Fifty years after Nixon’s resignation, conservatives will only learn the right lessons from him by looking at him in full.
Fifty years after Nixon’s resignation, conservatives will only learn the right lessons from him by looking at him in full.
F ifty years after he resigned the presidency, Richard Nixon is back. At least, some people on the right would like us to believe that he is and that it’s time for conservatives to embrace his legacy wholeheartedly and to reject the stale leftist narratives about Watergate (among other things) that have sullied his reputation.
It is necessary to reject the standard left-wing gloss on Nixon. But doing so hardly absolves Nixon of his sins. From a conservative perspective, there was good to the man and his presidency, but also bad — and ugly. Conservatives will only learn the right lessons from Nixon by looking at all three.
To admit that there might have been anything good at all about Richard Nixon is to set oneself against the guardians of post-war leftism, for whom Nixon was a chief antagonist. That antagonism may have begun in Nixon’s own upbringing. His relative poverty and lack of initial contact with the elite institutions of American life (though he earned a scholarship to Harvard, he attended college in his hometown of Whittier, Calif.) may have helped breed in him a lifelong discomfort with America’s upper echelons.
But the enmity truly began when Nixon established himself as a fervent anti-communist. Questions (fomented by Nixon himself) about his Democratic opponents’ commitment to anti-communism helped Nixon win his first House and Senate races in California. And even more important to Nixon’s rise in national prominence was his involvement in the great national drama over Alger Hiss’s communist past. Former National Review editor Whittaker Chambers, who had known Hiss when they were both communists, took a great personal risk by accusing Hiss (a darling of the day’s establishment) of having been one. Chambers professed immense gratitude toward Nixon and the House Un-American Activities Committee for their work on the Hiss affair. In his memoir Witness, Chambers wrote that “Richard Nixon made the Hiss Case possible.”
Nixon’s winning the presidency, nearly a decade after he had lost it and six years after he had told reporters, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” attests to an undeniable political canniness. And his time in office was characterized by plenty in which conservatives can take pride. He wouldn’t have won without recognizing the appeal of — and need for — law and order in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which he set about attempting to provide as much as a president could. He also at least made overtures to the right. As Matthew Continetti recounts in The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, Nixon corresponded regularly with Russell Kirk and found places in his administration for Milton Friedman, Martin Anderson, and other foes of big government. Even National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. got a U.N. gig. The Nixon years were not entirely fallow for the Right.
If to admit of anything good about Nixon goes against the left-wing consensus, then to admit of anything bad would seem to indulge it. Not so. Nixon gave conservatives plenty to complain about. His relationship with them had been tenuous even before his presidency. In a 1965 column, Robert Novak reported that “Nixon described the Buckleyites as a threat to the Republican Party even more menacing than the Birchers.” (A young Nixon aide named Pat Buchanan was dispatched to keep the peace between Nixon and NR.) In 1968, National Review ultimately endorsed Nixon. But that same year, NR editor and leading fusionist Frank Meyer provided this mixed (and ultimately prophetic) assessment of the man. Calling him an “honorable” anti-communist with an “ambiguous” domestic record, Meyer believed Nixon could be “acceptable” to conservatives “if he can avoid the temptation to which he has succumbed in the past, the temptation of assuming that the conservatives are in his pocket and therefore distorting his position to court the Liberals.”
Some modern conservative defenders portray Nixon as a sworn enemy of the administrative state, a characteristic certainly evidenced by some of his speeches. “An early priority in Nixon’s counterrevolution was to tame the national bureaucracy,” the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo wrote last year. But Nixon expanded the very government apparatus he supposedly sought to contest. As our Andy McCarthy wrote for Law & Liberty, Nixon’s administration “pushed through extensive regulation of the economy, ended the gold standard, created the Occupational Health and Safety Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, passed the Endangered Species Act and expanded the Clean Air Act; increased Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, in addition to establishing Supplemental Security Income for the elderly and disabled.”
One could add other things to this dubious record: Nixon’s imposition of wage and price controls (supposedly to combat inflation), his expansion of affirmative action throughout the federal government, and his failure, in those pre–Federalist Society days, to meaningfully change the direction of the Supreme Court. His presidency did give us William Rehnquist but also Warren Burger, who largely continued the Warren Court’s revolution, and Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade. The man who set himself against “amnesty, abortion, and acid” in 1972 did not make a public statement about Roe. Privately, he worried about the pernicious effects of widespread abortion but thought it might sometimes be necessary, such as “when you have a black and a white, or a rape.”
Nixon’s foreign policy, a harder aspect of his legacy to dismiss outright today, also agitated contemporary conservatives. They bitterly resented the fact that he had “recognized one tyrannical regime” (Communist China, which he promised to visit and then did) “while negotiating an arms-control agreement with another” (the USSR), as Continetti recounts. Buckley, who went on the press delegation to China with Nixon, remarked of Nixon’s perceived accommodationism at the time, “No wonder that they took to toasting, in the People’s Republic of China, with increasing ardor, the health of Richard Nixon.”
Eventually, some conservatives had had enough. In 1971, Buckley and a group of other conservative leaders issued the Manhattan Declaration, in which they formally suspended their support for Nixon on account of his various transgressions against conservatism. Some of the leaders of Young Americans for Freedom were involved in this declaration as well; that group had also suspended its support of Nixon the same year. National Review went on to endorse a failed primary challenge to Nixon by stalwart conservative congressman John Ashbrook (R., Ohio). Conservatives’ complaints about Nixon may have been inefficacious, but they were real and legitimate.
So who, then, were more audacious? The conservatives who distrusted Nixon just before his historic landslide (albeit one that did not much help Republicans in Congress), or those on the right who subsequently sought to rehabilitate a man who was not just unreliably conservative but is now seemingly forever saddled with a sullied reputation among the general populace? To answer, one must turn to that ugly matter: the attempted burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, the cover-up of which Nixon was ultimately implicated in.
Conservatives initially paid it little heed, then became divided. Some, including a good number who had soured on Nixon, rallied to him. M. Stanton Evans said he “wasn’t for Nixon until after Watergate,” calling it “a breath of fresh air” in the wake of wage and price controls. The ever-practical National Review editor James Burnham, however, worried that Nixon would become a drag on the conservative cause. In spring 1974, James Buckley, the brother of William and “the sainted junior senator from New York,” called for Nixon to resign. In August, his brother joined him, as did the Wall Street Journal editorial board; famed conservative senator Barry Goldwater (R., Ariz.) told Nixon he likely wouldn’t survive impeachment. Having lost Congress, Nixon resigned.
Give the Nixon revisionists credit: They do not shy away entirely from the Watergate obstacle. Some think he shouldn’t have left his post. “I’m comfortable saying that I don’t think it served the United States for Nixon to have resigned or been forced from office over Watergate,” Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative, has said. Others view the impeachment in the context of his supposed war on the bureaucracy. “Nixon was subverted by the very forces he feared most,” Rufo wrote. “His enemies in the bureaucracy and the press were able to use the Watergate scandal to oust him and stop his plans for realignment.” Mills and Rufo are downstream of other efforts, such as the book Silent Coup, to exonerate Nixon.
Such revisionism is certainly tempting. The painfully self-important mythology that has grown up around Watergate, the template it has formed in the Left’s mind, begs for puncturing, especially in light of comparable Democratic behavior in the same era. And it’s not hard to see why the narrative of a bureaucratic coup rising up to thwart a Republican president might have particular resonance for right-wingers today. That, as well as certain putative spiritual and inarguable personal ties between Nixon and Donald Trump’s movement, help explain the modern “Nixon renaissance” on the right. Indeed, Rufo has admitted that the “substantive purpose” of his effort to rehabilitate Nixon is not just to troll but also to demonstrate “a capacity for reshaping how people think about political figures in the past, which gives us a lesson in actively shaping [the perception] in the present of political figures of our current day.”
So, is there any truth to the claims on which this effort at narrative-reshaping depends? Nixon’s reputation as a bureaucracy-slayer undone by the bureaucracy is suspect given his actual relation to it. As Andy wrote, “progressive Democrats took Nixon out because they could, not specifically because he was bent on dismantling the administrative state.” As for whether Nixon did nothing wrong . . . Nixon himself disagreed. “Some people say I didn’t handle it properly,” he said in 1978. “And they’re right. I screwed it up. And I paid the price.”
Nixon was also uninterested in exculpatory theories concocted on his behalf. “I don’t go with the idea that there . . . that what brought me down was a coup, a conspiracy etc. I brought myself down,” Nixon told David Frost in 1977. He refused to meet with Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, the authors of Silent Coup. And in his final speech as president, Nixon said, “Others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them — and then you destroy yourself.” Whatever the skullduggery employed against Nixon, that he found himself in this situation in the first place and that he fell on his sword demonstrated the range of his character, his flaws and merits. On Watergate, some of Nixon’s defenders are more Nixonite than Nixon.
Conservatives’ experience with Nixon shows that true conservatives need to demand actual and extensive footholds in a presidential administration, not mere overtures; that our political leaders need not just grievances and grudges but firm principles and precepts and a solid character; and that we must not just set ourselves against our political opponents but also inspire the country. “Dark patriotism” will only get conservatives so far.
True conservatives are better off taking our cues from Ronald Reagan. Reagan was at least as electorally potent as, and indisputably more politically successful than, Nixon. But it’s important not to default to the Reagan of diluted political memory as a lazy shorthand for conservatism’s confused and aimless state circa 2016. The real Reagan’s agenda was bolder than Nixon’s, and his success arose because of this boldness, not in spite of it. Reagan wasn’t perfect. But neither is he some obsolete Boomer relic — if he were, how could Nixon not be? — today. He still has plenty to teach us.
Fifty years after Nixon’s resignation, the Left undeniably hates him and will continue to do so. A true understanding of the man requires looking past this crude reductionism. But neither that persistent distaste nor the odor of controversy around a comparable public figure should reflexively motivate the Right to embrace Nixon wholeheartedly. There are undoubtedly lessons to be learned from the Nixon years. It’s important that conservatives not learn the wrong ones.