1999: Victory Without War, by Richard Nixon

I read Richard Nixon's 1999: Victory Without War.  The book is entitled 1999, but it was actually published in 1988.  Come to think of it, I remember Dan Quayle referring to it as the 1988 Republican Vice-Presidential candidate in his debate with Senator Lloyd Bentsen (the "You're no Jack Kennedy" debate).

I have four items.

1.  Nixon discusses the end of detente, his system of negotiations and easing of tensions with the Soviet Union.  Nixon is against a number of arguments from hardliners and doves, and he apparently regards detente as a middle ground between those two extremes.  Because detente entails the U.S. talking with the Soviets, it allows the U.S. to have influence over what the U.S.S.R. does, whether that concerns Soviet expansionism or arms control.  When the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. have a fairly easygoing relationship, Nixon argues, the U.S.S.R. is more likely to treat its own citizens well rather than abusing them, whereas isolating the U.S.S.R. is counterproductive.  Nixon also notes that, during his practice of detente as President, the Soviets did not make significant gains in terms of taking over other countries.

Nixon traces the end of detente to America's loss of the Vietnam War.  Essentially, he argues that this loss demoralized the U.S. from taking a tough stand in protecting its own interests, and thus the U.S. accepted any agreement the Kremlin wanted.  There wasn't any more tough negotiation, in which the U.S. does what the Soviets want in one area, if the Soviets do what the U.S. wants in another area.  Meanwhile, the U.S. was cutting its defense budget and hindering U.S. assistance to South Vietnam, even as the U.S.S.R. "increased its military aid to North Vietnam" (page 58).  But Nixon also notes an example of a hardline stance shattering the effectiveness of detente.  Because the U.S. Congress deprived the U.S.S.R. of Most Favored Nation Trade status, until the U.S.S.R. permitted more Soviet Jews to leave, the U.S. could no longer use trade as a "carrot" to encourage the U.S.S.R. to do what it wanted.  Nixon summarizes the demise of detente on page 58:

"When Congress refused to grant the Soviet Union most-favored nation status, it took away the carrot.  When it cut the defense budget and hamstrung the President's ability to react to Soviet aggression, it left the United States with a weak stick.  Those actions sent the wrong message to the Kremlin.  They in effect telegraphed Moscow that it could pursue its aggressive policies at little or no cost."

Joan Hoff in Nixon Reconsidered narrates the end of detente a bit differently, for she depicts it as a matter of increased hostility between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, rather than the U.S. letting the U.S.S.R. walk all over it.  Like Nixon, however, she acknowledges the significance of the undermining of MFN with the Soviet Union in the end of detente.  See here.

Nixon argued that America's loss of the Vietnam War contributed to the end of detente, and I should note that Nixon more than once discusses what he considers to be the negative consequences of the U.S. losing the Vietnam War.  According to Nixon on page 106, for example, American loss of the Vietnam War allowed the Soviets to "threaten sea lanes vital to Japan" from harbors of Vietnam.

2.  What does Nixon in the book 1999 think about President Ronald Reagan's policies regarding the Soviet Union?  He's mixed.  He likes Reagan's policy of assisting anti-communist forces in other countries, yet he laments that Reagan's bellicose rhetoric has encouraged many Western Europeans to fear nuclear weapons rather than Communism.  Nixon supports the Strategic Defense Initiative, yet he thinks that Reagan is over-optimistic about its effectiveness, and that it should protect American weapons sites rather than the entire country (since the weapons sites give the U.S. strike capability).  Nixon does not support trying to surpass the Soviet Union in nuclear capability, since that leads to an arms race, and yet he is critical of nuclear disarmament, as he sees nuclear weapons as a way to safeguard the peace and to discourage the Soviets from getting out of hand.  Nixon is critical of Reagan's agreement to remove a number of warheads from Western Europe, as the Soviets remove even more warheads, for he contends that this leaves Western Europe vulnerable to Soviet conventional forces.

3.  Did Nixon envision the end of the Cold War?  Again, he's rather mixed.  He doesn't appear to envision it ending, and he argues that Mikhail Gorbachev is still a Communist dedicated to Soviet expansionism, so he contends that the U.S. should be on-guard.  At the same time, he seems to acknowledge that the Cold War takes an economic toll on the Soviet Union, and he also argues that the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe is not particularly strong.  He says that, even in times when the U.S.S.R. sent in forces to squash anti-Communist revolts in Eastern Europe (in the 1950's and late 1960's), it had to send a large number of forces to accomplish its goal.

4.  A lot of these issues are not directly relevant today, since there is no longer a Soviet Union.  At the same time, I wonder if some of Nixon's insights can still be pertinent to today's world: how the U.S. interacts with Russia or China, for example.  I really don't know.  Putin does not seem to have imperial ambitions (as far as I can see, and I'm open to correction on this), at least not as the Communist Soviet Union did, yet he does like to flex his muscle on the world stage.  Missile defense is still a discussed issue, since Putin does not like for Eastern Europe to have a missile defense system, feeling that this make Russia vulnerable (or so I have read).  I would have to know more about the world before I could discuss the possible relevance of Nixon's insights to today!

Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character 2

On pages 20-21 of Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, Fawn Brodie states:

"Billy Graham, Nixon's 'spiritual adviser,' who had led the prayer breakfasts at the White House and had given the funeral service when Nixon's mother died, described to his own biographer, Marshall Frady, how he vomited after reading the Nixon tape transcripts.  He said, 'I thought like John Wesley when he said, 'When I look into my heart it looks like hell.''  He did not say 'when I look into Nixon's heart,' but 'when I look into my own.'"

Brodie then goes on to say that Graham "soon saw his own escape from responsibility", and she goes on to quote Graham's statement in which he blamed Nixon's downfall on sleeping pills and demons.

Brodie argues that many people seek to differentiate themselves from Nixon, in an attempt to make themselves feel better about themselves, amidst their own shortcomings.  They ask what made Nixon so bad because they want for him to be worse than them, for their problem is that they see a bit of themselves in Nixon.  On page 20, Brodie gives examples: "We need reassurance that his lying is pathological whereas ours is simply 'white' lying, lying out of kindliness or unwillingness to give offense.  We want to be told that our small evasions, if any, in reporting our income tax do not compare with his fraudulently backdating a deed to win a tax break of half a million dollars."

This sort of theme has come up previously in my reading for My Year (or More) of Nixon.  Both Joan Hoff and Monica Crowley contend that Nixon was a scapegoat for flaws within the United States.  And David Greenberg in Nixon's Shadow stated (or perhaps he quoted someone who stated----I don't remember offhand) that a number of Americans could identify with Nixon.  Nixon was one who played roles and wore masks in his life, for instance, and many Americans realize that they do the same thing.

I've been thinking of doing a post on the hit TV series, Breaking Bad, but I'll comment on it here, even though I realize that more people would probably read what I have to say were I to write a separate Breaking Bad post.  More than one Christian blogger has stated that the show teaches them about Christian truths, such as original sin, and the slippery slope on which evil can place a person.  I have to admit that I myself do not think about spirituality when I am watching Breaking Bad.  I'm intrigued by the plot, the characters, and all the money that Walter White is making, but I don't contemplate how the show relates to my life.  I tend to identify with something that Matthew Paul Turner said on Facebook: "The '"Breaking Bad can teach us about God' blog posts are beginning to get old. I've seen at least 5 or 6 today. Why can't a good show just be a good show? Must every good show, song, or movie become a tool for Christians trying to make a mediocre Christian point?"

One reason that I was hesitant to learn any moral lessons from Breaking Bad was that I had a hard time judging Walter White.  Walter had cancer and a kid with special needs, and his jobs weren't making him much money, so he went into the meth business to provide for himself and his family.  It's a "situational ethics" sort of scenario, in which none of the options is great.

As I thought some more, however, there did come to be a time when it was no longer a matter of situational ethics.  Walter's cancer eventually went into remission, so he didn't have to worry about that anymore.  But he continued to be in the meth business.  Why?  Well, he was good at it, and he was making a lot of money.  Moreover, he had lingering resentment because, years before, he was part of a scientific discovery, and he was excluded from the huge profits that were made on it.  He thought that he had been cheated out of what he deserved, and he was making up for that by making tons of money in the meth business.

There, I believe, Breaking Bad teaches me something about morality and spirituality: Can greed and resentment lead me to do something that's wrong, something that ends up hurting people I don't see, and people I do see?  In this case, by looking into Walter White's heart, I see the flaws in my own.

Reinventing Richard Nixon 6

My latest reading of Daniel Frick's Reinventing Richard Nixon challenged the revisionist claim that President Richard Nixon significantly advanced the well-being of African-Americans.

According to Frick, more public schools became desegregated when Nixon was President simply because Nixon was enforcing the Supreme Court decision of Alexander v. Holmes County.  Frick states that "Put simply, Nixon had no choice but to act as he did" (page 155).  On page 158, Frick notes that the unemployment rate for African-Americans jumped from 6.4 percent in 1969 (when Nixon became President) to "as high as 10 percent in 1972" (page 158).  Frick also states that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1974 (Nixon's last year in office), 22.6 percent of African-Americans between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four were in poverty.  African-American men between 1969 and 1979 merely gained $21 for every $1,000 that white men earned, whereas they had gained $82 between 1959-1969.  Frick then notes that the ten years after 1969-1979 (the decade that would include the Reagan years) were even worse in terms of the gain in African-American income in comparison to what white men made: it was $22.

