Sightings of the Last New Nixon

By LANCE MORROW

We'll survive. Despite all the polls and all the rest, I think there's still a hell of a lot of people out there--and you know, they want to believe...

--Nixon to Haldeman, April 25, 1973

It was not a re-emergence to compare with Napoleon's journey out of Elban exile to try to regain France. Nor was it precisely the great soap opera of redemption that occurred in the mid-'50s when the American people decided that Ingrid Bergman, disgraced adulteress, might be restored to favor. But somewhere in the historic procession from the majestic to the trivial, one might plausibly place Richard Nixon's trip to Hyden, Ky., over the Fourth of July weekend.

For the first time since he said goodbye to the White House staff four years ago and flew away to his self-imposed house arrest in San Clemente, Nixon came to speak at a fully public occasion. He had rejected 100,000 invitations. He chose Hyden carefully: a remote eastern Kentucky coal-mining town of 500, Republican since the Civil War, where the virtue of loyalty has been toughened into a kind of clannish defiance. Nixon rightly sensed that there he would find, unregenerate, some of the believers he described to H.R. Haldeman in the spring of 1973, when his Administration was in the first stages of its slow-motion collapse. "All Nixon did was stand by his friends," said the local motel owner in Hyden. "And that is one of the traits of us mountain people."

Hyden and the rest of Leslie County had reason to think well of Richard Nixon. His revenue-sharing program had, among other things, helped to build a new $2.5 million recreation center (gymnasium, swimming pool, community center and tennis courts). Gerald Ford was invited to dedicate the center, but his schedule was full. To Hyden's surprise, Nixon accepted. Flying into a tiny nearby airport in an executive jet, Nixon may have imagined himself in a time warp, transported back ten years to an old campaign. He found a crowd of 1,000; some of them had waited for three hours in 90DEG heat. They wore Nixon campaign buttons; some lugged his 1,120-page memoirs, the size of a small steamer trunk, hoping to get an autograph from the last President they truly and fully liked. "He should get around the country more and speak out," a local Republican committeewoman said with wistful truculence. "Other Presidents have done as bad as he ever did." But a friend of hers was not so sure. "He wouldn't ever want to run for public office again," she said. "He should just lead a quiet life from now on." Four satin-shirted high school musicians played Hail to the Chief. Nixon plunged into the crowd, pressing flesh, absorbing adulation like a man breaking a long fast.

As a limousine swept him into Hyden, a dusty red-brick collection of small shops, two pool halls, a drive-in movie and a motel, Nixon read banners that said THANKS FOR REVENUE SHARING, NIXON IS THE ONE, and NOW MORE THAN EVER. After a night in the motel, Nixon rode to the dedication, where he sat drenched in sweat in a non-air-conditioned auditorium packed with 4,500 people in 95DEG heat. A stream of east Kentucky dignitaries took their bows. Then Nixon, who looked wilted and dazed in those ceremonies, rallied for a 40-minute speech notable for its force and its predictability (the U.S. needs a strong military and intelligence capability, a strong economy, the will to fight "against aggressors who go under borders rather than over borders"). At last, in a tumult of approval, he invoked the "real America--a spirit you'll find in great cities and small towns, in factories and mines. I know that spirit is strong in the heartland of America, Leslie County, Kentucky."

The Kentucky venture was Richard Nixon's latest tentative and gingerly stage of reemergence, certainly not into public life but at least, for brief moments, into the view finders of public attention. A year ago he sat for the David Frost television interviews. Last winter he went to Hubert Humphrey's funeral. He and Pat flew to New York and the Bahamas, making small banter with photographers at stops along the way. They threw a party back at Casa Pacifica for some 300 returned Viet Nam P.O.W.s. Nixon also gave a party to celebrate the publication of his memoirs. Despite the $19.95 price and the many early (somewhat gloating) predictions of failure, the book has been riding for weeks now in the middle ranges of the bestseller lists.

Disraeli once called Gladstone's ministers "a range of exhausted volcanoes." In the past couple of years, Watergate and its players have seemed similarly defunct: the political passions of the scandals expired, parole boards and literary agents tidying up like janitors, attending to the last details. And now, again, Nixon reappears, one of the strangest, loneliest, most complicated and interesting political figures in American history.

This discreet apparition just dancing now on the margins of publicity raises some fascinating questions.

Will Nixon, who has been pronounced politically dead so many times before, be able to rehabilitate himself in the American imagination? Is there sufficient rightward veer in American politics these days to coax along a bit of revisionism about Watergate? If Nixon has by now exhausted the role of American villain, the political Grendel who tape-recorded himself snarling under the bridge, then what role might he still play, if any? An eventual party emeritus, perhaps, grudgingly respected and sought out for his savvy in foreign policy?

