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A dozen years after his passing, the fact that Richard Nixon re-mains a subject of fascination on at least four of the world’s continents should surprise no one. He spent nearly half a century at or near center stage in the international arena. He was a participant in great battles involving domestic and foreign security, race and politics, the law of the jungle, and the rule of law. Five times he was nominated by his party for national office; four times he won. His greatest electoral triumph gave birth to his most ignominious defeat and disgrace as he became the first and thus far the only president forced from office by his own misconduct. Foes seemed to regard his fall as the personification of Divine Justice. Even those who remained personally loyal came to see two Nixons: one detached, analytical, a student of greatness striving to achieve peace in his time; the other, dark, coarse, vindictive, conspiratorial, a refugee from the pages of Greek tragedy, doomed to self-destruction by fatal character flaws.
Nixon can be reconsidered, even reevaluated, but he can’t be reinvented. His presidency was destroyed by his own criminality, dishonesty, and ineptitude, and the country suffered through a “long national nightmare.” It deserved better, much better. Still, this is a good time to consider his record as a whole. His supporters urge that the record is impressive. Pat Buchanan, his “conservative” speechwriter, calls Nixon the second-best politician of the century, claiming that he broke apart the New Deal coalition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Buchanan’s number one), a realignment that dominated five out of six presidential elections and eventually recaptured the Congress. Ray Price, the former New York Herald Tribune editorial writer who became Nixon’s “moderate” speechwriter, is another who places Nixon in the front rank of presidents. “Eventually, Nixon will be ranked among the better—maybe the best—of the presidents,” he argues. “But not until the evaluations are made by people with no vested interest in Nixon as evil.” It is Price’s view that those who feverishly prosecuted Nixon for Watergate ought to have relented, thereby allowing him to conclude what would have been a second term of awesome accomplishment.
Perhaps politics is the best place to begin. During Barry Goldwater’s heyday as the choice of conservative Republicans, the historian James MacGregor Burns wrote a column suggesting that Goldwater was truly radical because he sought to change the United States from a four-party to a two-party state. In seeking to break up the historic coalition between liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans, on the one hand, and conservative southern Democrats and conservative Republicans, on the other, Goldwater, Burns argued, wanted to leave the country with only two parties: one liberal and Democratic, the other conservative and Republican. Goldwater’s response to such analysis was simply to say that he was seeking votes in the South because “you’re supposed to hunt where the ducks are.” Four years after Goldwater’s 1964 debacle, Nixon nearly lost to Humphrey because the third-party candidate, George Wallace, drew so heavily in the South. Nixon’s insight was that the South could be won by Republicans without playing the race card but instead by emphasizing the conservative, family-oriented, pro-law-and-order values northern Republicans had in common with white southern Democrats. The key was to work with the South on racial issues rather than seeking to disgrace Dixie and to support voting rights for all, thereby allowing blacks to flood into the Democratic Party across the South, accelerating the movement of conservative whites to the Republicans.
Buchanan notes that winning the South was not enough. Republicans in the North had to play the law-and-order card as well as other social issues in order to capture the white ethnic vote—those who, for example, supported Democratic mayors such as Chicago’s Richard Daley and Philadelphia’s Frank Rizzo. These constituencies were willing to accept an end to de jure segregation but rejected social experimentation, such as the busing of students to achieve numerical racial balance. They were more concerned about having their police drive criminals from the streets of their cities than they were about observing every conceivable procedural nicety imposed by the courts for the protection of suspected felons. They might have had some problems with the war in Vietnam, but they went into service when drafted. Often they volunteered. They had no patience for draft card destroyers, flag burners, and those who emigrated to Canada to beat the draft—let alone those like the Weathermen and Black Panthers who practiced violence to stop the war or achieve racial goals. Nixon recognized these people as the “great silent majority.” He played to their opposition to lenient judges by pledging to appoint “strict constructionists” to the bench. He assured the South that its voice would be heard. Long before he took his first position on civil rights as president, Nixon’s commitment to fairness under the law was said to be a casualty of his so-called “Southern Strategy.”
