The same is true of Nixon himself Critics within the press and academia who viewed him as a crook and a war criminal will increasingly give way to more balanced analysts. Even before his latest illness, old bitterness seemed to ebb, worn away by time and grit. At Nixon’s death, nothing about him was perfectly clear anymore. Like children standing at the grave of a deeply flawed father, Americans began to construct a more complex picture of his strengths and weaknesses.
In the broad sweep, history’s treatment of Nixon depends on Nixon’s treatment of history. That treatment was not just his prodigious if conventional writing. It was, more significantly, his conditioning of the political culture-the way he changed public perceptions of public life and institutionalized cynicism. Is Nixon’s influence on the nature of our politics still being felt? Now, more than ever.
Each generation of politically conscious Americans views Nixon differently. For those over 60, his contemporaries, it was either like (rarely love) or hate. His bundle of bromides and resentments-particularly of elites-often mirrored their own. For those under 30, Nixon is just another figure from history, emitting a faintly noxious odor of no great consequence.
It’s those in the middle-thirtyish to fiftyish-who will render the first historical verdict. Nixon had his young supporters, but by and large we knew Nixon not as a contemporary or a dusty historical personage but as a twisted symbol of corruption and despised authority. Nixon believed deeply in that notion of authority, particularly his own. The great irony is that he did more than any modern president to undermine the very values he built his career on.
Strange as it sounds, Richard Nixon was our Franklin Roosevelt-the political leader who dominated the landscape for so long that he shaped or warped us in ways we barely understand. For someone growing up under Nixon, the invasion of Cambodia and the campus unrest that followed loomed about as large in our consciousness as, say, the Battle of the Bulge did for our parents when they were young. Nixon’s resignation was our VJ Day. These events, 30-odd years apart, had opposite effects on the political sensibilities of younger people. Imagine what the heroic use of power in World War II did for a young generation’s faith in their leaders. Now imagine what the criminal abuse of power in the Nixon years did to the next generation.
Analyzing Nixon without. Watergate, says political scientist Nelson Polsby, is like looking at a map of Switzerland without mountains. If you doubt how severe the abuse of power was, consult J. Anthony Lukas’s “Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years,” a sorry catalog of lies, bald crimes and sheer contempt for democracy that extends far beyond Watergate and the cover-up. The late political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau, no longhair, wrote that the invocation of “national security” as justification for any government action was one of several practices of “a distinctly Fascist character” introduced in those years. Nixon apologists always complain that their man just did what other presidents had done. This is half true. The abuses had precedent in kind, but not degree. He was a lot worse.
Yet Watergate will not be Nixon’s only legacy either. His influence is bigger than a scandal-and bigger than any foreign-policy accomplishments, like restoring relations with China a few years earlier than expected. He dominates our political consciousness not because of what he did-for good or ill-but because of who he was. If the Kennedys personified our hopes, Nixon conjured our fears-of our parents and, in his moments of awkwardness and insecurity, of ourselves. In the mirror of television, this was uncomfortable, and often funny. Nixon’s public humiliation was seen by us almost as a joke, a memory that should bring some remorse. But the humor was influential, too. Making fun of Nixon helped shape the ironic sensibility that now so dominates popular culture.
Nixon’s legacy for our politics is more serious. His character came to represent political character generally; his slashing style, imitated in a thousand attack ads, infected what we thought of every politician who followed. The anesthesia of the Reagan era never really treated the cancer that John Dean diagnosed as growing on the presidency. The real cancer was more than just the corruption of one administration; it was the corruption of politics as a whole in the mind of a generation. Nixon helped make people skeptical not just of individual politicians (a stout American tradition) but of the legitimacy of politics and government as a means of addressing their problems. Reagan exploited that. Clinton is suffering from it. He and every other politician in America are still reaping the bitter harvest of Nixon’s career, in distrust of leaders, lack of respect for institutions and cynicism about public service. We don’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore, but he’ll be kicking us-and our politics-long after the historians have had their say.
