American Experience

Roger Morris on Nixon's political skill

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Well, I would have to say that Richard Nixon is probably the most gifted and skilled political practitioner, in his pre-Presidential years, of all of the American Presidents in the 20th century. I don't think he has a rival, frankly, in Roosevelt or Truman or, least of all, in his contemporaries, in even Lyndon Johnson, who was renowned for his powers of manipulation and maneuver as an American politician. Richard Nixon is very much a self-made man in the six years prior to his emergence as a national figure. Between the moment he's elected to Congress in 1946 and the moment he's inaugurated as Vice President in 1953, he conducts nothing less than a kind of prodigy of American political self advancement. He's helped along the way, very, very importantly and very crucially by key figures. Often by figures behind the scenes and by secret arrangements and by historical forces that are not apparent, at all, to the naked eye. And he has some very powerful patrons. But he's a man of enormous brilliance and tactical gifts and tireless devotion to his own career. A very skillful and very accomplished as a very young man, very, very early on in the whole process. So that I think one of the ironies of Richard Nixon's ultimate failure as a President and his disgrace as a resigned chief executive is that his early career was so very promising; really prodigal in very many ways.

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