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I finished Daniel Frick's Reinventing Richard Nixon: A Cultural History of an American Obsession.  In this post, I'll use as my starting-point something that Frick says on pages 222-223:

"...Dallas Boyd, who has developed a fascination with Buddhism, theosophy, astrology, and channeling, has come to believe in an authentic Richard Nixon who exists outside the man's physical shell.  Through his intense identification with the role he plays on stage, Boyd has been inviting this genuine Nixon into the actor's body.  Enticing this spirit to experience the play might permit the man's tortured soul to slough off the 'prejudices and stubborn self-images' that imprisoned the historical Nixon throughout his life.  The point of all Boyd's efforts of these past fourteen months, he comes to realize, is to provide some form of expiation for the disgraced former president: 'I've already forgiven myself.  It's all for Tricky Dick from here on out.'  As he prepares for his performance each night, Boyd meditates, channeling all of Nixon's 'anger and hatred,' transforming it into 'the most peaceful, wonderful feelings.'  Exploring Nixon's guilt permits the actor to realize that Nixon's chance to exorcise the demons of his past might redeem us all.  As Boyd, transformed into Richard Nixon, makes his entrance on stage, the walls and ceiling of the theater evaporate.  The stars of the Milky Way shine overhead while, below, the dead from Cambodia and Kent State join the audience, along with Pat Nixon and the actor's dead lover.  Together, all these imperfect people, 'as flawed as Dallas, as flawed as Richard Nixon,' desire simply 'a glimpse of the truth.'  And that release, through Boyd's spiritual performance, seems only moments away."

Frick is talking here about the short story "Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree," by Gerald Reilly.  The story is about a forty-three year old homosexual actor named Dallas Boyd, who is going to play Richard Nixon in a one-man show.  Boyd is getting rave reviews, but he is finding that he is too tired for the two-hour performance, since he is in the late stages of AIDS.  Also, Boyd learns that Richard Nixon has recently died.

I don't know if Boyd is literally channeling Nixon, in the sense that Nixon's spirit is possessing him, or if "channeling" in this case simply means that Boyd is really identifying with his character.  I am not a supporter of channeling, but the image of healing, redemption, and reconciliation in the midst of human imperfections is beautiful in the passage that I just quoted.

The passage reminded me of something that Frick said near the beginning of his book.  Frick was discussing Richard Nixon's funeral, and he noted that evangelist Billy Graham in his sermon at the event likened Richard Nixon to Saul.  Frick describes Graham's sermon as follows:

"Reading the noted Hebrew Bible scholar Ernest Wright's characterization of the first king of the Israelites evokes an unsettling case of reverse [deja vu]:  'Saul had some fine political successes, but he seems to have possessed a certain instability of character.'  By conjuring up this tragic figure of a man who could have been a great king had it not been for 'an evil spirit from the Lord [that] tormented him,' Graham reminded us of Richard Nixon's presidential accomplishments while calling us to mourn that he had succumbed to his demons.  At the same time, Graham insisted, the nation must cease to condemn Nixon, because 'in the end the only thing that really counts is not how others see us here, but how God sees us' (Services, 18).  Pronouncing that he believed Nixon was now in heaven, Graham attempted to complete the process of spiritual healing by forever taking the power to judge the former president out of the secular realm and by aspiring to inter not just Nixon's physical remains but also the uneasy spirit of his political legacy that had haunted recent American experience."

I've long felt sorry for Saul because he had his inner demons, and he came to a bitter end.  He's a tragic figure.  II Samuel 7:15 even goes so far as to say that God removed his mercy from Saul.  Does this call into question God's unconditional love for each and every human being?

I like the themes of healing and reconciliation.  I would like to think that everyone, regardless of who he or she is, will experience that.  But some might think otherwise.  Alger Hiss, the man Nixon claimed was a Communist spy, said that Nixon went to his grave with sins un-atoned for.  Does believing in some healing, reconciliation, or mercy in the afterlife entail assuming that sin and whom it hurts does not matter, that God is a God of cheap grace?  I don't think so.  Even a number of universalists will say that there may be discipline and purgation of sin in the afterlife for those who are in "hell."  I believe, though, that it's a positive thing to hope that people will arrive at a state of happiness, inner healing, and reconciliation with others.  We were born into this world, and some had a harder road than others, which may have influenced how they turned out.  All of us had made poor choices, for different reasons.  We all need mercy and healing.

