I’ve had the first volume of Richard Nixon’s memoirs on my shelf since high school. I got them because of a childhood inside joke, and only recently got around to reading them. The volume ends with Nixon’s first term, though there are portentous intimations, occasionally, of what came after.
I’ll start with rolling narrative observations, then a grab bag of details that I found fun, then my favorite excerpt to close out.
Big Picture Stuff
Before reading his memoirs, my basic cartoon of Nixon was “guy who always felt on the outs no matter how much power/prestige he accumulated.” His famous press meltdown and debate performance, the Watergate scandal, and his tendency to appeal to a “silent majority” all supported this thesis. But in fact, seen through his own eyes, Nixon was frequently an insider. I was right about his sensitivity to criticism, but he seems to have been similarly sensitive, touchingly, to praise. His memoirs are full of remembering kind words people he respected had for him, in speech and in writing, and it’s clear that he not only was beloved by (many of) his fellow Republicans, but that he himself understood this.
Speaking of people Nixon respected, I got a new appreciation for Eisenhower and how large he loomed during the middle of the 20th century. I’d known very little about him as a president, but it seems like he was enormously popular, never really losing his special glow. In fact, a large chunk of Nixon’s memoir concerns his vice presidency, during which he represents himself as Eisenhower’s grim enforcer. The one (partial) critique Nixon levies against his old boss is that Eisenhower would never say no to anything, and thus Nixon was often stuck being the bad guy. Amusingly, Nixon partly puts this critique in someone else’s mouth; he just so happens to be talking to one of Eisenhower’s subordinates in the army, who observes that reporting to Eisenhower meant having to break a lot of bad news on his behalf.
In fact, a lot of Nixon’s career (at least as he describes it) seems path dependent on this trait of Eisenhower’s. Eisenhower was a “unifier” president, much like Obama in my lifetime, appealing directly to the center and avoiding partisan politics. But his administration - that is, what he actually wanted to do - was pretty conservative! Nixon, thus, was the fall guy, the hatchet man, the representative of Eisenhower’s more divisive policies when Eisenhower himself wished to remain above the fray. It’s a testament to either Nixon’s character or his skill as a writer that he never seems bitter about this state of affairs, and that his praise of Eisenhower and celebration of their relationship seems sincere. It probably really is sincere; Nixon’s daughter ultimately married Eisenhower’s grandson.
They say the past is a foreign country, and Nixon’s heyday of the 60s and 70s really does seem very different from today. A mandatory draft, huge protests, regular domestic terrorism, and, of course, the perpetual shadow of the Cold War. So much of Nixon’s era revolved around tensions between capitalism and communism, and in that context the threat of nuclear war. It’s a little weird; today, about 20% of humanity lives under communism, and about 80% under capitalism, but I don’t really get the sense that either economic style fears that the other will suddenly and irrevocably overwhelm them. From a recent visit to Texas, I suppose radio ads may beg to differ, but on the whole it’s hard to imagine anyone getting so worked up over purely ideological questions these days, except maybe infighting leftists.
Also, holy shit did a lot happen during Nixon’s presidency. He didn’t even have the full eight years, and he presided over the end of the gold standard, the creation of the EPA, opening relations with China, and the first ever moon landing. All this during the Vietnam war and a narrowly avoided second Cuban missile crisis, which, unlike the first, was kept under wraps. I’ve only read one presidential memoir, so maybe every term is like this. But I doubt it; Nixon’s years do feel extra consequential.
On the other end of the world-shaking spectrum, Nixon’s family life was pretty touching. Hand-written letters were clearly very important to him; he wrote them for various family members at milestones. He clearly prized the letters he wrote to his daughters when they got married, and treasured letters he got from others in both personal and professional capacities. He reads like a thoughtful father more generally, and an adoring husband. It’s his memoir, so it’d be a little pathetic if he came off badly there, but I do find myself believing.
Fun Details
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