The Second Resurrection of Richard Nixon
Witcover, Jules
The Second Resurrection of Richard Nixon You can’t keep a bad man down by Jules Witcover Does the country really need another book on Richard M. Nixon? For one who has spent nearly 40 years...
...According to Ambrose, longtime Republican wise man Bryce Harlow once observed that if Nixon “ever had a heart attack, he would breathe into his own mouth and resuscitate himself...
...Virtue comes from character...
...Equally corrosive is the fact that Ambrose, after having presented all of the Nixon obscenities and correctly identifying them as such, falls back on the old everybody-did-it dodge, contending that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were guilty of all or most of Nixon’s crimes but just didn’t get caught...
...Who needs to be reminded...
...Goddamn it, the truth...
...they were living through and paying for the savings and loan scandal...
...Had Nixon engaged in public debate, education, and persuasion, he could have been a great president...
...they had lived through the Reagan administration and Iran-contra...
...Nor did it end when Nixon was booted out of the White House, as Ambrose further notes: >After assuring Ford he would not go to China before the 1976 election and risk drawing more attention to his pardon, Nixon goes anyway, claiming the Chinese insisted, which the author says Secretary of State Henry Kissinger knew was not true...
...But its reliance on such written sources as Nixon’s own exceedingly self-serving books and one by the even more discredited revisionist Spiro Agnew risks diminishing its overall credibility...
...The most valuable part of this book, nevertheless, is the chronicling of Nixon’s return from the political dead, in which Ambrose lays out the very calculation Nixon denies...
...in his candor, in telling another interviewer that while his comeback “has not been a deliberate program,” he knows “Americans are crazy about renewal . . . because they say, ‘What makes this guy tick?’ They see me and they think, ‘He’s come back’ or ‘He’s risen from the dead.’ ” Nixon’s most “candid” moments, in fact, have come in his unintentional revelations about himself in such self-aggrandizing books as Six Crises and his more recent, rambling, and oft-times sophomoric In the Arena...
...All too familiar are the deception, tastelessness, and shamelessness of this world-class rotter who poisoned American political life for so long, chronicled exhaustively-nay exhaustinglyonce again by this author...
...Then he could have given it and he could have locked up the nomination right then [and] there...
...Ambrose also accepts Nixon’s contention that he ended the Vietnam War “with honor” and states that he “brought peace to Vietnam...
...But Ambrose then renders his final judgment: “Nixon will never be called Richard the Great...
...But throughout his long career, Nixon has been so transparent in his selfserving actions that it is hard to see how a serious, long-term student of this devious and basically insecure man could conclude that the tapes were Nixon’s best defense...
...Whether this * Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990...
...He traces the comeback from Nixon’s seeking safe turf in China and Kentucky for his postElba coming out, to the successful way in which he has insinuated himself into the nation’s foreign policy dialogue-sometimes right, as when he observed in 1988 that “Eastern Europe today is ripe for positive peaceful change,” and sometimes wrong, as when he predicted “the Soviet Union will do whatever is necessary-including a brutal military invasionto suppress an insurgency seeking to liberate one of its satellites in Eastern Europe...
...Ah, how it all comes back...
...On learning that there was no Dictabelt recording of a conversation for which a tape was “missing,” Nixon suggests: “Why can’t we make a new Dictabelt?’ *Counseling Dean: “Tell the truth...
...Like Bram Stoker’s prince of darkness, not only is Richard Nixon back, but he no Jules Witcover is a syndicated columnist and author of The Resurrection of Richard Nixon (1970...
...Yet Ambrose sees a new Nixon (what, another one...
...Maybe I tried to help them too much...
...longer fears the daylight...
...If Ambrose is contending that there is much new about the surviving Nixon, he is not convincing...
...Two hundred years from now he will get only a paragraph or two in a high school American history text, and the first sentence will begin: ‘Richard Nixon, 37th president, resigned his office because of the Watergate scandal.’ ” That may be so, thus rendering wasted all of Nixon’s relentless efforts to rewrite history...
...In the end, however, while confessing a developing admiration for Nixon in the course of writing this third volume of political biography on the man, Ambrose draws conclusions that should be read by those who think America was the ultimate loser when Nixon resigned...
...book is the one to perform that service, however, is arguable...
...By 1990, people born after 1965 asked of Nixon, ‘What did he do that was so terrible?’ They had read about Jack Kennedy and the womanizing, Bobby Kennedy and the wiretapping, Lyndon Johnson and his use of the FBI...
...The Watergate investigators and eventually the public at large saw through his faking, rendering the tapes utterly self-incriminating...
...As Ambrose* notes, a whole generation has come of age without a clear remembrance of Nixon’s crimes, so maybe another book laying them out in all their squalor would be a public service...
...His transparently self-congratulatory books, his occasional television forays, and his endlessly gratuitous advice to the country that told him to get lost in 1974 are all conspicuous elements in his re-resurrection...
...Yet Ambrose quotes a world-renowned scholar “in textual criticism and bibliography” who concludes that “throughout recorded history no author has ever produced, albeit unwittingly, a text so systematically debased and corrupt...
...Stephen E. Ambrose...
...Nor was Nixon the first president to profit from his association with millionaires...
...The author, while repeatedly and devastatingly spearing Nixon for his lies and evasions, is strangely sympathetic, even idolatrous, toward him on other occasions, to the point of naivetC...
...Who, after all this, can doubt it...