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In my blog post today about Daniel Frick's Reinventing Richard Nixon: A Cultural History of an American Obsession, I'll use as my starting-point a passage on pages 167-168.  There, Frick states:

"For liberals, Richard Nixon serves as more than an easy target----he functions as a touchstone for the validity of their values.  In 'Angst for the Memories,' a September 1993 episode of Murphy Brown, a situation comedy about a 60 Minutes-like television newsmagazine, Murphy (played by Cand[i]ce Bergen) lands an interview with the reclusive author of a landmark 1960s novel, Technicolor Highway.  The excitement of this scoop fades when Murphy discovers that her literary hero has become a virulent neoconservative.  Commiserating afterward at their favorite tavern, Murphy and her co-workers admit that they too have changed.  One by one, these denizens of the liberal media offer confessions----one now believes that many welfare recipients are lazy, another has considered purchasing a gun----until one of them cuts to a final test: 'Does anyone here think Nixon might have gotten a raw deal?'  Instant denials reassure them, and, with great relief, Murphy and her colleagues clink glasses, toasting, 'At least we've still got that,' affirming Nixon's villainy as their one bedrock belief."

I checked the Internet Movie Database for this episode, and I noticed that Martin Sheen was on it.  I wonder if he was the actor who played the author who became a neoconservative.  It would be cool if he was!

Change.  I'm interested in shows that depict a change in one's ideology or religion, whether that change be from right to left, or from left to right, or from either extreme to someplace in the middle.  I was intrigued when I read a description of an episode of Family Ties, "My Back Pages," which was during Season 5: "An old college friend comes to Steven to ask his help in starting up an old left wing political magazine, 'The Scavenger.' But after hanging around with the other staff, Steven realizes he no longer has the same ideals he had back in the 1960's, fearing he has accepted the middle of the road thinking he protested against as a youth."  What specifically was Steven's ideological change?  Essentially, he came to support the PTA, and he voted Democratic rather than taking the radical approach of rejecting both parties.

Frick elsewhere in his book talks about people's ideological changes.  There was Ron Kovic, whose belief in American myths about America being the good guys and the good guys being winners were undermined by his own experience in Vietnam, along with its aftermath.  There is another Vietnam vet Frick quotes, who said that he realized that the American soldiers in Vietnam were like the Redcoats during the American revolution, the ones who were depicted to him as evil back when he was a child.

A conservative relative of mine once told me that more liberals become conservatives than vice-versa, as if liberalism is naive idealism, whereas conservatism is a more realistic, "grown-up" perspective.  But my conservative relative is wrong, I suspect, in saying this, for I know a number of conservatives who became liberals as a reaction against the extremism of the Tea Party.  While I believe that the inefficiencies and intrusiveness of government can convince a liberal to question his or her faith in big government and to become a conservative, I also think that a conservative can lose faith in the tenets of conservative mythology, as they shatter against the brick wall of reality: that everyone has a chance to succeed in America, that many who are poor are poor due to lack of effort, or that America is consistently a force for good in the world.

A problem that Frick highlights more than once in this book is that liberals have not successfully replaced the widely-accepted conservative mythology with their own narrative that can catch on.  There may be some truth to what Frick is saying.  I can think of reasons that cause me to doubt his sentiment.  For example, liberals are good storytellers in terms of crafting populist narratives.  Which is more inspiring: the little guy taking on a big corporation that is polluting his area's water supply, or a corporation resisting big government regulations?  I suppose that Atlas Shrugged is a fairly good story, even though it's in the latter category, and yet I find the former narrative to be more widespread and inspiring.  Championing the downtrodden against the rich and powerful makes for good storytelling.

But I cannot deny that conservatives have crafted quite an influential narrative.  During the debate on Obamacare, a liberal I know was complaining that, although Democrats were in power at the time, conservatives had still managed to shape the debate about health care.  We were hearing, and many were assuming, standard conservative lines about the issue: that government-run health care is a bad thing, that the Canadian health care system is terrible because it has long lines, and the list goes on.