Nixon’s actual record on civil rights was far more progressive than his critics acknowledged. Early on he said that the approach of his administration would be to enforce court decrees in the civil rights area, rather than relying on his cabinet departments. But he was good to his word. When the Supreme Court decided Holmes v. Alexander, replacing the period of “all deliberate speed” with an “integrate now” command, Nixon, his vice president, Spiro Agnew, and, most notably, his extremely able secretary of labor, George Shultz, formed biracial committees of outstanding citizens in the affected states in order to ensure that the edict would be obeyed with minimal disturbance.
Nixon also supported extending the Voting Rights Act of 1965, described by many as the most important piece of civil rights legislation ever passed. He also advocated its extension to northern communities that met the act’s low turnout criteria. As applied, the approach produced more elected blacks but fewer elected Democrats, particularly in the House of Representatives. Nixon harbored doubts about the innate abilities of African Americans to compete economically with whites. But by conviction, he was opposed to denying them that chance. His commitment to economic opportunity for minorities took many forms: automobile makers and other franchise industry leaders were urged to dispense more dealerships or outlets to minority businessmen. In the craft unions, many of which had been totally segregated, unions were compelled to adopt target numbers in order to bring blacks into parity with their numbers in the qualified population. That approach was tried first among Philadelphia craft unions, earning its place in history as the “Philadelphia Plan.” The Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC) also leaned on federal contractors to establish specific targets for the employment of black workers.
Nixon was also the first president to establish minority set-aside programs in the area of government contracts. Over time, these programs became mechanically administered and ran afoul of the Supreme Court. But in their day, thousands of minority contractors gained their first piece of federal action. And he supported giving teeth to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which wrestled with cases of individual employment discrimination by backing judicial enforcement of its decrees.
With the help of his “closet Democrat,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nixon introduced the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), which essentially guaranteed a family of four an income of at least $1,600 per year. The plan, which also included welfare reform, was considered a beacon in its time. But representatives of the poor savaged the plan, in part to deny Nixon the luster of having achieved it and in part because they thought they might do better in some future administration. They’re still waiting.
Nixon received little credit in his day for his backing of civil rights, and it is only recently that analysts such as Dean J. Kotlowski, whose book Nixon’s Civil Rights offers a highly objective assessment of the Nixon record, are taking a second look. There are several reasons for this.
First, Nixon’s was a nuanced program geared toward achieving an end to de jure segregation rather than forcing new kinds of experimental integration, such as mandatory busing or site selection policies designed to force minorities into predominantly white communities.
Second, Nixon’s commitment to naming southern strict constructionists to the Supreme Court, as well as his support for tough new anticrime legislation, earned the distrust of minorities, who felt that in a crunch they would be abandoned to the president’s “Southern Strategy.” Nixon refused to demonize the South. His long-range objective was political—to bring it into the Republican Party purged of racism but not of conservatism.
Third, in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death, the civil rights movement fractured between old liberals, such as Roy Wilkins, and radical new activists, such as Stokely Carmichael. The result was a division between black political leaders who saw their future organically linked to the Democratic Party and radicals who cared nothing for traditional political coalition building and sought instead to do their own racial thing. Both constituencies were hostile to Nixon-style republicanism. The leadership of the African-American community clearly saw its future as being linked to the Democratic Party. Franklin D. Roosevelt may have cracked the marriage between blacks and GOP dating back to the Reconstruction era, but it was not until the Nixon era that African Americans’ support for the GOP bottomed out at under 10 percent. Evidence of Nixon’s own personal bigotries has come to light over the years, particularly some of his more sordid anti-Semitic cracks. For a man whose immediate political family included the likes of William Safire, Henry Kissinger, Arthur Burns, Leonard Garment, and others, this has caused much embarrassment. “Nixon was not anti-Semitic,” Ray Price insists. “But he did bitterly resent the almost universal antipathy Jews had for him.”
An interesting exception that I noted time and again during the course of our interviews involved the people of Israel. Nixon would take almost any occasion to speak of their brilliance, their toughness, and their commitment with undisguised esteem. And when he recited accounts of policy disagreements, he left no doubt in my mind that he was as concerned with the best long-run interests of the Israelis as with the geopolitical dilemmas of his own government. In a sense, Nixon’s feelings about Israel were as revealing as his obvious reverence for the Chinese leaders. For if the Chinese patriarchs had exhibited in their personal lives the ability to struggle, to fight, to lose, to come back, to fight again, to triumph over adversity, and to continue to struggle even after reaching the top, Israel’s character as a nation was also rich in the sort of symbolism that Richard Nixon appreciated and revered.
