Nixon’s Final Campaign
By MICHAEL NELSON
Richard Nixon ran more campaigns for national office than any other American except Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he tied. In the six presidential elections from 1952 to 1972, Nixon was on the ballot five times, as the Republican nominee for either vice president (1952 and 1956) or president (1960, 1968, 1972). He was elected twice as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s running mate and twice as the head of the ticket, losing only to John F. Kennedy, in 1960. Another of Nixon’s national political campaigns, his battle to hold on to the presidency during the Watergate crisis, ended in a second defeat. He resigned in August 1974 in the face of certain impeachment and removal.
But what of Nixon’s final campaign, the one he waged from 1974 until his death, 20 years later, to be remembered as a statesman and foreign-policy maestro rather than as a crook and subverter of constitutional democracy? All of Nixon’s earlier campaigns had clear outcomes: He either won the office he sought or lost it. A recent flurry of Nixon books and a smash London and Broadway play about his famous post-presidential interviews with the British television-talk-show impresario David Frost indicate that the returns from Nixon’s last campaign are still coming in. And the outcome may remain too close to call for quite some time.
The play, Frost/Nixon, dramatizes the first major battle over Nixon’s reputation between the former president and his critics: the lengthy televised interviews with Frost in 1977. Frost paid Nixon $600,000 for the privilege of questioning him on camera for more than 28 hours, resulting in four 90-minute programs. In their session on Watergate, the last to be taped but the first to be aired, Frost drove a visibly shaken Nixon to admit that he had “let down the country,” “did abuse the power I had as president,” and “said things that were not true.” Most memorably, Nixon mourned, “I brought myself down. I gave them a sword, and they stuck it in. And they twisted it with relish.”
The interviews were seen at the time as a clear defeat for Nixon. As David Greenberg shows in Nixon’s Shadow, “Far from changing minds, Nixon’s victim pose elicited mostly scorn.” A Newsweek poll showed that considerably more people lowered their opinion of Nixon after watching the interviews than raised it. In 1982 the first survey of historians to be conducted after the interviews ranked Nixon in the lowest category of presidents, ahead of only Warren G. Harding and Ulysses S. Grant and behind James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson.
The Conviction of Richard Nixon, James Reston Jr.’s contemporaneously written but only recently published account of his work 30 years ago as a researcher for Frost, shows how hard fought Nixon’s Watergate concessions were. Until nearly the end of the 12 days of interviews, Nixon successfully dodged, weaved, and filibustered Frost’s questions on subjects he didn’t like while discoursing impressively whenever Frost asked about foreign policy or other topics on which he felt at ease.
Meanwhile, between bouts of fuming at Frost for his weak questioning and docile listening, Reston dug deeply into the available Watergate tapes and found a previously neglected June 20, 1972, conversation between Nixon and his chief political staffer, Charles Colson, that seemed to place the president in the Watergate cover-up three days earlier than did the more familiar June 23 recording, which Nixon had come primed to discuss. (That’s the one in which Nixon suggested that aides ask the CIA to divert the FBI from its Watergate investigation on dubious national-security ground.) Frost did his homework, surprised Nixon on camera with the new transcript, and successfully badgered him into what remains the closest thing to a confession he ever made. “He was firmly skewered,” Reston writes. “His face showed it. His gibberish confirmed it. … After the interviews a role for him as an American plenipotentiary seemed highly unlikely. He died in 1994, with this last dream unfulfilled.”
But were the Frost interviews the stake in the heart that Reston claims? In hindsight, argues Conrad Black in The Invincible Quest, the interviews were actually the forum in which Nixon was allowed to lay claim to the limited zone of culpability Nixon called it “horrendous mistakes unworthy of a president,” which Black notes is somewhere “between mere mistakes and a crime” whose boundaries he would defend for the rest of his life. The interviews also allowed Nixon to show the full sweep of his mastery of foreign affairs, so much so, Reston reports, that technicians on the film crew, “bored as they were by the fineries of foreign policy,” said they “might even consider voting for Nixon again if they had the chance.”
Arguably the main contribution the Frost interviews made to Nixon’s redemption was the predicate they laid for Frost/Nixon. I have not seen the play, and I am eager to find what the director, Ron Howard, makes of it in the film version he plans to release in early fall 2008. But I have read the playwright Peter Morgan’s script and confirmed the judgment of most leading theater writers that, as Ginia Bellafante observed in The New York Times, “so committed is the play to the idea of Nixon’s likeability that it may be one of the great victories of Nixon revisionism.”