Joan Hoff, in her revisionist book Nixon Reconsidered, offers other, more positive statistics.  On page 97, she refers to independent surveys that Nuestro Business Review and Black Enterprise conducted in 1981, which showed that "56 of the top 100 black firms had been established 'between 1969 and 1976, 30 of them in the years of 1969 through 1971 when the federal minority enterprise program [under Nixon] was being launched.'"

I did a search on the African-American poverty rate.  I could not find specifically the poverty rates by year for African-Americans between the ages of 18 and 64.  Here and here, though, are charts about the African-American poverty rate over the past five decades, or so.  Essentially, during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, the African-American poverty rate plunged dramatically, though it still remained in the double digits.  Under Nixon, it increased slightly, then decreased slightly, then increased slightly again, and then decreased.  It would later make a dramatic rise under Carter (probably due to the recession), and it continued to rise under Reagan until 1983 or so, when it fell.   Through all of this time, it was in the double digits.

UPDATE: On page 267, Frick states: "Even Nixon's successes in affirmative action served this scheme.  [Presumably, the scheme is taking political advantage of divisions.]  The Philadelphia Plan, which worked to increase the number of blacks gaining unionized employment in the construction industry or the administration's program to give a predetermined number of federal contracts to businesses owned by minorities allowed Nixon to pit blacks against organized labor."

Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full 23

My blog post on Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full will focus on money supply and the gold standard.

1.  On page 696, we read:

"Unemployment was low, but inflation had risen from 3.3 percent to 5.5 percent under Nixon, and Arthur Burns, who had gone to the Federal Reserve chairmanship in January 1970, was a monetary conservative.  Nixon urged him to expand the money supply, as he had urged during the 1954 and 1958 midterm elections, but Burns declined to do so (as Eisenhower had).  There was virtually no economic growth through 1970."

When the money supply is expanded, that can mean inflation, since, when more money is out there, companies raise prices.  But some people support expanding the money supply as a means to stimulate the economy.  Nixon sometimes favored expanding the money supply for this reason.  Arthur Burns, however, a "monetary conservative" (as Black calls him), was resistant to this.  Ron Paul was a Presidential candidate in 2008 and 2012, and he often spoke in favor of the gold standard and restricting the money supply to combat inflation.  What did Ron Paul think about Arthur Burns?  On pages 115-116 of End the Fed, Paul states: "Following the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, [Burns] dearly wanted to be reappointed.  He cut the discount rate and accelerated money growth.  True, he was a Republican, but he wanted to go down in history as bipartisan...Sadly for Burns, the courtship failed.  Even more sadly for the country, the courtship wrecked the dollar further."  Paul apparently did not regard Burns as a man of principle in terms of monetary conservatism, at least after Jimmy Carter's election in 1976.

2.  On page 739, we read the following about the Bretton Woods agreement:

"In 1944, the Western countries had agreed at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, on a new international currency agreement, based on the U.S. dollar and the backing of the dollar by the gold reserves of the United States.  There was gold in the Treasury of the United States to redeem about one-quarter of the outstanding currency, and there were fixed exchange rates with other major currencies, especially the British pound.  This system had worked well for twenty-five years, but now U.S. gold reserves had declined (from $25 billion to $10.5 billion), Europe was back on its feet, Japan was much more powerful economically than it had ever been, the United States was on the verge of running its first trade deficit in over seventy-five years, and gold was clearly under-priced as a commodity, as the dollar was overpriced as a currency.  Gold played an obsolescent and impossible role now because there were at least six or seven other important hard currencies.  Manufacturing in Japan and Western Europe was now extremely competitive..."

That's Black's explanation of the problems in the Bretton Woods agreement, a sort of gold standard (though Ron Paul in End the Fed refers to it as a "pseudo-gold standard"), which Nixon wanted to end.  These problems included a decline of U.S. gold reserves, gold being under-priced, and the need for the U.S. to compete with Europe and Japan, something that the Bretton Woods standard may have been hindering.
Joan Hoff in Nixon Reconsidered is rather critical of Nixon's policy on Bretton Woods.  Her discussion of the rationale behind ending Bretton Woods overlaps with what Black says: "Faced with a gold drain and a trade deficit, the United States allowed the dollar 'to float' on international markets to increase markets abroad and stop any more speculative pressures against the dollar.  This could not be done without causing even more domestic inflation and had to be offset by some deflationary action to placate unions in the form of wage and price controls" (page 140).  But Hoff argues on pages 143-144 that things did not work out as planned:

"Still another unintended consequence arose from the decision to abandon the Bretton Woods system.  This aspect of the NEP represented a deregulation of international currencies.  Since then, economic regionalism has flourished because three rival trading blocs emerged.  Each established a separate regional monetary order based on the yen, mark, and dollar----a situation that has contributed to exchange rate instability and currency speculation since then.  The increased tension among these three major regional trading blocs will continue until the current global recession is over.  What the world learned following the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement is that floating exchange rates and freer trade do not go hand in hand.  In fact, instability of the former almost always produces complaints about unfair trading practices and pressures for protectionism.  Yet the intensification of regional international competition based on competing currencies...could result in a worsening of worldwide economic conditions in the 1990s.  There is little doubt that the world needs another Bretton Woods system to stabilize currency exchange rates."

I vaguely understand some of this discussion.  I don't entirely comprehend why countries debase their currency in order to make their exports more competitive.  I did a search online to find an answer to my question.  Some of the articles were too abstract for a layperson like myself.  One comment that I read simply said that debasing currency makes exports cheaper abroad, but it did not explain why.

I think that what I see here is a tension between a desire for flexibility and a desire for stability.  The reason that we ended Bretton Woods was probably that it did not allow for the flexibility that we wanted: it was chaining the dollar (not all, but some) to gold, which was not in great supply, and it was hindering the U.S.'s ability to compete.  But Hoff's concern appears to be that eliminating Bretton Woods led to instability: now that currency is not attached to gold but can float freely, there is not much stability in terms of exchange rates.  And countries are concerned that other countries are debasing their currency in order to give their own exports a competitive edge, a practice that they consider to be unfair, and which can encourage them to retaliate with protectionism.

Nixon Reconsidered 8

I finished Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered.  I have three items.

1.  I liked something that Hoff said on pages 344-345:

"...the parents of those born after 1974 either strongly opposed or supported Nixon for reasons their children still do not quite understand: 'My parents hate him,' one of my students responded on a questionnaire asking why she was taking a class on Nixon, 'and I want to know why.'"

Why did I like this passage?  I can't really say.  I guess it's because it warms my heart to see people wanting to learn more about the world around them, due to something in their background that they don't quite understand.

I was one of the people born after 1974.  What did my parents think about Richard Nixon?  My impression is that they neither hated him nor loved him.  They believed that he was a shady politician, but they didn't have high expectations about politicians, in general.

Although my parents didn't appear (at least to me) to have strong opinions about Nixon, there were a couple of times when they expressed an opinion about him.  When I was in the sixth grade, I was reading The Final Days, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.  The back cover quoted the New York Times saying about the book: "Unprecedented....Mr. Nixon emerges as a tragic figure weathering a catastrophic ordeal...and weathering it with considerable courage and dignity."  When I read that quote to my Mom, she responded that she felt that way about Nixon during Watergate.

My Dad one time told a story about a conversation that his father had with someone about Nixon.  A relative was really gun-ho about Nixon, saying that Nixon would be a great President, and my Grandpa retorted, "Nixon will be the last President, and, not only that, he will be the worst President."  My Dad in telling the story may have been implying that my Grandpa was not too far off the mark: while Nixon did not turn out to be our last President, Nixon's Presidency did end on a dismal note.

2.  On pages 345-346, Hoff talks about how Nixon during the 1990's was deemed by many to be authentic:
"He insisted on speaking out on issues, especially foreign policy ones; he looked like a real person, not a talking head, on television; he stood for something rather than nothing or everything, as is now the trendy postmodern fashion...Nixon's potential appeal by the early 1990s because of his own 'real' look was lost on him; he once said to me that 'blow-dry hair is now as important as brains' when running for office.  It is truly a postmodern moment when Richard Nixon, who had to deal with charges of inauthenticity all his public life, became more real and authentic than the totally packaged variety of contemporary politician."

Throughout Richard Nixon's political career, there were many who did not regard Nixon as particularly authentic.  With all of the "new Nixons" coming out, many wondered who the real Nixon was.  According to Hoff, however, Nixon during the 1990's was regarded by many as more authentic than most of the politicians who were on the scene.  I can attest to that, on some level.  I was watching a YouTube clip of David Frost's interview of Nixon, in which Nixon was responding to Frost's questions about Watergate.  One of the commenters said that she liked Nixon because he was comfortable with being who he was.  Granted, this clip was of an interview of Nixon from the late 1970's, not the 1990's.  But I could see the commenter's point.  I don't know if Nixon was telling the truth or not in the Frost interviews, but he did come across to me as authentic, as a real person.  I have the same impression whenever I watch Nixon's Checkers Speech from 1952----and this is a speech that detractors consider to be particularly inauthentic, with its staged den and Nixon's sappy reference to the family dog.  Many say that Nixon was uncomfortable in his own skin, and they may be right.  But there were a number of times when Nixon came across as authentic, as if he were conveying a message of "This is who I am, take it or leave it."

