Missing from the retelling of the Watergate story are the astonishing achievements of that most maligned of statesmen in the 20th century.
It has been a summer of remembrance.
The centennial of the Great War that began with the Guns of August 1914. The 75th anniversary of the Danzig crisis that led to Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The 70th anniversary of D-Day. In America, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And this week marks the 40th anniversary of the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Once again, aging liberals will walk the children through the tale of that triumph of American democracy when they helped to save our republic from the greatest menace to the Constitution in all of history.
Missing from the retelling will be the astonishing achievements of that most maligned of statesmen in the 20th century. And as this writer was at Nixon’s side for more than eight years before that August day in 1974, let me recount a few.
When Nixon took the oath in January 1969, more than 500,000 U.S. soldiers were in Vietnam or on the way, and U.S. casualties were running at 200 to 300 American dead every week.
Liberalism’s best and brightest had marched us into an Asian war they could not win or end. Yet by the end of Nixon’s first term, all U.S. forces and POWs were home or on the way, and every provincial capital was in Saigon’s hands.
Nixon had promised to end the war with honor. He had done so. Moreover, he had negotiated with Moscow the greatest arms control treaty since the Washington Naval Agreement of 1921-22: SALT I, setting limits on long-range ballistic missiles, and the ABM Treaty.
Nixon had gone to China and brought that enormous nation, then in the madness of its Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, out of its angry isolation.
He would rescue Israel in the Yom Kippur War at her moment of maximum peril, with a massive U.S. airlift and warning to the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev not to intervene as Moscow appeared about to do.
At that war’s end, Nixon would pull Egypt out of the Soviet Bloc into America’s orbit, where Anwar Sadat would later negotiate a peace with Menachem Begin. Golda Meir called Richard Nixon the best friend Israel ever had.
Though he took office with both houses of Congress against him and the media loathing him, Nixon ended the draft as he had promised, created the successful all-volunteer Army, and extended the vote to all 18-, 19- and 20-year-old Americans.
When he took office, only 10 percent of Southern schools were desegregated. When Nixon left, the figure was 70 percent.
During Nixon’s first term, 12 Americans, beginning with Neil Armstrong, walked on the moon. No American has ever done so since.
Nixon remade the Supreme Court, naming four justices in his first term, including a new Chief Justice, Warren Burger, who replaced Earl Warren, and future Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Nixon increased Social Security benefits to seniors and indexed them against inflation, as he had promised in 1966. Scores of millions of retired and elderly Americans today enjoy a far greater economic security because of Richard Nixon.
Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, OSHA, and the Cancer Institute, of which he was especially proud.
During the first 25 years of the Cold War, America bore almost alone the burden of rebuilding Europe and Japan, the defense of the West, and the hot wars in Korea and Vietnam to halt the advance of communism.
As U.S. dollars poured out, allies began to cash them in for Fort Knox gold. Nixon ended Bretton Woods, shut the gold window, let the dollar float and imposed wage and price controls. For better or worse, Richard Nixon was the father of the modern economic era. No future president has undone what he did.
As coalition builder, Nixon is rivaled in the 20th century only by FDR. As this writer relates in The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority, Nixon rebuilt his ruined career and reunited his shattered party after the LBJ landslide of 1964, and he led it to victory in a cliffhanger three-way race in 1968, the most violent year since the Civil War.
By 1972, that united Republican Party had rallied to its banners a coalition of more than 60 percent of the nation, giving Richard Nixon an unprecedented 49-state landslide and enabling Republicans to maintain control of the White House in 20 of the 24 years after 1968.
1968 had been the year of the Tet Offensive, the breaking of the Johnson presidency, the murder of Dr. King, race riots in 100 cities, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and the shattering of the Democratic Party in the convention hall and the streets of Chicago.
By 1972, Hugh Sidey of Time was hailing the “cooling of America” in the Nixon presidency. Then came Watergate.
Remember his other accomplishments, when hearing this week again of the horrors on the tape of June 23.
Republished with gracious permission from Mr. Buchanan (August 2014).
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Two points.
1. Richard Nixon was a deeply flawed human being, who made some really big mistakes.
2. He was absolutely wrong about one thing, in that he will be kicked around by “journalists” for a long time yet to come.
Yet, as the Old Vulcan Proverb has it, “Only Nixon can go to china.”
Nixon ended the Vietnam War with honor? And who started our involvement? FDR and Eisenhower were both involved in getting us into Vietnam. Then you can add Kennedy and LBJ. This involvement was a bipartisan effort.
But as for Nixon and Vietnam one needs to look at the percentage of Vietnam casualties that occurred during his administration. In addition, what about the bombing of civilian targets in North and South Vietnam or the attacks on Cambodia with the results they brought.
While in South America, we need to talk about our intervention and our installing of the brutal dictator Pinochet because we disagree with Chile’s democratic outcomes. This is important to mention not just for the reminder of how we sometimes support dictators over democracy, but because the kind of economy ushered in with the 9-11-73 coup replaced the Bretton Woods system and is at the heart economic and social problems today. Neoliberal Capitalism has not only increased wealth disparity, it has minimized democracy and has provided the kind of Capitalism that made Marx right in his analysis.
Nixon did some things right. Amongst other things e listened to protesters–something our most recent presidents seem unwilling to do. But he greatly failed when it cam to life/death/freedom issues for many.
And of course there are other problems. What we don’t need here is this blind hero worship promoted by those who favor authoritarianism. Pat is an intelligent man who could very well be thinking more independently.
It is only fair to mention that in Chile Allende was forming an alliance with Castro and was a committed marxist himself. The “brutal” dictator Pinochet did eventually allow for elections and was thanked for it by being arrested in his old age.
And may I ask for examples of Marxist correctness, and also, why is ‘authoritarianism” assigned to, presumably Buchanan, but not to Marx?
I doubt FDR had much, if anything to do with what was then called Indo-China, he did die before WW ll ended.
No question there is much to admire about Nixon. There are some personal ticks about the man that leave one flabbergasted. My intuition tells me he wasn’t as bad a person as he appears, even in those taped discussions. But there are some moments in those tapes that are dispicable.
Your list of his accomplishments is astounding. It truly argues for a better reputation. I would argue though against one thing he pushed through as law, establishing the voting age down to 18. I think that was a huge mistake. I don’t think people of that age are capable of understanding the full ramifications of issues. I think they have skewed the country in a bad way. On the contrary I would have raised the voting age to 25.
As much respect I have for Mr. Buchanan I find myself in drastic disagreement with him on this. Nixon not only took his time getting us out of Vietnam, he extended the war into Cambodia which only empowered the communists there which would lead to one of the worst genocides in history.
As Rothbard noted in his article, “Nixonian Socialism” that he was by no means a conservative free market man but instead was nothing less than a continuation of LBJ’s work.
“But now the Administration has swung around to the Liberal thesis of monetary and fiscal expansion to cure the recession, while yelling and griping at labor and employers not to raise wages and prices—a “guidelines” or “incomes” policy that is only one step away from wage and price controls……Pumping in more money while imposing direct price control and hoping thereby to stem inflation is very much like trying to cure a fever by holding down the mercury column in the thermometer.”
On top of that his war on drugs was hardly helpful and was exposed as nothing more than a ploy to lock up political opponents.
On top of that constitutional scholars and contributors Kevin Gutzman and Brion McClanahan agree that Nixon was one of the most unconstitutional Presidents we ever had.
Maybe the disarmament and getting China to open up were good but they hardly seem compelling enough for me to not conclude Nixon was still one of the worst Presidents we ever had.