No Harris Poll would show the Israelis unwilling to fight, and Nixon knew that no bearded, unkempt Israeli protestors would storm the Knesset urging peace at any price. The Israeli people did not seek haven as exiles when their country was in peril. Rather, they struggled to return home, to take up arms, to join the battle as citizen-soldiers.
Israeli leaders were not forced to seek fig leaves, they sought victory. Israeli victories were swift and certain, not agonizing and ambiguous. When Israel fought, there was no discussion of dominos. There was only one domino the Israelis cared about, and they knew it would fall the first time they lost a war.
Israel was smart and tough, two qualities that, when combined by Nixon, constituted the ultimate compliment he could bestow upon a nation or an individual. Israel would never be a superpower like the United States, but it would never be a pitiful helpless giant either.
Nixon’s presidency saw major increases in the rights of women and came within one state legislature of adopting the Equal Rights Amendment, but Nixon’s emotional and political involvement in the women’s movement was negligible.
By contrast, Nixon’s commitment to Native Americans’ rights was perhaps the greatest of any president in history. He settled major land claims with the Taos Pueblo, the Yakama, and Alaska’s native peoples; he ended talk of termination of the reservations; he reformed the archaic Bureau of Indian Affairs; and most Native Americans recognized that he was no “assimilationist,” having been a process they equated with genocide.
For a man who barely mentioned the environment in his entire political life, Nixon is credited by many environmentalists as having had the best record of any administration in history. “He didn’t start anything, but he let it all just happen,” recently explained Douglas Starr, a specialist in environmental reporting affiliated with Boston University, “and what happened was the greatest proliferation of environmental legislation ever.” Three factors contributed to the explosion of interest in environmental matters during the mid-to late 1960s: first, Rachel Carson’s seminal book about pesticide pollution, Silent Spring; second, the 1968 oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel; and third, Nixon’s appointment of Governor Walter J. Hickel of Alaska as secretary of the interior at a moment when Hickel’s biggest task would be to go thumbs-up or-down on construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, a project many people feared would do irrevocable damage to the fragile Alaskan tundra or, worse yet, produce a devastating oil spill off the coast of Valdez, the proposed terminus.
Hickel presented a soft target. As an Alaskan office holder, he had never met a restriction on land use he could support, nor did he care much for isolated natural treasures. “A tree looking at a tree does nothing,” he was fond of saying. Were there but a single tree in all of Alaska, environmentalists responded, Hickel would construct a sawmill on the site. Fortunately for their cause, the environmentalists decided to use Hickel’s confirmation hearing as an educational forum for the dissemination of their concerns, rather than as a means of mobilizing support for his rejection. Nixon responded in kind, appointing the noted environmentalist Russell Train as Hickel’s deputy and, shortly thereafter, forming the Council on Environmental Quality to dispense good advice to the president and his administration. Before his first term ended, Nixon would see the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and passage of historic clean air and clean water acts. “He wasn’t mad about the environment,” confessed his aide Ken Khachigian years later. “Nor did he care all that much about many domestic matters. His approach at the time was to give these people what they wanted in the hope that they would provide him with the support he needed to fight the war in Vietnam the way he knew it had to be fought in order to win.”
Nixon’s “new federalism” is portrayed by his supporters as an indication that his domestic views were not nearly as casual as critics maintained. True foreign issues were infinitely more important to him. But he was no less ahead of his time in calling for a return to the states of revenue sources then hoarded by the federal government along with the responsibility for spending the money wisely. More often than not the decision regarding expenditures belongs to those closest to the citizens. The problem with going very far in this analytical direction is that Nixon himself did not go very far with his new federalism. Concerned about creeping inflation, higher unemployment, and the growing general sense of malaise about the economy, Nixon elected to take the easy shot provided by Democrats and to impose wage and price controls after Congress passed legislation giving him the power to do so. Under Nixon, who imposed the controls essentially to distract attention from society’s economic problems, the new federalism never had a real test.
Nixon did get to tinker with the Supreme Court of the United States. He appointed a total of four justices, more than any president save Franklin Roosevelt, who had problems of his own with the Court he inherited.
