Reflections on a Larger-Than-Life Enigma, Richard Nixon

The first presidential vote I ever cast was for George McGovern.

Check that. The first presidential vote I ever cast was against Richard Nixon.

McGovern for president? No way, but my unbridled contempt for the Nixon-Agnew ticket and for the four years of the Vietnam War under their Administration was such that I would have voted for Fidel Castro had he run.

As a 23-year-old, I projected onto Nixon and Agnew all the hypocrisy, pettiness and political evil that I thought resided in a large segment of their “Silent Majority.” And yet, I was not one of those inveterate Nixon-haters that his supporters dismissed out of hand. As a Midwestern boy uninterested in politics until college, I had no reservoir of ill will toward Nixon. In fact, he seemed plenty Midwestern himself and I probably would have voted for him in 1968.

By 1972, I despised him. Agnew’s forced resignation in 1973 only confirmed my suspicions about both of them. Meanwhile, as a young reporter in Omaha, I was spellbound by the stream of Watergate disclosures and then almost drunkenly giddy when my newspaper, long one of Nixon’s staunchest backers, called for his resignation after editors spent hours reviewing transcripts of the newly released Watergate tapes.

Contemplating Nixon now, as of this writing in a coma and perhaps near death, it occurs to me I haven’t had that kind of passion, good or ill, for any major political figure since.

On one level, I must have known he might die before me, but the prospect of it has an air of unreality and pathos. Not even the most public disgrace imaginable kept him down forever. He was ultimately invincible and impenetrable, the embodiment of something or someone that stretched way beyond his own identity. As such, how could we not help but think of him as immortal?

At a time like this, I’m happy that my onetime pathological need to vilify Nixon has long since passed. As the memory of Vietnam and Watergate faded, so did the rancor. I’m in favor of rehabilitation for everybody.

Over the years, then, I tried to get a more realistic fix on him. Where his admirers saw a great man, though, I saw an average man who by dint of some hard work and a lot of happenstance got to where he was. Where his admirers credited him with vast political acumen, I saw nothing extraordinary.

In the end, I couldn’t cite anything but his survivability. He seemed like the quintessential “Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” driven to succeed and to be somebody but without much humanity behind it.

For a long article on Nixon four years ago, I interviewed Stephen Ambrose, a scholar and biographer of both Nixon and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

What makes him tick, I asked Ambrose. “I don’t know what makes him tick,” he said. “You put it all together and it doesn’t come out with 2 plus 2 equals 4. With him, 2 plus 2 equals 5. He’s bigger than his life, bigger than his background. He’s a unique human being. In a way, we’re all unique, but you and I aren’t Dick Nixon. He can’t be explained, it seems to me.”

I guess I liked Ambrose’s quote because it reflected my own ambiguity about Nixon. We could understand Kennedy’s charm, Eisenhower’s towering wartime stature, Truman’s populist appeal, LBJ’s can-do swagger . . . but what was it that Nixon brought to the dance?

Ambrose went on to say that Nixon’s legendary insecurity didn’t make sense. “He was nominated by his party five times for national office. Four times he won and still he feels mistreated and unappreciated by the American people. How do you put that together? Henry Kissinger has a line, not often quoted, that I think is worth pondering: ‘Think what this man could have done if anyone had ever loved him.’ ”

Many people now are saying, of course, that they love Nixon. Even given the delicate nature of his condition, the thought of the public loving Richard Nixon still doesn’t ring true. How can you love someone you never came to understand?

But weep not, because none of that may matter to the enigmatic native son of Orange County.

“I’m often asked if I’ve come to like Dick Nixon,” Ambrose told me in 1990, “and my reply is, ‘I don’t think he wants to be liked. I think he wants to be admired and respected, and I have come to do that.”

If the end is, in fact, nigh for Nixon, he must have taken solace in knowing that so many millions around the world accorded him that admiration and respect. And even the enemies he loved to hate must pay homage to this highly public man who still somehow pulled off the amazing feat of remaining at least partly unexplained, right to the end.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.