...The author writes that “it would have been ridiculous for him to eliminate a passage from the transcripts when it was on one of the tapes that had already been handed over to the committee...
...And why should he...
...Seventeen years after the Watergate stake was driven into his heart, he is casting a shadow again, a very large one, on the foreign-policy consciousness of the country...
...He could go swimming or do anything...
...The author professes that summaries of taped conversations between Nixon and White House Counsel John Dean were “skillfully done,” though with slight augmentations “that gave an interpretation more favorable to Nixon...
...He was a sometimes brilliant, frequently successful, often flawed leader, but never a great leader...
...In his conclusions, Ambrose seemingly contradicts himself on Nixon’s ending of the war by observing that “if Watergate had never happened and had Nixon stayed in office, he would have been in a better position to extract some funds from Congress” to bolster the Saigon government in 1975...
...Ambrose’s own chronicle definitively establishes that there was nothing, nothing whatever, that Nixon would not say or do to save his own skin, down to the most patently false contention...
...He is the only president who resigned his office, the only one forced to accept a pardon for his deeds...
...This will never be forgotten...
...On the one hand, it is comprehensively accurate in regurgitating the sordid details of the Watergate cover-up and the aftermath, gleaned tirelessly from the available Watergate transcripts and tapes and relatively few interviews (only 17 in all, an embarrassingly small number for a book of 637 pages) with players major (Bob Haldeman, Chuck Colson, Gerald Ford) and minor (Hugh Sidey, Richard Reeves, William Safire...
...Of these, the author writes: “So many believed him that his version became the standard perception of Watergate...
...Citing Heraclitus’s observation that “a man’s character is his fate,” Ambrose says that Nixon “had nearly every gift that the gods could bestow...
...This prospect alone justifies the retelling of why Nixon was forced from office 17 years ago, and how he has come once again to haunt us...
...But the contemporary re-resurrection goes on, and don’t be surprised if the Count Dracula of the Republican Party is back in the sunlight of forgiveness and acceptance at the GOP national convention in Houston next August...
...That is why Nixon despised virtue, and railed against it...
...As it is, he doesn’t even rate as a good one...
...In this, Ambrose says, Nixon was dead wrong...
...It is not against the law to borrow money from your friends...
...He has never been able to resist explaining his own deviousness, apparently believing that doing so will make him appear all the more clever...
...In other words, the same old Dick Nixon is still with us in all his disingenuousness...
...While it is true that neither JFK nor LBJ was a choir boy, neither of them systematically subverted the Constitution in the manner of Nixon and his henchmen...
...Richard nixed In ways small as well as large, the author provides a primer on the authentic Nixon in the White House for the Rip Van Winkles among us: >Sending good wishes to a National Women’s Political Caucus meeting while asking domestic policy aide John Ehrlichman: “Is it wise to throw pearls before swine?’ *Accusing television commentators in an interview of innuendo, leaks, “leers, and sneers,” then adding: “which is their perfect right...
...Power was publicity rather than policy...
...He argues as well that the Watergate tapes “were Nixon’s best defense . . . for the obvious reason that they contained so many exculpatory statements by Nixon, statements that he had made in his own transparent way whenever he remembered that the recorder was running...
...In a recitation of Nixon’s personal financial manipulationshis purchasing property through sweetheart deals with his buddy Bebe Rebozo and others, and his taking a huge income-tax deduction for giving away his vice-presidential papers after backdating the donation to qualify under a then-expired tax regulationAmbrose writes: “Still, except for the questionable deduction for backdating the vice presidential papers, Nixon had done nothing illegal...
...But Nixon was the one who got caught...
...Or am I wrong?’ >Telling interviewer David Frost of aides Haldeman and Ehrlichman, whom he fired to deflect criticism from himself, “I can be faulted because I defended them too long...
...But wait a minute...
...Commenting on Resident Ford’s observance of the bicentennial, during which he made many speeches, Nixon tells David Eisenhower that his successor should have made one major speech...
...Power to Nixon, Ambrose writes, “was manipulation, inside information, polls, favors, trade-offs, bribes, public relations, smears, and intimidation...
...The Second Resurrection of Richard Nixon You can’t keep a bad man down by Jules Witcover Does the country really need another book on Richard M. Nixon...
...Suggesting to Haldeman and Ehrlichman that libel suits be filed against Dean and others, adding: “Use the most vicious libel lawyer there is...
...He notes that Nixon, in writing of the true leaders he has known, noted that, of all their admirable qualities, “virtue was not one of them...
...No wonder they wanted to know what Nixon had done that was so temble...
...That is the one thing I have told everybody around here...
...For one who has spent nearly 40 years having Dick Nixon to kick around and has done his share of kicking, the answer at first blush is: enough already...
...He should have said, a week before July Fourth, ‘Look, I’m going up to Camp David to work on this speech.’ He didn’t actually have to work on it...
...For example, Ambrose buys Nixon’s argument in his memoirs that a very damaging quotation from one Watergate tape was inadvertently missing from a transcript Nixon submitted to House investigators...
...Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson did it, he notes...
...What he did was withdraw American troops from South Vietnam in a war that during his successor’s term saw a humiliating evacuation under fire of the American embassy in Saigon and the overrunning of South Vietnam by North Vietnam...
...Simon and Schustel: $27.50...
...The one that he most lacked was character...
Vol. 23 • December 1991 • No. 12
