This is not Oliver Stone’s portrayal of a cold, calculating Nixon.
This is not Frost/Nixon’s portrayal of an unrepentant, bombastic Nixon.
This isn’t even Futurama’s portrayal of a dictatorial, power-grubbing Nixon.
It all started with me telling Richard: “you know…the older I get, the more I appreciate Nixon.”
His response, “you know…me too.”
A professor of mine, Dr. Gertmenian, worked on the National Security Council with President Nixon. He had to report to the man on a daily basis, and over time, gained many insights about his character. In fact, he was slated for Nixon’s team for the China visit but at the last minute was diverted to Moscow to handle a situation he still won’t discuss.
He said that Nixon had a managerial style where he would tell you to write things down and make sure that you were transcribing his every word. My professor didn’t mind, as Nixon’s thoughts and plans were often brilliant and richly detailed.
He said that no man could recall various facts from history to make a cogent argument better than Nixon, that he had total recall and an intelligence that was consistently vastly underestimated. He placed him “with Churchill” on a scale of dynamic world leaders.
One story in particular he recalled was when Nixon was flying in Air Force One over coal country, which was, at the time, Indiana and the zone between Chicago and Cleveland. Nixon noticed that you couldn’t even see the ground from the low-flying ready-to-land plane. His travel companion said that this pollution was constant, and not just a virtue of that day.
It was at that point, he said, that Nixon vowed to start the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. It was discovered that this pollution was due to bituminous coal, also known as “soft coal”, compared to “hard coal”, known as anthracite. At the time, anthracite was more expensive than bituminous, and while bituminous plants could only handle that kind of coal, anthracite plants can process both. The demand for both is inelastic, so the supply all depends upon the price as they’re substitute goods.
So Nixon advocated for a gradually-increasing 1/10th of one percent tax upon bituminous coal. This took the least efficient and most polluting of the plants out of business, and the revenues were used to re-educate those who worked in bituminous coal plants at other jobs.
This was an economically-brilliant idea, because workers weren’t displaced and polluting coal was removed from our system.
Many decisions that Nixon made affect us today. Obviously, the EPA has gone off of their original goals, and become a massive government waste. An EPA is a prudent idea, just nowhere near its current form. His plan to drawdown Vietnam has been lost to history, but after the escalations of Kennedy and Johnson it was the only reasonable plan and is a blueprint for how to drawdown in other countries where we’re involved. Opening us up to China gave American companies access to the world’s largest market and has turned that government away from communism and to believing in capitalism. Getting us off the gold standard put us in charge of our own currency, and helped take us off the ebb-and-flow crash-cycles that the gold-only system provided us.
There’s no denying Nixon was a smart man. He may have been disagreeable. But he was a man of strong moral convictions, a man who saw that the lazy entitlement system of our country and those encouraging it would weaken our system, a man distrustful of elites and the power they wielded over the media and society, a man whose oft-reviled “enemies list” turned out to be forward-thinking considering the anti-Americans our country was ready to be transformed by, a man who didn’t abuse government power but saw it as a force for good when applied in small and targeted doses.
Honestly, the Left should absolutely love him: he made environmental policy a focus, he withdrew us from Vietnam and was anti-war, and he saw room for government intervention in the economy.
They disliked the fact he wasn’t on their side. Had he been a Democrat, you never would’ve heard about Watergate. After all, LBJ did it worse and first.
I respect him for a variety of reasons, not just his intelligence and morality but his dislike of all things the Left currently holds dear. And when it was time to step down, he graciously accepted responsibility and saved others from being blamed, perhaps in the most magnanimous stroke a President has ever made.
Few modern leaders exist that have the strong moral basis and intellectual strength that Nixon did. It’s a pity and a disservice that he died a shamed man.