From Beginning to End, Nixon Was a Fighter

Richard Nixon’s election to the presidency in November, 1968, was the capstone to one of the country’s most turbulent postwar years.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been slain in Memphis, Tenn., and riots swept the country. Weeks later, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.

North Vietnam’s Tet offensive had crystallized political revulsion about the war, and Lyndon B. Johnson, in effect, had been driven from the White House.

Every month something new set the country on edge. An American spy ship, the Pueblo, was captured off North Korea; its crew was thrown into prison. A B-52 bomber with nuclear weapons aboard crashed in the Arctic.

Democrats nominated Hubert H. Humphrey amid anarchy in the streets of Chicago, and he ran a campaign crippled by Johnson and the war and complicated by the angry presence of Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace stealing off with disaffected blue-collar voters.

From this yearlong maelstrom, Nixon emerged with a plurality of 43.4% to become one of the most durable and controversial American political leaders of the 20th Century.

Never had there been a more astonishing turnaround.

It was the resurrection of a man who had spent six years in political purgatory.

He emerged from the chaos of 1968, political analyst Jules Witcover wrote, because his objective was survival: “Through all the year’s turbulent events, he had not sought enlightenment, not discourse, not public adulation, but survival. Over the previous six years, he had been like a soldier in combat whose only goal is not to be a daring hero, but to be alive when the battle is over.”

That was the way it was for Nixon to the end.

The man who entered politics when anti-communist fervor was at its peak died still battling to survive the taint of the Watergate scandal that drove him from the White House nearly 20 years ago.

He had taken the public posture of an elder statesman, traveling the world, writing and advising his successors, but to the end he was fighting to regain his impounded presidential papers and control the tape recordings that had helped humiliate him and bring him to the brink of impeachment before he quit. It was doggedness and determination that made him a survivor in spite of a personality that seemed ill-suited to retail politics.

Nixon was, friends note, basically a shy man, who never really enjoyed meeting new people. He detested confrontations with colleagues or disagreements with people who worked for him. He preferred to make his decisions in solitude on the basis of memoranda written for him rather than haggling over them or searching for a consensus.

Try as he did, he could never develop a common touch that put his constituents at ease.

He was said to carefully rehearse little jokes and asides that he wanted to use to lighten conversations, but often he still came off as uncomfortable and awkward. More than once, he was photographed walking on the beach in shiny, leather shoes. He was seen in coat and tie hitting golf shots at his San Clemente estate. Once when he stopped to console a motorcycle officer hurt in a motorcade accident, his only comment was to ask the suffering man whether he liked his job.

But he never ceased trying to be down to earth. As the Watergate scandal wound to a conclusion, he went to Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, where, surrounded by country music entertainers, he played with a yo-yo and banged out “Happy Birthday” to his wife on a piano.

Like Johnson, he was at times maudlin about his humble beginnings and somewhat haunted by the glamour, star quality and adoring press coverage that surrounded the Kennedys. Even after all of his years in Washington, he was uncomfortable with what he regarded as the capital’s social and intellectual Establishment based in Georgetown.

His feelings were understandable.

W. Averell Harriman, the New York multimillionaire who served in high diplomatic posts in the Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Johnson administrations, once threatened to walk out of a Georgetown dinner party when then-Sen. Nixon arrived and ignored him after the guests were seated.

There were slights, real or imagined, even at the hands of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Once asked to describe Nixon’s contributions as vice president, Eisenhower made his famous offhand remark that he would need some time to think of something.

Nixon was said to have been hurt on another occasion at an outdoor affair at Eisenhower’s Gettysburg estate. After it was over, Eisenhower invited his more important guests inside, but Nixon was left standing on the lawn. So Nixon fashioned himself a political gut fighter from the beginning, and he made enemies early--when he labeled U.S. Rep. Jerry Voorhis a communist dupe, and when, in his race for the Senate, he snidely referred to Helen Gahagan Douglas as the “pink lady.”

But his fights helped define him as a man of courage. In his famous “Checkers” speech in 1952, he saved his place on the Republican ticket. As vice president, he courageously faced an anti-American mob in Venezuela and held his own in a tit-for-tat “kitchen debate” with Nikita S. Khrushchev in Moscow.

Nixon’s election in 1968 completed a long comeback from the ugly and graceless--”You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”--scene after his loss in the 1962 California gubernatorial race. That was just two years after he had lost to Kennedy in the race for the White House.

The astonishing turnaround had seen Nixon leave California for New York, considering his political career ended. He had no political base, no organization and no prospects. But the assassination of John Kennedy and Barry Goldwater’s disastrous loss to Johnson in 1964 opened the door once more.

The 1968 campaign, run with clockwork efficiency and tactical and public relations genius, brought Nixon to the White House with an appeal to the “silent majority” and with an unexplained plan to end the Vietnam War.

Four years later, with the Democrats still waging fratricidal conflict, Nixon easily won again.

Not only had he been a fighter, he had been lucky.

He had smoothly transformed himself from a redbaiter into a tireless advocate of international discourse. Fiercely partisan and conservative at home, he was politically liberated in foreign policy. Unlike Kennedy and Johnson, he was free to make his historic opening to China and to conclude the first strategic arms agreement with the Soviet Union without fear of retribution.

But he remained the extraordinary political partisan, a man who seemed to need enemies.

And he had them aplenty, no matter how successfully he modernized himself on issues. More than any other Republican, he was loathed by mainline Democrats, who remembered him from his days in Congress, his attacks on Voorhis and Douglas and his work on the House Un-American Activities Committee.

From the day he first captured attention as a biting anti-communist, he was an easy mark for caricaturists, with his bushy eyebrows, five o’clock shadow and jowls that shook when he delivered an oration. Washington Post cartoonist Herblock delighted in drawing Nixon emerging from a sewer; comedians parodied his habit of over-dramatizing every development on the horizon, and critics kept alive the unshakable appellation Tricky Dick .

Although he had been vice president for eight years, Nixon, as President, was in spirit still an outsider. He surrounded himself with young aides who had little political experience and boundless personal loyalty. They shared Nixon’s perception of patriotism, revulsion about long-haired anti-war demonstrators and contempt for officials who leaked stories to the press.

The Watergate story that unfolded before Congress and in courtrooms in 1973 was not just the tale of an inept attempt to burglarize the political opposition, but the story of Richard Nixon. No one ever in American politics had ever traveled such peaks and valleys.

His imprint was upon some of the great events of his time. But less than six years after fighting his way back from oblivion, his Administration was disgraced by burglaries being committed, telephones tapped, political enemies listed for possible retribution--and, in the end, the only resignation of an American President.

In the hours after he announced his resignation, Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House was filled with automobiles, horns honking in celebration.

Watergate had become a national pastime. But once Nixon’s knowledge of the cover-up had become clear, the anger directed at him was deep, deep enough that Gerald R. Ford would lose the presidency two years later because he granted Nixon a blanket pardon.

For nearly 20 years before his death, Nixon waged a last battle to overcome the sorry end of his Presidency.

In some measure, he succeeded.

He assumed the posture of elder statesman, traveling the world and writing on foreign policy. He counseled not only Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, but also Bill Clinton.

And shortly after his death Friday night, the incumbent called him “a statesman who sought to build a structure of peace.”

True.

But he will always be the first President forced to resign from office, named as an unindicted participant in a criminal conspiracy.

And he will always be an enigma. He was, Henry A. Kissinger wrote, “a strange mixture of calculation, deviousness, idealism, tenderness, tawdriness, courage and daring,” a man who wanted in the end to be remembered for his idealism.