The Nixon of Frost/Nixon is strange, to be sure. Attempting small talk, he asks Frost, “Did you do any fornicating?,” and throughout the play he gazes enviously at Frost’s hand-tooled Italian loafers. (The former actually happened; the latter is Morgan’s invention.) But Morgan also puts words of, well, wisdom in Nixon’s mouth. “Never retire, Mr. Lazar,” Nixon tells the book agent Swifty Lazar in his first long speech of the play. “To me the unhappiest people in the world are those in the watering places, South of France, Palm Springs, Newport … going to parties every night, playing golf every afternoon, then drinking too much, talking too much, thinking too little, retired no purpose. What makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle. The struggle. Even if you don’t win it.”
Nixon’s odd attractiveness in Frost/Nixon should come as no surprise. All of Morgan’s recent scripts notably The Queen, about Elizabeth II in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, in 1997, and The Last King of Scotland, about the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin have portrayed their historical protagonists as more complex and substantial than their prevailing public images. The choice of accomplished and appealing actors for these roles has helped to win a measure of audience sympathy for their characters: Frank Langella as Nixon, Helen Mirren as the queen, and Forest Whitaker as Amin.
One reason the Frost interviews have been so important in helping to fix Nixon’s place in history is that until recently the records of his presidency were locked in escrow. That was the result of yet another Nixon campaign: to keep his administration’s secrets for as long as possible. Now that most of them are available, though, what the historian Robert Dallek rightly labels “a striking irony” has become apparent. The combination of 2,800 hours of previously secret White House tape recordings and 20,000 pages of transcribed telephone calls (in addition to all those papers) makes the Nixon administration “more transparent than any before or since.”
Dallek is a self-proessed document maven, so much so that he told The New York Times that he chooses which presidents to write about based partly on which new collections of documents have recently been opened for inspection. Over the years, this approach has served him well. His biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy are solid, if somewhat ploddingly written, and each is marked by fresh revelations. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, for example, famously revealed the wacky drug cocktails that Kennedy took as president to deal with his terrible health problems.
Dallek’s new book, Nixon and Kissinger, is very much in the three-documents-and-a-cloud-of-dust tradition. It is a dual biography of the president and his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, which focuses on the major foreign-policy decisions that Nixon, advised by Kissinger and almost no one else, made from 1969 to 1974. Dallek describes himself as a “Franklin Roosevelt Democrat,” so it’s no surprise which of those decisions he thinks were good (the opening to China, détente with the Soviet Union) and which he thinks were bad (the slow disengagement from Vietnam, the overthrow of the socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende, the tilt toward Pakistan in its war with India). Dallek does find it remarkable, given the wild insecurities and hatreds that plagued both Nixon and Kissinger and often poisoned their working relationship, that so many of those decisions were good ones.
What’s lacking in Nixon and Kissinger is, well, anything we didn’t already know from lots of other Nixon books. Those were written with fewer documents, but enough, apparently (along with interviews, the public record, and the insights of careful Nixon watchers), to tell us as much about him as Dallek does. Stephen Ambrose and Richard Reeves on Nixon, Walter Isaacson and Jeremi Suri on Kissinger, and Larry Berman on the two men’s relationship are among the many who have plowed that field, and it’s not clear what Dallek adds to their labors other than a few more illustrative quotations.
In trying to make sense of Nixon, Dallek seems to follow Reeves’s 2001 book, President Nixon: Alone in the White House, in arguing that Nixon was mainly motivated by his twin desires to win elections and do great things in foreign policy. But it’s not evident that Dallek understands what Reeves understood: Nixon wanted to win elections in order to do great things in foreign policy. Dallek also puzzles, as Reeves did, about why so flawed an individual as Nixon chose politics as his vocation, but it’s Reeves who figured out that Nixon saw politics as the arena in which, through great deeds, he could become a better person than he knew himself to be by nature. “Each day a chance to do something memorable for someone,” Nixon wrote on one of many Reeves-quoted lists he drew up for himself as president. “Need to be good to do good. Need for joy, serenity, confidence, inspirational. Goals: Set example, inspire, instill pride.”
Perhaps to compensate for the absence of document-generated revelations or insights in his book, Dallek sometimes inserts offhand claims that take him recklessly beyond the archival record, in which he is, if not interesting, at least secure. For example, more than once he writes that a rapid pullout from Vietnam, far from signaling weakness to the world, as Nixon and Kissinger believed, would have signaled strength. But where’s the evidence or even the argument to support that claim? Does Dallek seriously think that Nixon could have conceded defeat to the Communists in Vietnam without losing the political base that enabled him to pull off his openings to the two major Communist powers?