Nixon’s first appointment, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, proved to be a man of central casting looks but also of marginal intellectual and administrative talents. Harry Blackmun evolved into a dependable liberal during his years on the bench. William Rehnquist proved as able as he was conservative, while Lewis F. Powell, regarded as a somewhat aloof patrician at the time of his appointment, proved to be one of the most effective and influential members of the Court. Of course, two Nixon nominees—Clement F. Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell—failed to survive the nominating process. After berating the Senate for its anti-South bias following its rejection of Carswell, Mr. Nixon was forced to concede in our interviews that the appointment of the Florida mediocrity had been a mistake.
During and after the Nixon presidency, the Court, boasting up to four of his justices, attempted to abolish capital punishment, decreed that abortion came down to a woman’s personal choice, permitted state universities to consider race a “plus factor” or “tiebreaker” in admission decisions, upheld the right of war dissenters to burn American flags, and in a unanimous decision told Mr. Nixon he must produce the Watergate tapes and other documentary evidence subpoenaed by the Office of the Special Prosecutor.
At the same time, while repealing none of the criminal decisions so hated by Nixon constituents, the Court clearly gave police and prosecutors some flexibility where search or arrest procedures had not been strictly adhered to or had not directly affected the outcome of the case.
Ironically, future generations may find the Court’s decision in United States v. Nixon to be the most significant and far-lived “contribution” of the Nixon presidency. Decisions that deal with the allocation of power among the three branches of government often maintain their relevance over the centuries. Most constitutional scholars today can offer a lucid analysis of Marbury v. Madison (1803) or the 1819 case of McCulloch v. Maryland, but hardly any other decision from that time. In the same vein, United States v. Nixon’s role in limiting the scope of executive privilege may be on the lips of future constitutional scholars long after Roe v. Wade and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke are long-forgotten.
If United States v. Nixon will, through Nixon’s own miscalculations, survive as his most enduring legacy, what about other decisions that seemed so important during his presidency or in the years immediately thereafter? Let us consider a few of the major candidates.
First, the new Republican Party.
I have discussed this new political alignment above, as well as Nixon’s role in it. Nixon was among the most sophisticated politicians ever to seek higher office in the United States, and clearly he discerned the elements of what Kevin Phillips called “the emerging Republican majority.” Nixon did what he could to encourage the process and speed it along. Clearly, he succeeded. But his contribution to what I believe was an inevitable process consisted of little more than saying some nice things about the South, holding hands with southern districts ordered to desegregate, and seeking to appoint a few southern judges to the U.S. Supreme Court. Yes, he also went after northern white ethnic voters, and yes, in 1972 and 1984 they voted Republican in mammoth numbers. But again, I think the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the catalytic ingredient in realigning constituencies from four essential voting blocks into two. During the post-1965 period, the Sam Ervins, Senator Richard Russells, and the John Stennises were cast from the scene, to be replaced by the Jesse Helmses, the Bo Callaways, and the Trent Lotts. At the same time, northern liberal Republicans such as Jacob Javits, Hugh Scott, and Clifford Case were also disappearing. Nixon, for the most part, simply rode the crest of events. Nixon’s courtship of the northern white ethnic vote is more impressive. With his tough anticrime stance, his appeals to patriotic values, his assaults on the media and other bastions of liberalism, Nixon put into play the political loyalties of hard hats and social conservatives, war veterans and police officers as had no other national Republican candidate in memory. That the opposition was dominated by the George McGovern left made that tactic even more successful. Nowhere was this reaching out more evident, the attempt to form an organic bond more clear, than in Mr. Nixon’s “Silent Majority” address:
Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the force of totalitarianism.
And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow
Americans—I ask for your support…
Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.
After the passage of thirty-eight years since that address, the audience of former rock-solid Democrats is still one of the prized swing voter populations in U.S. politics, a true Nixon legacy, later afforded tender loving care by Ronald Reagan.
Second, détente with the Soviet Union.
This Nixon-Kissinger special barely outlived the 1972 trip organized to celebrate it. Ushered in at a time of manifest U.S. weakness in Vietnam, it was treated as a policy devised by accommodationists willing to live as the second-ranked power. The problem was compounded by widespread dissatisfaction with the arms control agreements themselves, outrage regarding the USSR’s treatment of its dissidents and refuseniks, and the perception that the Russians had violated the very heart of the new arrangement by backing the Egyptian and Syrian Yom Kippur attacks against Israel and behaving even worse when Israel struck back successfully. Over the subsequent decade, détente was seen as a roadblock to successful U.S. action in either stemming Soviet acts of aggression or taking advantage of opportunities to hasten the demise of the brutal Communist system. Today, détente has no fathers, not Henry Kissinger, not Brent Scowcroft, not Dimitri Simes. It is a political orphan.
