Nixon Richard Milhous - Being Nixon : a man divided

The candidate.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

Those descriptive words fit him only occasionally. In his daily life, he was more often fretful. He wished to be seen as cool and calm in crisis, and he could be, but he was subject to episodes of venting and lashing out. He was socially anxious and could be hopelessly, helplessly awkward. At his White House dinner for the artist Andrew Wyeth, he welcomed Wyeths daughter-in-law Phyllis, who was in a wheelchair, and exclaimed, Just last week I met with the Easter Seal children! He was being bashful, but he looked sneaky. Tenderhearted and devoted to his wife and daughters, he could seem callous to them in public.

Hope and fear waged a constant battle in Nixon. At the end of his presidency, fear won out. Nixon was often driven by fearhe was, he believed, surrounded by enemies. At the same time, he understood the hopes and fears of others, the insecurities of the people he memorably named the Silent Majority. He was an introvert in an extroverts business; incredibly, he was also one of the most successful politicians in American history. Weak at human relations but cunning at power, he made politics into a science and also an art; for him it had a cadence, precision, and beauty, wrote his daughter Julie.by breaking the New Deal coalition and siphoning off disaffected Democrats who sensed that the native Californian, born to the lower middle class, was more sensitive to their wants and needs than the liberal elitists Nixon so enthusiastically scorned.

His accomplishments at home and abroad were great: opening up China, achieving arms control with the Soviet Union, ending (if too slowly) the Vietnam War, desegregating the Southern schools, increasing benefits for the elderly and the disabled, creating the Environmental Protection Agency. Indeed, some historians call him a liberal. He was not, but he was a crafty activist who loved to outflank and confound his foes.

Did he achieve all this in spite ofor perhaps because ofhis anxieties? Nixons inclination toward the dark side has long been a clich. Less understood (possibly even by Nixon himself) is his heroic, if ill-fated, struggle to be a robust, decent, good-hearted person. In the battle against his darker impulses, he fought with a kind of desperate courage. At some level, I believe, he was aware of this struggle, though he gave every indication of a man with little or no self-knowledge.

Nixon believed deeply in his country, and he largely realized his ambition to be a statesman. Nonetheless, anyone listening to the tapes of his White House conversations will cringenot, perhaps, at the profanity (common among men of his World War II generation under stress) but at the sheer hubris. Nixon and his lieutenants rarely, if ever, stopped to wonder if they possibly were wrong and their opponents were right. Such arrogance was and is probably characteristic of the conversations of most presidentsthe Oval Office is a cockpit of sycophancybut Nixons brittle pridefulness was so disturbing and at moments ugly that it makes you want to cry out. (Did he really rail against Jews in government? Yes, he did.) Ultimately, Nixons obsession with smiting his enemiescombined with an utter inability to confront his friendswas fatal to his presidency.

Even so, his constant attempts to be a better man, generous and big-spiritedand to control his fate, knowing, perhaps, that he was destined to failare poignant. Improbably, this anxious boy from a pinched background believed that he was meant to do great things. Shy and bookish, he wanted to wake up every morning and ask, What will we accomplish today?

This is not a book intended to weigh the success and failure of Nixon as a policy maker, and, although the Watergate scandal figures inevitably and prominently, I do not attempt to solve its many mysteries. Rather, I have made an effort to understand what it was like to actually be Nixon. Drawn from the memories of three dozen or so men and women who worked for him as well as from the growing flow of new and rich archival material, this book is a chronicle of a fantastically contradictory and intriguing figure who set out to change the world and, for better and for worse, did just that. The story is best told from the beginning.

Frank and Hannah.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum