William Tyler
The Bad Boy: Nixon

William Tyler | The Bad Boy: Nixon | 03.11.24

- Thank you very much, and good evening or whatever time of day it is to you. Welcome to this, what is it? The one but penultimate talk in this American series, and today I’m talking about Richard Nixon. Now tomorrow my successor, three times removed successor as principal of the City Lit, Mark Malcolmson, is talking about the relationship between President Eisenhower, and as he was then, Vice President Nixon. So I hope you’ll listen in tomorrow night to Mark, who is in my view and outstanding lecturer and such an interesting person, who spent a lot of time working in the states as well, and he’s an enthusiast. And so do please try and listen tomorrow to Mark on a different aspect of Nixon. So I pondered on how I should start the talk, and I had various starts and then I thought, well if in doubt, I always go to Churchill if in doubt, but I’m not going to Churchill, I’m going to Shakespeare, and I’m going to words that Shakespeare wrote in the play “Julius Caesar”, where Shakespeare put these words into the mouth of Mark Antony.

“The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” And I thought perhaps there’s no better quotation with which to begin a talk about President Richard Nixon, who to the man and woman in the street is forever associated with the scandal of Watergate. And indeed the suffix gate has been applied to countless other occasions and events in both the States and here in Britain. In Britain our last gate was following the COVID epidemic, and the breaking of their own rules by the government and their advisors at Number 10 Downing Street by holding parties, which had been forbidden to the rest of us. And so this got called Partygate, and that emphasises how big a scandal Watergate was, that it entered the lexicon of English, of English English and American English, as something to describe that sort of event.

In my worst moments of contemplating where we are across the Western world with liberal democracy, if we are going towards a point at which decisions will have to be made on how we develop our democracy in the future, then I think we might well point to Watergate at the moment at which liberal democracies began to fail, or at least if the liberal democracies themselves didn’t fail, then at least in which ordinary citizens began to ask questions. That’s just a view you may not share, but I suspect that in the future, say 50 years on, we will look back at this time, and look back at Nixon and Watergate as the beginning of the questioning about liberal democracies and how they function. But you could argue that a better way of starting this talk would’ve been to quote Nixon himself from his resignation speech, where he didn’t use his own words but quoted those of former president Teddy Roosevelt who said, “Sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I have failed.”

Now of course in Nixon’s case, that is really an attempt to absolve himself from the horror of Watergate, to play it down. “Well, we all make mistakes,” he’s saying, “but there’s good things as well that we do.” And that’s the same for, well that’s the same for any politician, and we tend to use the words good and bad rather loosely about past politicians. “He was a good president, a good prime minister, a bad president, bad prime minister,” and when we do so we’re referring to policies and the success in seeing those policies through, or the failure in seeing those policies through. But that is not what it is with Nixon. Nixon is a different animal. Contemporaries were highly critical of Nixon, and there’s none more critical than former President Harry S Truman.

This is a total damnation, not by faint praise, but damnation by damnation. Truman said of Nixon, “Richard Nixon is a no-good lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.” Wow, that really is some comment from one former president to at the time, a president on his way out. So today I’m going to look at those two sides of Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, and Nixon served in office from 1969 through to 1974. Like LBJ whom I spoke about last week, I think it’s right to think of Nixon as a professional politician. He was born in 1913. It’s always interesting to know when people had their upbringing, not just in terms of their family life, but in terms of the the time, the period of history. He was born in 1913, in other words, just one year before Europe was taken to World War, and four years before America joined that war in 1917.

He came from a fairly humble family in California. His father was a small lemon grower, but also ran other businesses like a like a grocery store. His mother interestingly was a Quaker. The family weren’t rich, they weren’t particularly poor, they’re a lower middling family if you like. But the parents were very strict on Nixon, and that may be something that if you are going to psychoanalyse Nixon, you would want to take into account. Like JFK, Nixon served in the Second World War in the US Navy, rising to the rank of Lieutenant commander. Unlike Nixon, sorry. Nixon, unlike Kennedy, did not have a glorious war, or as the phrase is, a good war. The beginning of it, he was pushing papers around. The second part of it no, he did serve in the Pacific, but unlike Kennedy who got all that publicity, remember, when his boat sank and all the rest of it, and in a sense, poor old Nixon never stood a chance when competing with Kennedy.

He lacked that je ne sais quoi. He lacked what modern day politicians have to have, or at least most have or should have, which is charisma. Poor old Nixon really didn’t have charisma, whereas JFK had it in spades. After the war, and now he’s in his 30s, he goes on to represent his own state of California, first in the House of Representatives and then in the Senate. In the House between 1947, when he’s demobbed, to 1950, and then in the Senate from 1950 to ‘53. And he’s spotted by Dwight D Eisenhower, and he becomes Eisenhower’s vice president between 1953 and '61, and that’s the period in particular that Mark is going to talk about tomorrow, and Mark is obviously going to link that to the past, and I imagine to the future, although we haven’t talked about that.

So wait till tomorrow to hear a little bit about that background. I’m instead going to concentrate on two things. I’m not today, as I would normally when talking about a person, follow a strict chronological line of speaking, being I think always easier to follow a line. I’m not doing that. I’m going to begin with what I suppose most of you, knowing I was going to speak about Nixon expect me to speak about, which is the Watergate scandal. Then I will attempt to show that Nixon’s political successes were quite a number and important ones, both in the field of home affairs and indeed, particularly perhaps you might argue, in foreign affairs. So we’re starting with the bad and moving to the good, if you want to put it very crudely, but at the end of the day you will have to decide for yourselves where you throw your stone of judgement when it comes to Nixon. Do you buy what he said? “I had some successes and I’ve had some failures.”

