The Return of Richard Nixon - 18 May 1987

A friend of mine, spotting a famous man’s photograph on the cover of an American news magazine, said, "Well, bang goes one of your more memorable sentences".

I was, of course, flattered that he had ever memorised a sentence of mine, but I privately put it down to a, well, not mean a mischievous streak in him, that the sentence he referred to should have made a judgement that has turned out to be wrong. The sentence that I did not enjoy looking up came at the end of the last talk I did about the only president in American history who decided to resign in disgrace rather than face his certain conviction by the Senate sitting as a court on charges of high crimes and misdemeanours including obstruction of justice.

Of course, I was talking about nobody but Richard Milhous Nixon; the talk that was given, I think, four years after Nixon had left the White House when he surfaced, briefly, for a series of absorbing television interviews with David Frost, and then it seemed, passed into oblivion. This was the sentence, "An engrossing human being, once in high office trying, with astonishing tenacity, to prop up the defences of his self respect, he is a character of Shakespearean complexity and pathos, pitiable, sympathetic, and gone for good".

Well the picture on the latest issue of this news magazine is that of a smiling, tanned niftily-groomed man in a midnight blue blazer, he could be the chairman of the board of a highly successful multinational corporation. But no doubt about it, it is old Nixon, 73 years old, his hair sleekly styled and surprisingly darker than it appeared to be 12 years ago when he left Washington in a helicopter for exile in California and, in spite of the forced grin and the spreadeagled waving of the arms, was the very picture of a drawn, sallow, exhausted and discredited man.

The headline on the magazine cover says "He’s back", and the sub heading reads "The rehabilitation of Richard Nixon". Gone for good indeed. I suppose the German politicians thought Hitler was gone for good when they put him in jail in, was it 1923?, and Churchill himself must have been sure he was gone for good when he was stunningly dismissed by the voters after the victory in Europe.

But he was recalled by the British electorate six years later, and went out, once for all, ten years after he thought he was done for. So I have learned, rather late in the day, never to write the epitaph of a politician, however movingly, until he is beneath the sod.

The word rehabilitation in that sub heading, "The rehabilitation of Richard Nixon" is no exaggeration, though I ought to say at once that he is not going to run, or stand, for any political office and even now, 12 years after his disgrace, not even Ronald Reagan, who stood by him till the very end, would think of appointing Nixon, as say, an ambassador. He might think of it but a pack of his advisors and certainly a great majority in the Congress would tell him to think again.

Still, it’s a remarkable, if not an amazing, story. Some people say that Nixon laid low and brooded and never planned his return to respectability, let alone power. Others say that he is, always has been, a calculating man and once he recovered for the time being from a plague of fleabites and came slowly out of a long stretch of criticism and neglect, then, as one friend put it, it was a matter of feeling the way, biding his time and carefully erring on the side of doing less than more.

He sat down to write books, burying Watergate from his conscious past anyway, books about famous leaders, about Vietnam, in the main, about foreign policy. By the time three of them were out, a fair reader couldn’t help noticing that his experience through 40 years of politics was impressive and that, unlike Carter and Ford, he had a sense of history, and later on that, unlike Reagan, he was, is, a realist not an idealist, that he sees the world as something far more complicated than a rousing B film.

So, gradually, serious societies, foreign affairs discussion groups – of which the United States has some distinguished ones – began to invite him to speak. He came out of his California shell, he moved to a country home in New Jersey. From time to time, he dropped by ordinary lunch counters and burger stands and said, "Hi" to the surprised and flattered lads and lasses.

He dined in New York restaurants, he went off on several foreign trips and was received by heads of government with attention and after an hour or two of expounding his ideas, with interest just short of awe. I should say that the capitals in which he received this sort of courtly treatment were places like Paris and Peking where his misdemeanours and obstruction of justice were thought of as routine political tactics, hardly punishable by expulsion.

In the past three years he has been applauded by the annual conference of American newspaper editors and given a warm, if cagey, welcome by the national press club in Washington. By now, Dr Henry Kissinger has come to say that of the three persons you’d call if you were president and were confronted with a world crisis, he would be on almost anyone’s list.

But if he is now, slowly, cautiously being taken on his own terms, as an elder statement of the Republican party and a valuable point of reference on foreign policy, there is a majority of senators and congressmen who were there 12 years ago. And millions of voters, who will remember why articles of impeachment were drawn up against him and who do not share his own publicised view that his White House wire-tapping was minimal compared with other administrations.

It’s true, we now know that presidential wire-tapping was routine in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. And never more culpable, though unknown, than in Robert Kennedy’s secret wire-taps on all the movements of the Reverend Martin Luther King. But Nixon was not about to be impeached for just keeping records of telephone conversations, though it was they that revealed the high crimes and misdemeanours. Not just the fatuous breaking into the Democratic party headquarters in the hope of getting something on the opposition, but Mr Nixon – while professing for two years total ignorance of this escapade – actually mobilised his closest White House aides to cover up the knowledge, to lie before a Senate committee, to destroy evidence, to pay out a million dollars or more of hush money, to evade taxes, to break the laws having to do with presidential campaign financing.

In the very beginning he enlisted the FBI to help in the cover-up, and later brought in the internal revenues service to harry and hound a long secret list of people Nixon took to be his political enemies. This was the catalogue of wrongdoing that was uncovered, first by a Senate committee and then by a special prosecutor, then by the ruling of the Supreme Court that all the White House tapes must be released to the house judiciary committee which finally voted articles of impeachment.

Since then, you may be sure, presidents and all other officials of the executive ranch have been zealous not to have wire taps that were not sanctioned by a court for purposes of a criminal investigation, the financing of election campaigns is carefully watched, congressmen run a mile from anyone who might offer to launder campaign contributions, and so on.

So the public scrutiny of those sorts of crimes was heightened by Watergate and its aftermath, and behaviour which might once have gone unnoticed or rather, unchallenged, is now carefully gone into by the press and by television. Lately, for instance, there has been a big to-do about Mr Michael Deaver, a close associate of Mr Reagan for 20 years, who quit his job recently as deputy chief of staff at the White House, and now heads a very profitable public relations firm whose clients include several foreign governments, including Canada.

The allegation is that Mr Deaver used his great influence with the White House to arrange the recent agreement between the United States and Canada to do something about acid rain. Now the law says that an official – high official – of the government may not lobby his own government agency on anybody’s behalf within a year of leaving the government. The American-Canadian agreement came within months and, admittedly, Mr Deaver had a lot to do with it.

I don’t know how it is with your government and the restrictions on, say, a former Cabinet member's right to become a bank director or a representative of a foreign corporation, but in this country, the penalty can run to two years in jail. Well, the government ethics office is looking into Mr Deaver's case, so is the department of justice and there is an official investigation been started in Canada. I think that much has been made of Mr Deaver's allegedly improper behaviour because the press and television have finally totted up the score of dubious behaviour during the six years of the Reagan administration.

In that time, over 100 senior administration officials have been accused of illegal or unethical conduct. Six presidential appointees have been indicted, two have been convicted, and two are coming up for trial. Ten bigshots of the environment protection agency have resigned after investigation. All of these, whether simply accused or convicted, have had the steady support of President Reagan, who said either that he trusted them completely or that the charges against them were ridiculous.

So first, it was the media that unearthed these unsavoury acts and then the courts, all the various investigating bodies of Congress; the result has been to build up a pall over much of the behaviour of high officials of the Reagan administration.

And finally, the conduct of these people and the president's unwavering defence of them brings up the question – is this administration notable for extreme Christian tolerance, or for moral numbness?

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