Nixon Now!
“Gentlemen, as I leave you now, just think of how much you’re going to be missing: you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore!” -Richard M. Nixon, 1962
“We are Nixon; he is us.”- Gore Vidal
I’m not proud to admit this, but yes: I am a Nixonite. I find Nixon’s story, his feral trajectory endlessly fascinating. And illuminating. There are life lessons…and then there’s Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon, rising upwards from poverty to the White House; destroying his rivals as communists, so only he could open China; fighting for family values and the “silent majority,” as he taped himself and his cronies cursing and snarling the American way.
I’m a Nixonite, in that I find his story endlessly relevant in a world obsessed with using success–that nebulous, fragile concept–as a means to make itself whole. Nixon’s story reminds me that there are limits to the value of success. The demons that, inexorably, drove Nixon on to achieve his dreams, eventually, of course, laid the foundation of his utter destruction. He twice became president–the prestige he had craved since childhood–winning the largest, at the time, second term landslide in history…only to piss it all away on a third-rate burglary.
He taped himself and his fellow thugs, in the Oval Office, making deals, making threats…even as he kept other, more private diaries, of his emotions and his days. According to his attorneys who heard those (still private) tapes, that Nixon is sensitive and vulnerable. That Nixon is human. That was the leader we needed, in those frightening days of campus uprising, and war in Vietnam.
Instead, we got the profane, racist, sexist Richard Nixon. As always, he saved the worst of himself for his countrymen. What a shame. One has to wonder what his life must have been like, believing as he did, that he had to deny the good within himself, so he could be the bogey man he made America believe she needed.
How lonely he must have been.
I’ve always found Nixon’s villainous character intriguing. Let’s face it: it’s hard to be good, and bad boys are fascinating. It’s damn hard to take responsibility for our desires. But once I started my business, and committed to learning from my mistakes, instead of running from them, Nixon became, for me, the ultimate life lesson. He had the discipline and determination to create the history he desired…and the cruelty, fear and lack of character to throw it all away. Watch his final White House speech, when he, with a straight face, almost in tears advises his staff to, “…always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
Indeed.
It is hard to be good. It is very hard for many of us to believe in ourselves, and to fight for what we believe, in a world that encourages laziness, and mediocrity, a world that rewards us for giving up on ourselves…it’s damn hard to be good. But what’s the alternative? You can choose to live either your hopes or your dreams, but each choice has consequences.
“Richard Nixon’s character is our history.” -Arthur Miller
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