One problem, if you will, with the liberal narrative may be that it just does not resonate with a number of Americans.  That does not mean that the liberal narrative is necessarily false, but rather that it's not what many Americans may want to hear.  In a country that prides itself on rugged individualism and pioneer spirit, many may not want to hear about community, or the importance of society taking care of the least of these.  In a country that sees itself as a force for good in the world, many may not want to hear the argument that America does not consistently do good when it comes to its intervention in other countries.  I realize that my definition of "liberal narrative" here is rather simplistic, since there are times when a liberal might support American interventionism into other countries, whereas a conservative may not.  But it is often those on the left who question the assumption that America is a force for good in the world.

Anyway, that's my rambling for the day!

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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."

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On page 126 of Reinventing Richard Nixon: A Cultural History of an American Obsession, Daniel Frick states:

"In the first months of 1991, when the United States led a UN coalition of forces to free Kuwait from an invading Iraqi army, George H.W. Bush, flushed with 89 percent approval ratings in a New York Times/CBS News poll, boasted, 'By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.'"

I was in Junior High School during the first Gulf War.  What the above passage brought to my mind was the fact that I grew up when the United States was recovering from the Vietnam War.  I grew up in the 1980's, which some present as a time when people were either reinterpreting or trying to forget what happened to the United States in Vietnam.  But people around me did not forget.  The TV shows that I watched were set in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.  Family Ties featured Steven and Elise Keaton, who were both flower children during their younger years.  And Highway to Heaven had a couple of episodes about people recovering from Vietnam: one was about a veteran who had been paralyzed in that war and was having difficulties getting dental coverage from the VA, and another was about a father whose Missing-in-Action son was found to be dead, and Jonathan and Mark were encountering challenges as they tried to raise money for a scholarship fund in the son's name.

On a personal level, my Mom would tell us about the military draft, and the very concept (quite frankly) scared me.  My Dad also occasionally talked about the draft lottery.  I also had teachers who were in college during the Vietnam War.

I guess that we as a country were still recovering from Vietnam when the 1991 Gulf War broke out.  And yet, then again, we were probably getting more accustomed to military intervention.  Reagan sent troops to Grenada, and there was Bush I's invasion of Panama.  But I don't think that those things completely alleviated the fears that many Americans had.  I wasn't old enough to be drafted, but I felt a sense of relief when President George H.W. Bush said on television that the soldiers in Desert Storm would be all-volunteer.

We ended up winning the first Gulf War, and more than one person heralded the end of Vietnam Syndrome----the fear that we had of interfering in other countries because that could lead us to become embroiled in a situation like the Vietnam War.  But were we truly healed?  I know that I was afraid when I was in college and there was discussion about the U.S. intervening in Bosnia and Kosovo.  Although the positive outcome (for the U.S. at least) of the first Gulf War led many to support George W. Bush's Iraq War----Sean Hannity, after all, predicted that the U.S. would win, and the liberals would then be applauding the returning troops because "Everyone loves a winner"----there were a number of protests against the impending war.  Largely, they were by people who hated George W. Bush.

I reflect on my experiences growing up when America was recovering from the Vietnam War.  And yet, I was an actual adult when we were in other wars: the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I wonder what impact those wars have on young people, or will have on succeeding generations.

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On pages 116-117 of Reinventing Richard Nixon: A Cultural History of an American Obsession, Daniel Frick talks about the book Born on the Fourth of July, a memoir that was written by Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic.  The book was later made into a movie, starring Tom Cruise as Kovic.

Kovic grew up watching John Wayne movies and believing that the United States was a moral force in the world, and he went to Vietnam with those convictions.  But his mythical view of the world began to be challenged when he shot one of his fellow soldiers accidentally.  This sort of thing never happened in the movies, he thought, for, in the movies, the good guys killed the bad guys, not other good guys.  Kovic tried to prove to himself that he was a brave marine, and he became paralyzed due to a war wound.  His homecoming did not go according to his expectations, for Kovic felt degraded in VA hospitals, where rats chewed on paralyzed people's limbs.  And no one waves to him or invites him to speak at the Memorial Day ceremonies put on by his hometown.  While Kovic apparently thinks that he has repudiated the hero myth, Frick says, he actually continues to hold on to it, on some level, for Kovic portrays his and other Vietnam veterans' disruption of the 1972 Republican National Convention as a heroic act.

