Setting the Record Straight

Looking back to Richard Nixon

By Ben Chapman
From the May 2006 Print Edition

In any U.S. history class, Richard Nixon is seen as a villain, perhaps the greatest of the 20th century, and is credited for creating the “imperial presidency.” Liberals especially love to recall the days when, through protesting, marijuana, and long hair, they toppled an autocratic regime and restored peace to the world. Well, let’s cut right to the chase — they are wrong.

Let’s start with the elephant on the page. The Watergate Scandal, which brought down President Nixon, was not excusable or justified, nor can it be defended. However, it can be put in context, studied, and understood. The seeds of corruption were planted long before Watergate, and the roots stretch across both parties.

While no president is without blemish, it is best to limit ourselves to what we may conceive of as the “modern era” of presidential politics. For example, Franklin D. Roosevelt had an “intelligence unit” supported mainly by the State Department through a slush fund. John F. Kennedy had well-known and documented ties to the mafia. Kennedy also had the FBI spy on Martin Luther King using one of the most massive bugging campaigns in U.S. history. Phone tapping had been on the rise since Lyndon Johnson. Of course, Johnson bugged Barry Goldwater’s campaign offices in 1964. The press and the liberal Democratic Congress laughed it all off.

Unfortunately, this is how politics was done in the mid-20th century. And more unfortunately, Goldwater’s presidential campaign was not the last to be bugged by the opposition party.

What made Nixon and Watergate so unique? I would contend that lack of a unified government is a major factor. Johnson bugged Goldwater, but with a liberal Congress protecting him, nothing was done. But Nixon was a Republican when Washington, D.C., was dominated by Democrats who would only be too happy to seek revenge on Nixon for massacring George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate of 1972, in the election.

When Nixon set up his “special investigations” unit before the 1972 campaign, reminiscent of FDR’s “intelligence unit,” he did so in an atmosphere unfriendly to him, and under the impression that his administration was constantly under attack by the opposition. Nixon was paranoid, however, and overreached.

Perhaps most famous were Nixon’s tapes of all Oval Office conversations, which later implicated him in the Watergate scandal. The irony is that President Johnson originally had the taping system set up, and Nixon initially ordered it removed. When criticism of his Vietnam policy became vocal, hostile, and widespread, though, he replaced the taping system. It could be argued that Nixon fell on his own lance. In context, he did so in the middle of a political war zone.

The greatest irony of all is that liberals hail the resignation of Richard Nixon as a milestone event in the history of protesting and activism. Yet when you look at Nixon’s domestic and foreign policy, was he the conservative boogeyman he is made out to be in the history books?

History records that it was Nixon who oversaw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and signed into law the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Under Nixon, social spending rose dramatically. Per-person costs of raising people out of poverty rose from $2,000 in 1965 to $167,000 in 1977. After all, it was Nixon who once remarked: “We are all Keynesians now.” He even instigated wage and price freezes!

Regarding the Vietnam War, yes, Nixon ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia. But he also withdrew from Vietnam in 1973. Under his administration, U.S. troops in Vietnam hit a peak of 540,000 and then dropped off at the end of his administration to just 50,000. Nixon’s “plan” in Vietnam had been “peace with honor.”

Most legendary of all was Nixon’s opening of U.S. relations with Communist China, hailed as one of the greatest foreign policy victories of all time. Nixon helped divide the U.S.S.R. and China, a strategic move in the context of the Cold War. And yet we see another one of Nixon’s many ironies: He spent his life in Congress during the McCarthy era hunting communists, only to open relations with one of the biggest communist countries in the world. Maybe this complicated life was just the prelude necessary to such a gargantuan step. After all, only Nixon could go to China!

Nixon’s record is interesting and puzzling to say the least. Reviled as “reactionary,” he was actually quite liberal. Labeled a warmonger, he withdrew from Vietnam. And in an atmosphere of dirty political games which stretched back 50 years, he had the great misfortune of being caught by the enemy camp.

It is incredibly hard to judge Nixon, and he will never be labeled “forgettable” or “mediocre.” But neither will he ever be labeled a great leader or a great conservative. The saddest thing of all is that, because of his personal mistakes and political crimes, he has lost the title that every president deserves. For all his accomplishments and all his progress, Richard Nixon will never be known as a great man.

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