’ and an ’old Nixon’. There is no man who can safely say he knows where the vice president stands. This is a man of many masks. Who can say they have seen his real face?”

Perhaps Bowie recognised a kindred spirit in this “man of masks”. Many Nixon watchers, though, were less than impressed, finding a hollowness in the man, a missing moral core that well earned him the nickname “Tricky Dick”. But this verdict was simplistic. As Fawn Brodie noted in her ”psychobiography”, Richard Nixon: the Shaping of His Character (1981):

“There are many who believe he was a man of no character. But that there was a “Nixon character” of great complexity cannot be denied.”

Nixon’s complexity makes him, for me, the most psychologically interesting president of modern times. This piece will consider how key aspects of his character—some more admirable than others—revealed themselves through the course of his career. It will pay special attention to the opening to China, and not only because, today, that episode is less well known than Watergate and deserves more attention. It was with this initiative that the 37th President demonstrated what he really cared about and how he saw himself, as a Great Man of History.

For Richard Nixon, the road to the White House, and later to China, was more circuitous, at times more doubtful, than he would have wished. At least in his early career, Nixon looked nigh-on unstoppable: elected to Congress aged 33 in ’46, to the Senate in ‘50, to the office of Vice President (under Eisenhower) in ‘52. Key to his rise was his central role in breaking the Alger Hiss spy case. Hiss, a bureaucrat in the FDR administration, was found to have been a spy for the Soviets; in 1950 he was jailed for perjury. The case made Nixon’s name as a staunch anti-communist, though he shrewdly softened his stance somewhat with the passing of the McCarthy era (a rebranding that led one paper to coin the phrase “New Nixon”).

It was running up against Jack Kennedy in 1960 that put a halt to Nixon’s vertiginous ascent. Nixon struggled to compete with JFK’s star power, though he would never admit it. He would later claim that he’d been put at a disadvantage by having to defend the incumbent administration’s record, while Kennedy had had the initiative as the attacker. Defeat in the 1960 presidential race left Nixon with a long-term obsession with the Kennedy family, and with the threat their power posed to him. But worse was to come—the much more humiliating loss to incumbent Pat Brown in the 1962 California gubernatorial election. That failure famously led Nixon to tell reporters, ”You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” Having to defend himself against insinuations of corruption in ‘52, along with what he saw as the media’s bias towards Kennedy in ‘60, had helped convince Nixon that the press had it in for him, held him in snobbish contempt—not only did he have (at this time) the reputation of a conservative, he was the son of a humble Quaker grocer and lacked an Ivy League education. Bitterly resentful, he bowed out of politics.

Perhaps more than at any other time, Nixon’s acute sense of being an outsider, a non- or even anti-Establishment figure (even though he’d been Vice President), was readily apparent at “the last press conference”. The poverty and hardship of his youth—he’d lost two brothers to tuberculosis—and the fact of being, as he freely admitted, “an introvert in a extrovert’s profession”, had imparted to him this outsider identity, along with copious drive and determination. His defeat in ‘62, though, was so demoralising that he felt compelled to return to his former profession. New York thus gained a celebrity lawyer. A year later, the shattering assassination of Nixon’s onetime nemesis took America into a new dark era. ”The assassination of John Kennedy,” the 37th president would observe in his memoirs, ”marked the end of an era of innocence for America.”

Though for half of the violent and polarising ‘60s Nixon was largely absent from public life, he remained highly engaged with the foreign policy issues of the day (domestic issues never engaged his imagination in anything like the same way). He was active in the GOP behind the scenes and, between ‘60 and ‘68, he undertook extensive travels in Asia, making a point of informing himself about China. One of the fruits of this study was a scholarly Foreign Affairs article, ”Asia After Viet Nam”, published in October 1967. In this piece, which would become well known, Nixon warned of the dangers of leaving an angry and hostile China outside of the family of nations.

The article reintroduced Nixon as a credible, thoughtful foreign policy figure, ahead of the presidential bid he was already planning for the following year. No rabid anti-communist who would plough on with the Vietnam War at all costs, he. This Richard Nixon was a convinced pragmatist and realist.

Undoubtedly, Nixon observed the mounting alienation and anger of what he would later call “the Silent Majority”—the core of which were the white Christians of middle America—and knew these were favourable times for him. By a dark twist of fate, the way was cleared for him by the assassination of another Kennedy. John’s brother Robert was campaigning for the 1968 Democratic nomination when he was gunned down by a Palestinian activist ostensibly enraged by his support for Israel. Extremely popular with liberal America, Bobby Kennedy would certainly have been a formidable opponent for Nixon. Fawn Brodie noted the somewhat eerie parallel with the tragic deaths of Arthur and Harold Nixon in Richard’s youth: once again the deaths of two brothers were proving profoundly influential on the course of his life.