Or do you really think there’s nothing more to be said than what Harry Truman said, that even if he told the truth, he would have to lie to cover it up. He is not an easy person to put in any box. There’s never been anyone, that’s a dangerous thing to say. There’s never really been anyone who has had this, it’s not a split personality, his personality remained the same throughout success and failure, but who is in these two parts, a yin and yang of success and failure. So Watergate, the scandal that brought Richard Nixon down and ended his presidency. Let me read you the words of one historian. It goes like this. It’s just a, so to get us into the picture of talking about and thinking about Watergate. “With beads of sweat forming on his brow, the President of the United States of America looked straight down the lens of a television camera and says defiantly, 'I’m not a crook.’

The President, Richard Nixon, is in the middle of an hour-long televised question and answer session with over 400 journalists. That the leader of the world’s foremost superpower is forced to make such an astonishing statement shows the scale of the scandal that had spread like wildfire through the White House. It will lead in the end to the first and only resignation of an incumbent president to date, and become the defining political misdemeanour of the 20th century.” The Canadian actor Martin Short recalls the event of Nixon looking into that camera, and we’ve all seen the television video pictures of that, and knowing everything that we now know, how extraordinary that was, “I am not a crook.” Martin Short, the Canadian actor said, “I remember as a kid, nothing struck me funnier than seeing Richard Nixon look into the camera and sincerely tell everyone he didn’t know where the 18 minutes had gone from his tapes.” You remember all that issue with the tapes that, from the White House. “But there was all this sweat on his upper lip. We knew he was lying, he knew we knew he was lying, but he was still determined to tell the lie.”

That’s politely saying what Truman said in rather more coarse language. Hunter Thompson, the American author, wrote this. “By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American dream.” Now remember we talked about the American dream, and many of you said at the time afterwards, and emailed me to say you thought the American dream had gone. And I said I don’t think it has, I think it will recover. But here as long ago as ‘74, Hunter Thompson wrote, “By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American dream.” Well that’s rather I suppose, something in the same ballpark as me saying just now when I started, that maybe as we look back on the history of liberal democracy in the 21st century, we shall see Watergate as an important moment of departure for that discussion and debate.

Maybe that’s what’s being said. Does it mean that democracy is going to die? No, I don’t think it does. Does it mean the American dream is over? No, I don’t think it does. I think we may have to revisit all of these things, and reinterpret them in the light of the present day, and in the light of events since Richard Nixon on both sides of the Atlantic. That’s just by way of breaking the ice as we go into the discussion of Watergate. So here to remind us of the story of Watergate, the word Watergate itself as, I apologise for teaching grandmothers to suck eggs, but sometimes it’s helpful to be crystal clear. I don’t know if Americans know the Lady Bird books, which are produced in Britain for children with simple words on one side of the page, and a picture on the other side of the page. Many of us here of my age group learned to read through Lady Bird books, and I’ve often thought that Lady Bird books are really important, because it brings you back to the basics and tells a story.

And the word Watergate then refers to the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC, and in particular to its sixth floor, where the Democrats had their party headquarters. And the story of what developed into the Watergate scandal can be dated back to the 17th of June, 1972, when the police arrested five men on the sixth floor, and brought them to book for attempted burglary. Well that all seems straightforward, except that all five were subsequently found to have connections with the CIA, and of a group that raised funds for the reelection of Richard Nixon as president. What that organisation was called is the Committee for the Reelection of the President, the Committee for the Reelection of the President, or in short an acronym, CREEP. It sounds like something out of a James Bond film, CREEP. Let me share a number of things with you as I go along, and this is the first thing I wanted to read, and it goes like this. “Nixon had deployed from the White House as President,” in his first term of office, “Nixon had employed an array of dubious techniques to suppress opponents.

The CREEP became a defacto intelligence organisation engaged in dirty campaigns against potential rivals. And what did that mean? Bugging offices, seeking material that could be used against opponents, and attempting to prevent leaks to the media.” So you’re doing things against your opponents, and at the same time trying to stop anyone finding out. Promise me that if any of you, in whichever country you are listening to me from, are going to stand for public office, promise me that you will not set up such an organisation to try and stop leaks, because leaks are virtually impossible to stop. What you’ve got to do is to make sure that there’s nothing, there’s nothing awful that could be leaked, but simply a difference of political opinion. That of course, is not the case with Watergate. This was Nixon attempting to find dirt on his Democratic opponents by bugging their offices, and by a dirty tricks campaign, accusations against them. And we see that on both sides in the Atlantic in the elections that are happening this year, and covering them up.

In whatever walk of life, covering up is the problem. Putting your hand up and saying, “Yes I did it, and I shouldn’t have done,” you might just get away with it. But attempting to cover it up and then being found, well there’s no way back from that position, which is what Nixon got himself into. Let me just finish this piece I was reading. “While CREEP was technically and officially a private fundraising group, its existence and true nature was known to several government employees and Nixon himself. While Nixon was aware that CREEP gathered intelligence on his rivals and administration’s enemies, conversations reveal that he was either unaware of the scale of their activities, or simply chose not to know.” Of course it gets worse than that as the scandal goes on. There’s often occasions, I’m sure many of you in work occasions, somebody’s come and said something, you say, “No, I don’t want to know that. I don’t want that in writing, and we’ve not had this conversation.”