3.  For this third item, I'll offer my general assessments of Hoff's book.  Overall, the book has a lot about policy, and I had to reread parts to grasp what exactly Hoff was narrating.  The book is important, but it is very dry, in areas.  At the same time, I enjoyed Hoff's anecdotes about her interviews with Nixon.  In terms of her argument that President Nixon had significant and progressive accomplishments in domestic policy, she may be right about that, but I wish that she addressed certain liberal arguments against Nixon's domestic policy.  For example, a number of progressives were critical of Nixon's welfare reform plan of giving cash benefits to the poor, maintaining that the funding would not be adequate.  Hoff should have addressed that charge by saying whether or not the poor would have been able to live on the amount of money that Nixon's plan would give them.  Another point that I would like to make is that I found Hoff to be rather elliptical, in places.  She seemed to agree that the Joint Chiefs of Staff was bugging the National Security Council, for example, but I wanted her to go into more detail about why it would do this.

Good book, though!

Nixon Reconsidered 7

I have two items for my blog post today about Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered.

1.  My first item will concern whether the United States should intervene in other countries.  Hoff has a section in her book, "THIRD WORLD MISTAKES", in which she is quite critical of how President Richard Nixon approached the Third World.  Overall, she seems to be arguing, he saw it through the prism of the Cold War.  Hoff discusses the Nixon Administration's treatment of Chile, which was headed by the Marxist President Salvador Allende, who would be overthrown in a coup.  While Hoff does not believe that there is evidence that the CIA or Nixon Administration "played any direct role in the assassination of President Salvador Allende," she does acknowledge that they "did everything possible to destabilize his government" (page 249), by funding Allende's political opponents, for example.  One who was opposed to such features of President Nixon's foreign policy was Secretary of State William Rogers, who would later say that the U.S. giving contributions to foreign elections is a bad idea.  One reason, according to Rogers, was that the U.S. doesn't get its "money's worth" in doing so.  Second, Rogers said, it is embarrassing to the countries and undermines their trust in the U.S.  And third, it contradicts the U.S.'s rhetoric about non-intervention and allowing "countries to determine their own future" (Rogers' words on page 251).  Some have characterized Rogers as not particularly bright, but I do believe that his critique of the Nixon Administration's policy in Chile is quite insightful.  I can still see Nixon's perspective----that the Soviets were backing the leftists in Chile, that the U.S. did not want a major Communist power in South America, and that thus the U.S. had to support Allende's opponents.  Still, in my opinion, Rogers does well to highlight downfalls to U.S. intervention in other countries' political systems. 

Hoff herself appears to pursue a rather isolationist route at the end of her chapter on the Vietnam War (even though I seriously doubt that she and Rogers were complete isolationists).  She essentially says that the U.S. government and military officials should apologize for the Vietnam War.  She blames the South Vietnamese, "not the dove-inspired constraints on the U.S. military", for losing the war (page 242).  While Hoff defends Nixon against a number of charges that she considers to be unfounded and unfair, she still apparently retains the opposition to the Vietnam War that she had when she was a New Leftist.

Hoff sometimes seems to praise Richard Nixon's foreign policy, as when she says that detente may deserve some credit for the end of the Cold War.  But, overall, she does not have too many kind words for Nixon's foreign policy.  As I said in my post yesterday, she is critical of the "linkage" element of detente, in which Nixon and Henry Kissinger would link together different issues in dealing with the Soviets, offering concessions in some areas if the Soviets would do what the U.S. wanted in other areas.  Her chapter about the Vietnam War is entitled "VIETNAM: WITHOUT PEACE OR HONOR".  She's against how Nixon approached the Third World.  What exactly does she favor in President Richard Nixon's foreign policy?  She says that his rapprochement with Red China was an accomplishment, but here, her applause strikes me as rather tepid.  One goal behind the rapprochement was to give the U.S. leverage in its relationship with the Soviet Union, and my impression is that Hoff does not believe that it did that.  Hoff's praises of Nixon's domestic policies are quite pronounced, by contrast.  She does note flaws in some of them, such as Nixon allowing the dollar to float, and Nixon believing that the Equal Pay Act could actually bring about equal pay for men and women in the workplace.  But she also believes that Nixon accomplished a significant amount of good in such areas as civil rights, the environment, and the U.S. Government's treatment of Native Americans, and that his proposal to reform welfare was quite groundbreaking.  I don't find that same level of respect in Hoff's book for Nixon's foreign policies.

2.  In my post here, I refer to Stephen Ambrose's claim that Nixon's desire for information about Democratic National Committee chairman Larry O'Brien could have contributed to the atmosphere that led to the break-in at the DNC's headquarters at the Watergate hotel.  Ambrose is not the only one who posits this, for many believe that the burglars were looking for information about O'Brien.  But Hoff does not buy this explanation for the break-in, and her reason is that "the Watergate burglars did not initially bug, nor were they subsequently caught in, O'Brien's office" (page 305).  Hoff goes into other motivations for the break-in that have been proposed, but she appears to be open to the controversial argument in the book, Silent Coup, by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, that the break-in was an attempt to find information about a prostitution ring that was servicing Democratic and Republican politicians.  I'm not sure if, or to what extent, she buys into the aspect of Silent Coup's argument for which John Dean sued its authors for libel: the argument that John Dean was somehow involved in ordering the break-in and trying to cover things up, since (according to the authors) Dean's wife was connected with someone who was prominent in the prostitution ring.  Hoff does, however, say on page 311 that Silent Coup "has surpassed other books about the origins of Watergate" and also "attempts to resolve factual contradictions in the testimony of all the participants about the break-ins and cover-up" (page 311).

David Greenberg in Nixon's Shadow said that Hoff essentially provided scholarly cover for Silent Coup.  There are many who may feel that Silent Coup was a book with a crackpot theory that several Nixon apologists desperately tried to grab onto, perhaps to make Dean a scapegoat for Watergate.  I don't know enough about Watergate to comment.  But I do have to respect Hoff's humble tone in praising Silent Coup, as when she notes that the book attempts to resolve contradictions in testimonies.  There's not a whole lot of pretense in her liking the book for that reason.

Nixon Reconsidered 6

In my blog post today about Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered, I will talk about detente.  Detente literally means a "relaxing or easing of tensions between nations" (page 183).  Under President Richard Nixon, detente included agreements with the Soviet Union on arms control and trade, and also the linkage together of different issues so that the United States could encourage the Soviets to do what the U.S. wanted in exchange for the Soviets receiving certain benefits and concessions.

I have three items on detente.

1.  On page 183, Hoff states that Nixon aimed "to seek sufficiency rather than superiority" in arms-control deals (Hoff's words).  The United States would not try to be superior to the U.S.S.R. by having more weapons, in short, but the United States would take care to have enough weapons to do the job of protecting itself and of being able to retaliate if the U.S.S.R. attacked it (and the threat of retaliation would hopefully discourage the U.S.S.R. from attacking in the first place).  I've read that Ronald Reagan criticized detente because it was the United States negotiating itself into a position of being number-two behind the Soviet Union.  I wonder if Reagan there was expressing his problems with the "sufficiency rather than superiority" aspect of detente.

2.  As I said in my post here, the concept of linkage seems to me to be common sense: the U.S. tells the Soviets that it will agree to something that the Soviets want, if the Soviets agree to do something that the U.S. wants.  That sounds to me like negotiation!  But the linkage of different issues in U.S. negotiations with the Soviets was actually pretty controversial.  In my post here, I discussed and linked to a YouTube video of a 1988 Presidential debate among the Democratic primary candidates, and also the Republican ones.  In the Republican debate, Alexander Haig was criticizing Ronald Reagan's arms-control negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev (which George Bush was defending) because they did not seem to have any linkage.  Meanwhile, other Republican candidates were critical of the U.S. dealing with the Soviet Union when the Soviets still had a poor human rights record and were helping to export Communism to other countries.  These Republican candidates may or may not have supported linkage, as Al Haig did, but they probably agreed that the U.S. should not just think about arms control when it was deliberating on how to deal with the Soviet Union, for the U.S. should also consider such issues as human rights and curbing Soviet interventionism.

Hoff herself does not seem to think that linkage worked.  She notes that Henry Kissinger was a major proponent of linkage, and I'm noticing a trend in Hoff's book that, in her eyes, most of what Henry Kissinger said and did was bad.  But what are her specific objections to linkage?  On page 158, Hoff states: "First and foremost, it never worked with respect to the Soviet Union in negotiations with Vietnam or the SALT I talks, and it made Nixinger policy look indifferent to Third World concerns, except insofar as they could be linked to relationships between major powers."  For Hoff (as I understand her), linkage did not enable the U.S. to get the Soviets to do everything that the U.S. wanted in the areas of Vietnam and SALT I, and, on some of the occasions when the Soviets did do what the U.S. wanted, it wasn't because of some convoluted linkage, but rather for other reasons.  I also want to say that Hoff's discussion of linkage and the Third World stood out to me because Nixon himself in some of his foreign policy books criticizes treating the Third World primarily as a battleground for the Cold War.  But Hoff's contention appears to be that Nixon as President did precisely that.

I may not be grasping the totality of the concept of linkage, or Hoff's arguments against it.  See the wikipedia article on linkage.  Something that the wikipedia article says (for what it's worth) is that "The Nixon-Kissinger approach did not link foreign and domestic arenas."  That would mean that human rights was not a part of linkage, at least not for Nixon and Kissinger----that the U.S. did not grant the Soviets advantages in (say) trade in exchange for an improved human rights record.  Still, Nixon in his memoirs does argue that the U.S. used its relationship with the Soviet Union to encourage it to allow Soviet Jews to leave the U.S.S.R.

