Best-Ever Nixon Document
On July 11, papers and recordings of President Richard Nixon that previously had been withheld by the Nixon Foundation were released online and at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Calif. Among these was an extraordinary piece of Nixoniana: a meandering 11-page memorandum (PDF) that Nixon sent in 1970 to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, urging that White House staffers talk up what a warm human being "RN" was. (As was his habit, in the memo Nixon referred to himself repeatedly in the third person.) Nixon complained that "average voters" regarded RN as "an efficient, crafty, cold, machine." To help correct this common misconception, Nixon cited "warm items" (Page 3) such as "the calls that I make to people when they are sick, even though they no longer mean anything to anybody" (Page 4). "I called some mothers and wives of men that had been killed in Vietnam," he added, helpfully.
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StumbleUponBecause he was Nixon, he resented somewhat the social imperative that the president be courteous. "[W]e have gone far beyond any previous president … in breaking our backs to be nicey-nice to the Cabinet, staff and the Congress … around Christmastime," Nixon groused (Page 3). "I have treated them like dignified human beings and not like dirt under my feet" (Page 4), he continued. Connoisseurs will recognize this last as a choice illustration of Nixon's rhetorical tendency to render the thing he denies (that he treats subordinates "like dirt under my feet," that he is "a crook," that the press will "have Dick Nixon to kick around") much more vivid than the denial itself ("not," "won't").
The public's failure to appreciate RN in "the whole field of warmth" (Page 4), Nixon believed, stemmed in part from his own humble reluctance to recite "all the good deeds" he had done. "The President does not brag about all … he does for people" (Page 4). He had kept to himself, for instance, that "when I learned that Alex Butterfield's daughter … had been badly injured, I told Alex to bring her to the office even though I knew she would be embarrassed about her appearance" (Page 5). Nixon resigned in August 1974 after Oval Office tapes showed that he had worked to cover up the White House's role in the Watergate burglary. He never did persuade the American people "with regard to the whole warmth business" (Page 6), and the 1970 memo, which appears below and on the following 10 pages, stands as a poignant illustration why not.
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Remarks from the Fray:
He was a horrible human being, but he is such a riveting character that I hardly even think of him as a real person--more like a fictitious character from an alternative history book written by Philip K. Dick. We all know that history had to have turned out differently. Nixon was voted out of office after making a fool out of himself with Alger Hiss, Helen Gahagan Douglas won election to the Senate in '50, Ike picked Henry Cabot Lodge as his running mate in '52, and Humphrey was elected president in 1968, right? Maybe not, but for a man so unstable on several levels and obsessed with power and the adoration of the masses, his accomplishments are not trivial. Having read about the man for a very long time, I still have no idea what drove him. Lust for power, sure, but it was far more complicated than that, I believe.
I just loved those memos, though. I especially liked the line about how Nixon visited sick people "that nobody even cares about." Well, it doesn't make you a great humanitarian to visit sick people that nobody cares about, then trumpet said acts to the masses as being evidence of your superior enlightenment. I also loved the part about how he was such a good guy that he wrote a letter to Hubert Humphrey after beating him. It wasn't like 1968 was the most vicious campaign ever (the Democratic primaries and convention were far more brutal than the general election), but writing the man a letter doesn't make up for secretly colluding with South Vietnam to boycott the Paris peace talks, preventing progress from being made and thus keeping said Senator from becoming President. In Nixon's world, though, he comes out the good guy on that one. The most impressive thing about that whole ordeal was that Humphrey actually knew what Nixon was doing and didn't say anything about it, for fear of destroying the nation's faith in government. That's a decent, upright man for you. Think of what might have happened if he had won in 1968? In the end, Nixon's great humanism seems like little more than a catalogue of things to be put on a memo trumpeting RMN's greatness. I doubt he ever did anything that didn't directly benefit himself--if he did, I certainly am unaware of it.
Ultimately, I don't feel too sorry that people didn't see Nixon's human side, because he hasn't quite convinced me that it exists...
--the_lev
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