Yeah, that’s quite a long way away from what happens eventually with Watergate. Let me just remind you of the two election campaigns. The electoral facts in the two Nixon campaigns are that in 1969 he only won narrowly against Senator Hubert Humphrey. In the 1972 election he faced Senator McGovern and he decided, and those around him, that this could be too close to call, given what had happened against Hubert Humphrey. And so that’s one of the reasons they enter this murky world. He got a landslide victory, and after the victory in the second presidential election, which he won, his approval rating was a staggering, topping 70%. 70% approval rating. Well most politicians would well, give anything to have a 70% approval rating. Of course, one of the problems with Nixon is he thought himself untouchable, and he thought of himself as enormously capable. The sad truth is he was capable, but also the sad truth is that he wouldn’t and couldn’t really deal with reality. He’s not, as we might say today, he wasn’t a people person.

The story of those who had burgled the Watergate Hotel broke when a young reporter from the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, went to cover the court case against the five accused of burglary, and it was from that everything unravelled. First of all Woodward, having covered it, reported this. He said, “Five men are no ordinary burglars, being found with unusually advanced bugging equipment and a surprisingly high-powered attorney. One of the men, James McLeod, admitted that he had previously worked for the CIA. Woodward connected him with another agent, Howard Hunt, and Charles Colson, a Nixon lawyer, and he did so through phone books. Colson went on to claim it upon hearing of the arrests the day after they took place, Nixon hurled an ashtray at the wall.” It’s getting close quite quickly. After the five men are arrested and charged, it’s getting closer to the White House and closer to the president.

The “Washington Post” realised they had a big, big story, and they teamed the young Woodward up with a more experienced reporter, Carl Bernstein, to dig deeper, and so they did. They found a willing source of information from within, as it were, the administration. He was known, and it was always assumed it was a man, he was known as Deep Throat. It turned out in 2005 when he outed himself that his name was Mark Felt, and he’d been an associate director of the FBI. Now Nixon was working through the CIA, not the FBI. And so the FBI associate director is the one that spills the story. Now things are always complicated in the lives of men, and in this case it’s complicated by the fact that Felt carried a, he carried a grudge against Nixon for not appointing him to the top job in the FBI. On such things do big events turn. And it’s that point when things begin to go wrong, and we enter the era, or the area of massive coverups. On being pushed into a corner now by what the “Washington Post” is printing, Nixon said a full investigation had taken place at the White House, and no evidence or wrongdoing had been discovered.

Remember Harry Truman and lies, and that was a lie. Not that nothing had been discovered, but that no investigation at all had taken place, no investigation had taken place. Now we’re headed now for serious trouble. When you are in a hole, do not dig deeper, but of course they went on digging. Nixon said, this is Nixon, “I can say categorically that the investigation indicates that no one on the White House staff, no one in this administration presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident. What really hurts in matters of this sort is not the fact that they occur, because overzealous people in campaigns do things that are wrong. What really hurts is if you try to cover it up,” but this is exactly what he’s doing. It’s a dreadful moment in a democratic country’s history. And so Woodward continues to dig, and Bernstein continues to dig. They dig and the more they dig, more journalistic gold do they find.

It goes like this. “They found that the Chief of Staff Haldeman and the Attorney General Mitchell were also implicated. Deep Throat claimed the Watergate break in was masterminded by Haldeman and also stated that the lives of the two reporters, the lives of the two reporters were at risk.” Woodward and Bernstein pressed on, relentless, and wrote that very famous book, “All the President’s Men”, later turned into a film. They’re digging and digging and digging, and more and more dirt, if you like, is coming to the surface. It was Nixon’s own paranoia that was to prove finally fatal. As a historian in this collection on American history writes, and I will read this small piece to you, goes like this. “Nixon had secret recordings installed in, or recording equipment, installed in the White House Oval Office, cabinet room, his private office in the White House. The resulting takes were a vital in proving his knowledge of and active participation in the Watergate coverup, and wider culpability in allowing his aides to commit behaviour both immoral and illegal.”

So second promise you make to me, if you get high office in any country, please do not bug yourself. You may think you’re bugging others, but you’re at the same time bugging yourself. And nothing really in our digital age can quite ever, ever be totally buried, can it? In February, 1973, with all of this going on, the Senate set up a judicial committee to investigate Watergate, and it’s this which in the end will bring Nixon down. Alan Axelrod writes this, “The investigative committee of the Senate was headed by North Carolina Senator Sam Irwin. Irwin patiently, persistently, and with the cunning of a country lawyer educated at Harvard, elicited testimony revealing crimes far beyond Watergate.” And Alan Axelrod lists them. “Mitchell controlled secret monies used to finance a campaign of forged letters on false news items intended to damage the Democratic party. Two, major American corporations have made illegal campaign contributions amounting to millions to Nixon’s campaign. Three, in 1971, the office of Daniel Ellsberg, the psychiatrist, in order to discredit the Pentagon Papers, was burglarized.

A plan was drawn up to physically assault Ellsberg. Nixon had promised the Watergate burglars clemency, and even bribes in return for silence. Patrick Grey, Nixon’s nominee to replace the recently-deceased Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI, turned over FBI records on Watergate to White House Counsel John Dean. Two Nixon cabinet members, Mitchell and Stans, took bribes from shady financier John Vesco. Illegal wiretaps were in the White House safe of Nixon’s advisor, John Ehrlichman. Nixon directed the CIA to instruct the FBI to not to investigate Watergate. Nixon used $10 million in government funds to improve his personal homes. During '69 and '70, the United States secretly bombed Cambodia without the knowledge, let alone consent of Congress.” Wow, this is far beyond Watergate now, accusations of undemocratic as well as illegal actions from the very top of the American administration. And all of this is being followed, not only in America but across the world, on television news reels.

