Editorials / Richard Nixon, R. I. P. / Muddlers Abroad
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS Richard Nixon, R.I.P. by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. A nd so a stroke felled former president Richard Nixon. His obi body had taken a lot of abuse. He had been a fixture in American life...
...Different facets are drawn out by different conditions—a change of lighting, a shifted position, the colors nearby...
...There, years, of political instability have been overcome by force of arms and careful cultivation of the citizenry...
...In answer to his niece's query, "What is the matter, Uncle James...
...Viewing his deeply lined face, I thought the cartoonists had been too charitable...
...And he was right to advocate punishing Serbian rapacity by bombing their bridges across the Danube...
...After dinner my friend said "the boss will see you in the morning...
...Instead our energies are consumed with futile undertakings: the war between the sexes, multiculturalism, affirmative action, The Homeless...
...We are even closing our embassy in Grenada...
...When almost everyone else was wrong, he correctly predicted the 1980 presidential results and every Senate race save one or two...
...All these concerns are framed in such a way as to be at best futile, at worst idiotic...
...When I first met Nixon he looked like hell...
...Madison's last words were "Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear...
...There is talk again of radical turmoil and a return of Cuban influence...
...President Clinton is the classic playboy pol...
...How we became friends is very simple...
...He assumed that I would stick around and have coffee with him the next day...
...I do know Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...What precisely are we to do about The Homeless...
...Clinton will not be able to evade the brutes...
...Had the friendship begun when he was in power I might have flown in Air Force One with him to China and served a stretch in public housing...
...in fact it is a charade confected by con artists seeking power...
...We do not have this option in foreign policy, where it is in the interest of our enemies to thwart us...
...Doubtless both were there...
...As in the Middle East, Korea, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere the brutes are growing restless in the absence of forthright American policy...
...When will theread the lives of the rest...
...His greatest gifts are sweet talk and evading responsibility...
...that we discussed politics, history, and sports...
...Yet as the date to close the American embassy approaches, suspicions among the inhabitants grow...
...Many of them do not want homes...
...His presidency was not my cup of tea, and I had occasion in the late 1960s and early 1970s to deride it...
...that's his job...
...In Washington and the capitals of many of our allies the smart money is betting that our inept president's Waterloo will come in foreign policy...
...Our response, in keeping with the mediocrity of this Administration, is confused and erratic...
...He has other monuments, of course, but a great man's work starts with his family...
...Yet with me he talked books, history, philosophy, current events, sports...
...He kept an eye on geopolitics and on all national races...
...All these matters deflect America from the serious business of government, which is basically to maintain the peace at home and abroad...
...Foreign affairs are going to become less and less manageable for this president...
...What precisely is the proper balance of boys and girls, blacks and whites, Europeans and Asians, vegetarians and meat-eaters, in the workplace, the community, outer space...
...The Cubans want an end to the UN embargo against them, and they are courting support among the island nations in their neighborhood...
...Obviously the tortured face that I first saw in San Clemente was the face of unconcealable suffering...
...The next day I was ushered into the ex-president's library for coffee: there the infamous pol sat, slouched in a reading chair that appeared to be floating on a circular pond of books and papers discarded beneath it...
...The character of an interesting man is often like a crystal, sometimes like a diamond...
...Alas, once he was out of power he inveigled me into friendship...
...History attests to it...
...He was in exile in San Clemente...
...Was this a set-up...
...One of his aides who happened to write for The American Spectator invited me down from Los Angeles for dinner...
...With a pipe at his side and reading glasses, he looked like a fellow editor...
...There is no reason to believe that once the Serbs have hacked out all the desirable territory in Bosnia they will not set their sights on Croatia...
...He was a piece of Americana and a chunk of history...
...As with his friend Henry Kissinger, different aspects of his personality entered and exited abruptly, occasionally without warning...
...One of Nixon's favorite lines from Churchill has Churchill saying of Asquith, "His children are his best monuments...
...So what will historians record as his last words...
...President Clinton has demonstrated a magnificent talent for getting himself out of domestic jams, by shifting blame, mislabeling problems—in general deceiving the public and the press...
...What will the United States and NATO do then...
