". . . what starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid . . . But if you are reasonably intelligent enough and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts ..."
--Richard Nixon to his former director of communications Ken Clawson, 1985
Richard Nixon wasn't that bad.
OK, if you want to make an argument that he was the worst person to ever serve as president of the United States, maybe you've got a case. There are many ways to define a scoundrel, and Nixon always seemed to me more tragic than evil. Harry Truman and Abraham Lincoln oversaw more slaughter, perhaps others behaved as selfishly. It is fashionable to call whoever currently occupies the White House "the worst ever"--it was said of Barack Obama and George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and of every other president going back to Watergate. And it has always been hyperbole, though maybe not so much now as any time in the past 40 years or so.
Most historians rank Nixon as a middling president; my myopic view is that he was nearly a great one whose foreign policy achievements alone were enough to raise him above average. The last progressive Republican to inhabit the White House, Nixon's groundbreaking visit to China in 1972 delivered that country from an extreme and dangerous isolation. Nixon went to Moscow to negotiate the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, causing the first fissures in the Iron Curtain and ushering in the era of detente. Reeling from the investigations that would eventually bring him down, Nixon saved Israel from near annihilation in the 1973 Yom Kippur war.
And on the domestic front, Nixon was able to achieve what JFK and LBJ couldn't--he desegregated Southern schools. He ended the military draft. He established the Environmental Protection Agency. He created more new national parks than any other president. He began the federally funded war on cancer. He proposed a comprehensive health insurance plan that would have covered all Americans. Garry Wills, in 1970, presciently identified Nixon as "the last liberal." In an essay for the 1996 book Character Above All, New York Times columnist Tom Wicker "concluded that he was neither evil nor a victim, except of himself--and we're all that kind of victim."
But Nixon was a president who, by his own admission, let down the American people. His political successes signaled an erosion of the importance of principle in the national argument about the way we should live. He had a Manichean impulse to divide the world into friends and enemies. Was there ever a sillier, more diabolical presidential foible than his meticulously prepared "enemies" list? What kind of paranoia requires the tape-recording of all conversations, great and small?
Nixon's career prefigured the rise of Bill Clinton, which in turn made it thinkable that a man with the character flaws of a Donald Trump could hold the office. And as we watch the Trump administration begin to rhyme with Nixon's--James Comey's testimony last week reminded some of us how compelling we found the gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate hearings back in 1973--we might be appalled at how low our expectations have fallen.
Nixon might or might not have been a bad man, but he was an effective president. A better president than Jimmy Carter, who--as prickly and haughty as he can sometimes be--walks the walk as a good Christian.
I don't know what's going to happen with the current POTUS; I expect more drama and imagine the Republicans in Congress will continue to prop up his administration until Trump becomes too toxic to abide, but then I've been wrong a lot in the past 18 months. I should know better, but I overestimated Americans.
You can argue that this president has already abused the public trust worse than Nixon did; what Comey laid out in his public testimony last week was a prima facie case for obstruction of justice. But if you have elected a certain kind of intellectual mascot, you have your talking points already. You're not about to be persuaded by evidence or testimony. You have your faith.
That's the nature of the American Frolic, the pervasive lack of seriousness in dealing with the critical moral choices facing us as a nation and as individuals. We've been conditioned to react rather than consider, we are a nation divided into rooting interests. We enlist as a member of a thought tribe in lieu of genuinely thinking.
Unlike Nixon, who overcame hardscrabble poverty, Trump has fairly sailed through life, cushioned by inherited wealth and a few powerful friends. Still, he shares with Nixon what Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style in politics," relying on fear-mongering and anti-intellectualism. Trump is hostile to the free press, he fabricates claims about those he considers to be his political rivals, he expresses suspicions that others are constantly out to get him.
Comey's testimony this past week that Trump has sought a pledge of personal loyalty led back to a passage in Trump's (ghostwritten) book Art of the Deal. Talking about his mentor Roy Cohn--the infamous fixer who was also a key figure in the careers of Joseph McCarthy and Nixon--the quasi-fictive Trump made it clear he valued loyalty over integrity. No one ever accused Cohn of having integrity. But he was loyal to his friends.
That there is no moral bottom to Donald Trump has been made clear to anyone willing to honestly consider the man's words and deeds. His misbehavior, like Nixon's, is pathological, and likely symptomatic of some terrible inner sadness for which we might, in other circumstances, feel deep sympathy. Others will disagree, but I don't know that it would be fun for a person with a full complement of emotions to be Donald Trump.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 06/13/2017