For my blog post today for My Year (or More) of Nixon, I will feature
two quotes. The first is from the book that I am reading now, Conrad
Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. The second is from Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician.
On page 449 of Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, Black states the following about Nixon's frustration with Dwight Eisenhower:
"Nixon
steadily ran strongly in polls of Republicans expressing a presidential
preference, but always said that he was not a candidate for the 1964
nomination. When Eisenhower enumerated for the press ten Republicans
that he thought would be good presidents, and left Nixon out, Nixon let
his displeasure be known at a fashionable dinner table. He knew this
would be reported to Eisenhower, who called the next day and said that
Nixon had made his point many times that he was not a candidate. Nixon
pointed out that, as reported, Eisenhower was not confining himself to
declared, or even likely, candidates, and the former president told a
reporter the following week that if there were a 'sudden wave of
support' for Nixon, he would certainly be qualified. Nixon had had
about as much of Eisenhower's condescensions as he could take, and
referred to his former boss from time to time as 'that senile old
bastard,' which was in fact the opinion that he had intermittently had
of him since the fund crisis thirteen years before. Nixon was aware of
Eisenhower's qualities and of his historic status, but it was a relief
to drop the mask of exaggerated deference, at least occasionally and in
private."
On pages 135-136 of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, Roger Morris talks about a possible reason that Richard Nixon as a young man loved football:
"Later,
reporters were ever puzzled at why he had played football so long and
so punishingly at Whittier and, even with the cheers when he finally got
in the game, with such failure and humiliation. In the end, thought
Wood Glover, 'He just enjoyed the game. He enjoyed being around it.'
He found among the football team, even apart from their locker room bull
sessions, the candor and freedom from artifice that he had seen in his
father, and that was missing in much of the rest of his universe. If
the Milhouses were a tribe of quiet, compelling women, if debate and
academics demanded subtlety and maneuver, the football field was a world
of men and a kind of raw honesty. 'I think he liked the contact with
those people,' Ingrum said. 'And I'm not too sure that he didn't enjoy
it more than he did with just the scholar type, because I think he was
challenged from a different standpoint. You know, the athletes don't
give a hoot what they say or when they say it...and I think Dick enjoyed
the comradeship and the straightforwardness."
So end the readings!
The
reason that I love these passages is that they express how artificial
and intimidating the social world can be. There are so many subtleties
and nit-pickings and politics and jerks in the world today, that it's a
challenge for neurotypical people to get through this jungle, let alone
people with Asperger's, or others who feel as if they don't have a
social map! Nixon was happy when he could take a brief break from his
need to be obsequious towards Eisenhower and could express what he really
thought about Eisenhower and his history of condescension towards
Nixon, even if Nixon could only take that break in private. And Nixon
as a young man probably liked football because it was so raw and
honest----it didn't have all the nuancing and subtleties of academia, or
the repression of feelings from his Quaker heritage. Rather, athletes
were blunt in saying what they thought, and football involved tackling.
You'd think that people with Asperger's would gravitate towards
sports. But my impression is that this often does not happen. For one,
there are many with Asperger's who lack ability in sports (though there
are exceptions). Second, because Aspies are different, they can be
targets of bullying, sometimes by the blunt athletes, who may not feel
bound by the rule of propriety that says that one person should not
bully another. I'm not saying that all or even most athletes are like
this, but this sort of thing does happen.