Life does not always (or even usually) play out as it does in the movies.  I think of the movie Pleasantville.  At the end of the movie, the Mom is upset because a date did not go as she expected.  She thought that things were supposed to turn out a certain way.  Her son, wised up from time that he has just spent in a 1950's sitcom, responds to her that things are not supposed to turn out in any particular way.  There's a lot of wisdom to that, but it's cold comfort to those who have been fed a bunch of myths over the course of their lives.

But where would we be without our myths, without ideals that inspire us and motivate us to get out of bed in the morning?  I think that one reason that many people turn to religion is that it gives them some assurance that God has a benevolent plan for them.  I myself do not believe that people should replace their idealism with jaded cynicism.  Maybe there is some realistic medium between the two extremes.

All of that said, it's sad that Vietnam veterans experienced what they did, without getting a whole lot of gratitude when they came home.  I'm not saying that the Vietnam war was necessarily right, but it must have been hard for people to have put themselves on the line as they did, and to experience things that radically transformed their lives, often negatively, only to return home without receiving so much as a "thank you."
I remember an episode of the early 1990's sitcom Major Dad, in which Gerald McRaney played Major John MacGillis.  In this episode, American soldiers are returning from the first Gulf War, and the General wants to give them a warm and celebratory welcome.  The Major at first is reluctant, for he recalls that he did not exactly get a warm welcome when he returned home after the Vietnam War.  The General then encourages the Major to give the returning soldiers the welcome that he should have received after returning home from Vietnam.  Life does not always go according to our ideals or our expectations, for it's a cold world.  But we can act to make this world a little bit better.

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On page 69 of Reinventing Richard Nixon: A Cultural History of an American Obsession, Daniel Frick states:

"The 'completely pragmatic' and 'cynical' reactions of the Watergate president do not harmonize with the young man whose Quaker family taught him the difference between right and wrong (RN, 628).  Nor do justifying political espionage and lying to Congress and the public illustrate any of the personality traits enshrined in the orthodox success ethic.  Horatio Alger's heroes never said, 'Everybody does it.'"

The tension between morality and cynical pragmatism that Frick highlights is also present on page 93 of Anthony Summers' The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon: "Looking back, [Nixon's long, yet occasional, therapist, Dr. Arnold] Hutschnecker suspected Nixon had 'guilt feelings' for having pursued politics in the vindictive style of his father rather than on the 'saintly' path of his mother.  Nixon's fervent wish, the doctor felt, was that someday he would be able to say to Hannah, 'Mother, I have made peace.  Now I am worthy of you.'"

Can one get ahead by taking the moral and ethical high ground?  Or is something that a person once told me true: that an honest man cannot make it in this world?  Granted, it is hard for a person to be moral when so many around him or her are immoral: perhaps they are not all breaking the law, but they are primarily looking out for themselves, and they don't care whom they ruin or stomp on to advance.  I think of the politicians Nixon ran against in 1946 and 1950: they were principled people, but Nixon was able to run roughshod over them because he was willing to go on the attack (sometimes fairly, and sometimes not) and to receive the benefits of support from wealthy special interests, who provided him with money.  (I'm relying here on Roger Morris' narrative, which I deem to be credible.)  Did those politicians accomplish anything, for themselves or for others, by standing by their principles?  Perhaps not, even though they may have felt better about themselves than Nixon did (at least according to Hutschnecker's analysis of what Nixon felt).  But we do need more politicians who are principled and who take on the special interests, otherwise our country will stay in the same wretched condition.  I'll also add that people can get ahead by being good, on some level, for, when a person has a reputation for honesty, that can attract customers and employers, both of whom do not want to be taken advantage of.