We know what’s happening, we can see it. In October of '73, the Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign over bribes he’d accepted before he was vice president, but when he was governor of Maryland, and then of course is the finale to all of this. In July, 1974, Nixon was ordered to hand over the secret recordings. Time is now certainly running out for him. And the ramification of being ordered to hand over the tapes is of course quite clear. Dozens of tapes were now being looked at, and the use of dirty tricks, and how the orders frequently came direct from Nixon are now there for all to see. And later in July, 1974, let me read. “In July, 1974, having exhausted various means of preventing their release, including releasing transcripts and heavily redacted tapes, Nixon is ordered to give up the tapes to the investigators, and Congress moves to impeach the President.

Any possibility that Nixon might hang on disappears In August, when a previously unheard tape is released.” The evidence is known, and you’ll all remember this, the smoking gun tape. “On this tape, the smoking gun tape, Nixon is heard advising Haldeman to advise the CIA to stop the FBI investigating the Watergate scandal.” It really cannot possibly continue. And so to avoid impeachment Nixon resigns, and as Michael Dobbs says in his book “King Richard” which is on my blog, along with some other books about Nixon. “King Richard” is subtitled, “Nixon and Watergate, an American Tragedy.” And he writes in this of those last moments, “Richard Nixon resigned the presidency of the United States on the 9th of August, 1974, 16 days before the Supreme Court ordered him to turn over tapes requested by the special prosecutor. The so-called smoking gun conversation of the 23rd of June, 1972, showed that Nixon had ordered a coverup of Watergate within a few days of the break in.

He was pardoned by his successor Gerald Ford,” who had replaced Spiro Agnew as vice president. “He was pardoned by his successor Gerald Ford for any crimes he might have committed while president. Following his death on the 22nd of April, 1994, 20 years later, he was given a full state funeral attended by all five surviving American presidents. Around 3700 hours of the secret recorded tapes finally became available to the public in 2013, following a 40-year legal battle involving historians, the government, Nixon, and his heirs.” The strange thing about that last 20 years is Nixon wrote, of course, had wrote a lot of words exonerating himself, but he was also installed as an elder statesman. This is perhaps another worrying aspect of it. Instead of being a pariah, he’s treated, after a space of years, like any other retired American president, on whom those in office could take advice. It’s a strange case is Nixon, a very strange case. And that’s the bad, that’s Watergate.

But I said when I began that there’s a yin and yang about Nixon. If that’s all that there was about Nixon, he was a bad president, period. He was the worst president, period. Whatever words you want to use, and that’s the end of the story, but it isn’t. Had Watergate not happened, had there never been a Watergate, and Nixon had fulfilled two terms as President, he would be remembered today as not just a good president, but potentially an outstanding president. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? When you think about Nixon and Kennedy, when we spoke about Kennedy, we were left in the air because we couldn’t guess how Kennedy’s presidency would work out.

Some people think it would’ve been, hit the heights. Other people think the opposite, that it would’ve hit the buffers. But with Nixon, we’ve got the whole picture, and he did have success. If we look at his domestic policy, in 1973 he ended the draught, and he moved the United States military to an all-volunteer force. That’s something significant. He also, and this is, okay, there were presidents who’d moved in this direction before, not least FDR, but he founded the Environment Protection Agency in 1970. Now today, 50 plus years on, we are all so concerned about the environment, and the possibility of Armageddon with the planet. And we failed to recognise that 50 years ago, Nixon was doing something about it. The Protection Agency in 1970 began to raise concern about conservation and pollution. In many ways, it was ahead of its time. It introduced the Clean Air Act.

Well, true that in Britain that had been introduced some 14 years before, but it introduced a Clean Air act. It introduced a Clean Water act. My goodness, in Britain today we need that. Clean Water, Clean Air, and the Mammal Marine Protection Act. Now those things are very much in the news at this time, and yet this was forward-thinking. This wasn’t necessarily going to win him votes. He dedicated a hundred million dollars for what was, he described as the war on cancer. That led to creation in the States of national cancer centres, and antidotes that helped fight the disease. If you remember back in the '50s and '60s, which some of us can remember, there was very little that was able to be done for those suffering from cancer. 1970s, Nixon instigates national money. Remember the old debate about private-national, a hundred million dollars from the American Treasury in a campaign to improve cancer outcomes. In 1972, he passed legislation which enabled women to enter collegiate sports, a civil rights act, if you like, against gender bias.

My goodness, we still have problems about gender bias and sport. And he was able to do that by insisting upon no gender bias at colleges and universities which receive federal funding, and that of course gave a green light, or red light if you want to look at it, to other educational establishments. This is quite remarkable stuff. He initiated and indeed oversaw the peaceful desegregation of Southern schools, this lingering, lingering racism from the end of the Civil War. He also lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Now remember, all of this is against the background we’ve spoken about before, a background of civil rights, of women’s rights, of the youth movement, and of concerns about the environment. Well, Nixon actually ticks the boxes of those. If you’re appalled by Watergate, and of course we all are, you may not want to think of successes, but that’s what I’m saying to you about Nixon. The good-bad simplistic approach to past presidents does not work with Nixon. And then of course there was a group that we haven’t talked very much about in the modern history of America as I’ve gone through the course, is he became the first president to give Native Americans the right to tribal self-determination by ending the policy of forced assimilation, and began to return sacred lands.

