This Christmas, as on many holidays and birthdays, one of my presents was another piece of Richard M. Nixon memorabilia to add to my considerable collection. This time it was a copy of a 1974 Rolling Stone magazine — one month after Nixon resigned — with the former president on the cover and the headline, “The Quitter: Our Memories of a Broken Ruler.”
My collection of Nixonia started accidentally while I was a Pitt student. I stumbled into a Shadyside art gallery sale and was drawn to a small oil portrait of the by-then disgraced former president on the floor. The owner said it was the only presidential portrait that had not sold, and I could have it for a hundred bucks, adding that the frame was worth more than that. He even let me pay over time, as long as I got it out of the shop.
My unionist family fiercely opposed Nixon because of his red-baiting days in the 1950s, but that bargain portrait led to other Nixon collectibles: campaign buttons, photos, inauguration items, record albums, bubble gum cigars, bumper stickers and posters. We now have a powder room — “The Nixon Library” — decorated floor to ceiling with his stuff.
Nixon was complicated, but I have grown to understand him more over the years. He did some bad things and some very bad things, but he did some good things, too. He created the Environmental Protection Agency, opened the door to China, entered into arms control treaties with the Soviet Union and signed Title IX into law to end gender bias in sports.
Nixon had flashes of compassion but kept an enemies list. He was brilliant at times but often derailed by deep distrust. He threw sharp elbows in politics but usually did what was right for the nation.
When Nixon narrowly lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960, some of his advisers urged him to challenge the results because of alleged voter fraud in Chicago and elsewhere. But Nixon quickly and graciously conceded, even as some of his supporters filed unsuccessful challenges. He put the interest of the nation ahead of partisan interest.
The Watergate break-in at Democratic National Party headquarters was initially minimized by Nixon’s press secretary, who called it “a third-rate burglary.” It would hardly be a blip on the screen today, but Nixon had to fight hard to survive. He wiggled and squirmed and lied — but when he was caught red-handed in the cover-up, he respected the rule of law and resigned.
In a very human side note to Nixon’s fight to prevent the release of damning Oval Office audio recordings during Watergate, one of his greatest concerns was that his vulgar speech in private would become public. When transcripts of the conversations were released, they were filled with “expletive deleted” edits. But Nixon was embarrassed when he was eventually forced to release the actual audio.
In his book “In the Arena,” he said, “… since neither I nor most other presidents had ever used profanity in public, millions were shocked.” Consider that in light of President Donald Trump cursing a heckler and giving him the finger during an auto factory tour last week.
In a 2024 article in “The National Interest” called “We’re All Nixon Now,” Luke Nathan Phillips wrote that “… it is the combination of his very real flaws, his very real gifts, and his final acceptance at the height and end of his career that only the grace of courage and charity could have redeemed him, that make his an indisputably great American life, compelling to this day.”