After securing the Republican nomination (Ronald Reagan was also in the running, and came second), Nixon ran on campaign promises to secure ”peace with honour” (a Disraeli phrase) in Vietnam (he hinted at a “secret plan” he had to achieve this), to restore law and order, and to unite a deeply divided America. This last pledge was encapsulated by the slogan “Bring Us Together”, which Nixon claimed to have taken from a placard he saw a girl holding while campaigning that year. Here, then, was another New Nixon: Nixon the unity candidate. This latest reinvention was a somewhat unlikely one for those who knew the man well. Nixon had, according to Richard Reeves in President Nixon: Alone in the White House (2001),

”a tribal and genetic view of peoples everywhere. He gloried in cultural warfare, dividing the nation geographically, generationally, racially, religiously. He believed that was what all politicians did.”

“Nixon,” Reeves notes, “was a hater.” And in this he was nothing if not consistent. In retirement, when he was keeping busy penning books on his favourite subjects (foreign policy and himself), Nixon told Republican leader of the Senator Bob Dole, “I just get up every morning to confound my enemies.”

If 1968-model Nixon intended to engage in culture war as president, prudently he did not let that particular cat out of the bag during his campaign. His opponent, LBJ’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey, also spoke of unity—in more liberal terms of course—but Nixon’s moderately conservative message won out. For too many voters, Humphrey came across as LBJ mark II, offering much the same domestic policy agenda and, most problematically, little in the way of answers as regards Vietnam, at least until very late in the year. In September, following what was widely perceived as the victory of the New Left at the raucous Democratic Convention the previous month, Humphrey did finally break with the hawks of his party by calling for a bombing halt and renewed negotiations with North Vietnam. But it was too little, too late. In the event, Nixon beat his Democratic opponent comfortably in the Electoral College, by 301 votes to 191, with independent George Wallace gaining 46. Nevertheless, the president-elect could not afford to relax: the popular vote was much narrower than the College results might suggest—43.4%, 42.7% and 13.5% for Nixon, Humphrey and Wallace respectively—and the GOP failed to carry either chamber of Congress (something which had not happened since 1888).

Nixon’s 1969 inaugural was nothing to write home about, but did contain at least one memorable passage:

“The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker. This honor now beckons America—the chance to help lead the world at last out of the valley of turmoil and onto that high ground of peace that man has dreamed of since the dawn of civilization… This is our summons to greatness.”

Sceptics may well have assumed Nixon intended to harp on this peacemaker theme in a cynical attempt to make withdrawal from Vietnam look less like a defeat. But as David Greenberg relates in his 2008 essay “Nixon as Statesman: the Failed Campaign”, the truth was likely more complex:

“Nixon’s peacemaker self-image was forged in childhood. His mother, Hannah Milhous—quiet, modest, self-possessed—impressed on her son high standards of moral aspiration.”

As an adult Nixon spoke of his mother with great reverence: “He always called her a “saint”, imputing to her a righteousness that he could never match.” He also said his biographers “didn’t recognize the full impact of his mother’s Quaker heritage on his personality.” Had they done so, they would have realised there were deeper reasons for Nixon’s overtures toward China and the Soviet Union in the election year of 1972 than they assumed. With regard to Nixon’s religion, harsher critics saw the man as a hypocrite, espousing Quaker ideals while waging vicious culture war. But Greenberg argues for a more nuanced interpretation:

“…rather than hypocrisy, it is more fruitful to regard Nixon’s peacemaking instincts as an ideal inherited from his mother about which he was long ambivalent—scorning them when his uglier impulses consumed him (as they often did), elevating them in calmer moments as an ideal. Once in the 1950s, when he physically restrained Senator Joe McCarthy from beating up the journalist Drew Pearson, Nixon was heard to say, “Let a Quaker stop this fight.” His mother’s religion was the asylum of his nature’s better angels.”

Richard Reeves claims Nixon’s would-be soaring inaugural address was lifted stylistically from Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural. He cites no supporting evidence, but it would fit Nixon’s peculiar obsessive pattern. There’s no doubt that from the 1960 election on, the Kennedys lived rent-free inside his head. As president, Reeves notes, ”Nixon talked about the Kennedys every day.” When Nixon paid a ritual visit to the Berlin Wall in 1969, the cheering crowds could not entice him to spend more than a couple of hours in West Berlin. In his mind, it was Kennedy’s city. When a speechwriter reminisced about VP Nixon’s visit to St Paul’s Cathedral in 1958, when the Queen had been present and the choir had sung “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, Nixon growled, “That’s a Kennedy song”, and gave instructions for that detail not to be mentioned in any statement. There were many more similar occasions.

One reason for Nixon’s fixation seems to have been personal insecurity, a nagging inferiority complex. He may well have been aware of the White House tape that had captured JFK mocking him. Ahead of the 1962 gubernatorial, Kennedy had said that his erstwhile opponent would be “selling encyclopaedias” or working as a “grocery clerk” if he lost again. Nixon may also have felt guilt at having indirectly profited from the Kennedy brothers’ deaths. In his 1995 biopic Nixon, Oliver Stone has a contemplative President (Anthony Hopkins) musing about who is helping him: “Is it God… or Death…?” Of course, it’s also true that the Kennedys remained a powerful family in the early 70s; Nixon’s fear of them was not necessarily irrational.

In 1969, priority number one for the incoming 37th President was finding a way out of the war the 35th had tried, as much as possible, to keep America out of: Vietnam. The war was claiming 200-250 American lives every week, and countless more Vietnamese. Johnson’s strategy—containment, to avoid a wider war with the USSR and / or China, combined with gradual escalation—had clearly failed. Though US forces had achieved consistently high ”body counts”, that is, inflicted heavy casualties on Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army forces, this had not forced the communists into acceptable negotiations. And that despite the additional pressure applied by Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam from March 1965 to November 1968. The situation was grave, and Nixon was determined not to be the first American president to lose a war. Among his first cabinet appointments was Henry Kissinger as national security advisor; he hoped the brilliant former Harvard professor would help him find a way out of the imbroglio. The two drew up secret orders for the carpet bombing of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army sanctuaries inside neutral Cambodia, to begin in late February (in the event it was delayed until March). Aimed, in part, at pressuring the North to negotiate in earnest, it would be an escalatory move at a time when almost everyone was expecting deescalation.

”Why don’t you get out of Vietnam?” President de Gaulle’s question, put to Kissinger during Nixon’s first state visit to France in February, was one large numbers of Nixon’s countrymen would’ve loved to have asked, and rather less politely than the French president had. Kissinger replied that, “a sudden withdrawal might give us a credibility problem... in the Middle East”.

The great French statesman was one of Nixon’s heroes and meeting him as an equal was a dream come true for the American president. De Gaulle was a Great Man of History, just as Nixon strove to be. Nixon must’ve been delighted to discover that when it came to the USSR and China, de Gaulle was thinking along the same lines as him. The French president speculated that, due to the widening Sino-Soviet split, the Soviets might opt for a policy of rapprochement with the West. A rift between the communist powers had opened up in the early ‘60s; the situation was already grave in early 1969, but later that year it would threaten to escalate into open warfare, with border clashes near Soviet strong points raising fears in Washington that the Russians were looking to manufacture a pretext to invade.

Perhaps mindful of the need for the US to engage in triangular diplomacy to gain more influence over the situation, de Gaulle argued that “the West should try to get to know China, to have contacts, and to penetrate it.... It would be better for you to recognize China before you are obliged to do so by the growth of China...”

Nixon did want to get out of Vietnam, and the “secret plan” he had for doing so turned out to be ”Vietnamization”, the gradual transfer of responsibility for the war’s prosecution to South Vietnamese forces. US troops would be coming home, though of course not all at once—the initial June ’69 withdrawal involved 25,000 of them, but that still left more than half a million in-country. 18 months later the number was still substantial, sitting at around 335,000. As the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) had always struggled to achieve the sort of battlefield results US forces had, Vietnamization was a slow process.

Nixon believed that when combined with the judicious—and secret—use of American air power, Vietnamization was the road to “peace with honour”. But Operation Menu, the bombing of Cambodia, did not remain secret for long. Somehow the New York Times got wind of it and broke the news in May, causing a public outcry. The leak, the first of many, had occurred despite Nixon and Kissinger having characteristically kept most of the cabinet in the dark about the bombing. Reeves notes:

“On domestic matters, Nixon was willing to pander to Congress. On foreign policy, he tried to deal with both the people and the people’s representatives on a “need to know” basis. He did not trust them with the truth.”