Now those are, I would argue, and I would be prepared to argue in a balloon debate, that this is modern legislation dealing with a modern world, and giving out what I guess most of us would think as positive signals. I cannot however remain in the balloon defending Nixon when we get to Watergate, it’s not possible. But just because of Watergate, we should not forget the forward march of American policy under Nixon, both at home, and spectacularly abroad. Now I quoted just now from Michael Dobbs’ book on Nixon and Watergate, and I wanted to read this paragraph from the right at the beginning of the introduction to the book, and Dobbs wrote, “As Nixon prepared to take the oath of office for the second time, the son of the struggling Quaker grocer had many reasons to celebrate. Despite his perpetually restless nature, he had been reelected by the largest margin of popular vote of any president in the nearly 200-year history of the republic.

He’d won the grudging respect to the foreign policy crowd, that despised band of elitist snobs, for the geostrategic brilliance of his opening to China. Most gratifying of all, he was on the cusp of concluding a peace agreement with the communist government in North Vietnam, heralding an end to a war that had cost the lives of 58,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese. Four years previously in his first inaugural address, he had described the title of,” this is a quote from Nixon’s first inaugural address. “He described the title of peacemaker as the greatest honour history can bestow.” That’s how he wanted to be remembered, peacemaker. “The road to peace had been long and bloody, but the prize was finally within his grasp.” And it may be his achievements in foreign policy were far more important, at least in the medium term, than were his successes in home policy.

In 1972, he participated in the SALT talks, S-A-L-T, remember stands for Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, with Brezhnev, Russia’s leader, in an effort to calm down the Cold War and to do so through diplomatic means. This led on to the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile, the ABM Treaty as it’s known, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which again helped to calm US-Soviet tensions by curtailing the threat of nuclear weapons or the use of nuclear weapons, between the world’s two superpowers. Remember, Cuba had not been so far back in history at this point. He also became the first American president to visit communist China where he issued a communique known as the Shanghai Communique, in which he announced an American desire for open, normalised relations. And in 1973, he signed the Paris Peace Accords, ending American involvement in the Vietnam War. Now these were big, big events, enormously important events in terms of world history.

This was an attempt to diffuse the Cold War. And as he said, there’s no greater title than that of peacemaker. And across the world, this was hugely acknowledged. Alan Axelrod, whom I’ve been using, says this. “President Nixon, who had risen to power in Congress through his uncompromising, at times virulent stance against communism,” he was very, very anti-communist. He made all sorts of claims when he was standing for the House and for the Senate against his Democratic opponents, calling them, oh well, it was all awful, calling them communists when they weren’t. “But now as President, he worked with his advisor, Henry Kissinger, to engineer detente with the Soviets and with the Communist Chinese. His most immediate modification was to cut them loose from North Vietnam.

But the ramifications of the Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy extended far beyond the Vietnam War.” A really important sentence of Axelrod, not writing as a democratic advisor, but writing as a historian. Axelrod writes this, “The consummate cold warrior,” which he had been, “Richard M. Nixon initiated the long thaw that ultimately ended the Cold War.” And as you know, I often say, if you were doing a postgraduate course, that would be the title of your next essay, “The Consummate Cold War Warrior”, so anti-communist, and seeing communists and Reds under the beds where there weren’t. But as president, the man who with Kissinger initiated detente with Russia and with China, and got America out of the horror of Vietnam. That is no small achievement, it really is not. Now, I’m going to talk about the Cold War next week, and we will have to return to Nixon, because that again is a turning point.

That’s a huge turning point. And many of you know that during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Nixon supported Israel with massive aid, quite relevant today. Prime Minister Golda Meir said it had saved Israel. It had saved Israel. So Nixon was a real force on the world stage. He was playing the role of the leader of the West. And he played it with, I am sorry to say to those of you who are opposed or may be opposed to Nixon, with panache. But that cloud of Watergate obscures for many the sun above, of the successes of home policy as well as the successes, and I think really significant successes of the Cold War. Now you may say with the truth that he may have been successful in terms of detente, and he may have contributed to the eventual thaw of the Marxist regime in Russia and in Eastern Europe, but that has not prevented us entering a new Cold War with Putin. But you can hardly, I think, lay that at Nixon’s door.

He was dealing with his present. And I suggest to you that he dealt well with that present, and he cannot be blamed for the subsequent move of the world to a new Cold War. And new leaders of the West will have to emerge to deal with this new Cold War, and China and Russia, and the attacks on Israel remain firmly in our sights today. And hopefully someone with Nixon’s panache and grasp of detail, and someone like Kissinger will reemerge to deal with the problems that we face. That lies in the future. I want to, I’ve got a couple of things by way of conclusion. Well, I actually have three things by way of conclusion, and this is from 1977. David Frost, the Anglo-American television interviewer, interviewed Nixon in 1977. It was a very famous, and it really made Frost’s name in lights, his interview with Nixon. Later in 1992 on the American TV show “Larry King Live”, Frost said this about Nixon, whom he’d interviewed some 15 years earlier.

He said, “And at the end, a sad man who so wanted to be great, was a phrase that occurred to me,” said David Frost. “As I left him the last time in San Clemente,” at the end of those interviews in 1977. “At the end, a sad man who wanted to be great, was a phrase that occurred to me as I left him the last time in San Clemente. Because I mean, he was lonely and alone, and I mean, he was a sad man. He wasn’t quite a tragic man, because there wasn’t quite that nobility about it all, but you felt he was a sad man at the end. But at the same time, at that time one was particularly aware that there were people in prison because of his actions, and so that took away a little of the sympathy.” And that’s a very, very interesting comment to make. And Michael Dobbs says something, well, in some ways quite enigmatic I think, but nevertheless following on from what Frost said, and years later than that, of course.

