Professor Dave again, let’s talk about Richard Nixon.
Richard Milhous Nixon may have been the most temperamentally unsuited man ever elected to
the presidency. Uneasy in social situations and resentful of slights both real and imagined, his
paranoid nature and vindictive personality would ultimately be his downfall. He remains the only
president ever to resign from office, so let’s examine the events that mark his personal history.
Nixon, a World War II Navy veteran, had been selected and groomed by wealthy conservative
Southern California backers for their state’s 12th congressional district election in 1946,
hoping to defeat five-time incumbent Democrat Jerry Voorhis. Nixon succeeded, using what would
become a defining campaign tactic, insinuating that his liberal opponent was “soft on Communism.”
He quickly burst onto the national scene, serving on the House on Un-American Activities Committee,
investigating New Deal official Alger Hiss. A journalist named Whittaker Chambers
had claimed that he and Hiss had both been Soviet spies in the 30s. During the trial it was
revealed that Chambers had classified documents proving Hiss had indeed been a Russian spy.
Hiss could not be tried for espionage because the statute of limitations had expired,
but because he lied about not knowing Chambers, he was found guilty of perjury. Later, Ronald Reagan
would credit Chambers’ memoir as the reason for his leaving the Democratic Party to join the GOP.
The Hiss conviction was a great victory for Nixon, and it contributed to the “Red Scare”
Communist witch-hunts of the 1940s and 50s. Nixon rode this hysteria to national prominence, and was
elected Senator from California after smearing his opponent, former movie star Helen Gahagan Douglas,
for being soft on Communism. When Dwight Eisenhower ran for president on the GOP
ticket in 1952, Nixon was presented as a young, viable running mate from an electoral-rich state.
During the campaign, Nixon played the role of political attack dog, which he’d perfected in
his previous campaigns, while Eisenhower stayed serenely above partisan politics.
The Eisenhower/Nixon ticket sailed to an easy victory,
and after only six years in politics, Dick Nixon was a heartbeat away from the Presidency.
After eight years as vice president, Nixon faced no serious challenge for the GOP presidential
nomination, and fought Democratic opponent John F. Kennedy in the 1960 general election.
Nixon campaigned on his superior experience over Kennedy, but his performance in the
televised debates, especially the first one, projected an image of weakness and lethargy.
Recovering from an illness, Nixon was sweaty, his eyes constantly darting around. This and his five
o’clock shadow all exemplified the “Tricky Dick” persona, as he was often referred,
famously summed up in the slogan - “Would you buy a used car from this man?”
Kennedy, so calm and poised, exuding a youthful vigor and wisely having accepted an application
of makeup before taking the stage, came off as far more presidential. Kennedy eked out a narrow
victory, winning by just one hundred and twenty thousand votes. Nixon then decided to run for
Governor of California in 1962, which he lost by a surprising three hundred thousand votes.
Embittered, he blamed his loss on the press and told them it was his last press conference,
stating: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” He moved to New York and worked for a
prestigious law firm. After the crushing defeat Goldwater suffered to LBJ in the 1964 election,
Nixon traveled around the country helping the GOP recover many lost seats in the midterms
and build new alliances within the party. As the Vietnam War, counterculture, and urban riots
exploded, Nixon decided to run for President again in 1968, presenting himself as the “New Nixon,”
an elder statesman whose wisdom and experience could heal the social upheavals tearing the
country apart. His campaign focused on “Law and Order,” to combat the riots and protests.
During the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon violated the Logan Act,
a law from 1799 prohibiting private citizens from engaging in diplomatic treaties.
It was later revealed that Henry Kissinger, then Johnson’s adviser on the Vietnam peace talks,
secretly alerted Nixon’s staff that a truce was coming, and negotiations had nearly concluded. A
cease-fire was imminent and Democratic opponent Hubert Humphrey, who had been steadily gaining
ground, seemed assured of winning. But at the last minute, the South Vietnamese pulled out.
LBJ received an FBI report saying that Anna Chennault, a Nixon ally, had told the South
Vietnamese ambassador that the Vietnamese should cease negotiating because they could
get a better deal from Nixon. LBJ called him into the White House and Nixon denied any interference.
Johnson was livid; he knew Nixon was lying because he’d heard the FBI wiretaps. He even
called the Republican Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen, to complain.
