Before proceeding further, it’s important to articulate how profoundly at odds this argument is with the conventional views of Nixon held in August 1974, when he resigned the presidency in disgrace and was written off as a political force. To be sure, that judgment modulated as the years passed and as Nixon, as I show in my chapter on his post-presidency, proved, once again, the depth of his political insights. Over the last forty years, Nixon has been acknowledged as a master statesman for opening US relations with Beijing, and for pioneering détente with the Soviet Union. On the fortieth anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, in 2014, pundits across the spectrum acknowledged his tremendous political acumen and achievements in foreign policy. Even liberal critics conceded that he was a man of great intellectual gifts.
At the same time, however, Nixon’s fundamental image has not changed all that much. Nixon is widely portrayed as a racist, for example—and to be sure, he does himself no favors in that regard on the White House tapes. He is seen on racial issues as a backward politician, one whose Southern strategy helped set the stage for more subtle but potent racial appeals to the electorate that have continued to the present day. “The worst thing Richard Nixon ever did was tell racists they had a point and welcome them into the party of Lincoln,” wrote Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. “The best thing he ever did for the Democratic Party is give its racists a place to go.”4
Yet the truth is far more complex, as I will show.
Similarly, Nixon is seen as a warmonger—the man who dropped an untold tonnage of bombs on North Vietnam in his desperate attempt to win the unwinnable Vietnam War. His invasion of Cambodia was not only illegal and immoral, critics say, but it also set off the last great wave of US domestic antiwar protests, which culminated in the tragedies at Kent State and Jackson State. And his Christmas bombings of 1972 were widely decried as bloodthirsty. “To send B-52s against populous areas such as Haiphong or Hanoi could have only one purpose: terror,” wrote Anthony Lewis. “It was the response of a man so overwhelmed by his sense of inadequacy and frustration that he had to strike out, punish, destroy.”5 The truth here, too, is more complex.
And finally, Nixon is still remembered by many as our criminal president, the only one ever to resign the nation’s highest office. John Dean, who served as Nixon’s White House counsel, helped engineer the Watergate cover-up, and then served as a witness for the prosecution, has written several books about the Nixon years. His most recent, in 2014, ironically titled The Nixon Defense, exhaustively chronicled the cover-up in day-by-day detail. The book “will remind people of why Nixon deserves so unflattering a historical reputation, despite the opening to China and détente with the Soviet Union,” wrote historian Robert Dallek. “It should also serve as a renewed cautionary tale about elevating politicians with questionable character to high office.”6
“I think we should celebrate August 9 as a day of national liberation every year,” Democratic strategist Frank Mankiewicz said. “Every country celebrates the day the government got rid of its tyrants. We should too.”7
Nixon’s negative image is enduring across age groups. Those old enough to have lived through Nixon’s presidency tend to have hardened views of his misdeeds, while those born after his tenure are even less inclined to give him a fair shake, more or less accepting the verdict of history.
I should make clear that I carry no brief as a defender of Nixon on the Watergate affair. It’s clear to me from extensive reading of the Watergate literature that Nixon was willing to do things that few if any presidents would have seriously considered—ordering burglaries of private citizens’ medical files and break-ins to safes that contained sensitive documents, and using the Central Intelligence Agency to obstruct a criminal investigation by the FBI, among other things. I believe that the House of Representatives’ decision to vote impeachment articles against the president in August 1974 was justified, and that President Nixon’s subsequent decision to resign the office, rather than face that ordeal, was the right one. He had lost the capacity to lead and squandered his moral and legal authority. Watergate will always shadow his reputation and legacy.
But to see Watergate as the primary Nixonian legacy, especially in light of the scandals that have followed, is to miss the range of Nixon’s achievements. A close examination of the Nixon record reveals that few presidents achieved as much on a substantive, and enduring, level as he did. This most controversial and detested of American politicians created a new American governing coalition—one predicted by the writer and political commentator Kevin Phillips in his seminal book The Emerging Republican Majority—that became the dominant force in presidential elections for a generation. And no candidate owned that new majority more than Nixon: his forty-nine-state landslide in 1972 is the greatest wipeout in American history.8 No politician can achieve that degree of consensus without great political skill and a deep attunement to the wishes of the electorate.
What were those wishes? Put most broadly, Americans of Nixon’s time wanted a general continuation of the domestic liberal consensus that had prevailed since FDR: They were looking for maintenance and even some expansion of the New Deal social programs, especially those geared toward the middle class. They wanted progress in racial relations and equality, but without the fevered confrontational style of the 1960s—and certainly without the rising crime and sense of menace that had started to permeate American life. Americans wanted law and order and a return to some form of social stability. All of these things Nixon strove to provide, in policies or in rhetoric, or in both. He saw himself, in fact, as a “Disraeli conservative,” a leader who could offer a “strong foreign policy, strong adherence to basic values that the nation believes in, combined with reform, reform that will work, not reform that destroys.”9
Nixon’s domestic-policy approach has often been characterized as canny and shrewd, even Machiavellian—but I think that misses the mark. To be sure, Nixon was a pragmatist, and as a president whose chief passion was foreign policy, he did regard domestic policy more flexibly than he regarded the great issues of statesmanship. Yet, at the same time, his approach also represented a more coherent, visionary program than either ideologically committed liberals or staunch conservatives could offer. His program was, in the end, a response to the moods and needs of the American people at this time. It was a philosophy of responsiveness that Republicans today have for the most part abandoned.
On foreign policy, too, Americans of Nixon’s era wanted an approach that reflected a proud but pragmatic people’s approach to the world: They were interested in self-defense and self-interest, a strong defense of our ideals and values, and the flexibility to make accommodations where necessary and possible in a dangerous world. What Nixon gave them, in bringing the Vietnam War to an end, in ending the military draft, and especially—and most historically—in forging new relations with Communist China and less hostile relations with the Soviet Union, was the embodiment of this complex and necessarily imperfect approach. Nixon is best remembered today for his foreign policy achievements, and for good reason, as I’ll examine in detail in chapter 2.
Nixon’s impact, then, is enduring, and the lessons of his presidency remain transcendent, despite the impact of his bad acts. That’s the message of this book.
There were many ironies to Richard Nixon’s career. He was the red-baiting young politician who helped bring down Alger Hiss, who called Senator Helen Gahagan Douglas “pink right down to her underwear,”10 and who mixed it up with Nikita Khrushchev in the famous Kitchen Debate—yet he was also the American president who went to Beijing and forged a new American relationship with China.
He was the candidate, and president, who skillfully