He says this in terms of, sorry, if I can find it quickly, I will read it to you, it’s here. Dobbs writes, “The story of Richard Nixon’s fall is neither a Greek tragedy,” which is exactly what Frost said, “nor a Shakespearean tragedy,” where I began. “But as a uniquely American drama that we continue to live through today. It is a story without end, because this is a story of us all.” I’m not entirely clear what he means, but I think I do. My own conclusion I wrote on my blog, for those of you who look up my blog before I give the talk or afterwards, to see what I’m going to talk about, and sometimes I actually talk about what I put on the blog, and I hope I did this week, but I did put on my blog. And so this is me synoptically clever. I said, “Nixon defies one-word descriptions of his time in the White House as either bad or good, a crude technique to describe other presidents.

Nixon’s problem was himself, his hubris, his arrogance, his narcissism, his recourse to lying, and many more descriptions which had been given to him by his political contemporaries, by journalists, and by historians. Put simply, Nixon remains an interesting but ultimately flawed holder of America’s highest office.” But as I said at the beginning, each of you must cast your judgement stone as you see Nixon. And I’ve got one last thing to read. This is frightening for an educator. This is an American educator who wrote this. “School was never in business to produce Thoreau. It is in business to produce a man like Richard Nixon, and even more a population like the one which could elect Richard Nixon.” “School was never in business to produce Thoreau. It is in business to produce a man like Richard Nixon, and even more a population like the one which could elect him.”

Now those of you who like me have spent your life in education, are worried about the role of education in the preservation and future of liberal democracy. I don’t think we do a very good job. I don’t think we’ve done a very good job, with children or with adults. And that quotation rather made me sit up when I was looking through material about Nixon. So I thought I would end with that. And maybe it’s only a select number of you who’ve been in education that will relate to that. Now I need to give lots of you, it’s 6:00 and I will stop, because I’m sure lots of you are going to say a great deal of things. Where are we? I can’t see. Question and answer, there we are.

Q&A and Comments

Oh, somebody, that’s a, Clive, thank you so much for beginning by saying, “Good afternoon, William.” Well, good afternoon, Clive. That seems very gentlemanly and sophisticated. Thank you very much. Sue says, oh Sue says, yeah. Yeah, I leave Sue’s comment. Rita, oh no, sorry. Those are all comments about what I wear. I’m sorry about that. Yanna says, “The word you were looking for is anti penultimate,” yes I know. It’s a nasty little word, I think. Yanna says, “In the OED, suffix, a terminal element denoting an actual or alleged scandal, and usually an attempted coverup in some way comparable with the Watergate scandal of 1972,” the gate suffix. Absolutely, it’s entered the language. Michael, “Truman, a great president, was often intemperate in his off-the-cuff remarks.” No, well that’s a very, that’s a very polite way, if I might say so, of discussing it. The more important question is, it may have been intemperate, but was it accurate?

Q: Monty says, “Today is liberal democracy not an oxymoron?” A: Well, it’s the only terminology we have. And I do like the word oxymoron, and so I’ve got to say Monty, if you use a word like oxymoron, I’ve got to agree with you. Now yes, I think there is a problem about the wording.

Oh, and Karen says, “We in Canada had Dick and Jane books very similar to the Lady Bird books.” The the point of those books are, that they deal with complex subjects, some of them, like nuclear fusion, but they deal with it in simplistic words. I’m told that they’re the most difficult of books to write, ‘cause you have to write about complicated ideas in simple language. I’m not sure what that refers to. It’s iPad, “Yes we did, but years before Nixon, Judy Gorman.” I’m not sure what you are referring to. Help me out if you want to. Shelly, “At least Nixon resigned. At least the Republicans made him go. The Watergate burglary was nonsensical. McGovern, Nixon’s,” oh, it it gives out there. David, “He also had the IRS look closely at the tax returns of his opponents,” he did. Tax returns of politicians are a very big issue in Britain at the moment, because of the Prime Minister’s wife.

Yanna says, “The Watergate is not only a hotel. It’s primarily an upscale complex of flats and apartments. Some of those were rented out as offices, which was the case with regard to the Democratic Party in the break in.” Thank you Yanna, for making that very clear. Shelly, “Opponents would’ve won the '72 election anyway. Too much to the left, like Goldwater is too much to the right. Compare this with Trump trying to make a coup and stay in office, and the Republican party not holding him accountable.” Yeah. I’m not going back to issues about Trump and Biden. Jacob, “In 1968, Nixon defeated Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was not a senator at that time,” good, correct.

Marilyn, “Nixon lack of personality and the Watergate scandal overshadows his achievements in domestic and foreign affairs,” that’s what I think. You used the word overshadow. Do you remember the accusations about five o'clock shadow when he appeared on TV? He didn’t look the part. I hate the idea of modern politics, where politicians have to look the part. They have to be trendy, or they have, they can’t just be themselves, and I find that really rather depressing. Marilyn, “I remember the growing up during the Cold War and the great fear of communism. When I mention the Cold War, most of the younger generation never heard of the phrase Cold War.” Oh dear, how depressing is the young’s lack of knowledge of recent history. And some of those may well be in positions of power to make decisions. Next week I’m going to talk about Cold War.

Sherry, “I never thought that an American president would be more reprehensible than Nixon. Trump however, far exceeds evil exhibited by Nixon. Furthermore, Nixon had brains, Trump does not. Nixon at least seemed to have a love of country, whereas Trump is a traitor.” And iPad says, “I agree with all you say.” I can’t argue, obviously, I can’t argue against that. Not because I don’t involved in an argument, because it seems to me so evidently true. Jonathan, “And that’s why it may be starting with Nixon and Watergate. I’m talking about the decline of liberal democracy, but it isn’t only in America that we see that.” Jonathan, “The concept of a politician being told only what he needs to know is brilliantly portrayed in the British comedy series 'Yes Prime Minister’.” Absolutely right. I don’t know, I think Americans can get hold of “Yes, Prime Minister.” It was a brilliant series, and brilliant because it was so near the mark.

