In Defense of Dick

Richard Nixon never had a chance. He was many things, many of them vulgar precisely because he thought himself incapable of being vulgar. But more than anything else, Nixon was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was in the Oval Office during the first moment in history when masses of people openly defied the credibility and authority of the government. It didn't matter who was there. But it was Nixon.

The true import of Nixon's "crimes" was not in their measure, in their audacity, or in their novel nature; indeed, on the scale of post-war presidencies, Nixon's crimes were actually rather mild. The only new thing about Nixon was that he was caught. And when he was caught, he honestly could not fathom how he was being crucified for things that Kennedy and Johnson did most days before shaving. This only re enforced his predisposition to self-pity.

Mustering all the detachment that I can, having not lived through this man's tenure, it is clear to me that Nixon was one of our best presidents, certainly better that his predecessor and successors. Indeed, it was Nixon, of all people, who steered the ship of state during what were by far its darkest days since the Civil War.

It was Nixon who first gave federal endorsement and backing to the environmental movement. It was Nixon who made peace with China, thereby further isolating the Soviet Union and making detente a much more attractive option for the Kremlin. And it was Nixon, albeit too late for many, who ended America's war in Vietnam.

These nods may seem sacrilegious to many, perhaps including my parents, to whom Nixon was just a jowly and considerably less folksy premonition of Bush the Younger. But Nixon, remember, created the EPA, made peace with adversaries armed with WMD of apocalyptic potential, and ended an unwinnable war without causing a right-wing backlash. Can one imagine Bush doing any one of these things? Has he not, in fact, done precisely the opposite?

When Bush confronts a problem, his first instincts are to bomb it, cut it down, or set it on fire. Nixon, it is now clear, was more "liberal" than Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton, of course, is usually full of shit, but at Nixon's funeral in 1994, he found room to acknowledge that historians would come to speak respectfully of "the age of Nixon." Perhaps the young president intuitively grasped that any age would seem golden when compared to the then-dawning Age of Clinton.

But Nixon, whom nobody ever liked, and who was elected only due to the murders of the last two politicians that Americans actually did like (mostly because they had no idea what John and Bobby were capable of), was undone by a two-bit burglary, and by an air of entitlement and paranoia that his predecessors had shared but were somehow spared of having to confront.

If John Kennedy had lived, and even if he had avoided disclosure of the minefield he had layed for himself (or laid for himself, if you will), he would not be remembered as fondly as he was due to his martyrdom. Martyrdom does things for men that they could never do for themselves, no matter how good and great they are. Kennedy's martyrdom made us forget everything, including the fact that he stole the election of 1960 from one Richard Nixon.

For all the misery wrought by America's involvement in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson was more directly responsible than any other single person. Yes, his predecessors dithered, keeping South Vietnam half-pregnant for nearly 20 years. And yes, his successor, Nixon, took 5 years to extract American from the war, but it was Lyndon Johnson, and nobody else, who took the plunge.

Kennedy and Johnson spied on their enemies, tapped their phones, read their mail, plotted to kill foreign leaders, and so forth. But only Nixon was caught. This is not to excuse the conduct, of course, just to illustrate the tragic aspect of it that is so Nixonian.

Out of the three men who led the United States during the 1960's, there is only one who was probably too smart to start an American ground war in Vietnam. That one was Richard Nixon. Instead, having been robbed of his place by the golden boy, it fell to Nixon to clean up the mess, although only after the golden boy's heir had been slain as well. Only Nixon was left. And that was why he was hated.