Nixon knows best

Richard Nixon continues to fascinate and repel us. On the 35th anniversary of Watergate, is it time to stop kicking Dick around and reconsider his accomplishments?

By Allen Barra

Read more: Books, Richard Nixon, Allen Barra, Watergate, Biographies, Books Features

June 15, 2007 | Like some third-world conflict that flares up just when you thought everything was settled, Richard Nixon is back again. Played by Frank Langella in a Tony Award-winning performance (opposite Michael Sheehan's David Frost) in Peter Morgan's "Frost/Nixon," he's the toast of Broadway. And just in time to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, bookshelves are inundated with Nixon lit.

For the uninitiated, Elizabeth Drew's "Richard M. Nixon" provides the only outline of his life and career currently in print. The book doesn't have much else to recommend it; at just 147 pages, it seems rushed, as if it was phoned in or culled from old essays. Drew doesn't much like Nixon, which puts her in step with most journalists who knew him, but unfortunately she also seems uninterested in him. Having established that Nixon was a "pragmatist" -- Drew seems to spit the word out, as if it were unclean -- and that he had "no guiding philosophy," she settles down to systematically write off every achievement of Nixon's administration, ascribing them to luck, clever aides and a Democratic Congress (Nixon apparently being the only president who ever had all three).

Much more fun is James Reston Jr.'s "The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Stories of the Frost/Nixon Interviews," which plunges us right into the unholy mind of the most disgraced president -- though, to be fair, we should say the most disgraced president yet -- in U.S. history. Reston was already a veteran researcher of two Nixon books before being asked by David Frost, the popular English TV interviewer, to build a research team for the 1977 televised interviews (on which the Broadway play is based). "This bout of heavyweights," writes Reston, "remains the most watched public affairs program in the history of television," with more than 48 million Americans tuning in for "the only trial over Watergate that Nixon would ever endure."

In a portion of the White House transcripts reprinted in Reston's "The Conviction of Richard Nixon," the beleaguered president cries out rhetorically to his flunky, Charles Colson: "Here we've done great things. We've got greater things to do, and they're talking about this goddamned Watergate." The remark seems almost prescient, as if Nixon somehow knew that everything he had ever done would heretofore be pushed into the background by the impending scandal. It almost sounds like a plea to the next generation of historians to remember him for something besides Watergate.

As if in reply, three other recent books on Nixon argue that other aspects of his career, both good and bad, are worth remembering. Jules Witcover's "Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew" plugs a gap in our understanding of one of the minor mysteries of post-World War II presidential politics: namely why Nixon would have chosen a nonentity like Spiro Agnew for his vice presidency in 1968. Agnew, more right wing than Nixon himself, was an ideological attack dog who could do much of the public barking that Nixon himself no longer had the time and inclination for -- in the witty words of the late senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, referring to Nixon's role as Dwight Eisenhower's redbaiting V.P., Agnew became "Nixon's Nixon." As it turned out, Nixon didn't like his Nixon any more than Eisenhower had liked his, and, in Witcover's judgment, "was guilty not only of this original choice of Agnew but also in then denying him as vice president entry into the inner circle" -- exactly the way Ike had treated Nixon.

However obnoxious Agnew was and however revealing of Nixon's character his treatment of his vice president may be, Spiro was small potatoes in Nixon's presidency. Robert Dallek's "Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power" is the best book yet on what the author terms, without hyperbole, "one of or possibly the most significant White House collaboration in U.S. history." Nixon, as bigoted a man as any who ever occupied the White House, didn't like his Jewish secretary of state any more than he did Agnew, but thanks, perhaps, to the pragmatism Elizabeth Drew sniffs at, Nixon understood, as presidents before and after him have not, the importance of having a man who was smarter than he for an advisor. Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's spectacular successes with China and in thawing the Cold War provide "some constructive lessons for the present and the future on the making of foreign policy." Their notable failures in expanding and prolonging the war in Southeast Asia and their blind eye to the growing problems in Central Asia also stand "as a cautionary tale that the country forgets at its peril."

Margaret MacMillan has picked the juiciest Nixon subject of all in "Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World." She details Nixon's 1972 trip to China and meeting with Mao Tse-tung, which, at 98 percent, registered the highest public awareness of any event in the history of Gallup polls. The story of the most important political meeting since World War II makes for fascinating reading, particularly in light of China's emergence as a 21st century economic superpower. MacMillan puts Nixon's political shrewdness in bas-relief, contrasting it to ideology of his contemporary conservative critics. Pat Buchanan was so furious over what he perceived as the selling out of Taiwan that he threatened to resign from the White House staff (he didn't). William F. Buckley Jr., who went along on the trip, condemned Nixon and went on to throw his support to an obscure Ohio congressman named John Ashbrook, who was trying to block Nixon's reelection.

Neither Buchanan nor Buckley -- nor, for that matter, few other Americans of the right or left besides Kissinger -- understood as Nixon did that the first steps toward ending the Cold War had been taken. The American right, had it been completely honest, would have awarded him at least half the credit for bringing down the evil empire that they today give to Ronald Reagan.

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