Richard Milhous Nixon: RIP

This day in 1913, Richard Milhous Nixon was born...

Today is January 9^th, the date in which the most durable American politician in history, a man who reached both the heights of success staging the single greatest comeback in American political history prior to Donald Trump, but also was brought low in a scandal which now, based on recently declassified documents, shows the heavy hand of the CIA and a monolithically hateful press who despised this man since he exposed a Russian Communist spy named “Alger Hiss.”

This day in 1913, Richard Milhous Nixon was born to Frank Nixon, an Irish Catholic who was a heavy drinker, turned task master for his three sons and who managed a roadside store in the growing streets of Orange County, California. As a boy, Nixon would rise at 5 am to drive to the docks and vegetable markets in Los Angeles, return with produce, wash it, and put it in place in the family store before leaving for school.

Nixon’s mother to whom he was devoted was a quiet Quaker who although deep in her faith thought faith was a deeply personal matter. She saw two boys die of tuberculosis. Unlike his friend with whom he entered Congress in 1947, John F. Kennedy, he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

The meteoric nature of Nixon’s rise from being a married man discharged from the U.S Navy to Vice President of the United States in just six years is under-appreciated. Nixon recalls interviewing with a white-shoe New York law firm seeking a job and looking out the window of their skyscraper office space to see General Dwight D. Eisenhower drive by in an epic ticker tape parade through wall street to celebrate the end of World War Two.

Just six years later, he would be Ike’s running mate for Vice President and on the trajectory to have a razor thin race for the Presidency stolen from him in 1960. He then made a disastrous decision to seek the governorship of California in 1962 to keep his White House ambitions alive and then stage (Pre-Trump) the greatest political comeback in American presidential history.

Nixon elected not to contest his hair-thin loss of the Presidency to JFK in 1960 even though the New York Harald Tribune produced a multipart series on voter integrity issues focusing on both Chicago and the state of Texas where LBJ had refined vote stealing to an art form. Although Dwight Eisenhower and New York Governor Thomas Dewey, who was the Republican nominee for President in 1944 and 1948, urged Nixon to challenge Kennedy's election, Nixon knew that the “sore loser” image would trail him and hamper any shot at a real comeback.

Nixon worked diligently to remake himself, repositioning himself as an “elder statesman” who had had 6 years in the wilderness to think about the great problems facing the country; a man with deep foreign policy experience at a time when the American people were desperate to get out of Vietnam as opposed to the partisan slasher of 1952 and 1956.

More importantly, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy while running for President, the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the deep divisions of Americans about the Vietnam war parted the seas to allow Nixon to make a stunning political comeback. Nixon’s remake was so disciplined that beginning in 1968, Nixon would stop signing his name as “Dick Nixon” and begin signing everything as “Richard Nixon.” Autograph dealers know that Nixon’s signature as “Dick Nixon” is far more valuable today than the more common “Richard Nixon” found on official documents and most signed documents as well as autographs signed starting in 1967.

In many ways the brutal murder of John F. Kennedy had the inadvertent effect of breathing political life back into Richard Milhous Nixon. The public associated Nixon with Kennedy because the young President was gunned down only 3 years after defeating the former Vice President. Nixon’s disastrous campaign for Governor of California turned out to be a blessing because it essentially killed any possibility that the party would nominate him in 1964 as a compromise candidate between Rockefeller on the left and Goldwater on the right. This kept him out of a 1964 drubbing of Lyndon Johnson who was universally popular because he had just become President.

Nixon met Elvis famously in the White House and they both had something in common, they both had 1968 comebacks.

As President, he reached a strategic arms limitation deal with the Soviet Union, ended the war in Vietnam on a much faster timetable than sought by the Pentagon, the NSA, and the defense establishment, brought China in out of the cold back when China was a dirt poor agrarian society with limited technological capabilities. Nixon, of course, could not foresee that future Presidents George Bush would grant China the “Most Favored Nation Trade Status” and that Bill and Hillary Clinton would sell the Chinese military secrets regarding U.S. missile targeting for illegal campaign contributions. Bush and Clinton then began the wholesale outsourcing of jobs and manufacturing to China, including that of our most necessary pharmaceuticals, something Nixon could never have foreseen.

Nixon desegregated the public schools without bloodshed or incident. Prior to his Presidency over 86% of Public Schools in America were still de facto segregated. That number dropped to 16% thanks to the efforts of Attorney General John Mitchell, future Senator Daniel Patrick Monahan, and Commerce Secretary-turned Secretary of State George Schultz.