Politicians of both parties agree that Nixon could never run for public office again. One California Republican who was asked about Nixon's future grimaced: "Bringing him up again is like poking a dying frog to see if you can get one last jump out of him." But the man undoubtedly still arouses extremes of feeling. Distaste, contempt and even hatred rise almost reflexively in many Americans at the sound of his voice. The late Stewart Alsop, attempting to explain this automatic reaction to Nixon, once told the story of an argument he had about Franklin Roosevelt. Young Alsop had his collegiate defenses of F.D.R. demolished by a rectilinear old Republican who declared: "A man who does not dislike and distrust Franklin Roosevelt by instinct, without asking for reasons, is no gentleman." Plenty of Americans feel that way about Nixon: it is an allergy, a gag reflex.

Furthermore, a devastating disillusion cost Nixon whole brigades of his most loyal supporters four years ago, after the tapes revealed that he had lied in his frantic exertions at self-defense and survival. One aide told him bitterly, according to Theodore H. White, "Those who served you best hate you most." Yet there remains in the U.S. a vague, perhaps unmeasurable feeling that, after all, Watergate was not all that bad, that its catastrophic results were out of all proportion to the wrongs that were done. It is conceivable, goes the reasoning, that he was only defending friends in the White House who had done stupid things, gone too far in their zeal. Or perhaps his only mistake was in getting caught.

The Lasky Syndrome enters here: in his bestselling book last year called It Didn't Start with Watergate, the muckraking conservative journalist Victor Lasky detailed prior presidential offenses--what he says were Franklin Roosevelt's uses of the FBI to dig up scandal on his enemies and to tap the home phones of his top advisers, the spectacular array of extramarital affairs that Jack Kennedy paraded through Camelot, the Kennedy wiretaps on Martin Luther King Jr., and so on. Why was only Nixon driven from office for his offenses when he had such precedents for misbehavior? The three articles of impeachment adopted by the House Judiciary Committee were specific and damning. It takes a kind of ethical myopia not to understand that the accumulated offenses of Watergate were different. But in many Americans' minds, the scandal recedes with the years into a small, dark tangle of legalities, a smudge of vengeful newspaper ink.

When Dick Nixon was starting out in California in the '40s, some Republicans liked to say to one another: "He's our kind of guy." Despite Watergate, despite the universally acknowledged unlovability of Nixon, he still seems to many Americans "our kind of guy," in rudely definable contrast to "their" kind of guy. It is partly a cultural division--the difference between a sort of Nixon Class (some businessmen, blue-collar workers, large portions of Middle America) and the New Class made up of people who deal in symbols and information, not things: people from universities, Government welfare agencies, publishing houses, the communications industry, consumer groups, environmental causes. All kinds of litmus tests can be applied to identify the New Class: What do you think of abortion?

Of capital punishment? Do you drive a Volvo? (The distinction is hardly complete or infallible; plenty of businessmen and blue-collar workers detest Nixon.) Some have argued that Watergate was the effort (a successful one) by the New Class to repeal the results of the 1972 election. Well, crime is crime: Congress and the courts, not the New Class, brought Nixon down. But the argument has a metaphorical, symbolic appeal to those who feel Nixon was destroyed for who and what he was, not what he did.

The Democrat now sitting in the White House and suffering his own troubles in the polls is also altering the perspective with which Americans view Watergate. Nixon's foreign policy accomplishments -- China, SALT, the Middle East and the rest -- look pretty good against the developing Democratic record.

The chillier international weather involving Russia makes many nostalgic for Henry Kissinger. Walter Lippmann wrote several years ago: "Nixon's role in American history has been that of a man who had to liquidate, defuse, deflate the exaggeration of the romantic period of American imperialism and American inflation: inflation of promises, inflation of hopes ... I think on the whole he has done pretty well at it."

After all sifting of reasons, however, it is difficult for Americans to know what to do emotionally with Richard Nixon. A compassionate and even sentimental people with a kind of friendly compulsion to forgive, they would be disposed to accept Nixon, to leave the past for historians to sort out. But some token of repentance seems to be an informal condition for that. Nixon, in his soft avowal during the Frost interviews that "I let the American people down" and some gentle self-accusations in his memoirs, appears to have traveled as far as he psychologically can toward contrition. It is possible that he will never forgive either the enemies who brought him low, or himself (those given to psychohistory would argue that they amount to the same thing). Perhaps Nixon will grow old in America as a kind of strange, unregenerate presence viewed with indifference, curiosity or eventually the respect that is accorded, with a short laugh and an incredulous shake of the head, to the unrepentant survivor.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.