3.  On pages 203-207, Hoff talks about the decline of detente.  Certain arms control agreements were slow in coming, and there was also concern that some of the arms control agreements already negotiated were disadvantageous to the U.S.  The Jackson-Vanik amendment to the Trade Reform Bill was challenging trade with the Soviet Union.  And a grain deal with the U.S.S.R. was resulting in an increase in domestic grain prices.  Later, President Jimmy Carter would emphasize human rights, specifically the provision about human rights of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and that was "a bone of contention between the United States and the Soviet Union" (page 207).

Nixon Reconsidered 5

For my blog post today about Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered, my topic will be the so-called "madman theory."

What's the "madman theory"?  According to Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman, in his book The Ends of Power, Nixon during the 1968 campaign mused about how he could end the Vietnam War as President by making the North Vietnamese think that he was a madman who could do anything, including drop the nuclear bomb.  The notion that Nixon held to a "madman theory" is widely accepted.

Hoff appears to be skeptical that Nixon embraced the "madman theory," however, and she lists the following considerations:

1.  Only Haldeman mentioned Nixon saying anything about it.  Nixon himself told Hoff that he didn't remember using the term in a conversation with Haldeman, and that he rarely discussed with Haldeman "substantive foreign policy matters" (Hoff's words on page 177).  Hoff also says that Nixon would have been imprudent to use the term "madman theory" in discussing his diplomacy, since Nixon called the anti-war protesters irrational.  Nixon did say, however, that, if he discussed the threat of "excessive force" in the Vietnam War, that had to do with Nixon using Kissinger as the "good messenger" (Nixon's terms) who would be a foil to Nixon's well-known anti-Communism.  That sounds to me like the substance of the madman theory----within a "good cop, bad cop" context----even if Nixon did not use the exact term.

2.  Hoff speculates that the term "madman theory" may go back to Henry Kissinger.  In 1959, Daniel Ellsberg delivered two lectures to Kissinger's Harvard seminar, and they were entitled "The Political Uses of Madness."  Ellsberg discussed how Adolf Hitler used "irrational military threats" (Ellsberg's words) in a political manner, and Ellsberg went on to criticize Hitler's strategy.  Hoff states that "there is some indication in even his earliest books that Kissinger accepted such an approach as diplomatically feasible," but that there is nothing in Kissinger's memoirs that indicates Kissinger's support for the "madman theory" (page 178).  According to Hoff, this is probably because Kissinger was trying to depict himself as a great negotiator.

3.  Hoff refers to an example of Kissinger encouraging the use of force, while Nixon was very hesitant.  "On April 15, 1969," Hoff narrates, "North Korea shot down a United States Navy EC-121 reconnaissance plane, killing all thirty-one men aboard" (page 173).  Contrary to what Kissinger would assert in White House Years, Hoff states, we can see in military documents that Nixon at first was all for "striking the North Korean airfield responsible for the attack on the American plane" (page 174).  But Nixon changed his mind on this, concluding that such an attack would be unfeasible, due to the dearth of enough U.S. planes and ships in the area, and the potential unwillingness of Japan and South Korea to serve as a base for the U.S. (since they wouldn't want to be involved in a conflict between the U.S. and North Korea).  Hoff states, "It would have taken up to a week to mount an effective air strike, with effective backup power, in case North Korea decided to deploy its 400 MIG jets" (page 175).

Kissinger, by contrast, supported an air-strike.  Kissinger did not believe that the North Koreans would attack back, plus he thought that an air-strike would show the Soviet Union, China, and North Vietnam that Nixon meant business.  Nixon in his memoirs says that Kissinger told him: "If we strike back, even though it's risky, they will say, 'this guy is becoming irrational----we'd better settle with him.'"  Kissinger was the one supporting the "madman theory" in this case, not Nixon, Hoff argues.

Hoff narrates that Kissinger during the Ford Administration would similarly "overreact."  In 1975, the Khmer Rouge "captured a U.S. merchant ship and its forty-man crew", and President Gerald Ford acted on Kissinger's advice by attacking Koh Tang, the island where the ship and crew were believed to be (page 176).  Kissinger supported this measure as a way to maintain the United States' worldwide prestige, after "sixty hours of negotiating had failed" (page 176).  But the attack ended up being a disaster.  Forty-one Americans died, fifty were wounded, and many Cambodians were killed on account of a bomb while they were evacuating.  Moreover, the Cambodian government released the crew prior to the U.S. attack, meaning the attack was useless.  Hoff states that the U.S. should have negotiated with Cambodia through the UN or neutral channels.

But let's return to the North Korea incident.  As I look in volume 1 of Nixon's memoirs, and I read Nixon's account of the North Korea incident, it seems to me that Nixon identified with Kissinger's motives for wanting the U.S. to attack North Korea, for Nixon himself was concerned about U.S. prestige abroad.  Nixon also narrates that he initially supported a retaliatory attack.  But Nixon says that he came to believe that an attack would not be feasible, and he states that Kissinger himself came around to backing off from his support for an attack.  Kissinger saw that (among Nixon's team) only Vice-President Agnew, Attorney General John Mitchell, and he supported an attack, whereas Secretary of State William Rogers, Secretary of Defense Mel Laird, and most of the other top national security people opposed it.  (It's interesting to me that Agnew and Rogers were involved in these discussions, since there were many times that they were marginalized or kept outside of the loop.)  According to Nixon, Kissinger concluded that "we could ill afford a Cabinet insurrection at such an early date in the administration", and also that "congressional and public opinion were not ready for the shock of a strong retaliation against the Communists in North Korea" (page 475).  Nixon agreed to a plan of continuing intelligence flights, while backing them up with "fighter escort," and also of launching another round of attacks on North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia, just to show North Vietnam (and North Korea) that the U.S. still meant business.  Nixon also expresses a sense, based on intelligent reports, that what North Korea did was an isolated occurrence.

I've not yet read the entirety of Henry Kissinger's White House Years, but his account of the EC-121 incident is on pages 315-321.  Essentially, Kissinger portrays Nixon as failing to act decisively and to demonstrate solid leadership during this crisis, which occurred so early in Richard Nixon's Presidency.  Rather, according to Kissinger, Nixon was dithering and was considering options.  Kissinger admits that he himself (meaning Kissinger) "favored some retaliatory act, but was less clear about what it might be" (page 317).  Kissinger also sees Nixon's point that "we could certainly not sustain a prolonged ground war" if North Korea responded (Kissinger's words, page 319), but Kissinger says that he did not believe that North Korea would escalate the situation if the U.S. retaliated.  Like Nixon in his memoirs, Kissinger narrates that he (meaning Kissinger) ultimately backed off from supporting retaliation because there was "no Congressional support" for it, plus Nixon's team was divided.  Kissinger states on page 320: "I never had had an impression that Nixon had his heart in a retaliatory attack.  He had procrastinated too much; he had not really pressed for it in personal conversation; he had not engaged in the relentless maneuvering by which he bypassed opposition when his mind was made up."

While Hoff disputes elements of Kissinger's account of the EC-121 incident, what is interesting to me is that Kissinger's account appears to be more consistent with Hoff's portrayal of Nixon than Nixon's own account of it in his memoirs, even though Hoff does not appear to be a huge fan of Kissinger (or such is my impression----she seems to portray Kissinger as a glory hog who could offer some pretty bad advice and whose accounts are not always trustworthy).  Kissinger depicts Nixon as someone whose heart wasn't into retaliation, which is consistent with Hoff's contention that Nixon was not a supporter of the "madman theory."  Nixon, however, seems to be implying that he would have supported bombing North Korea to secure America's reputation, but he did not deem it to be feasible at the time.  Circumstances were holding him back, in short!

Nixon Reconsidered 4

I have three items for my blog post today about Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered.

1. On page 109, Hoff says the following about Nixon's stance on equal rights for women:

"Nixon told me in 1983 that his family (his wife and two daughters) favored the ERA, but he had come to believe after 1963 that the Equal Pay Act would achieve equality for women----apparently not realizing that this legislation could never end the pay differential between women and men or the sex-segregated nature of the U.S. labor force.  This view may have had validity in 1969 when Nixon came into office, but he argued the point with me as though twenty years had not passed and proved him (and many others, including Democratic women who had supported the Equal Pay Act) wrong.  Nonetheless, he correctly asserted that effective application of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act could serve the same purpose for women as passage of the ERA.  Nixon admitted to me, however, that as president he had not done as much for women as he would have liked."

This paragraph exemplifies that Hoff's intention in Nixon Reconsidered is not to whitewash Nixon's record on domestic policies, although she does believe that Nixon as President had a number of significant progressive domestic policy accomplishments.  Hoff is open about what she considers to be strengths and weaknesses in Nixon's record.  For example, Hoff acknowledges that there were weaknesses in Nixon's policies regarding women.  Hoff also discusses the sexist attitudes of Nixon and some of his staff, as well as Nixon's tepid support for the Equal Rights Amendment as President.  At the same time, Hoff notes accomplishments that Nixon made in terms of fighting gender discrimination, and she also appears to give Nixon the benefit of a doubt, in some cases.  On page 104, Hoff says that Nixon questioned the value of recruiting women for government positions, as Nixon expressed doubt that this would get him more female votes.  Hoff states: "Rather than being a totally negative comment simply rationalizing the president's reluctance to appoint women, it could have been, suggested the columnist Tom Wicker, a 'hard political calculation; or it conceivably was a view somewhat ahead of its time that women generally wanted effective measures against sex discrimination rather than the highly visible 'token' jobs in government for a select few.'"

