For my blog post today about Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full,
I will use as my starting-point something that Black says on pages
311-312. The topic is Vice-President Richard Nixon's impressions of
foreign countries and leaders.
"[Nixon] said he was impressed by
presidents Batista in Cuba, Cortines in Mexico, and Castillo Armas in
Guatemala (who had recently replaced President Jacobo Arbenz Guzm[a]n,
thanks to U.S. intervention disguised as a local uprising). His
description of Batista as an honest and socially progressive leader and a
'voracious' reader is not one that most Cubans would recognize. His
concern that the palace of the president of Mexico was more opulent than
the White House, although people less than a tenth of a mile away from
it 'lived in caves' was perceptive. His belief that the United Fruit
Company would see to the rising prosperity of Honduras was inexplicably
foolish for such a well-qualified observer (that company had led the
opposition to the former regime in Guatemala). But his reservations
about Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and about the desperate
poverty of Haiti, were sensible, if not startling feats of
observation. He did advocate the gradual incentivization of more
democracy in the region, and successfully advocate assistance for the
Inter-American highway."
Richard Nixon's approach to foreign
countries and leaders has come up often in my blog posts for My Year (or
More) of Nixon. There are times when Nixon appears to be quite
progressive, empathetic with countries (particularly their problems with
colonialism), and compassionate towards those impoverished by systemic
injustice. But there are also times when he is skeptical about
democracy being the right system for every country right away, when he
arguably treats the Third World as a battlefield for the Cold War while
neglecting the problems of people in Third World countries, and when he
has a belief (that some would call naive) that multinational
corporations can save the day. Like Black, I have the impression that
Nixon's views on foreign countries and leaders were a mixture of
idealism and realism.
There's also the issue of Nixon's admiration
of leaders whom many would consider to be corrupt or repressive. Black
mentions Nixon's impression of Batista, the leader of Cuba who would be
overthrown by Fidel Castro. I think that the Shah of Iran is another
example. Nixon speaks highly of the Shah in his books. He saw the Shah
as someone who sincerely cared for Iran, highlighted the land reforms
that the Shah helped to enact, denied that the Shah was particularly
repressive, and affirmed that the Shah was an important bulwark against
Soviet aggression in the Middle East. When I watched the 2012 movie Argo
and saw the brief documentary at the beginning about the Shah's
repression, I wondered: "Man, is this the same guy Nixon was talking
about, the humble gentleman Nixon was praising?"
It puzzles me how
a leader can come across as an intellectual, as humble, as a visionary,
as a reformer, and as one who cared about his nation, and yet be
repressive and corrupt in his leadership. And this does not just apply
to right-wing leaders or dictators, for I have read about the same sort
of thing when an American meets with a left-wing dictator with a
reputation for brutality: the dictator actually is quite impressive, not
the sort of person one would expect to be a horrible despot. One could
say that such leaders are merely putting on an act when they are
meeting with American representatives, that they have the social skills
to deceive and manipulate the big, strong Americans. I'm sure that
there's a lot of acting going on in these meetings, but I also think
that, on some level, the controversial leaders are bringing who they are
into their interactions with American representatives. How, then,
would I explain these leaders' insensitivity, harsh repression, and (in
many cases) corruption, in light of their sensitive, intellectual side?
I don't know. We are all mixtures of good and bad, of idealism and
blind-spots. Maybe that's what's going on.