Third, the ABM Treaty.
This, together with SALT I, was a genuinely important achievement that preserved the ability of each superpower to deter the other from striking first in a crisis. Nixon was right, at the time the agreement was signed, in noting the folly of any power that would strike first, knowing that it could itself be destroyed by a retaliatory strike. But those who hated any deal implying acceptance of the permanence of the Soviet Union hit the ABM Treaty and accompanying restrictions on offensive missile launchers as a principal culprit of U.S. inferiority. The numbers were uneven, they declared. The deal could not prevent the Soviets from achieving a nuclear war–fighting capability. The United States was giving up a promising area—antimissile defensive systems—in which it had a clear technological advantage. Failing to deploy systems that could intercept nuclear weapons headed for one’s population centers when the ability existed to do so was an act of total immorality. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, even Nixon had joined the camp of his opponents and was marching in the parade for defensive missile deployments. On the grounds that a man should not prosper by disowning the very program he was most proud of, I would strike the ABM Treaty and accompanying limits on offensive missile launchers as being of marginal international consequence.
Fourth, Vietnam.
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger nearly pulled off a military and diplomatic miracle in Vietnam but wound up with nothing to show for it except Kissinger’s Nobel Prize for negotiating a peace that died in its infancy. Those who criticized Nixon’s handling of the war, his rallying domestic support against antiwar forces, and his occasional military surprises such as the incursions into Cambodia and Laos should have been more charitable at the time. He inherited a horrendous mess. He tried to end it by simultaneously using all three of the tools available to him: negotiation, linkage to steps he was taking with North Vietnam’s Russian and Chinese allies, and unilateral withdrawal. Had they been attempted in succession, all would have failed miserably. That they were done simultaneously provided the two statesmen with at least a “Hail Mary” chance of success. Was it to be? No, because unilateral withdrawal or “Vietnamization” let the North Vietnamese know that it was not necessary to negotiate in order to get the Americans out of South Vietnam. Linkage couldn’t work because both the Soviets and Chinese knew that the United States was far more committed to developing serious relationships with themselves than it was to reaching a satisfactory conclusion in Vietnam. In the end Nixon got the best deal he could but still left his South Vietnamese ally in a precarious position, given that the deal permitted North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in the South to remain in place. During the period of the “imperial presidency,” Nixon and Kissinger might just have gotten a commitment from Congress to enforce the deal. But that was so far from what the Congress of 1973–1975 was willing to commit to that it strains credulity to think that Nixon and Kissinger thought they might pull it off.
Fifth, China.
This was a great step on Nixon’s part, propitiously timed, enthusiastically pursued, professionally executed. There were minefields along the path to normalization—détente with the Soviets, the Taiwan question, a war in Vietnam—but the administration skirted them all. Nixon did not go to China in order to change the society Mao Zedong was about to leave behind, although change it has during the subsequent thirty-five years. Nor did he go there to force consideration of the Taiwan question—that, too, has been successfully finessed over time. He did seek help in Vietnam but understood he could not subordinate other goals to that evasive objective. So he signed a final communiqué, worked out before he arrived, expressing accord on those matters in which the two sides could find agreement and soft-pedaling other areas that, if pushed, could have ruined the entire event.
Nixon’s old friends in the China Lobby did feel betrayed. Chinese political writer Anna Chennault and others spread reports that Nixon had tricked them by making all sorts of promises of support during his campaign if the lobby would publicly oppose Lyndon Johnson’s bombing halt in North Vietnam. Other complications loomed down the road, including the Taiwan question, China’s regional intentions, and perhaps even China’s desire to become the world’s next superpower. There may, in short, come a time when scholars and historians critique Nixon’s China overture as the key that unlocked the door to an era when the United States would be overshadowed by the world’s most populous and fastest-developing nation. But from the admittedly constrained perspective of thirty-five years, Nixon—the one man with the credentials to flip China policy—did a right and profoundly important thing.
Sixth, Watergate.