What I liked about the paragraph on page 109 is that it highlighted two aspects of Nixon.  On the one hand, Nixon was making the same arguments in 1983 about the Equal Pay Act that he had made back when he was President, even though (according to Hoff) subsequent events had proven him wrong.  On the other hand, Nixon acknowledged to Hoff that his record as President on equality for women was inadequate, that he himself was not completely satisfied with his record on this issue.  Many of us would like to think that we accomplished something good, and we try to justify our decisions; yet, since none of us is perfect, we can also look back and reflect that we could have done more.  Self-justification and regret seem to co-exist in a lot of people!  Personally, I find it refreshing when an ex-President looks back at his time in office and shares his regrets: what he wished he accomplished but didn't, what he did wrong, what he could have done better, etc.  It makes the ex-President look more human, which contrasts with how politicians continually try to spin to make themselves look flawless.

2.  On pages 149-150, Hoff talks about how Henry Kissinger did not expect for his working relationship with Richard Nixon to last, and yet the two managed to bond over shared characteristics:

"On the surface Nixon and Kissinger----an American Quaker and a German-American Jew----appear to have been the odd couple of U.S. foreign policy.  Given his long personal and professional association with the Rockefeller family and his blunt criticisms of Nixon, Kissinger apparently did not think he would last even six months in the new Nixon administration.  Yet when these two men came together in 1968, they actually shared many viewpoints and had developed similar operational styles.  Both relished covert activity and liked making unilateral decisions; both distrusted bureaucracies; both resented any attempt by Congress to interfere with initiatives; and both agreed that the United States could impose order and stability on the world only if the White House controlled policy by appearing conciliatory but acting tough.  While neither had headed any complex organization, both thought 'personalized executive control' and formal application of procedures would lead to success.  Even more coincidental, perhaps, each had a history of failure and rejection, which made them susceptible to devising ways of protecting themselves and their positions of power.  Often their concern for protection appeared as obsession with eavesdropping, whether wiretaps or reconnaissance flights.  They even eavesdropped on themselves: Nixon by installing an automatic taping system in the White House, Kissinger by having some of his meetings and all of his phone conversations taped or transcribed from notes.  In a word, instead of compensating for each other's weaknesses and enhancing strengths, Nixon and Kissinger shared their worst characteristics."

Hoff goes into more detail about the relationship between Nixon and Kissinger.  It was quite stormy, in areas!  Nixon thought at one time that Kissinger needed psychiatric help, and Nixon often tried to hinder Kissinger from taking credit for foreign policy moves.  And Kissinger actually was trying to upstage Nixon (according to Hoff), and also badmouthed Nixon to others after the Nixon Presidency.  Meanwhile, as Hoff notes, Nixon in his memoirs was quite mellow in talking about Kissinger.  Overall, from what I have read in books about (and even by) Nixon, there were intense personality conflicts among Nixon's staff.  I doubt it's an Administration in which I would have wanted to work, at least in the inner-circle!

Moreover, Hoff notes that prominent Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman thought that Nixon and Kissinger actually did compensate for each other's weaknesses: that Nixon did well in crisis but poorly when things were going well, whereas Kissinger tended to stress out in crises, while handling the good times rather adeptly rather than botching things up.

Whatever their conflicts, Nixon and Kissinger did have a long-standing relationship in the area of foreign policy, particularly during Nixon's Presidency.  I recall Stephen Ambrose telling the story in his biography of Nixon of when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited Nixon and Kissinger during a conflict between India and Pakistan, and she noted that Nixon was continually saying, "Isn't that right, Henry?"

I like stories in which people whom one would not expect to get along actually do end up forming a fairly successful relationship----whether that be a working or a personal relationship.

3.  On pages 163-164, Hoff talks about Nixon's Secretary of Defense, Mel Laird, who had a reputation as a hawk during his time in the 1960's as a Congressman, but who as Secretary of Defense was much more moderate.  As Secretary of Defense, Hoff says, Laird pushed for the end of the draft, the replacement of American troops in Vietnam with South Vietnamese troops (Vietnamization), and the withdrawal of American troops "faster than the Pentagon thought the South Vietnamese forced could be trained to replace them..."  Laird also questioned extending the war into Laos and Cambodia.  Hoff says that, "unlike Nixon and Kissinger, Laird was more interested in ending the war in Vietnam than in winning it."  All this, "Despite cartoons depicting Laird's bald head in the shape of a missile, bomb, or bullet..."

In addition to liking opposites-attract stories, I also enjoy stories in which a person acts differently than people perceive him.  I think of the movie, Separate But Equal, which was about a companion case to the Brown vs. the Board of Education Supreme Court decision banning racial segregation in public schools.  In that movie, the side that is challenging segregation is afraid when Earl Warren becomes the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, for it learns that Warren as California Attorney General was a major force behind putting Japanese-Americans into internment camps during World War II.  But Warren surprised the anti-segregation side.  Not only did Warren come to support desegregation, but he also attempted to persuade the other justices to support it so that the court could make a firm statement.

The way that the movie depicts the situation, Warren's eyes were opened to the realities of racial discrimination after he had become Chief Justice, and he saw that his African-American driver was sleeping in his car one night because no hotel or motel would accept him.  Maybe this is true, and maybe it is not.  Still, Warren probably did surprise people when he fought for desegregation.

Why Laird changed his mind, I have no idea.  Perhaps he learned more.  Maybe he just got to the point where he wanted the war to end, and he didn't believe that hawkish measures were working.  I've read Republicans who make fun of how the liberal establishment says that Republican politicians who end up supporting liberal measures have demonstrated "growth" since their time in office.  Personally, I think it's great when people change with new information and exposure to real life----whether that change be from left to right, or from right to left, or from one of these extremes towards the middle.  All sorts of people can move from shallow positions to positions of depth.

Coming back to the issue of regrets, I'd like to quote what Earl Warren said in his 1977 memoirs about his support for Japanese internment camps during World War II (see here): I "since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating it, because it was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom and the rights of citizens...Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends, and congenial surroundings, I was conscience-stricken...[i]t was wrong to react so impulsively, without positive evidence of disloyalty..."

Nixon Reconsidered 3

I have three items for my blog post today on Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered.

1.  On page 82, Hoff talks about a controversial report that President Richard Nixon's liberal adviser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, wrote about African-Americans.  The report covered a wide variety of subjects, but I noticed on page 82 that Moynihan referred to "low IQs among blacks" (Hoff's words on page 82, as she summarizes Moynihan's report).  Interestingly, after I read this, I came across an interesting column by African-American conservative Thomas Sowell, which gave examples of certain groups of African-Americans doing better on IQ tests than certain groups of whites.  Sowell attributed lower IQ scores (in certain cases) to isolation, meaning that race is not related to IQ.  You can read his argument here.

I don't think that IQ tests necessarily prove that isolated people are less intelligent than people in more cultured or developed areas.  Sowell mentions people in the fifteenth century who lived on the Canary Islands, and they were "people of a Caucasian race living at a stone age level."  Should we assume that they were less intelligent, just because they lacked progress or were away from more developed parts of the world?  I'm rather skeptical.  They are probably more intelligent than I am in areas.  For example, can you picture me hunting for my supper?  The reason that I would do better on an IQ test than them is probably that the IQ test would presume knowledge of my own culture.  I'd most likely do poorly on an IQ test that presumed intimate knowledge of another culture.

2.  On pages 91-92, Hoff says the following:

"Indeed, [President Nixon] had appointed several men who fought for a White House-dominated civil rights program: Secretary of Labor George Shultz, Assistant Secretary of Labor Arthur Fletcher, and OFCC Director John Wilks.  Instead of abandoning the Philadelphia Plan [on minority hiring in the workplace], they revised it to ensure as much executive-branch control as possible, an idea perfectly in keeping with Nixon's emerging New Federalism.  The revision also allowed the Nixon administration to keep the focus on the racism of the northern craft unions in the construction industry, rather than switching it to the equally racist hiring practices of southern textile industries.  But some prominent Democratic senators, such as Edward Kennedy, would have preferred Nixon to concentrate on practices in the South, thereby not allowing Dixie Democrats to be won over by Nixon's southern strategy.  Specifically, Nixon knew that if the Republican administration could be forced to implement nondiscriminatory federal contracts primarily against white southern textile owners and workers, such whites would stay in the Democratic camp."

That sounds rather disgusting, doesn't it?  I'm referring to Kennedy hoping that the Nixon Administration would get tough on southern textile owners in combating racial discrimination, because then more white southerners would get mad at the Republicans and vote for the Democrats instead.  That sounds like Kennedy suggesting that the Democrats exploit racism for political gain, the very thing that many liberals say that Nixon did through his Southern strategy.

Of course, I'm not sure what Hoff's evidence is that Kennedy said such a thing.  Her footnote refers to J. Larry Hood's "The Nixon Administration and the Revised Presidential Plan for Affirmative Action: A Study in Expanding Presidential Power and Divided Government," which was on pages 145-269 of the Winter 1993 Presidential Studies Quarterly.  One would probably have to check that to see if there's a quotation of Kennedy making that kind of statement.

