Memories of Nixon Are Bittersweet for Valley Politicians, Academics

For San Fernando Valley-area politicians and academics who knew and studied him, the memories of Richard Nixon are indeed bittersweet--that of a shrewd, complicated man, a slick and media-savvy former President always ready to deal the quick political pay-back while forgiving himself for any mistake.

For better or worse, they agree that Nixon was indeed a chameleon, a political animal of more than nine lives, able to rise from the ashes of Watergate to become a respected political statesman who changed the face of American foreign policy.

But the debate will rage for years: How will history treat the 37th President?

“From the very early days the man entered politics, it was quite clear that was going to be his career. And from the very early days, he was a scoundrel,” said Eugene Price, chairman of the political science department at Cal State Northridge, who once spent a day interviewing the former President at his home in San Clemente.

“He was either a politically amoral or immoral person,” he said. “Politically, his attitude was anything goes as long as you don’t get caught. To his dying day, he could never understand why an observing public could not condone his activity in Watergate,” Price added, saying Nixon simply considered the debacle a matter of politics.

A self-described “middle-of-the-road liberal,” Price said he doubted that Nixon’s reputation will be much redeemed over the years and that history will rank him as a “mediocre” President along with the likes of Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge.

“He was just a tacky politician. He had no real class. Who in America can point to Richard Nixon and say, ‘There’s the man I would like my daughter to marry,’ ” Price said. “The President is our great national image, but in his hands, that became squandered.”

For John Broesamle, a CSUN history professor who’s written about Nixon in a book on modern politics, Nixon will be among the most difficult Presidents of this century to evaluate because his great achievements, such as reaching detente with the Soviet Union, were counterbalanced by even greater failures, such as Watergate and Vietnam.

But on a personal level, “Nixon’s a man who spent much of his career over a span of more than 40 years involved in an exercise of explaining his past behavior and rehabilitating his image,” Broesamle said. And partly because of Nixon’s successful efforts to recast his career, time will mellow history’s reading of it, he added.

However, he said that will probably only boost Nixon’s presidency from “failure to marginal failure, from the lower class to the lower middle class.” He said history will record the man as “crude beyond any external expectation,” “petty, mean and vindictive,” and “an opportunist whose chief character flaw was a lack of principle.”

“Historians shouldn’t mellow too much toward Richard Nixon because he doesn’t deserve it,” Broesamle concluded, saying the tarnish of Watergate will never be wiped away. “His most memorable phrase was ‘I’m not a crook’--and he was.”

Despite calling him “a control freak” and a man with “an awful lot of psychological hang-ups,” Rodolfo Acuna, CSUN professor of Chicano studies, said history will record Nixon as a much better President than he was popularly perceived during the Watergate era, particularly in terms of his foreign policy successes.

Acuna said Nixon “had much more vision in foreign policy” than Ronald Reagan and called Nixon “much brighter” than either Reagan or John F. Kennedy. “If Reagan would have been in during Vietnam, he would have nuked them. (Nixon) probably will go down in history as an above-average President when it comes to foreign policy,” he said.

Yet at the domestic level, Acuna blamed Nixon for reductions in job training programs, being weak on civil rights and beginning to undermine Lyndon B. Johnson’s anti-poverty programs. “He set the groundwork for Reagan. Reagan was a President who screwed the middle class, where Nixon with his policies turned the middle class against the poor.”

Ed Davis, a former GOP state senator and Los Angeles police chief, now 77, recalls the former President as a complicated man always ready to forgive his own mistakes, one with an elephant’s memory.

And he’s glad that he’s not the historian who has to decide if Nixon, in the end, was America’s friend or bad-boy foe.

“It’s going to be a real test for historians because of Watergate,” he said. “He obviously made some terrible mistakes there on leveling with the American people. But his recovery from that and his re-emergence as a statesman shouldn’t be overlooked.

“In the end, he proved that, between Watergate and his life as a political statesman, he was very human and that there’s hope for everyone.

“He was a man of very strong convictions who was really brilliant. I would always be amazed when I sat down with him when he could recount the football or baseball scores from years ago and political elections as well. He never seemed to forget anything.”

Davis recalls at times having a rocky road with Nixon, after once having called former Atty. Gen. John Mitchell “a bald-faced liar.”

In his own way, Nixon wreaked his revenge. A picture taken with the President--a would-be keepsake for most people--showed only Davis’ left ear. And once, among a group of other police chiefs visiting the Oval Office, Nixon looked at Davis and handed him a pair of cuff-links, saying he wanted to be sure that Davis knew that the items did not come at taxpayer expense.

“He was trying to embarrass me,” Davis recalled. “I merely responded that, ‘Mr. President, I didn’t think you stole them.’ ”

In the end, though, Davis said, Nixon showed his true political colors.

In the early 1980s, a local Republican group asked to use Nixon’s Western White House, Casa Pacifica in San Clemente, for a fund-raiser. At first, the ex-President was all business, saying over the telephone that the house could be used only if all profits went to the Nixon Library.

“Then he called me back on the phone and said that he and Pat had talked the matter over and that not only would our group get to keep the profits, but that they insisted on catering the whole affair.

“He had a nice human side. Too bad his brilliance was wasted.”

Former Rep. Bobbi Fiedler recalls meeting Nixon in 1984 with other politicians for a strategy session prior to Reagan’s reelection--and walking away impressed with his political acumen, even a decade after he had left political office.

“For me, the personal characteristic that stands out is the high-level skill in terms of strategy,” she said. “Many Presidents relied on pollsters and political consultants. But Nixon was very hands-on in that regard. He had strong opinions and many, if not all, of them were well-founded. They turned out to be true.”

As far as Nixon’s legacy, Fiedler believes that he will be able to outdistance Watergate as a career milestone.

“Ultimately, this is a generational matter,” she said. “The younger generation won’t be as tuned in to Watergate as the older ones. They didn’t see him in that context. The fact that he stayed in the political arena and continued to have a role in foreign policy will more be remembered, I think.

“Still, Watergate is hard to forget.”

Corporate political consultant Paul Clarke, as a reporter for ABC News, covered Nixon as President during his glory years:

“Unfortunately, Watergate will be the stone around Richard Nixon’s historical neck,” he said. “But there is so much to consider about the man. In the area of foreign policy, he was the person who started the major changes in the Cold War relationships. There was his relationship with (Soviet leader Leonid) Breshnev, his stature around the world that helped move the nation from a real Cold War posture.”

Then there were his bold moves in international finance, removing the United States from the gold standard, allowing the dollar to compete in foreign markets. “It had a long-lasting effect on economy,” Clarke said. “He realized back then when nobody else did that international trade would be the thing.”

Clarke said that from his viewpoint as a journalist, Nixon will find a place in the midlands of American Presidents in terms of greatness and fiasco, “not in the morass of Coolidge, Grant and Fillmore, but not with Lincoln and Jefferson.”