Damaging though the revelation of Menu was to Nixon, the operation continued until May 1970. It was immediately followed by Operation Freedom Deal, the bombing of Cambodia over what would eventually be a much larger area, with the operation’s goal shifting from destroying Viet Cong and NVA forces and infrastructure to preventing a Khmer Rouge takeover of the country. Like Rolling Thunder before them, the Cambodia operations failed tomake North Vietnam more amenable to an acceptable peace settlement. Together with the worsening Sino-Soviet situation, lack of political progress in the war was a factor in Nixon’s decision to undertake the big, and risky, foreign policy initiatives he’d long had planned with regards to China and Russia. As usual these were conducted in secret, with Kissinger working out the tactics and doing the legwork—Secretary of State Bill Rogers (who’d been chosen precisely for his lack of knowledge of diplomacy) wasn’t even informed. Therefore, when Nixon told Rogers, in July 1971, that Kissinger (”Special K”, as the press dubbed him) had just come back from Beijing with an invitation for the President to visit China, he was astonished. So was the American nation when Nixon went on television two days later to announce it. It would be the first ever visit by an American president to a country Nixon described as “as unknown as the far side of the Moon”. More intelligent commentators soon grasped the announcement’s significance. As an act of classical triangular diplomacy, the opening to China could be expected to grant the United States more leverage over the Soviet Union. It should also make a Sino-Soviet war, which the Soviets would likely win and emerge from stronger and more dangerous, less likely. And this was a more important consideration than was generally appreciated—the signs that the USSR intended to invade its neighbour were not public knowledge.

However, contrary to the expectations of many, and not just the White House, the opening to China would ultimately not prove very fruitful with regards to Vietnam. The fog of the Cold War, a key factor in Johnson’s decision to commit ground troops in 1965, initially prevented Nixon, Kissinger and many commentators from seeing that Beijing and Moscow did not, in fact, wield decisive influence over Hanoi; privately, the President and his chief lieutenant would be left seeking little more than ”a decent interval” (a phrase Kissinger used in confidential negotiations with the Chinese) between American withdrawal and Saigon’s inevitable fall.

To his mounting frustration, Nixon also didn’t know who was responsible for the leaks that bedevilled his presidency. One of the most serious came in 1971, when the NYT published the Pentagon Papers, classified documents revealing how multiple administrations had misled the public over the war. Convinced the liberal media was up to its old tricks, a furious Nixon resolved to take radical action. Viewing Hoover’s FBI as untrustworthy, he did not task it with plugging the leaks; instead he created a covert in-house team, nicknamed the Plumbers, for the purpose. The President quickly expanded the Plumbers’ remit to include operations against all kinds of domestic enemy. There were activities targeting electoral opponents. Efforts were also made to undermine the antiwar movement, whose agitation Nixon saw as detrimental to the United States’ image abroad, and therefore to his ability to act effectively on the world stage. As the Plumbers’ methods included illegal wiretaps, break-ins, dirty tricks campaigns and the like, it was with the creation of this team that a labyrinth of lies began to take shape around the President, one that even the President and his men would sometimes become lost in, uncertain of what was true.

Also in 1971, Nixon made the fateful decision to have a secret, voice-activated tape recording system installed in the White House. Microphones were hidden in the Oval Office and a few other select rooms; when the President was present the system recorded talk in the rooms and over the phones. Nixon told his Chief of Staff HR “Bob” Haldeman, one of the very few people to know about the system, that the tapes would be invaluable when he came to write his memoirs. No doubt Nixon also hoped to keep track of what he and others had said, especially as regards illegal actions ordered by himself. The taping of conversations in the White House was in itself nothing new: every president beginning with FDR had done some recording. But Nixon’s system was unique in two respects: firstly, in being totally secret, and secondly, in the sheer quantity of material it generated, around 3,700 hours of recordings. When the existence of the recordings became public knowledge through the course of the Watergate hearings, the President’s speechwriter and ”conservative conscience” Pat Buchanan, Haldeman and others urged him to destroy them. As Nixon must’ve known that some of the tapes held incriminating or otherwise regrettable conversations, his decision not to heed their advice remains one of the enigmas of his presidency. To his great embarrassment, the public got to hear innumerable examples of him using foul language—slurs at the expense of every minority you would expect, plus a few you might not (Italians, Irish). More gravely, on at least one tape Nixon could be heard discussing, with Bob Haldeman, the cover-up of White House involvement in the Watergate burglary. Come 1974, this would be the “smoking gun” tape that would sink Nixon’s presidency.