Overall, at least in my reading thus far, Hoff does not appear to manifest too high of a regard for a number of liberal Democratic politicians.  She says that they opposed Nixon's domestic agenda because they felt he was stealing their thunder----that he was doing the sorts of things that they wanted to do, and wanted credit for.  Of course, what many liberals claimed was that Nixon did not adequately fund programs, but Hoff says that liberals would have supported Nixon's plans----even at the funding levels that he had----if a Democratic President had been responsible for them.  She also contends that, on certain domestic programs, Nixon spent more than his Democratic predecessors.

This is not to suggest that Hoff sees Nixon as perfect.  Far from it.  For example, Nixon's denials notwithstanding, she seems to acknowledge that Nixon had a Southern strategy.  She says that it was more successful on the rims of the South, allowing Nixon to be more moderate than conservative, but she also notes an example of someone within the Nixon Administration proposing that the Administration try to keep certain civil rights policies a secret so as not to offend white Southerners.  The thing is, I wonder how much of a secret Nixon's Administration could keep those policies, when white Southerners were being litigated!  And yet, I'm curious about whether the Nixon Administration's focus on minority hiring in the north rather than the south related somehow to the Southern strategy.  Hoff apparently does not want to go that far, for she simply says that we don't know George Shultz's motivation for having the policy the way that it was.

3.  On pages 97-98, we read the following about Nixon's adviser, Chuck Colson:

"Curiously, given his disregard for civil rights as a Nixonian hatchetman during the 1972 presidential campaign, Charles ('Chuck') Colson came into the White House charged with attracting ethnic votes to the Republican party by suggesting ways to improve their socioeconomic and political status.  In a fifty-two-page confidential memorandum to Ehrlichman at the end of 1971, entitled 'Issues for Spanish-Speaking Americans,' Colson accurately and persuasively argued for substantial and symbolic Hispanic programs, stressing housing, economic development, and education."

Colson doesn't look overly heroic here, since he wants for Nixon's Administration to help poor minorities for political purposes, rather than out of a deep moral conviction.  And yet, I do have to give him credit for proposing that Republicans devise ways to help poor minorities improve their socioeconomic status.  He's not like the Republican and Democratic politicians Senator Bulworth talked about, who told an inner-city church that the politicians came to the church, talked a good game to make news, and then left and forgot about their promises for the inner-city (see here).  There are Republicans nowadays who claim that they want to find ways to reach out to minorities.  I'm rather skeptical, for has the G.O.P. really cared much for minorities over the past twenty years or so?  And yet, like Colson, maybe now they will realize that they need minority votes, and this will influence them to come up with concrete policies that reflect concern about helping the marginalized to attain to a higher socioeconomic status, so that more people can have a shot at fulfilling their dreams.

(I apologize if I come across as a patronizing white liberal in the above paragraph.  I have good thoughts, but coming up with the right words to express them is not always easy for me!)

Nixon Reconsidered 2

I have two items for my blog post today about Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered.

1. On page 21, we read the following about President Richard Nixon's environmental policy, specifically White House counsel John Ehrlichman's contribution to it:

"Often using poll data, [John] Ehrlichman----with his assistant, Egil [Bud] Krogh; John Whitaker, who served first as Nixon's cabinet secretary and later as undersecretary of the Interior Department; and Whitaker's assistant, Christopher DeMuth----substantially influenced both Nixon's ideas and the content of his environmental legislation by making it into a crisis issue.  In fact, Ehrlichman, who had specialized in land-use law in Seattle, has been described by one forest conservation specialist as 'the most effective environmentalist since Gifford Pinchot,' referring to the controversial chief of the U.S. Forest Service under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.  He and Whitaker put Nixon out in front of Congress on environmental issues, especially with respect to the use of the permit authority in the Refuse Act of 1899 to begin to clean up water supplies before Congress passed any 'comprehensive water pollution enforcement plan.'  Curiously, Ehrlichman did not dwell on his own contribution to environmental reform in his 1982 book, Witness to Power, preferring to denigrate Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel, whose anti- and then pro-conservation and pollution views he constantly had to counter."

I thought this passage was funny.  John Ehrlichman, "the most effective environmentalist since Gifford Pinchot."  Really?  But, come to think of it, I don't know a whole lot about Ehrlichman, since I know of him primarily on account of what I have read about Watergate.  Maybe he was an environmentalist, for all I know!

The part about Ehrlichman not dwelling on his contributions to environmental policy in his 1982 book stood out to me.  I am tempted to think that, whereas Democrats liked to talk about reform, Republicans (specifically the Nixon Administration) were actually bringing it about, and were doing so in a low-key way.  Maybe there's some truth to that (though one should not undervalue the reforms that Democrats brought about).  But I doubt that it's the whole story.  The paragraph opens, after all, by saying that Ehrlichman and others used poll data.  Why would they use poll data, if they wanted their environmental policies to be low-key and unknown to the voters?  My hunch is that they would use poll data because, on some level, they are crafting their policies according to what would be effective politically, in terms of what would effectively advertise the Nixon Administration to the public.  This raises a question that I have asked since I started reading Hoff's book, and that I may continue to ask until I finish it (and perhaps even beyond): to what extent were the Nixon Administration's domestic reforms motivated by a commitment to principle, and to what extent were they politically-motivated attempts to get votes?  The impression that I am getting was that Nixon was quite a politically-calculating person.  But I can't rule out from my reading that there may have been some noble principles motivating Nixon.

2.  On pages 62-63, Hoff talks about the Office of Economic Opportunities' Legal Services Program, which aimed to provide legal services to the poor.  Under the Nixon Administration, Donald Rumsfeld headed the OEC for a while, and (when Rumsfeld was made Counsel) his replacement was Howard Phillips, a conservative who wanted to dismantle the OEC.  Howard Phillips would go on to become a conservative activist, and he passed on recently.

"...in November 1969 Rumsfeld believed that the White House was not supporting his opposition to the so-called Murphy amendment, which would have given each governor veto power over the OEO Legal Services Program funded by that state without the OEO directors being able to override the veto.  This issue arose over Nixon's proposal to turn the Office of Legal Services into a separate government corporation chartered by Congress and funded at the local level with revenue-sharing funds.  Since it was evident that local officials might choose not to use federal funds for such antipoverty programs, critics feared for its survival.  Women and Native American leaders were particularly concerned about continued legal aid for their constituents.  The White House went to great lengths between 1969 and 1973 to respond that the president's intent was to 'make sure that every citizen has access to legal services,' while 'correcting the abuses which went on under this program' and removing 'legal services from the recurring political controversy which has attended it.'  Nixon claimed, for example, in an August 11, 1969, statement to Congress about restructuring OEO that legal services to the poor would be 'strengthened and elevated' by having independent status...Civil rights advocates and antipoverty activists questioned both the motives and intent of the White House and, like Rumsfeld, were against the obvious intent of the Murphy amendment to allow governors to cut back funding for legal services benefiting the poor.  This prompted Ehrlichman, in a carefully worded memorandum, to point out to Nixon that 'in view of Don's [Rumsfeld] public stance and the nature of the opposition to Murphy's amendment you cannot favor the amendment'...Nixon ultimately supported Rumsfeld over those in favor of the Murphy amendment..."

This passage stood out to me for two reasons.  First of all, it brought to my mind a passage that I read in Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician.  Morris referred to a paper that Nixon wrote as a Duke Law School student that defended legal services for the poor, and Morris regarded that as ironic, in light of Nixon's efforts as President to undermine the Legal Services Program.  The thing is, according to Hoff, Nixon did not feel that he was trying to undermine the Legal Services Program, nor did he as President oppose the provision of legal services to the poor.  His whole point was that he was trying to preserve legal services for the poor by making the program more efficient.  On pages 64-65, Hoff says that Nixon believed that the OEO's provision of money to political groups like the American Indian Movement and the National Welfare Rights Organization was resulting in the "diversion of funds away from representing poor people in the courts."  (This is a line from a news summary, and Nixon indicated agreement with it.)

Was Nixon right on this?  Or would his policy have had deleterious effects on the ability of the poor to be represented in court?  I'm sure this was debated.  One reason that I like Hoff's book so far, however, is that she presents Nixon's characterization of his own domestic policies: we get to hear what he said about his own motives and agendas, not just his detractors' characterizations of them.  Some may say that Nixon was giving the public spin.  Perhaps.  But his side of the story should still be heard, and I would say the same about the perspectives of others in the debate: the political groups who feared the consequences of Nixon's OEO policy, Democrats, etc.

Second, Hoff refers to a concern about Nixon's policy regarding the Legal Services Program: that federal money would be given to the states, and the states would choose not to fund legal services to the poor adequately.  This was actually a widespread criticism of Nixon's New Federalism agenda in general: that it would give money to the states for certain programs, and the states would choose not to spend all of it on those programs, choosing instead to spend it elsewhere, or to use it to balance the state budget.  Unfortunately, as far as I could see (and I have not read all of Hoff's book), Hoff does not adequately address this concern.  She distinguishes Nixon's New Federalism from the policies of Ronald Reagan, whom she says did not particularly care for government involvement even at the state level (which is interesting to me, since Reagan talked about turning over power to the states, and yet it would not surprise me, since there are many Tea-Partier types today who seem to oppose more taxes and spending at the state and local levels, not just the federal).  According to Hoff, Nixon's policy was to give lots of money to state governments, and they would use that money for certain programs.  But Hoff should have rigorously addressed the question: What if the money would go to the state governments, and the state governments would not use all of it for the programs?

