Writers Come Away With a Respect for Nixon

Herbert Parmet once vowed to help keep Richard M. Nixon from becoming President. Stephen Ambrose says that in 1974 all he wanted was to get Nixon out of office. Roger Morris was so appalled by the invasion of Cambodia that he resigned from the Nixon White House.

Now the three have written books on the 37th President and all say the experience has increased their respect for Nixon--even though none of the three exonerates him for ethical failings.

“I think it was very important to see him as the very sensitive, intelligent human being that he is,” Parmet, a historian whose previous books include a definitive work on President John F. Kennedy, said in a telephone interview.

Ambrose, now at work on an account of the onslaught of criticism that drove Nixon from office in the Watergate era, said, “I can’t help but have a no-longer-secret admiration for his ability to stand up to it, and fight back.”

Morris is critical of Nixon’s ethics but says his book is an even-handed portrait.

Parmet, a professor of history at Queensborough Community College in New York, worked six years on his one-volume biography, “Richard Nixon and His America,” scheduled for publication Jan. 15 by Little Brown.

Ambrose, a historian who teaches at the University of New Orleans, is writing the final volume of a three-volume biography. The second volume, “The Triumph of a Politician,” was published recently by Simon & Schuster.

Morris, who has forged a reputation as an investigative journalist since quitting the National Security Council staff in 1970, recently completed the first of a projected three volumes: “Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician,” published by Henry Holt & Co.

Thus, with four living ex-Presidents on the scene for the first time in more than a century, the one who is getting the lion’s share of the attention is the one who was driven from office. Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974, after revelations stemming from a botched burglary at Democratic headquarters during his 1972 reelection campaign.

Nixon himself is putting finishing touches on the seventh book he has written since his resignation. “In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat and Renewal” is scheduled for mid-April publication by Simon & Schuster.

Nixon’s spokesman, John Taylor, said he does not believe the former President has read any of the books about him. Nixon said in a television interview last year that he never does.

Nixon granted five interviews to Parmet, but declined to be interviewed by Ambrose or Morris. Morris, who has written critical books about Henry A. Kissinger and Alexander M. Haig Jr., both top White House aides in the Nixon years, said, “I am sure he regarded me as a critic and as an adversary.”

Taylor said Parmet was recommended to Nixon by mutual friends and the former President was “aware of his high ranking in the scholarly community.”

Parmet, a Democrat whose works include “JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy,” said he thinks it was the interviews more than anything that burnished his view of Nixon.

“I, for one, as many Americans, grew up with a view of Nixon that was really based on a Herblock caricature,” he said. The heavy-jowled, stubbly and glowering figure portrayed by the Washington Post editorial cartoonist “was an unmitigated force of evil,” Parmet said.

“I promised my daughter once that he would never become President; she still holds that against me,” the historian said.

“I feel that I have gotten to understand Nixon based on the research I have done and probably more emphatically on the one-to-one personal encounters,” he said. “I began to see the basis for . . . how he felt himself in a constant underdog role.

“This has nothing to do, or very little to do, with policy. It has a great deal to do with the understanding of the man. Understanding does not necessarily lead to approval, but it does help me to see things from his perspective, and I think that’s very important.”

After he finished the book, Parmet said, he turned to his editor at Little Brown, Ray Roberts, and asked, “Do you think this is sympathetic to Nixon or hostile?”

Roberts said it was sympathetic, Parmet recalled.

Ambrose, who wrote an admiring two-volume biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower before taking on Nixon, said his revised estimate of the first U.S. President to resign from office stemmed from “the fact he is not in active politics anymore, and I am trying to look at him as a historian rather than as a citizen.”

“I am giving the devil his due,” he said.

He interviewed former Nixon aides, including Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and New York Times columnist William Safire, and found that they “really like the guy and admire him.”

“I just had to rethink my own feelings about Nixon in the light of what people whose opinion I respect felt about him,” he said.

“And then I’m working right now on the year 1974, and I must say that Nixon in adversity is more likable and more admirable than Nixon in triumph. Now that doesn’t mean that I have suddenly decided that he was innocent. By no means. In fact, I think I probably know as much as anybody except Nixon himself about how guilty he was.

“Also I hadn’t paid any attention in ’74 to what Nixon was doing other than Watergate. All I wanted was to get him out of office.”

After taking another look at Nixon’s proposals on arms control, welfare reform, federal aid to education and health care, he said, “I just have to groan at what we lost” when he resigned.

Morris said his research “gave me a great deal of added respect for how good a politician he was. I think as a young man he was quite superb, and would be good today.”

But his studies did not soften Morris’ view of Nixon’s California campaigns against Rep. Jerry Voorhis for the House in 1946 and Helen Gahagan Douglas for the Senate in 1950, often criticized for red-baiting and character assassination.

“If anything, the critics did not know the half,” he said. “Those campaigns were worse than even the critics thought.

“He was a meticulous, painstaking, thorough, often brilliant, very well organized, beautifully timed politician,” Morris said. “That doesn’t say anything at all about his values. It doesn’t have anything to do with the compromise of his integrity, or dirty money, or the honesty of his campaigning.”

But Morris, a Democrat when he first met Nixon and went to work for him, said: “I think we ended up writing a very empathetic and even-handed book about him and especially about his family.”