Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Column: Tales of the notorious Nixon tapes
By Asher Smith
Emory Wheel, Emory U.
December 05, 2008

It may be almost 35 years since Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace and 15 since his death, but wouldn’t you know it — it’s still fun to kick around poor old Tricky Dick.

Tuesday’s release of over 200 more hours of recordings from the Nixon White House revealed Richard Nixon to be — well, everything we always thought he was. On tape, for all the world to hear, we have Nixon admitting that he promoted a "goddamned fool" to the vice presidency, agreeing with Henry Kissinger’s assessment that Spiro Agnew "can’t be president." The paranoia of the 37th presidency again is placed on display, as he reminds his underlings that "the press are the enemy, the professors are the enemy." And it wouldn’t be a genuine collection of Nixon tapes without a full blast of ruthlessness. ("We are going to use any means ... I want the Brookings Institution cleaned out and have it cleaned out in a way that has somebody else take the blame.")

Truth be told, there are no real revelations here. None of the new tapes shed a truly fresh light on the Nixon we thought we knew — and quite frankly, they don’t compare to some of the classics of the Nixon archives, such as his contribution to the historiography of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church and the great powers of Western Europe. ("You know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were f---. ... But the Catholic Church went to hell three or four centuries ago. It was homosexual, and it had to be cleaned out. That’s what’s happened to Britain. It happened earlier to France.") Or his nuanced take on Judaism, summed up nicely by his assessment that "it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana are Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists."

Rehashing all the old classic Nixonisms, though, accomplishes a goal far nobler than the simple prompting of uncomfortable laughter. Historical analysis, like history itself, functions cyclically; differing camps still see a purpose in playing tug-of-war over the legacies of figures such as Franklin Roosevelt, Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and inevitably movements emerge to rescue and advocate on behalf of the memories of former ideological standard-bearers. This has been the motivation behind the slew of recent laudatory works honoring Barry Goldwater and his 1964 campaign and partly explains the efforts of those who try to cast Nixon as a worthy president.

Nixon revisionism has proved especially cyclical. While the release of these current tapes reinforce many of the initial critiques of Nixon, at various points the intelligentsia has been impatient to declare his image largely rehabilitated, particularly in the 1980s and ’90s as the conservative movement was ascendant. This was a task that was helped along by Nixon himself, who spent the majority of those years pumping out dense books on American foreign policy.

But while it is important to keep in mind the full story and to remember Nixon’s impact on the direction of American foreign policy — Robert Dallek’s 2007 book "Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power" did perhaps the best job of giving the Nixon administration credit for its foreign policy successes — to try and see Nixon as something other than a corrupt, somewhat tragic and unfailingly pathetic figure is to miss the point.

Invective of the sort that Hunter S. Thompson flung about may not be the most worthwhile; he didn’t help what was quickly becoming a minority view of Nixon with lines such as: “If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. … His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”

Some figures, though, need to be figuratively flung into the trash bin. It is almost inevitable that, one day, serious and well-meaning historians will attempt to write histories of the George W. Bush years that vindicate "The Decider." Surely, he couldn’t have been so obtuse; surely, Bush couldn’t possibly have been as tone-deaf and negligent of national disasters, economic indicators and the basics of diplomacy as the prevailing sources will inevitably make him appear.

But sometimes, to paraphrase former NFL coach Dennis Green, presidents are who we thought they were. In the case of Richard Nixon, reminders such as last Tuesday’s audio dump are immensely helpful in that they reinforce the perceptions that most people had already formed about the man. If only we could always be so lucky — one has to hope that, 35 years after Bush leaves office, there will be similar artifacts left around to ensure that his ineptitude remains as permanent a fixture in our popular memory as Nixon’s sorry string of "[expletive deleted]."

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