I guess that, ultimately, Nixon did oppose an amendment that would allow states not to use money for legal services for the poor.  His good, I suppose.  The thing is, it appears to me that he was doing so for political purposes, and also because (on some level) his arm was being twisted by Don Rumsfeld, whom I never envisioned as a progressive, but that's what he apparently was in this case.  According to Ehrlichman, Rumsfeld was making a stink about the Murphy amendment, and that put Nixon in a position of having to oppose it.  I can't say that Nixon comes across as particularly heroic, here (though I will say that he did come across as more of a progressive hero in his policies regarding Native Americans, at least in what I read about that in Hoff's book).

Nixon Reconsidered 1

I started Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered.  I first heard of this book when I was in high school.  I believe it was in 1994, when the book came out.  I had a subscription to the rather conservative Insight magazine (which someone bought for me for my birthday present), and it had an article about Nixon Reconsidered.  According to the article, Hoff's book was arguing that Nixon made significant progressive accomplishments on the domestic front.  I guess that didn't surprise me that much.  Back when I was in the sixth grade, I read Peter Hannaford's book, The Reagans, and (if I recall correctly) it discussed how Reagan was quite critical of President Nixon's proposed Family Assistance Policy (FAP).  In my mind, the fact that Nixon even proposed such a policy told me that Nixon was open to liberal ideas.  Moreover, one of my relatives had a copy of John Bircher Gary Allen's Richard Nixon: The Man Behind the Mask, and I read pieces of it when I visited his house.  At the beginning of the book, Allen quoted someone who complained that, under the Nixon Presidency, liberals get the action, whereas conservatives get the rhetoric.  I knew that Nixon wasn't exactly a conservative, in the Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater sense.

Still, the article in Insight about Hoff's book intrigued me.  I hoped to read Hoff's book someday, and, nineteen years later, that is what I am doing.  Why did Insight's description of the book intrigue me at the time?  Well, although I was aware that Nixon was open to liberal ideas, I really didn't know anything about his accomplishments in the environment and civil rights.  The notion that a Republican President would have a successful track record in making progressive accomplishments on issues of concern to liberal Democrats gave me a sense of glee.  Moreover, I was intrigued by a historian stepping forward and arguing that Nixon was essentially a good President.  My impression at the time was that not many people did that (though some praised his China policy).  My perception (limited as it was) was that Nixon was widely considered to be a crook, a liar, and a villain, and those who thought otherwise were Republicans (like the fictional Alex Keaton) who were blinded by their own partisanship.  But, with Hoff's book, here was someone who was proposing an alternative understanding, one who was arguing that we should reconsider Nixon.

As I said in my post here, I was worried that Hoff's book would be primarily a laundry list of President Nixon's domestic accomplishments, which I thought might get old and dull after a while.  But, as I look at the book's Table of Contents, I see that Hoff discusses other issues as well, such as Nixon's foreign policy, and also Watergate.  The book may be worth reading to get her take on a wide variety of issues pertaining to the Nixon Presidency.

So far, my reading of Hoff's book had not been dull.  I have had to go back and reread sentences because I was mindlessly reading, and something told me that Hoff had just said something profound and so I needed to go back and reread what I just read.  Hoff discusses such issues as Nixon being aprincipled (in her eyes), and also how the "modern industrialized state" and the media have been conducive to "the formation of the aprincipled megastate" (page 12), one that is repressive yet generous, and that justifies morally questionable activities using righteous-sounding terminology.

What particularly interested me in my latest reading, however, was Hoff's discussion of her historical methodology.  She said that she did not want to rely solely on interviews with people "about events that took place a quarter of a century ago", since one cannot always trust people who are interviewed, people who have their own agenda and who may want to rehabilitate their own reputation "by telling researchers or reporters what they want to hear" (page xiv).  Rather than just relying on interviews, Hoff also wanted to look at documents.  The reason that this interested me was that I had just finished Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician.  Morris does refer to documents, but he also relies a lot on interviews, or the testimony of eyewitnesses.  I wondered if I could really trust what many of these eyewitnesses were saying, or if they had their own agenda, which either clouded their recollection or influenced them to distort the past deliberately.  At the same time, I figured that if more than one eyewitness testified to something, there was greater likelihood that what they related actually happened.  In addition, I wondered if we would have much of a history if we could not, on some level, trust the testimony of eyewitnesses.  I recently watched a YouTube video of Pat Buchanan interviewing Gore Vidal in the 1980's about Vidal's book, Lincoln.  Buchanan appeared to be taking issue with Vidal's claim that Lincoln had syphilis, and Vidal responded that he was basing this on the testimony of someone who knew Lincoln, someone who is actually one of the few sources we have about Lincoln's young adulthood.  If one dismissed this source, Vidal seemed to be implying, we don't have much left about that particular time in Lincoln's life!

Nixon's Shadow 8

I finished David Greenberg's Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image.  In this post, I'd like to comment on Greenberg's discussion of three books about Richard Nixon.  The first two I have read, and the third is one that I am thinking about reading.

1.  Well, actually, the first book will be two books: the ones by Monica Crowley about her time working for Nixon during the 1990's.  On pages 299-300, Greenberg states:

"A final challenge to Nixon's reputation as a wise man came, ironically, from a book that aspired to showcase Nixon's acumen.  In 1996 and 1998, Nixon's former assistant Monica Crowley published two volumes of her conversations with her own boss as she recollected them.  Crowley understood that Americans still craved a glimpse of the 'real' Nixon behind his public facades; by reprinting Nixon's comments to her about Watergate, politics, and world affairs, she hoped to humanize him and to show off his wisdom.  But to many readers Nixon's undifferentiated remarks, from everyday chatter about the 1992 election to freshman-level musings about various political philosophers, came across as embarrassingly banal.  Instead of peeking into the mind of a visionary, readers found themselves eavesdropping on an elderly kibitzer.  If Crowley had hoped to highlight Nixon's mastery of geopolitics, the president's old friend Len Garment thought, her gambit backfired.  Her books, he said, showed Nixon 'at his worst:....craven, pompous, vain, vindictive, and, most unforgivably, silly...'"

I actually thought that Monica's books about Nixon were pretty good.  I wouldn't say that Nixon particularly impressed me in those books, for he did come across as rather vain and petty.  (I did admire him, however, for standing up for his wife after she died and some of the articles about her were negative, for, as Nixon said, Pat didn't ask to be in public life.)  On whether Nixon's political or philosophical insights were "banal" or "freshman-level," well, I can't say: they're probably better than anything I can come up with, and they don't seem to me to be any more banal than other things that I have read.  To be candid, I have read plenty of good books, but I am rarely blown away by people's attempts to be profound.

What I liked most about Monica's books was their description of Nixon the man.  One of the saddest parts of her Nixon in Winter was on page 338, when Nixon got into Monica's car, but he was afraid to go home to see his sick, dying wife and his children who were mourning for her.  Monica drove him around for a while, and they saw Nixon's previous home, "where Mrs. Nixon had enjoyed better health and happier times with her family and death had not loomed as immediately as it now did."  I thought that Monica effectively captured Nixon's vulnerability in the final years of his life.

2.  Greenberg has a chapter about revisionist historians who interpreted President Nixon as a liberal on domestic policy, and, on pages 328-329, he discusses where Stephen Ambrose comes out on that in Ambrose's Nixon trilogy:

"As it turned out, Ambrose's three-volume biography didn't deal with Nixon's social policies much at all...Hewing to the familiar narrative, Ambrose emphasized Watergate and foreign policy more than domestic affairs.  And despite his comments at Hofstra, his judgment of Nixon's domestic policies echoed the journalists of Nixon's own day: 'On the domestic side, Nixon has no claim to greatness,' Ambrose wrote.  '...Nixon might have achieved that level of accomplishment in a number of areas, such as welfare reform, or national health insurance for all, or government reorganization, or revenue sharing, but in each case he failed.'

"In the closing paragraphs of his final volume, Ambrose turned sentimental...Ambrose concluded his trilogy with a ringing endorsement of Nixon's presidency that was informed by the conservatism of the Reagan years.  'Because Nixon resigned,' Ambrose wrote of the man he once hated, 'what the country got was not the Nixon Revolution but the Reagan Revolution.  It got massive, unbelievable deficits.  It got Iran-contra.  It got the savings and loan scandals.  It got millions of homeless and gross favoritism for the rich....When Nixon resigned, we lost more than we gained.'...Ambrose seemed disinclined to end his biography on a bitter note and, by appending his fond summary, inched his judgment toward the revisionist camp."

I thought that Greenberg left out the best passage in volume 3 of Ambrose's Nixon that reflects some attempt at Nixon revisionism.  On pages 596-597, Ambrose states:

"It was Nixon's advocacy of such programs as student loans and grants and national health insurance for all that most infuriated conservatives like the Buckley brothers.  As did the liberals, the conservatives always assigned to Nixon the worst motives; in this case, the conservatives charged that Nixon was trying to pander to the liberals to save his own skin.  That hardly seems fair.  By the time he was pushing these proposals, in early 1974, Nixon knew that he had no liberal supporters left.  He knew his fate rested with the conservatives in Congress.  Nevertheless he made the proposals.  Would it be too much to suggest that Richard Nixon, who grew up in near-poverty conditions because of the crushing medical expenses his family had to pay and who could attend college only on scholarship, made these proposals because he believed in them?"