For those liberals who whine about the Southern Strategy, it was Nixon who rounded up the votes to pass the 1958 Civil Rights bill when Southern Democrats — under the secret leadership of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson — who because he aspired to run for President in 1960, wrote the southern manifesto for blocking civil rights for southern senators but was not himself a signer. Dr. Martin Luther King praised Vice President Nixon’s efforts, and they became friends.

Nixon is also the progenitor of affirmative action, a race-based program that many conservatives oppose. Nixon also increased federal financing of black colleges nine-fold at the same time tripling the justice department budget for civil rights enforcement. Nixon started the Office of Minority Business Enterprise which gave low-interest loans to majority black owned businesses.

In fact, running in the 1968 general election, with VP Hubert Humphrey challenging him from the left, Nixon won despite segregationist independent governor George Wallace running to Nixon’s right and taking an openly extreme position on civil rights and race issues. Recently the Mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, said that their city’s soaring crime and increasing homelessness was the responsibility of Richard Nixon. Clearly the Mayor fails to understand that it is high tax, soft on crime, and woke policies that are destroying the Windy City.

It is widely known that I have a tattoo of Richard Nixon on my back. It is not necessarily a political statement but for me it is a daily reminder that in life when you get knocked down, when you suffer some defeats both of which have certainty happened to me, when you feel defeated or depressed you must get yourself off the canvas, dust yourself off and get back in the fight. Nixon’s story is one of indestructibility, it’s the story of persistence, a story of resilience. It’s an American Story.

The narrative of Nixon's extraordinarily effective presidency has been destroyed in the ashes of a scandal which upon closer examination is clearly a deep state (or military industrial complex as President Eisenhower tried to warn us about) take down of Nixon.

As President Bill Clinton said at Nixon’s funeral, time is judging Richard Nixon on his entire record and all the events of his life.

Senator Bob Dole, who came to the Senate in 1968 from Kansas with Nixon’s support and would rise to be Republican National Chairman under Nixon, Republican Senate Majority Leader and the 1996 Republican candidate for President, gathered with every living American Presidential family including Clinton, Bush, Ford, Reagan, and Carter families.

Dole gave a moving eulogy at Nixon’s Yorba Linda Funeral in which Dole actually shed a tear. I reproduced the transcript here:

“I believe the second half of the twentieth century will be known as the age of Nixon. Why was he the most durable public figure of our time? Not because he gave the most eloquent speeches but because he provided the most effective leadership. Not because he won every battle but because he always embodied the deepest feelings of the people he led.

One of his biographers said that Richard Nixon was one of us. And so he was, he was a boy who heard the train whistle in the night and dreamed of distant places that lay at the end of the track, how American. He was a grocer’s son who got ahead by working harder and longer than everyone else, how American. He was a student who met expenses by doing research at the law library for 35 cents an hour while sharing a rundown farmhouse without water or electricity, how American. He was the husband and father who said that the best memorial to his wife was her children, how American.

To tens of millions of his countrymen, Richard Nixon was an American hero. A hero who shared and honored their belief in working hard, worshiping God, loving their families, and saluting the flag. He called them the silent majority. Like them they valued accomplishment more than ideology. They wanted their government to do the decent thing but not bankrupt them in the process. They wanted his protection in a dangerous world, but they also wanted creative statesmanship in achieving a genuine peace with honor. These were the people from whom he had come and who have come to your Belinda these past few days. By the tens of thousands no longer silent in their grief, the American people love a fighter and in dick Nixon they found a gallant one.

In her marvelous biography of her mother, Julie recalls an occasion where Pat Nixon expressed amazement at her husband’s ability to persevere in the face of criticism, to which the president replied I just get up every morning to confound my enemies. It was what Richard Nixon did after he got up every morning that not just confounded his enemies but turned them into admirers. It is true that no one knew the world better than Richard Nixon and as a result the man who was born in a house his father built would go on to become this century’s greatest architect of peace, but we should also not underestimate President Nixon’s domestic achievements.

For it was Richard Nixon who ended the draft, strengthened environmental and nutritional programs and committed the government to a war on cancer. He leap frogged conventional wisdom to propose revolutionary solutions to the healthcare and welfare reform anticipated by a full generation. The debates now raging on capitol hill to know the secret of Richard Nixon’s relationship with the American people. You need only listen to his own words; you must never be satisfied with success he told us. You should never be discouraged by failure, failure can be sad, but the greatest sadness is not to try and fail but to try and fail in the end is what matters. Is that you have always lived a life to the hilt, strong, brave, unafraid of controversy, unyielding in his convictions, delivering every day of this life to the hill. The largest figure of our time whose influence will be timeless. That was Richard Nixon. How American. May gods bless Richard Nixon and may god bless the United States.”