Nixon Left His Mark, and It Is All Around Us

It was a dramatic, unparalleled scene in the history of American politics. The choked, emotional farewell to the last of the loyal White House staff, the red carpet rolled out to the waiting helicopter on the South Lawn. Then, with a last characteristic wave at the door, Richard M. Nixon, who had been with us somewhere on the national stage for so long, was suddenly gone. The 37th President of the United States had resigned from office under the threat of impeachment, soon to be saved from a likely criminal conviction only by the controversial pardon by his successor and old friend, Gerald Ford.

Fifteen years later, it seems almost surreal, this constitutional crisis of the century. In part, of course, time has blunted and blurred the images. And Nixon himself, as he did again and again in his remarkable career, has staged something of another skillful and fiercely determined comeback in public relations. After the bipartisan ineptitude and relative dimness of his successors, there is a sort of nostalgia for his old diplomatic initiatives toward the Soviet Union or China, and even what seemed clear villainy 15 years ago now takes on the soft tint of competence and decisiveness.

Not that the dramatic Nixon foreign policy does not deserve careful study--though there may have been, as Tallulah Bankhead used to say, less here than meets the eye. His mutual propping with Leonid S. Brezhnev’s corrupt and sclerotic government may only have delayed and obstructed the liberalization we now see unfolding in the Soviet Union, and the savage repression in China shows all too clearly the character of the regime he embraced so expediently in Beijing in 1972. It was also Nixon who instituted in earnest the covert little Punic and proxy wars that now pass for our foreign policy in the Third World, who presided over the first, perhaps fatal decline in our international competitiveness and currency strength, whose refracted Realpolitik with Henry Kissinger roundly ignored the vast problems of poverty, migration, and environmental decay that threaten to overwhelm statesmanship in the next decade.

At any rate, his proteges, and his mark, are everywhere--from a defeated young Texas politician named George Bush whom he rescued from oblivion in 1970 and named to the U.N. ambassadorship, to Chief Justice William Rehnquist and his conservative majority on the Supreme Court, or to the former Kissinger aides and clients who now crowd the upper levels of the National Security Council and the State Department, guiding the otherwise-frozen hands of an uncertain new Administration.

Yet the real danger to memory and history is not in romanticizing Nixon’s global strategies, or mistaking his considerable patronage. The problem goes much deeper, coming home to the nation and body politic we truly are--and to how much this once-disgraced, fallen President made us so.

For it was also Nixon who largely wrought the Republican revolution in the South and the West, and thus redrew the map of America’s Electoral College politics that gave us Ronald Reagan and George Bush. More than any other politician of the era, it was Nixon who led and rode the huge tides of anti-communist fear and reaction, and the great-if-furtive counterrevolution against the racial and social upheavals of postwar America--all of which have driven the Democratic Party into a political wilderness from which it has yet to emerge.

And back further still, in the brilliant and tireless young politician he was at his beginnings, it was Richard Nixon who represented above all the elemental forces of corporate power, finance, agribusiness and energy, who epitomized the manipulative might of the media in politics, who in California in so many ways pioneered the use and masking of great money in political campaigning. And, above all, who artfully tapped the insidious prejudice, vengeance and smear mentality in American politics long before Bush ran his effective ads against Michael Dukakis.

Richard Nixon is never going to be the most beloved American President of the century. But he is going to turn out to be the quintessential politician of the epoch, and most of what he really embodied is in the ascendancy.

It has been a long time since they rolled up that red carpet from the departing helicopter, but he is with us still. And in the end, in ways yet little understood, he has probably won.