Hating Nixon -- A Family Tradition

Born in 1950, I knew about Richard Nixon from the dawn of consciousness -- and he was synonymous with Evil. I inherited my contempt of Nixon from my father, an FDR liberal who had come of age during the Great Depression. My father came by his hatred of Nixon honestly. As a resident of L.A., he had seen up close the gangrenous success of Nixon's red-baiting during his first political campaign against Jerry Voorhis in 1946 for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Nixon caught the postwar anticommunist wave early and rode it to a national reputation when he ran Alger Hiss to the ground as a Soviet spy -- the first real victory for the House Un-American Activities Committee.

What really cemented my father's antipathy towards Nixon, however, was his 1950 campaign against Helen Gahagen Douglas to represent California in the U.S. Senate. The communist smear tactic which had stood him such good stead was amped up by the distribution of hundreds of thousands of pink sheets slanting Douglas' voting record as "evidence" of communist beliefs. This earned him the well-suited moniker "Tricky Dick." But the dirtiest trick was the phone call my parents received asking if they knew that Helen Gahagan Douglas was married to a Jew. Click! That solidified my father's hatred, and Nixon won.

The following decade saw Nixon's rapid political rise through red-baiting, pandering, gross hypocrisy, and sheer effrontery. The best example of the latter was the way he wriggled out of a potential scandal when he was on the 1952 Republican ticket as Vice President. News of Nixon's improprieties relating to a fund established by his backers to reimburse him for his political expenses threatened to throw him out of the race. Nixon went on national television (a rarity for the time period) to defend himself, attack his opponents, and urge the audience to contact the Republican National Committee to advise whether he should remain on the ticket. And then, the maudlin arrow aimed straight at America's 1950s heart. He did receive one gift -- a cocker spaniel his children had named Checkers. "And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it." The Checkers speech cemented Nixon's appeal to Middle America, which he maintained until the Watergate scandal forced him to resign his presidency. My father was further disgusted, and the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket swept into office for two terms.

My father's hatred was somewhat assuaged by Nixon's loss to JFK in the 1960 presidential election and, surprisingly, his 1962 defeat for governor of California at the hands of the liberal incumbent Pat Brown. Always a sore loser, Nixon petulantly declared to the press, "You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

Music to my father's ears, but it was just another Nixon lie. It took him six years to shake off the "loser" label, but he never stopped scheming, campaigning, and picking off his conservative rivals until he secured the Republican nomination in 1968. He then torpedoed Humphrey's chance for election by secretly sabotaging potential peace talks brokered by Lyndon Johnson (a dirty trick which extended the Vietnam war by six years and cost more thousands of American lives), and came into the office he felt was his by right.

I was nineteen and a freshman in college when Nixon ascended to the presidency. It was my turn to hate Nixon, and there was a lot to hate: his bullshit "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam; his cynical racist dog-whistling that captured the "solid South" of white bigots for the Republican party; his divisive rhetoric that pitted his so-called Silent Majority against their own children ("hippies" "draft dodgers"). The "secret plan" remained a secret for the next six years but involved extending the war into neighboring Cambodia. Those of us who took temporary shelter behind the draft deferment afforded to full-time college students grew increasingly hysterical when it appeared as though *we* might be sent into the senseless slaughter of a war nobody could understand or justify in any credible manner. We screamed, protested, took over campuses, and blocked freeways. Nothing could move the Establishment, not even the killing of four student protestors at Kent State in May of 1970.

Nixon reigned imperturbably over it all, and the lies that streamed endlessly from his mouth and those of his henchmen ... We simply couldn't believe that Middle America lapped it all up -- even as their sons, nephews, and husbands were dying. The irony was that Nixon was relatively progressive, especially by today's standards, but we couldn't see, much less celebrate, his achievements. He was Evil Incarnate and it didn't seem to bother him in the least. We knew he had no principles except to win, but we couldn't make Middle America realize that. He had them in the palm of his greasy hand.

Tricky Dick's undoing was that he couldn't stand the thought of losing. The 1972 election was a slam-dunk, especially after his most threatening rival, Bobby Kennedy, was gunned down in Los Angeles after winning the California primary. (I was around for that one, too.) When the Democrats chose the unelectable George McGovern as their standard bearer, Nixon rubbed his hands in glee. But still, he had to cheat, to leave no stone unturned, no bug unplanted, no whispering campaign unpursued. With his blessing, he let his henchmen hire incompetent clowns to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex during the election.

Two years of agony followed as the fetid stream of lies, leaks and coverups grew in volume until Washington was swamped with investigations, stonewalling, and revelations that pointed inexorably towards the Oval Office. "What did the President know and when did he know it?"

My father and I watched in horror. We knew he was guilty, but he still had Middle America and the Republican party at his back. Even though the Watergate scandal brought the country to a standstill, he might very well remain in office. Nothing, it seemed, could kill him off. And then the Oval Office tapes were revealed, subpoenaed, and Nixon actually gave them up after the Supreme Court ordered him to do so. (How innocent we all were back then!) Now the whole world gained entry into Nixon's petty, scheming, paranoid, and always self-serving mindset. It was an (expletive deleted) public relations disaster. Still, he held on.

I joined the Peace Corps in the summer of '74 and flew to Philadelphia to meet the rest of my training cohort before we were sent off to the Central African Republic. We asked our Peace Corps Washington liaison what the atmosphere in the nation's capital was like. "Watergated," he replied dourly. It was a great time to leave the country.

I will never forget being awakened at 2:00 a.m. on August 9, gathering with other trainees on the balcony of the Agricultural Institute of M'baiki to listen to Nixon's resignation speech on a staticky short-wave radio. The dark, looming rain forest into which we stared only underscored the unreality of what was happening back home. Had Tricky Dick been finally toppled? To paraphrase Gerald Ford's same-day inauguration, our long national nightmare was over.

One month later, President Ford gave Nixon a full, unconditional pardon. The fix was in. Who could be surprised? At least, we told ourselves, Nixon was out of public life for good. Ah, but even that stake had not pierced his zombie heart! After a period of illness and gilded disgrace in his rich Pacific seaside mansion, Nixon wrote, schemed, plotted and worked tirelessly for his rehabilitation. My father and I shook our heads. Finally, this truly evil man had gotten his comeuppance ... and nothing for him changed. No contrition, no enlargement of his humanity (missing to begin with), only his inexhaustible hunger for recognition.

He wormed his way back into the good graces of the Republican party and subsequent Republican presidents as an Elder Statesman and expert on foreign affairs. He published book after book, pressed his "wisdom" into the ears of Republican presidents as much as they would allow. When he died at the age of 81 in April of 1994, his funeral drew luminaries from around the globe, including every living President.

My father died one month later, a far finer man with much less fanfare. With Nixon out of public office, he could relax his hatred. I was not so lucky -- the Reagan snake oil, so attractively packaged and sunnily delivered, proved far more damaging to the national fabric than the overweening egotism of a man who had no ideology, no desire for public service, who only wanted power and recognition. So much worse was to come.

-- Robert Philipson

Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, David Becomes Goliath

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