The White House’s small Lincoln Sitting Room was among the locations that was wired for taping in 1971. Often, of an evening, the President retired here for solitary ”brainwork”, committing thoughts about plans and problems (including the problem of what sort of president he should be) to yellow legal pads. As Garry Wills observes in Nixon Agonistes (1970), Nixon was always a meticulous planner. In a logistical role during his WW2 Navy service in the South Pacific, Nixon had time enough to study poker in depth, becoming an expert player before risking serious money. Characteristically, Wills notes, “he made no unexamined move.” We learn, too, that in law school Nixon was known for his “iron butt”, a posterior that could remain planted in a study chair for punishing lengths of time.

Kissinger later told Richard Reeves, ”Remember, the story is not in the tapes. The real Richard Nixon can be found on paper.” Reeves comments:

”That could be dismissed as an attempt to diminish the meanness and vulgarity of the taped language, but it is also an important reminder that Nixon was a man who learned and constructed his pictures of the world with books, summaries and memoranda.”

The contrast with the current President, a man singularly uninterested in books, is striking—and sobering.

Nixon’s preserved notes give invaluable insights into his thinking. One note found on two pages that he wrote on November 15, 1970 I find especially intriguing:

“The primary contribution a President can make is on Spiritual lift—not material solutions.”

Although petty jealousy of John Kennedy’s legend certainly motivated him as well, some part of Richard Nixon seems to have been driven by the noble desire to spiritually uplift the American people with historic acts of statecraft. The momentous China trip, on which the President set off aboard Air Force One on February 17th, 1972, certainly qualified as that.

Nixon and his entourage arrived in Beijing on February 21st. The President, Kissinger and most of the rest of the party debarked from Air Force One in ebullient mood; among cabinet members, only Pat Buchanan was sceptical. As he relates in his 2017 book Nixon’s White House Wars, in a pre-trip memo to the President he’d written of his concern that the initiative would cause, to some degree, the

“psychological and moral disarmament of the world and American anti-Communist movement, to whom Hitler’s Germany was but a scale-model of Mao’s China...”

Nixon seemed to pay this argument no mind. After the brief (less than anhour) symbolic meeting with Mao (who was frail and in failing health), the state dinner, held on the first evening in the Great Hall of the People off Tiananmen Square, offered the President a more substantial opportunity to ingratiate himself. ”Let us start a long march together,” Nixon declared to Premier Zhou Enlai as part of his toast. Adding to the surreal atmosphere, the People’s Liberation Army band played a selection of American tunes, including ”Home on the Range”.

Conservative luminary William F Buckley, invited on the trip as a key right-wing supporter of Nixon, was unimpressed by the President’s conduct, telling Buchanan he wouldn’t have been surprised had he toasted Alger Hiss. But the disenchantment, even disgust of right-wingers was at odds with the extremely favourable reaction of most commentators to the trip. The public, too, thrilled to TV images of Nixon, Kissinger and Zhou Enlai in Tiananmen Square and on the Great Wall. This was the most audacious ”New Nixon” yet, ringing the (ch-ch-)changes in the Cold War. Nixon and Kissinger were celebrated as masters of statecraft.

The trip concluded on February 28th with the issuing of what became known as the Shanghai Communiqué, a joint diplomatic statement by the two nations, arrived at after detailed negotiations between Kissinger and Zhou Enlai. The document contained yet more disappointments for conservatives, foremost among them the United States’ acknowledgment that “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.” Even though this fell short of formal recognition of communist China (and the corresponding cancellation of recognition of Taiwan), Buckley, Buchanan and others viewed it (correctly, as it turned out) as a step towards that. For them Nixon and Kissinger were throwing Chiang Kai-Shek’s Taiwan, America’s old wartime ally, under the bus. In the days after the trip, Buchanan seriously considered resigning, but in the event decided he’d be better off holding on to whatever influence he wielded as the President’s ”conservative conscience”.

Conservatives’ grumbling did little to diminish Nixon’s belief that the opening to China was his greatest achievement so far, and proof he was the Great Man of History he’d long believed himself to be. As expected, rapprochement with China paid dividends when it came to negotiating with the Soviets—they suddenly became more amenable to nuclear arms control talks, over which they’d long dragged their feet. Détente, the relaxation of tensions with the USSR, was widely viewed as another foreign policy triumph for “Nixinger”.

Capped by November’s landslide re-election victory, 1972 was the year Nixon the peacemaker confounded his enemies. It would be his best year, in fact his last good one, as in 1973 Watergate exploded into view and Nixon’s world began to collapse. That Richard Nixon was capable of making history in two very different ways, one admirable, the other lamentable, is a large part of what makes him the most psychologically interesting president of modern times.