“This is treason!” Dirksen limply replied, “I know.” And so, even before he was elected
President, Richard Nixon was already guilty of high crimes against the United States.
After the election, Nixon made Kissinger his National Security Adviser, and in the next four
years more than twenty thousand US troops died in Vietnam, over a hundred thousand were wounded,
and more than a million Vietnamese were killed. In the final indignity, Kissinger was given the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for negotiating the very settlement he helped sabotage in 1968.
Although Nixon never had a secret plan to end the war, he did have plans to expand
the war into Cambodia to root out the North Vietnamese Army’s hiding places.
An aggressive bombing campaign against Cambodia began in 1969. Ground troops were later deployed.
When Nixon announced his expansion of the war into Cambodia, there was outrage from coast to coast.
Universities shut down in protest, condemnation for the illegal invasion was nationwide,
and in Kent State in Ohio, four protesting students were shot dead by National Guardsmen.
About forty thousand Cambodians would die as a result of US intervention.
Ironically, Nixon’s domestic policies have since been hailed as the last
liberal domestic agenda in a Republican Administration. 1970 saw the first Earth Day,
a product of the environmental movement, so Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency,
endorsed the equal rights amendment for women, proposed a national Guaranteed Annual Income,
and had always been progressive on Civil Rights, despite pandering to Southern segregationists.
In truth, Nixon had little interest in domestic policy,
instead seeing himself as a grand foreign policy strategist, playing a global chess game with the
Russians, who were as Machiavellian as he was. His greatest strategic maneuver occurred in 1971
when Kissinger secretly flew into China to open negotiations with the isolated Communist nation.
When Nixon announced the visit, it was hailed as a masterstroke of diplomacy, something only a
firm anti-Communist like Nixon could pull off. The irony was, of course, if any Democrat had done it,
Richard Nixon would have been among the first calling for their impeachment.
Nixon visited China in the summer of 1972 and he returned in triumph. His re-election was
the biggest landslide in history; he carried every state but Massachusetts. And, he had
solidified the GOP’s hold on the South, which had been solidly Democratic for over 150 years.
But like Johnson, the seeds of Nixon’s fall had been sown during his greatest triumph. Even though
1972 Democratic opponent George McGovern never posed a serious threat to Nixon’s re-election,
Nixon utilized a team called “the Plumbers” to break into the Democratic National Committee
headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington DC, to see if they had anything
incriminating on Nixon. On June 17th, 1972 five of the Plumbers were arrested burglarizing the DNC,
including men with links to the CIA and FBI. Their phone books contained White House phone numbers,
turning the burglary into the greatest political scandal in American history, exposing abuses by
the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the former Attorney General, and the White House itself. Ultimately,
Nixon’s party turned on him and he was forced to resign in disgrace. Nixon’s original Vice
President Spiro Agnew had previously been forced to resign when he was found guilty of taking
bribes while Governor of Maryland, and congressman Gerald Ford was selected to replace him in 1973,
thus putting Ford directly in line to take over the remainder of Nixon’s second term in 1974.
In the end, the man elected on a “Law and Order” platform with the insistent claim,
“I am not a crook,” was the greatest lawbreaker ever to sit in the Oval Office.
As his successor, Ford pardoned him in order to spare the country from more of its “long
national nightmare,” and Nixon spent the rest of his life trying to rehabilitate his image
by writing books on foreign policy. But in his paranoia, he had even bugged the Oval Office, and
when those tapes were made public, they condemned him for all time, revealing Nixon to be a petty
thug who pursued vendettas like a Mafia don. Still, Nixon had transformed American politics,
as the South would become a GOP stronghold for decades to come. Nixon was the first Republican
who convinced the middle class to vote against their own interests by appealing to their fears.
The once moderate Eastern Establishment GOP evolved into a more right-of-center
Republican Party, the ideological child of Ronald Reagan, combined with the political slash and burn
tactics of Nixon. After a dozen years of trauma beginning with Kennedy’s assassination, Vietnam,
Watergate, and finally the fall of Saigon in 1975, the United States was exhausted and would
never quite recover the unbridled optimism that had been lost. And the office of the
Presidency would be forever diminished by the crimes and moral failings of Richard M. Nixon.