It's Friday, Aug. 9, 2024, the day of the week when I offer quotations intended to be uplifting or elucidating. Today is also the 50th anniversary of Richard M. Nixon's resignation as president of the United States. So my words of wisdom are inspired from that momentous episode in U.S. history.
If you skipped over the blurbs above, go back and look at the one mentioning Richard Nixon. It was written by Chapman University historian Luke Nichter, a Nixon scholar who poses an interesting question: Why, even 50 years after he left office (and 30 years after his death) is it so difficult to find dispassionate – and, yes, revisionist – examinations of the Nixon presidency? It's almost as though the 37th U.S. president was uniquely despised by the class of people who would do such a reexamination. Or perhaps Nixon was just a singularly malevolent politician? That was certainly the view of legendary "gonzo journalist" Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote one of the most vitriolic (and highly entertaining) obituaries in the annals of American letters.
First appearing in Rolling Stone magazine, it began with an inimitable dateline:
DATE: MAY 1, 1994
FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.
The lines that should be taught in journalism schools:
Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing – a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."
There is no evidence Jerry Ford thought any such thing, let alone blurted it aloud to golfing buddies on the links at Vail, but Hunter Thompson often took literary license. It's too bad in this case because what immediately followed was a vignette so fascinating I hoped it was true:
I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."
Whether or not that conversation took place (and it seems unlikely), I could relate to it. I grew up in a household where the word "bastard" was so closely associated with the word "Nixon" that my younger siblings probably thought it was part of the man's name. And that was just Mom. My father tried to be objective, even around us. It was his job.
After a brief stint in Democratic Party politics in San Francisco, another in the U.S. Army, and a third as a truck driver, my father settled into journalism. It was a profession that suited him so well that by the time I was in college, he was covering the Nixon White House for the Washington Post.
Best known for his coverage of Ronald Reagan, Lou Cannon is retired now and living near Santa Barbara, where he's putting the finishing touches on his memoir. In that manuscript, he recounts a telling White House encounter between the three of them – Nixon, Reagan, and Dad – that occurred during Nixon's first term in office.
Reagan was governor of California at the time – a job Nixon had sought a decade earlier, with disastrous results. Nixon had another reason to look upon Reagan with wariness: He figured, correctly, as it happened, that Reagan had presidential ambitions of his own. In any event, it was Ronald Reagan who introduced my father to Richard Nixon.
"Mr. President, this is Lou Cannon," Reagan said. "He's written a book about me."
This information seemed to vex Nixon, who stopped in the receiving line and looked my father –and Reagan – up and down.
"Well," Nixon replied, "I'll scan it."
The petty sense of resentment implicit in that word "scan" was not lost on either man.
"Lou," Reagan said, as Nixon moved on down the line, "he just took care of us both."
That was Nixon's forte, making sure he or his henchmen "took care" of enemies, rivals, or even allies who might later get in his way. In truth, Nixon was so obsessively mistrustful of everyone and everything that he couldn't get out of his own way.
The 1972 campaign scandals we know as "Watergate" took place in an election year in which the Republican ticket would win 49 states. All Nixon had to do to win reelection was … nothing. But that wasn't in his nature.
There's an old Joseph Heller line – I think it's from the novel "Catch-22" – that comes to mind when I think of Richard Nixon: "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you." Liberals certainly were out to get Nixon, and had been long before he became president. But his paranoia was real. It was textbook. The upshot was that he existed for decades as kind of a dark presence in our family – and in the American political system.
As I write these words, I am looking at a memo written on July 30, 1972, by President Nixon to White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman. That morning, the Washington Post had published an article written by Lou Cannon headlined "Nixon Running Scared."
That story apparently got under Nixon's skin. His memo to Haldeman runs three pages. His premise is that the Washington Post "is totally against us."
Making no allowance for the possibility of objective reporting, Nixon starts by telling his top adviser that he understands campaign aides must deal with "media representatives that we know are antagonistic to us."
Nixon's second point is that they should not "waste time" with such outlets at the expense of "turning down interviews with media representatives who are our friends." This seems to be to a false choice, but Nixon – who would win reelection in 1972 in a landslide – is just warming to his main point:
"Third, even when our most intelligent people are meeting with people like Cannon they must constantly keep in mind that they are confronting a political enemy and that everything they say will, therefore, be used against us."
When Nixon died in the spring of 1994, I was on the White House beat for the Baltimore Sun at and covered Nixon's funeral in his native Orange County, California – the place, he once said, "where all good Republicans go to die." Nixon had a stroke before he could make good on that promise, but he went home to be buried.
Hunter Thompson was not present, but he certainly weighed in:
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern – but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
Nonetheless, Thompson's presence was missed at the funeral, so I channeled him by writing a phony pool report I circulated to a few friends in the press section. In it, I expressed a chilling foreboding: President Clinton had leaned over the casket of the 37th president, who was lying in an open coffin without the requisite silver stake through his heart. I thought I saw Bill Clinton inadvertently inhale Nixon's evil spirit.
"I think in the future Clinton will be impeached," I proclaimed.
I'm not a professional humor writer and some of my colleagues might have found the satire in bad taste. But I was sitting beside David S. Broder, the highly respected Washington Post journalist once dubbed "the high priest" of American political journalism. David seemed to find it funny, although he and my father were close friends, and David knew about the Nixon memo to Haldeman.
Years later, when Clinton was impeached, Broder called me up and said with a chuckle that my puckish pool report had proved prescient after all.
But that's not the moral of this story. After throwing away the fake pool report, I wrote a respectful account for the Sun about Nixon's funeral. Much had happened in American politics in the 20 years since Nixon left Washington in disgrace, and the ceremony reflected those changes.
"It was an extraordinary day of reconciliation," I wrote. "Strong men cried eulogizing Richard Nixon. Proud men expressed humility. Partisan men laid aside old wounds."
I also wrote about the long lines of tens of thousands of Americans, many of them immigrants, many of them mixed-race couples who queued up to pay their respects. This was not the conservative Orange County of Richard Nixon's childhood.
Yet, these people, who freely granted interviews, weren't making a partisan statement. They were giving their testimony about how they felt about our country. Richard Nixon came from humble beginnings to become a U.S. president, they said, an office that symbolizes the promise of America.
There are obvious lessons here for our time. When I ask my brothers and sisters in the Fourth Estate why their coverage of Donald Trump is so unhinged, their basic reply is that Trump is the one who is unhinged. All they have to do is point to the last six or seven things he said.
It's a valid point. Hunter Thompson would have an aneurism trying to cover this guy.
But here's my rebuttal to my friends in journalism: if Lou Cannon and Carl Cannon can be fair to Nixon, you can be fair to Trump – or at least to his voters. I like to think David Broder, who died in 2011, would agree. In his writing, Broder tried to countermand the influence of political consultants and their maddening talking points by giving voters more deference in his coverage.
"I've learned that the most undervalued, underreported aspect of politics is what voters bring to the table," he once explained. "My generation of reporters was deeply influenced by Teddy White, the greatest political journalist of our time. He showed us how far inside a campaign you could go.
"We naturally emulated him, at least as far as our skills would take us," Broder added. "Before long, we got so far inside that we forgot the outside – that the campaign belonged not to the candidates or their consultants or their pollsters, but to the public.
"Given the American people's deep skepticism about our political system today," he concluded, "we can raise their faith some if we give them the feeling that, at least at election time, the press and candidates are responding to their thoughts and views."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