William, “Vietnam, a major, IE major reason.” Sorry, it was an N missed. Sorry, I didn’t read that properly. “A major reason for Nixon election,” absolutely. Jean, “We arrived as immigrants in Manhattan from South Africa on July ‘74. Having had no TV and no criticism of the government, we were absolutely amazed that criticism was allowed, and that we could watch it all unfold.” Well, that’s a positive for a democracy against an autocracy, it’s true. But really what happened over Watergate should simply not have happened.

Q: Shelly, oh, who turned out to be Deep Throat? A: Oh, Rita’s answered for me, thank you Rita. Yes, his name was Mark Felt, as I think. The White House plumbers, which is the people that went, the name ascribed to those who went in to the sixth floor the Watergate Hotel.

Says Simon, “There’s a TV miniseries with Woody Harrelson, unbelievable.” I’ve not seen that. I guess it must be available in Britain. I have not seen that. I shall make a note of that and see if I can track it down. “Bernstein mainly today appears as a talking head on TV. Woodward has turned his sights on Trump.” Marilyn, “I could never understand why Nixon didn’t just destroy the tapes. If they had been burnt, nobody would’ve been able to prove.” David, “I think it would’ve been the same result. He would’ve been charged with destroying the tapes with the implication of something to hide.” Yeah, it’s difficult to say what would’ve happened. David is of course right, but it would’ve been much more tricky to pin him. Just take my advice, don’t have tapes made in your office.

Myrna, “A group of senators actually went to Nixon’s office and advised him to resign or face actual prosecution and perhaps prison. Nixon took their advice. As a true Trump-style victim, his departing words were, 'You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.’” Yes, I could have used that phrase that he used. Neil, “That was after his defeat in ‘62 for the governorship of California.” But I could have used it. “I don’t remember hearing anything about Nixon after he resigned till he died, except the pros and cons of Ford pardoning him.” No, he was a very isolated man, in the way that Frost described. He was sad, yeah, the whole thing was sad. But as Frost said, he was not a tragic hero. He certainly wasn’t, nor was he a Shakespearean tragedy. He was just a very American one-off event.

Q: Oh Yanna, “Why was Nixon politically exonerated?” A: Question mark, answer. “Because Americans live by, though they generally don’t know the phrase, .” Yeah, don’t say anything bad unless you’re dead. Well, I think it just saved a lot more coming out and ongoing. It was not good for the body politic. Let’s put it like that.

Who is this? Neil. “'Gaslit’, a series about Martha Mitchell and her role in exposing Watergate is well worth watching.” Oh, this is great. Diane, “I thought Nixon was as bad as a president could get. Now I know how bad is bad in Trump, and sit once again with great trepidation at Trump’s possible re-sitting as our president in November.” I was, let me be honest, I was not next week, next week I was always going to talk about Cold War. And so the last week, the week after next week, which will be the last week, I was going to talk about America today, but I decided with Trudy that that would not be a particularly wise thing to do, given people’s not unexpectedly strong views. Instead, I’m going to do a talk about the state of the world today, and not talk about Trump or Biden, but America as America, as America’s role in the state of the world today, and America’s leadership of the free world and where we are today. And I’m going to do that, and of course that will change inevitably, was Trump to be elected, and no one knows where that goes. But I really don’t want to get into, the people who’ve written to me and saying, “Well, he’ll never accept it if he loses, and that could be worse than him winning. It might lead to civil war,” and so on. Let’s cross those bridges when we come to them.

Ron, “Nixon authorised a massive airlift of arms to Israel during the ‘73 war.” Oops sorry, lost it. I’m so sorry, I’ll get it back again. “In the Yom Kippur War of '73.” Here, oh hang on, I’ve lost it now. Oh yes, here we are, Ron. “Nixon authorised a massive airlift of arms to Israel during the '73 war, which saved the day for Israel. This, despite some anti-Semitic comments he is known to have made in private.”

Q: Mimi, “Was Nixon an antisemite?” A: Ron, “He is known to have made some antisemitic comments in private, but he did appoint Kissinger and he supported Israel.” Gerald, “Detroiter Max Fisher remained a close friend to keep him favourable to the US Jewish community.”

Q: Gerald, “Wasn’t his success in foreign policy primary due to his reliance on the advice of Henry Kissinger?” A: Yes, Kissinger is a huge figure in this, but Nixon was not the sort of person that took advice. So, and remember what Nixon said in his first inaugural address about a peacemaker. Nixon and Kissinger were on the same page. Kissinger was an extraordinary exceptional man, absolutely. And together they did what they did.

Stewart, “The Watergate break ins were supervised by Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt. Liddy was an ex FBI and prosecutor, Hunt was ex CIA. Liddy served as an advisor to John Ehrlichman. Liddy was sentenced for a 20-year prison term and was ordered to pay $40,000. He began serving the sentence on the 30th of Jan, '73. President Carter commuted his sentence to eight years to match the other conspirators’ terms. Hunt was sentenced for 30 months or eight years in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal.” Thanks, I didn’t go into that, I could have done. More time, I would’ve gone through them all. Rose, “Lucky for us, we can have opinions in a democracy, which is at stake in many places around our world. I think that the dominant behaviour is what is important. And if you are a dishonest human, what else can one say? A thief is a thief, and yes, the negative in Nixon’s case overshadows the positive. I’m thinking simply today of some of our prime ministers or presidents, whose last acts of shocking behaviour annuls the good done.” Yeah, can’t disagree with that. “Still Nixon was better than, still he was better than the it, depends what it is. President who was responsible for Kosovo, that Putin used as an excuse to attack the Ukraine.”