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On page 46 of Reinventing Richard Nixon: A Cultural History of an American Obsession, Daniel Frick says the following:

"When, in the days before his resignation, Henry Kissinger tried to console Nixon with the thought that history would rank him as a great president, Nixon responded, 'That depends, Henry, on who writes the history' (RN, 1084).  Certain of the assessment his presidency deserved, Nixon determined not to bow to the judgment of the political analysts, journalists, and academicians with the power to create the accounts of his tenure in office.  In typically self-reliant fashion, Nixon resolved to write his story himself."
Here are some thoughts:

1.  Did Nixon's telling of his own story give him a good legacy in the eyes of the public?  I'd say "yes" and "no."  The fact that he kept on writing and speaking did ensure that he got to be known for something other than Watergate, and many respected him for that.  But the stigma of Watergate remained.  As far as his side of the Watergate story goes, I'm doubtful that most Americans are even aware of it.  But his books are out there for anyone who wants to learn about it.

2.  I like this paragraph because it is about a person setting out to define himself, rather than allowing others to define him.  In those days, in my opinion, a person needed some power to do so.  It wasn't like today, when all kinds of people can set up their own blog.  Rather, a person needed to have a degree of fame and influence in order to tell his side of the story, and Nixon had those things.

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I started Daniel Frick's Reinventing Richard Nixon: A Cultural History of an American Obsession.

My latest reading was about how Richard Nixon's story about himself reflected rags-to-riches stories in American culture.  There was Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, in which Benjamin Franklin goes to a city and is all alone, with only a few loaves of bread to eat, and yet Franklin manages to make a success of himself.  There were Horatio Alger novels, which portrayed street urchins who rose to a position of middle-class respectability.  And there were Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People and Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, which essentially communicated that people could attain success by having the right attitude and by practicing certain strategies.

Nixon depicted himself as one who got ahead through hard work.  There was a rugged individualistic tone to Six Crises; for example, Nixon portrayed himself as the main protagonist in the Alger Hiss case, as he chose not to reveal that Father Cronin fed him information about Alger Hiss before Hiss even appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).  (Cronin would deny in 1990 that this was the case, after years of saying otherwise, but Frick notes that Cronin even in that particular interview says that he helped Nixon out.  I should also note that Anthony Summers, on page 490 of The Arrogance of Power, asks how Cronin was even able to retract his long-standing claim in 1990, for Cronin in January 1991 "was in a home for the aged, deaf, and...unable to hold a cogent conversation.")  Even later, Nixon would portray himself as a lone sage.  A 1972 campaign poster showed an apparently solitary Nixon staring outside of a White House window; the thing is, that picture originally had Henry Kissinger standing close to Nixon and speaking to him, but Kissinger got cropped out of that picture in the campaign poster.

Frick acknowledges that there was more nuance in the rags-to-riches motif from which Nixon may have been drawing.  Benjamin Franklin and a protagonist in one of the Horatio Alger novels, for instance, needed outside support, for some prominent people helped Franklin out of debt, and the Horatio Alger protagonist advanced after he saved a prominent man's son from drowning.  They didn't get ahead all by themselves.  I would add that Dale Carnegie's book presumes that people need others, which is why one might want to win friends and influence people.  (Carnegie himself, however, says that he's presenting a way of life of giving to people, not merely a strategy to get ahead.)  Frick likens the Nixon narrative to Westerns, in which a lone hero comes forward and saves the day.

The narrative that Nixon rose through hard work came into play at Nixon's funeral, as Bob Dole said that Nixon got ahead by working longer and harder than anyone else.  According to Frick, Dole was depicting America as a land of opportunity, in which anyone could get ahead, and he was tying Nixon with Americanism.  But Frick says that some might have deemed even Dole's comments to be divisive.  Nixon arguably started his political career by portraying his opponent as insufficiently patriotic.  Was Dole doing something similar, by implying that being a patriotic American coincided with appreciating Richard Nixon as one who epitomized American values?  Frick notes later in the book that Richard Nixon's Six Crises came out at around the same time as Michael Harrington's book on poverty, entitled The Other America, and also Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.  Is Frick implying that there was a growing acknowledgment that things were not as rosy in America as Nixon was indicating in Six Crises: that America was not a place where everyone could get ahead through hard work?  (That's not to suggest that Harrington and Friedan were responding to Six Crises.)

