Hail to the Chief, at Last — the Reappraisal of Nixon’s Legacy Is in Full Swing

It was my good fortune last week to participate in a panel discussion held by the Spectator at New York re-examining the presidency of Richard Nixon. My fellow panelists were the Watergate expert and deputy counsel to President Nixon, Geoff Shepherd, and a younger writer and researcher on the subject, Daniel McCarthy. I was invited as a Nixon biographer and cordial acquaintance of the former president in the last five years of his life.The audience was about a hundred people at the Spectator’s splendid roof-top New York headquarters on southern Fifth Avenue. The audience was polled at the outset and most thought Richard Nixon a great president, almost all the rest a good president, and one person thought him a bad president but changed her opinion by the end of the session.I was invited to speak first and made the case that Nixon’s one full term as president was, next to President Lincoln’s and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first and third, the most successful single term in the history of that office. I also, while deferring to Mr. Shepherd as the world’s foremost authority on Watergate, and whose website is the unchallenged center of all documentation and evidence on the subject, that there is not now and has never been one scintilla of probative evidence that Nixon committed any felonies or broke any laws. Mr. Shepherd confirmed this, having exhaustively studied all relevant evidence.In support of my contention that Nixon had had the fourth-most successful term in the history of the American presidency, I cited his extraction of the country from the Vietnam War while maintaining a non-communist government at Saigon, it having been demonstrated in April, 1972 that the South Vietnamese could defeat the North Vietnamese on the ground by themselves provided there was heavy U.S. air support. This fact was deemed by Nixon and Henry Kissinger to be reasonable assurance of South Vietnam’s survival, though North Vietnam was sure to breach the peace agreement. Only the Watergate idiocy made the great American effort and sacrifice in Vietnam futile.I also cited the reopening of relations with Communist China; the negotiation and conclusion of the greatest arms control agreement in history with the Soviet Union, which incidentally restored American nuclear superiority (which Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had given away); and his ending of segregation through private-sector negotiations within each state, sparing the country the judicially-ordered bussing of tens of millions of schoolchildren all around the metropolitan areas of America against their parents’ wishes in the interests of “racial balance.” Nixon also founded the Environmental Protection Agency (with a sensible and not the radically anti-capitalist mandate it has had more recently), and abolished the draft, while avoiding inflation and reducing the crime rate. There was no debate on any of these points, though the other speakers elaborated on and supplemented them. There was no dissent in the room on the view that Nixon was shamefully treated, that the whole nation had been led by bloodless assassins in the press, the Congress, and the Justice Department, who had no excuse for destroying a successful presidency that had just been re-elected by the greatest plurality in the history of American elections. It remains unsurpassed though the electorate has doubled in size — he won in 1972, 47 million to 29 million, winning 49 states.Mr. Shepherd expertly and convincingly detailed the outrageous legal misconduct of the former White House counsel, John Dean; special counsel Leon Jaworski; Judge John Sirica; the FBI; the Erwin Committee; and almost everyone associated with that monstrous pseudo-officious insurrection.There followed a wide-ranging discussion of the Nixon era, the detailed dishonesty and illegalities of his persecution, and the shameful action of the press, not only defaming and stigmatizing the president, but inundating themselves with awards for professional enterprise and integrity for doing so.It was generally agreed that Watergate played an important role in reducing public faith in the press to less than twenty percent of the country. This is a fundamental weakness of the system, as democracy cannot ultimately survive without a free press, and a free press will not survive indefinitely if few people value it.I invited the well-informed audience to contemplate the implications of the fact that the United States had destroyed one of its outstanding leaders for no remotely just reason. It is a sobering thought. The lively general interchange ranged quite widely over subsequent presidents including distinctions between Nixon and President Trump, as well as Nixon’s relations with President Eisenhower, who encouraged the myth that he had been drafted like Washington, but who had really been put across in 1952 by Nixon’s delivery of California’s support to seat Eisenhower delegates over those of his rival, Senator Robert A. Taft, in contested states.We all commendably declined to masquerade as unlicensed psychiatrists, always a temptation with Nixon because of his inexplicably eccentric behavior at times.There was general agreement that Nixon and Kissinger were chess players, President Reagan a poker player, and Mr. Trump a bit of both, but that they were all what was needed at the time. There are a few similarities between Nixon and Mr. Trump, as nationalists and capitalists. Yet Nixon was the unglamorous but diligent champion of the middle class, and Mr. Trump is, in his way, a manifestation of the American star system, and a champion of the working class and the minorities. Nixon was a somewhat shy man who went all the way through the system. Mr. Trump is the ultimate extrovert and a complete political outsider.Nixon was a master of the career comeback, and though often morose, he always thought that he would prevail in the end. That knowledgeable group thought Nixon well along in the greatest comeback of all. His enemies mobilized the puritanical conscience of America, which survives despite all the corruption and hypocrisy of American politics. Yet Nixon has now taken control of that conscience and the growing realization that the 37th president was disgracefully mistreated gnaws constantly at it. The defamers and myth-makers wallowed and splashed in the swamp of their destructive mendacity for decades, but Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have died, dismally, though not physically. Their explanations of their crucifixion of half-a-century ago become more ludicrous and mawkish each year. I made the point that it is impossible now to read the unctuous piffle of the counts of impeachment against Nixon without being astonished that anyone could take them seriously as qualifying as the “high crimes” the Constitution requires for removal of a president from office.The historical stature of Richard Nixon rises steadily and inexorably to his recognition as one of the country’s most capable presidents. Hail to the chief, at last.

Hail to the Chief, at Last — the Reappraisal of Nixon’s Legacy Is in Full Swing

Hail to the Chief, at Last — the Reappraisal of Nixon’s Legacy Is in Full Swing

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