Bernard, “Nixon also prolonged the Vietnam war, costing unnecessary American lives, so his administration would be the one to get the peace, like Trump blocking border legislation, hoping he would be the one to pass the legislation.” It is true that there were huge numbers of Americans that died in Vietnam during Nixon’s presidency. I’ve never heard it said, but I’m sure there are people who are saying that he went on with unnecessary American lives, so that he could get the credit for the peace. I’m not sure that I would necessarily go along with that. What I’m interested in, Bernard, as you and others are linking Nixon very clearly to Trump. And I understand why, but I think you have to be, I think you have to be careful, because I don’t think Nixon is like Trump. I think Trump, if Nixon is a one-off, certainly pray God, Trump is a one-off. Carol, “The horrid trickster Roger Stone got his start working with the Nixon enablers.” From Jacob, “How ironic that a person who was caught on tape uttering antisemitic remarks would be the one who saved Israel with an emergency airlift of arms during the Yom Kippur war.” Ron, “Nixon couldn’t afford for an American ally to fall against Soviet-armed Arab armies. It was all part of the Cold War.” Ron, absolutely right, absolutely right.

Q: Barry, “Did not Nixon send Kissinger to Pretoria, South Africa, and then Rhodesia was sold down the river, and Mugabe then became the president of Rhodesia?” A: Yeah sorry, not everything is brilliant.

Myrna, “John Dean is on TV as an expert in politics these days.” Oh, well that’s nice if people say thank you, I hope you did. Those of you who are really interested, A, listen to Mark tomorrow night, ‘cause you’ve got a different twist. And also look on my blog where I’ve listed the books that you might want to read if you haven’t read them. I guess many of my American friends will have read them, and be sick to death of Nixon, and the films and TV series and all the rest of it. But if you aren’t, there are some interesting books on that list which are well worth reading. Sorry, who says, Michael. “In '68, Nixon ran for president by saying that he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. It wasn’t until some years later that Congress, amid anti-war sentiment rampant in the US, ended financing of the war, that the war was forced to come to an end. In this period of time, additional thousands of Americans were killed,” Absolutely, as I’ve just said, “in addition of course to the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.” Absolutely right.

Ron, “I could not disagree more,” great, “with giving so much credit to Nixon for events that occurred because they were being blown across the United States and the world by winds of fortune.” “Events, dear fellow, events.” Now that’s the McMillan phrase, “Events, dear boy, events.” Well okay, we may have simply to agree to disagree. Oh Nicholas, that’s a very good question.

Q: “Besides the events of Watergate itself, would the other misdemeanours that were discovered because of Watergate been sufficient to lead to his downfall?” A: I think the answer is hopefully yes, but the reality might have been otherwise.

Riva, “People insist on good-bad, black-white, does not apply to any political great.” If you mean that no one is perfect, absolutely. And I talk a lot about Churchill, and there are many things in Churchill’s whole life that are not immensely great. But what he did in 1940 was superb, and nothing can detract, in my view, from that. Nixon’s problem was that Watergate was so dreadful that it has detracted from his other successes. “Is Lockdown considering a series on,” I mean, I guess, sorry, that’s a wonderful word, “on Italy history and politics, et cetera?” I don’t know, you’d have to ask Trudy, I’m the hired hack. Not as far as I’m aware. I think I’ve got two things to read out.

Sue, “Nixon also established OSHA to protect American workers. Look how the Republican Party changed in 50 years.” Well, from a British point of view, it’s always difficult, and I said this I think on an earlier occasion, to talk about the two political parties in America because British people want to compare them to our two political parties, and it doesn’t work like that, because our political parties have largely remained, maybe changing somewhat, but our two political parties are remained linked to one common political core each. And that is not the case in America. And so it becomes very, it’s impossible to compare the two countries. And you are right, that of course the Republican party is changed enormously and it goes on. That’s the nature of American political parties, they do change their stance.

Daniel, “In 1960, Nixon said of the presidential election as he lost to JFK, "They stole it fair and square.” That doesn’t sound like Trump, does it? Myrna, “Music and art on weekends and Wednesdays.” Well, I think that’s back to what Lockdown does. “The difference between Nixon’s good and his bad, that his good also involved a similarly-oriented Congress, whilst the bad was his alone.” Yeah, that’s absolutely true, Yanna, and that of course is the major difference between British and American politics. The British Prime Minister has to have the majority vote in the House of Commons, and in the end, the House of Lords has to stand back. It cannot defeat the will of the House of Commons. And the House of Commons has to be in the control of the Prime Minister. If he loses the control of the House of Commons, he has to go, he has to call a general election. Whereas in America, we have a different system whereby the president of one political party, can face both a House and potentially a Senate of the opposite political party, and that is a difference between the two systems. There are positives and negatives about both, which we don’t have time to go into, I’m pleased to say, but you’re absolutely right.

So thank you all for listening. Thank you all for taking the trouble to raise questions and points, all of which have been interesting. And I hope other people listening to the questions and the points made will have been also stirred by them as I have been, and to make us think about this extraordinary man, Richard Nixon. And do please listen to Mark tomorrow, 'cause that will be fun as well.

Thanks very much, next week Cold Wars et al. See you all then, bye.