"Is there a villain here?" Richard Nixon

Poor old F Scott Fitzgerald. Not only did he have an unhappy life marred by alcoholism, a destructive marriage, and a lack of appreciation for his genuine literary genius, I looked up his quotation about there being no second lives in American lives to discover people call him, on the basis of that thought, fatuous, asinine and plainly stupid. And this for a line found in notes for a novel that was never finished, let alone published. I hope none of us are so castigated for our unpublished thoughts.

Fitzgerald himself had no second act (or perhaps he did, but it was certainly a downer) but others have. Some people point towards celebrities but in this day of celebrityitus, I say, who gives a toss? If a celebrity can’t recover from a career disaster, it says more about the quality of their publicist than any reflection on the nature of American life. A much more substantial second act, if not a third, was in the career of Richard M Nixon.

Nixon, one of the greatest politicians of the 20^th Century, rose to become Vice President under Eisenhower, before losing the presidential election to everyone’s favourite political Rorschach inkblot, John F Kennedy, retired from politics to come back to claim the presidency in 1968, destroyed his own career through the illegalities and ineptitudes of the Watergate scandal, and then came back again to become a (usually secret and private) advisor to successive presidents on US foreign policy.

Nixon is a challenge to our simplistic 21^st century morality. Although we pride ourselves on seeing the other’s point of view, and resile from imposing our views on others and believe all things are relative, and generally become so understanding and sensitive and open that we create a society that stands for nothing and offers less, we still like to make famous people heroes or villains. People must be either good or bad. If we find one flaw in a person, we must condemn that person utterly. This prevents considering people as complicated beings and considering their actions and statements on their own merits. As the Onion Newspaper t-shirt states, stereotypes are a real time-saver.

And so it is with Richard M Nixon. There are those who want to sum up Nixon as a bad man or a good man, but this is impossible. Nixon did corrode the office of the President of the United States with illegal activities and cover-ups, actions with the potential to destroy the role completely. He was anti-Semitic (yet pro-Israel) and paranoid. But he also was intelligent, with a good analytic mind, a superb politician (no-one gets to the top who isn’t) and a good president, with major and lasting achievements in social justice and foreign policy.  If you don’t believe me, you might want to read Nixon/Frost by David Frost (with Bob Zelnick) his own account of the famous interview now immortalised (again, to be fair to the man) on stage and film. Frost has written of these interviews before and they are available on DVD. The account of the interviews while interesting does not contain, I thought, anything particularly new, but his assessment of Nixon’s presidency and his account of Nixon’s recovery and final years I thought illuminating and quite fair. What does come through is the amount of rigourous research and preparation that Frost and his team of US researchers put in, forcing Nixon to be honest in his responses through their grasp of the material and honest presentation. Like Woodward and Bernstein, success came though sheer hard work.

As Nixon’s career recovered to some degree, there were those who were determined that he should never be forgiven. One book I read, the name of which mercifully escapes me, was ludicrous in emphasising not only whatever Nixon had done wrong, but anything he may have done wrong, and anything he was ever accused of doing wrong, and insisting that was the only basis on which to judge the man and his career. That is as a stupid an approach as to say Watergate was a pretty minor crime (which in itself it was) and therefore was blown way out of proportion, as if the President using government agencies to cover up crimes of his associates is the sort of thing that Presidents, really, should be allowed to get away with. There are cynics who argue that Presidents get away with that sort of thing all the time. The fact remains they should not and US democracy would be in real danger if they did.

I was reminded of the John Howard years and people like David Marr and Philip Adams claiming that free speech was being repressed during his government, through their columns in national and city major dailies, as well on television and radio. Nixon was likewise accused of suppressing the media. His response: ‘[W]ho was repressed? My God, was CBS repressed? Was ABC repressed? The New York Times? The Washington Post? What about the dissenters? Were they repressed?  Were they afraid to speak?” Journalists I suppose like to cast themselves in a heroic light.

One thing I did strangely like about Nixon in this book was his inability or refusal to indulge in self-analysis. He would discuss his actions and the political and other repercussions but any time Frost tried to get him to indulge in a little psychological discussion he would move away. Maybe some self-analysis would have helped him resolve his odd personality, but then we wasn’t about to fall in the modern-day trap of thinking about himself so often that he could not spare much time to think about something else. Nixon was a politician who understood the people a great deal better than he understood himself. For a leader, that’s a good balance.

I’ll let David Frost have the finalish word on Nixon: To many he was a villain, to others a hero, to all an enigma. The excavation of Richard Nixon will no doubt continue well into the new century.

PS: I just found this in the Amazon website, a reader's (very positive) review of Frost's first book on the topic (link above). It's a good warning for us self-appointed experts;  there simply aren't that many people interested in Nixon's first post-resignation interview. Playwrights, movie makers, and millions of audience members would now I think disagree.