Hes Tanned, Hes Fit, Hes Ready

If you havent guessed what politician this article is about, I wont spoil it. This is one of a dozen or so I wrote while on a tour of presidential libraries. Sometimes campaign techniques were what caught my eye, and other times it was nostalgia for the era. On this occasion there were several matters, including some fantastic domestic policy that came from an unlikely source. What if we had a presidential candidate who decided to run independently of a major party, despite being a prominent member of that party? How about a candidate who decided to run in every single primary and win to prove electability? These might be unifying gestures in polarized times. Once elected, what if this sitting president wrote a bill guaranteeing health care to every American instead of just promising to? How about a president who reduced speed limits to save fuel and created new federal agencies to protect the environment and workers health and safety? How about wage and price controls, indexing social security, and getting America off the remnants of the gold standard? America had that president 40 years agoRichard Milhous Nixon. For the record, Nixon created OSHA, EPA and NOAA for the environment and workplace health and safety. His DEA was created to fight the drug trade. His Philadelphia Plan was the biggest and most successful federal affirmative-action program of any president. When the Supreme Court ruled against delays in school desegregation, Nixons labor secretary, George P. Shultz, set up local transition committees that worked. Nixon desegregated more schools than any other American president. Nixon reformed the federal budgeting process and initiated the daily press event and daily message that every other president has copied. During his presidency, men walked on the moon. He visited China and negotiated arms limitations with the Russians. The AFL-CIO and United Auto Workers lobbied against his universal health-care bill, hoping for a better deal after another election. Theyre still waiting.
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In some respects Nixon is still a huge influence on public policy. The people he brought to Washington to serve in government include George H.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Casper Weinberger, James Baker and many more who later served in senior posts. Nixon decided to run in every primary in 1968, to show he could win elections. This countered his losing image after unsuccessful campaigns in California in 1962 and the presidential campaign of 1960. The 1968 campaign featured telephone hookups at Nixon rallies so that audience members could phone in questions. Callers would get a customized letter back with a specific response. Nixon mailed out cheap vinyl on stiff paper, so his statements could be played on record players in peoples homes. In 1972, Nixons campaign was largely independent of the Republican Party. The Nixon Library is on the old family lemon ranch, and the clapboard home is part of the exhibit. Its a great place to confront the contradictions and counter-intuitive tidbits from Nixons career: a great hamburger cook in the South Pacific, Nixon was also a great poker player and left the Navy with enough money to bankroll his first congressional run in 1946. Nixons work on the Un-American Activities Committee exposed former Franklin Roosevelt advisor Alger Hiss as a spy. Nixons international interests and perspective made the cold warrior also a moderate or even progressive in the Republican Party at the time. He had only four years in congress and two years in the senate before becoming vice-president at age 36. He was the only politician to be elected twice to both the vicepresidency and the presidency and the only president to resign from office. An excellent student, Nixon won a scholarship to Harvard but couldnt attend for lack of money. He was second in his class at Whittier College and third at Duke University Law School. A cold warrior from the start, Nixon claimed his first congressional opponent was collaborating with Communist-controlled unions. In his first senate contest in 1950, he claimed his female opponent was pink right down to her underwear. Helen Douglas gave Nixon the nickname Tricky Dick and it stuck. A loyal and tireless vice-president, Nixon had to announce his own candidacy in 1956 when Ike wouldnt.
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 In 1960, when asked what Nixons contributions had been, Ike famously said, Give me a week and I might think of one. The great debater probably bested Khrushchev in the kitchen debate at an exhibition in Moscow but looked weak in TV contests with other candidates or reporters. With more than 20 years on the front lines of the Cold War, Nixon settled on dtente or cooperation with the Soviet Union. Would this have been called appeasement in the 1930s? A superb strategist, playing the China card when Sino-Soviet relations were at a low, Nixon failed to end the Viet Nam War before carpet-bombing the north and exiting through Cambodia and Laos. The great international tacticians support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War probably brought on the 1973 oil crisis but may also have pried Egypt loose from the Soviets. Nixons support for Pakistan may have hastened Indias nuclear program. In the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon ordered the attorneygeneral and deputy attorney-general to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Both refused and resigned, but the solicitorgeneral, Robert Bork, complied. Nixon reinforced the political dictum, Keep it in the positive when he said I am not a crook. Nixon is endlessly fascinating, and thus so is his library. A piece of counterfactual history goes like this: had Nixon gone on TV after his 1972 landslide, apologized for over-zealous campaign workers, fired half a dozen aides, donated a few hundred thousand dollars to the Kennedy School of Government to study ethics in campaigning and announced hed burned the storehouse of White House tape recordings, he would have served out his second term and gone down in history as one of the greatest US presidents.

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