Elsewhere Dallek asserts (again, more than once) that when Watergate heated up after Nixon had the special prosecutor Archibad Cox fired in the October 20, 1973, “Saturday Night Massacre,” Nixon should have invoked the 25th Amendment, “suspended his authority until his culpability could be determined,” and turned the powers of the presidency over to “Gerald Ford or House Speaker Carl Albert.” But after Spiro Agnew had resigned, Ford wasn’t confirmed as vice president until December, and Albert was a notorious public drunk. Besides, the 25th Amendment deals with presidential disability comas, nervous collapses, recovery from heart attacks, and the like. As its legislative authors made clear when Congress approved the amendment, in 1965, it was never meant to supplant the impeachment process.
Conrad Black’s The Invincible Quest is also full of opinions about Nixon, most of them upbeat, but then Black doesn’t make much pretense of offering anything else. His relentlessly chronological biography reads like an annotated timeline of Nixon’s life drawn from other Nixon biographies, a thick file of clips, an occasional document, and some late-in-life conversations with Nixon, whom he grew to like immensely. This goes on for 1,152 pages. Sounds awful, doesn’t it?
Except it isn’t. Two qualities redeem The Invincible Quest. One is the verve, style, wit, and vibrancy of Black’s running commentary on the people and events who populate the book; he’s the drink-in-hand raconteur who never stops talking but somehow never bores. The other is his opinions, which are so unpredictable and interesting.
Black’s forte is the extended riff, but here are some of his pithier comments on various public figures:
“Ronald Reagan was much disparaged as an ex-actor, as if that were an undignified occupation, especially in starstruck America.”
Hubert Humphrey “was a good man, a sincere liberal, but more dated and caricaturable in his yokel’s enthusiasm than Nixon.”
In his relations with the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, “Nixon was in the classic position of the national leader who feared his own police minister, like Napoleon and Fouché and Khrushchev and Beria.”
John Connally “was the sort of tall, firm-voiced, confident person who always impressed Nixon, provided he actually knew what he was talking about and was not just a blowhard.”
Henry Kissinger “has always been an inexhaustible storehouse of nasty opinions about almost everyone … no matter how congenial he is with the individuals when he sees them.”
Nixon’s party on the China trip “had hardly got to the end of Mao’s long driveway before they began the reinterpretation of their host’s anodyne, geriatric remarks into Confucian proverbs virtually written on giant tablets of the rarest marble. … This self-important, affected, aphoristic style took like measles among the Americans.”
As for Nixon himself, he “thought that he was doomed to be traduced, double-crossed, unjustly harassed, misunderstood, underappreciated, and subjected to the trials of Job, but that by the application of his mighty will, tenacity, and diligence he would ultimately prevail.”
Well, does Nixon seem likely to prevail in his final campaign, the one for historical vindication? Certainly he played his post-presidential hand skillfully, starting with the Frost interviews. For 20 years after he resigned, Nixon avoided partisan politics and controversial domestic issues, made foreign trips and wrote well-received books about foreign policy, and confidentially advised presidents who consulted him on world affairs. Bill Clinton was especially smitten, and, at Nixon’s funeral attended by all five living presidents spoke the words Nixon would most havewanted the world to hear: “May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”
Historians still rank Nixon low among presidents, although scholars in a 2000 Wall Street Journal survey lifted him from the “Failure” category into the lower range of the “Below Average,” enabling him to surpass Buchanan, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, and Franklin Pierce. Black’s generally pro-Nixon book isn’t selling nearly as well as Dallek’s generally critical one, and reviewers have been kinder to Dallek than to Black.
Outside the academy, however, Nixon’s prospects are much better. In a key indicator of changing public opinion about the former president, over the years voters have gone from disapproving Ford’s pardon of Nixon by two to one to approving it in the same proportion. College students, I find, accept what Ambrose has called the Nixon-inspired “impression that the only thing he and his administration had done wrong was Watergate.” What’s more, students tend to regard Watergate as politics as usual. That’s no surprise: The news media’s reflexive use of “gate” as the suffix attached to every small scandal has made the original seem small, too. And Nixon’s ability to win campaigns never depended on carrying the faculty vote.
Michael Nelson is a professor of political science at Rhodes College. He is author, with John Mason, of How the South Joined the Gambling Nation: The Politics of State Policy Innovation (Louisiana State University Press, 2007) and, with Sidney Milkis, The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-2007 (CQ Press, 2007).