That is an excellent question, within a beautiful and a thought-provoking passage.  But I thought the same thing as Greenberg as I was reading Ambrose's revisionistic stance near the end of the Nixon trilogy: it did not fit all that well with the rest of Ambrose's biography.  Ambrose in the first volume of his trilogy does depict Nixon as somewhat progressive on racial issues, but, overall, his trilogy did not strike me as a glowing account of Nixon's domestic policies, at least in comparison to other things that I have read.  I would have been more moved by what Ambrose said near the end had it been more consistent with the rest of the biography.

3.  One of the Nixon revisionists was scholar Joan Hoff, who wrote the book Nixon Reconsidered.  On page 336, Greenberg states the following:

"But while the list of Nixon's progressive programs ran to several pages, it still read as a laundry list; Nixon as a person hardly entered the picture.  Richard Norton Smith had criticized Nixon Reconsidered because 'process crowds out personality' in the book.  'Instead of biographical context,' he wrote, '...we get eye-glazing accounts of White House policy toward American Indians, and of the turf wars between the Council on Economic Policy and the Commission on International Trade and Investment Policy.'  Smith's boredom notwithstanding, the book's problem was not so much its purported tediousness as its sacrifice of context, flavor, and meaning.  No president, especially not Nixon, can be adequately measured as the sum total of his policy decisions, and to dwell only on policy is to reduce the president to just that.  'In pursuing her vision of Nixon without Watergate,' Smith wrote, 'Ms. Hoff comes dangerously close to giving us Nixon without Nixon.'"

I have not yet read Nixon Reconsidered, though I have looked through the book and have read bits and pieces of it.  I have been reluctant to read it because my impression is similar to that of Richard Norton Smith: that Nixon Reconsidered would be a laundry list of Nixon's progressive domestic accomplishments.  Moreover, I've feared that it would be a one-sided laundry list: that Hoff would simply list all the great things that Nixon did, without going into the disadvantages of his policies.  That, in my opinion, would be pretty boring.  But I'll still read her book at some point and see what she does.

I will say, though, that her account in her book of meeting Richard Nixon was quite remarkable.  She said that she had heard that Nixon was shifty-eyed, but that the Nixon she met looked her straight in the eye.  Moreover, from what Greenberg says, Hoff has an interesting story herself: she was part of the New Left when Nixon was President, and she was surprised as a scholar to learn about Nixon's domestic accomplishments.  I hope that her book has some personal dimension to it.  Something that I liked about her protege Dean Kotlowski's book, Nixon's Civil Rights, was that it was not just a tedious, wonky description of Nixon's civil rights policies, for it also got into Nixon the man: Nixon's attitudes about race, Nixon's relationship with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jackie Robinson, etc.  I'm not sure if I felt that I truly knew Nixon after reading that book----it's hard for me to read any book about Nixon and to walk away concluding that I truly know him.  But I did appreciate the personal dimension in Kotlowski's book.

Nixon's Shadow 7

I covered a lot of ground in my latest reading of David Greenberg's Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image.  I finished the chapter on the Washington Press Corps' image of Richard Nixon, the one about the image of Nixon that was held by Nixon loyalists, and the one on the image of Nixon promulgated in psycho-historical works.

I did find my latest reading to be engrossing, and there were at least two reasons for that.  First of all, Greenberg is a compelling storyteller.  In my latest reading, Greenberg told the tale of journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who investigated the Watergate scandal when many within the upper-level media were unwilling to do so.  Greenberg talked about Rabbi Baruch Korff, who had become a Nixon fan in 1972 due to Nixon's support for Soviet Jews, and who achieved minor celebrity status by launching an organization to defend President Nixon during the Watergate scandal.  Greenberg discussed the popularity and significance of works about Nixon.  Silent Coup's controversial thesis about Watergate was rejected by a number of observers, including certain historians, yet it was accepted by Nixon apologists and was given some scholarly cover by Joan Hoff.  Victor Lasky's It Didn't Start with Watergate, which was about how Nixon's misdeeds were no worse than those of previous Administrations, sold many copies, even though even Lasky acknowledged that the reason for its popularity was probably that it made Nixon supporters feel a little better after Watergate.  Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days, as well as David Frost's interviews of Nixon, made many Americans feel sorry for the former President.  And Greenberg goes into the entertainment media's depiction of Nixon.  Alex Keaton on the 1980's sitcom Family Ties was an ardent Nixon supporter, yet Alex was a likeable character.  (I appreciated this discussion because Family Ties was what got me interested in politics.)  And the 1999 comedy Dick not only depicted Nixon as a buffoon, but also Woodward and Bernstein.  In my mind, evaluating and discussing the significance of relevant players and works is an element of good storytelling.

Second, my impression is that Greenberg strives to be fair to Nixon, as he accepts and rejects the arguments of pro- and anti- Nixon people, as well as acknowledges some legitimate point in the various images of Nixon, without necessarily accepting those images completely.  Greenberg acknowledges that some of what the media accused Nixon of doing was false, and he also  says that the allegation that Nixon beat his wife Pat lacks convincing evidence.  Yet, Greenberg does not buy Nixon's arguments in every case: Nixon often alleged that the Democrats had his plane bugged in 1968, for example, but Greenberg does not believe that there is evidence for that.  In the chapter on the psycho-historical depictions of Nixon, Greenberg essentially says that they may have a point, but that they went too far at times: they could get overly political, or they would try to find a deep sinister meaning in insignificant things that Nixon did (such as mashing his mashed potatoes).  Greenberg makes an attempt to be fair and balanced, to both Nixon and also those who have written about Nixon.

That doesn't mean that I agreed with Greenberg on everything.  For example, on page 213, Greenberg says regarding Frost's interviews of Nixon that "The Watergate segments also provided the shows' most lasting moments, including Nixon's rationalization, soon to enter Bartlett's, that 'When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.'"  The movie Frost/Nixon depicts that statement as dramatic and as occurring within the context of Nixon's discussion of Watergate (see here).  The thing is, Nixon was not talking about Watergate when he made that statement, but rather he was discussing the Huston plan for gathering intelligence on domestic radicals.  Nixon's point, as Stephen Ambrose says, was that certain things that ordinarily would be illegal, such as burglary, become legal when the President provides cover for them.  One can argue that what Nixon said was still bad, even within that context, as David Frost does here, or even that Nixon's statement was relevant to Watergate because it provides us with insight into his view on Presidential power.  But Nixon was not explicitly talking about Watergate when he made that statement, nor did he say it in a particularly dramatic fashion (see here).

Ambrose's Nixon: Ruin and Recovery 16

For my blog post today on Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990, I'll discuss something that Stephen Ambrose says on page 488:

"On the subject of [Richard] Nixon, [Henry] Kissinger said, 'He was very good in foreign policy [but] he was a very odd man....He is a very unpleasant man.  He was so nervous...He was an artificial man in the sense that when he met someone he thought it out carefully so that nothing was spontaneous, and that meant he didn't enjoy people.  People sensed that.  What I never understood is why he became a politician.  He hated to meet new people.  Most politicians like crowds.  He didn't.'...[William] Safire reported that at the recent Vladivostok summit, Kissinger had sought to tout [President Gerald] Ford at Nixon's expense, saying that Nixon 'would never look [Soviet leader] Brezhnev in the eye.'"

Is Kissinger accurate about all of this?  Ambrose in volume 2 of his Nixon trilogy says a couple of times that Kissinger probably was projecting onto Nixon some of his own insecurities.  Moreover, on the question of whether or not Nixon liked crowds, I recall reading in Bruce Mazlish's In Search of Nixon about an incident in which, when Nixon was in a group with a few people, he was rather quiet, but he lit up like a light-bulb when a crowd came to see him!  Mazlish attributed that to Nixon's narcissism.  But who among us wouldn't appreciate the adulation of a crowd?

I can't say that Kissinger was totally wrong in his description of Nixon, however.  From what I have read for My Year (or More) of Nixon, Nixon was shy around new people.  He was introverted.  He liked to plan.  He didn't particularly care for surprises, in which he would be upstaged or caught off guard.

Ambrose himself talks about the introverted, aloof side of Nixon's personality, particularly when he depicts Nixon as alone during the Watergate scandal.  Technically, Nixon was not alone, for Nixon had his friends such as Bebe Rebozo and his family, as Ambrose narrates.  But Nixon was keeping certain things to himself, according to Ambrose.  Moreover, Ambrose talks a couple of times about Nixon's bad jokes, which may indicate a social awkwardness on Nixon's part.

Did Richard Nixon have Asperger's Syndrome?  Many people with Asperger's, or who know something about Asperger's, can look at some of Nixon's characteristics and see some overlap with Asperger's.  Nixon loved order.  He was socially-awkward.  He tended to ramble on and on about subjects that interested him.  Kissinger said that Nixon did not look Brezhnev in the eye, and there are many with Asperger's who have difficulty with eye-contact.  (I should note, though, that Joan Hoff in Nixon Reconsidered narrated that, when she met Nixon, Nixon looked her straight in the eye.)

But I have my doubts that Nixon had Asperger's.  When I watch YouTube videos of him, or listen to the Nixon tapes that are on YouTube, or read about Nixon's interactions in books, he strikes me as socially competent----not dazzling, mind you, but competent.  He is able to joke and to come up with quick come-backs.  He can even banter a bit.