...He had been a fixture in American life during six decades...
...CI country have enough affirmative action...
...Very few American leaders today have offered a reasonable vision as to what foreign policy America might adopt now that the Cold War is history and the vindicated policy of containment is no longer applicable...
...CI Muddlers Abroad 14 The American Spectator June 1994...
...I shall never know...
...That meant I had to spend the night...
...He knew many of the great political figures of the century and had / t isn't just in Bosnia that American foreign policy is irresolute and muddled...
...There are other points around the globe where American power is either receding or nonexistent...
...He does not learn from his mistakes," Nixon asseverated...
...Heinrich Heine said, "God will forgive me...
...New York's Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was on solid ground when he urged immediate removal of the U.N...
...Many do not want to be part of society and some obviously want to disrupt society...
...It makes sense to me...
...He was uneasy about televisionland and contemptuous of the twenty-four-hour entertainment...
...He's a lot tougher than people think...
...As Watergate receded into the past, the therapy of writing books proved to be cosmetic 12 The American Spectator June 1994 surgery for Nixon...
...Right now in the Caribbean, the promising results of years of carefully shaped policy are being endangered by inattention and shortsighted economies...
...I was reluctant, but reminded that a gentleman does not kick a guy when he is down...
...Nor is it only President Bill Clinton whose foreign policy is irresolute and in a muddle...
...Last lines were important to him...
...I did, and not reluctantly...
...In Grenada the populace is grateful for the sacrifices that we made there...
...Americans are not focused on foreign policy...
...Obviously I came to like the Nixon I knew...
...Foreign policy jams are a different matter...
...arms embargo that prevents the Bosnians from arming themselves against the oncoming Serbs...
...Oscar Wilde's were "I am dying, as I have lived, beyond my means...
...Or what about affirmative action...
...He was interested in biography, and was reading voraciously...
...So do Saddam Hussein, and Kim Il Sung, and a dozen or so other flouters of international law...
...He deceived me...
...We are closing embassies just when Cuban diplomats are attempting to spread their influence...
...As the years rolled by, and he produced books and articles more capably executed than those of any president since Woodrow Wilson, his face steadily returned to the health of the face that once filled our TV screens from the Oval Office...
...There are dozens of hot spots heating up...
...He finished another just before the stroke hit...
...Clinton's policy of bluster and resignation, noble declarations and retreat, has allowed a spread of ethnic cleansing and aggression in the former Yugoslavia that is at once immoral and likely to continue...
...When President Carter had been in office but a few months, Nixon solomonically pronounced him a one-term president...
...In talking with him one heard the concerns of a generation that passed through Depression, world war, and prosperity into televisionland and twenty-four-hour entertainment from flickering noise boxes, live concerts, and various pills and potions...
...The Nixon I saw that first morning and for years to come, usually over coffee, sometimes over dinner, always in private, was bookish, reflective, fleetingly religious...
...And then there is multiculturalism at the university—by definition it is undefinable...
...There are already sufficient territorial disputes between the Serbs and the Croats to ensure years of warfare...
...The Serbian dictator Milosevic cannot be sweet-talked ordeceived, and he has an army to carry out his will...
...To see the fine family that gathered at Nixon's sickbed, and later at his funeral, is to realize that Nixon could have lifted that line and said, "My children are my best monuments...
...And Italy's exiled King Umberto II expired after saying "Italia...
...Back in 1977, when so many people believed we had seen the last of Ronald Reagan, Nixon said, "Don't count him out...
...The social pathologies—drugs, illegitimacy, family breakup—accumulate, but at home we can delay our day of reckoning...
...Whenever I was with Nixon I had the impression that he was not all that different from the best Democrats of his generation, say Hubert Humphrey—though more interesting...
...I never really saw a squirrelly side to Nixon, or a conspiratorial side...
...Nixon was down and nearly out...
...America has been muddling through at home since the 1960s...
...But he cannot evade responsibility in foreign policy for long...
...Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has just published Diplomacy, a superb account of foreign policy wherein the reader will find an intelligent blueprint for a proper post-Cold War policy, though it is doubtful contemporary America has the energy or will for it...
Vol. 27 • June 1994 • No. 6