There is no question with which I have grappled more since my interview with Nixon than that of where Watergate fits into the perspective of history. For purposes of approaching this analysis, I have taken the position that what has not been proved by this time should be considered disproved. Therefore, I take at face value Mr. Nixon’s assertion that he knew nothing in advance of the Watergate break-in and that his essential motivation in directing Haldeman to lean on the CIA in order to block the FBI investigation was undertaken for purposes of minimizing political fallout from the incident. That, of course, does not absolve Mr. Nixon of the crime of obstructing justice. Indeed, given the statutory language involved, it constitutes an admission of guilt.
Watergate is a funny animal. Planting a bug on the phone of your chief political rival is not the worst sin on Earth, though it may well be a felony. The remaining offenses—suborning perjury, paying for the silence of witnesses, firing an honest official during the Saturday Night Massacre—get worse and worse but would probably not get my juices flowing to the extent that Watergate did had not most of the culprits been members of the U.S. government during the Nixon presidency. Honest governments are not that easy to find. Many systems the world over are predicated on the use of power, ballot box stuffing, and fraud. Democracies are different. They operate by the consent of the governed. They stand as a pyramid of good faith, of the honest execution of the law, of a respect for the opinions of one’s fellow citizens. The risk that a less qualified candidate will reach office, that the less qualified party will dominate the legislature, is subordinated to the risk taught by experience again and again that the dangers of authoritarian or totalitarian systems are far more egregious. When elections are dishonest, democracy doesn’t work. When processes are suborned, the system breaks down. When all this is done by people not in the government, it is bad enough. When it is done by subcabinet appointees or even those of cabinet rank, it is even worse. When it is done by the president of the United States, it is a shocking crime, a crime against the system, a crime against its values, a crime against its people. That is what Richard Nixon and his Watergate crimes were all about. What was at stake in the lengthy and diverse Watergate investigation was the question of whether this democracy could purge itself, could restore its institutions to robust health, could restore an increasingly cynical electorate to good citizenry, could restore society’s basic confidence in the institutions created to reflect it.
Though society’s willingness to restore Nixon to elder statesman status was some reflection of its desire to move beyond Watergate, the public cynicism engendered by those crimes seems destined to repeat itself every few years as one “gate” or another—“Lancegate,” “Kore-agate,” “Iraqgate,” “Iran-Contra-gate,” “Monicagate”—commands the public attention. But Watergate was unique.
I don’t believe, after twenty-eight and three quarters hours of interviewing the man, that Richard Nixon or his key defenders ever absorbed that message. Richard Nixon said he let the country down, but my feeling was that he was even more remorseful for letting himself down by getting caught. He might have escaped unscathed by burning the tapes. He could have shut his door and his ears to all that was going on about him. He could have fired all the culprits, including himself, and pardoned them to keep them from going to prison. He could have stalled the process through a battle in the Senate, hoping the numbers would stop accumulating short of the two-thirds majority needed to expel him from office. Instead, “I gave them a sword and they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish, and if I’d been in their position I’d have done the same thing.” A tactical mistake. A game lost. A careless maneuver on the field of battle. A loss instead of a win. Nothing more at issue than the identity of winner and loser; possibly the news should have been carried in the sports section rather than on the front pages.
I truly believe that Richard Nixon went to his grave firmly believing that he was a victim. Not in the sense that he didn’t run afoul of the law or perform the acts necessary to incriminate himself. Rather that he was a victim of a media establishment that hated him, left-wing Democrats still sulking over the outcome of the Jerry Voorhis contest, academics and intellectuals who came to believe Alger Hiss was guilty but who could never forgive Richard Nixon for proving it. Nixon in many ways was a supremely talented man. To praise his analytical skills, his great experience in foreign policy, his empathy for the values of the silent majority is not to simply throw a sop his way. Very few presidents of the past century came close to Nixon’s skills in foreign affairs or his ability to empathize with ordinary people. But to dismiss his crimes by simply noting that the man had a dark side is not quite sufficient. This was a man whose dark side conquered the whole. This was a man with competing tendencies that could not coexist. He is not a man who threatened democratic society in the manner of, say Augusto Pinochet or Hugo Chávez; rather, he threatened it with corrosion from within, with a lack of structural integrity, with destruction of the value system upon which it is grounded.
The pardon by Gerald Ford seemed a relatively small and somewhat technical act. Nixon’s real pardon would have to come from a higher source.