On the topic of getting ahead through hard work, I see some value in that narrative.  I agree with the Puritan Frick quotes who asked how one could go to sleep at night without having done a hard days work.  I'm all for working hard and persevering because that increases the chance of me arriving at success.  What I don't like is people appealing to that narrative to imply that everyone who is poor is somehow at fault, for there are plenty of people who are poor yet work long and hard.  I one time read a conservative friend of mine appeal to his father's folksy wisdom about being a hard-working employee in arguing that the minimum wage should not be increased.  I agree with that friend's father that an employee should show his or her worth to an employer by working hard.  But that should have nothing to do with the debate over whether or not to raise the minimum wage.  When an economy does not pay people enough to support themselves or their families, then that is problematic, and no amount of folksy wisdom will change that.

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I finished Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.  On page 1052, Black says the following about Henry Kissinger's eulogy to Richard Nixon at Nixon's 1994 funeral:

"At this critical moment, all rivalry between the two men finally vanished, and Kissinger's own best instincts came naturally to his eulogist's task.  His voice broke slightly at one point, when he referred to hearing 'the final news, by then so expected but so hard to accept, [when] I felt a deep loss and a profound void.'  (He told the author that he felt that 'part of me died with him.')"

That's one narrative about Richard Nixon's funeral: that it was an incident at which Americans were brought together.  Similarly, Daniel Frick states on page 4 of his book, Reinventing Richard Nixon:

"Had the Nixon funeral contained only...preaching to the converted, the ceremony could only have been expected to exacerbate old divisions.  Whatever evocative power the funeral service might have had must have come from its enactment of a ritual of political forgiveness between longtime warring camps.  Nixon himself could not have selected a more perfect candidate to fulfill this task than Democratic president Bill Clinton.  First of all, as a Vietnam-era college student who had avoided the draft and protested the war, he effectively symbolized the irresponsibility and lack of patriotism that Nixon had claimed epitomized too many in the baby boom generation.  And, second, Watergate had been pivotal in opening Clinton's political career...So, when in his eulogy, President Clinton affirmed that Nixon had made mistakes and that these were part of his record, no one could miss the unspoken reference to Watergate.  Only someone well-schooled in the catechism of anti-Nixonism could credibly offer the absolution that followed: 'Today is a day for his family, his friends and his nation to remember President Nixon's life in totality.  To them, let us say: may the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close...'  As an attempt to face the past and move on, this moment was the political high point of the ceremony: offering to Nixon's memory a pardon more genuine and complete than the merely legal one that Ford had granted."

Frick goes on to say that divisions still remained, even during and after Nixon's funeral.  But the narrative that Nixon's funeral was a place that healed divisions stood out to me on account of the opposite picture that I was reading in Anthony Summers' anti-Nixon biography, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon.  After Richard Nixon's death, Alger Hiss, the ex-State Department official whom Nixon during the late 1940's said was a Communist spy, said: "I am not going to gloat...There are a lot of things in that man's life that were left unatoned for..."  Summers probably agrees with Hiss' assessment, since his book is about the negative things that Nixon allegedly did throughout his political career.

Summers also notes who did not attend Nixon's funeral.  Some of them (i.e., Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt) did not particularly surprise me.  But some of what Summers said on page xiv did stand out to me:

"Tens of thousands more Vietnamese died in the short time that remained until South Vietnam collapsed, less than a year after Nixon's resignation.  The ousted former president of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, was not at the funeral.

"New research strengthens the suspicion that in 1968, on the eve of the election that brought him to the White House, Nixon manipulated the Vietnam War for selfish political ends.  Did he, fearful that impending peace negotiations would swing vital votes to his Democratic opponent, covertly urge Thieu to boycott the talks?  The prominent Republican Anna Chennault, who met secretly with Nixon and acted as a go-between with the South Vietnamese, claims he did.  She eventually came to despise Nixon and stayed away from the funeral."

I didn't know that Chennault came to despise Nixon, after allegedly serving him during the 1968 Presidential election.