Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 24, 1994 TAG: 9404240194
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID VON DREHLE THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
Flip through your mind's picture album, go as far back as you can toward the end of World War II. Remarkable the number of images that feature Nixon. In some he occupies the center of the frame, in others he is there on the fringe, or in the background. But always there.
Nixon hunted communists at the dawn of the Cold War and greeted the new Russians at the Cold War's end. He pioneered the television age in politics, and also made the worst campaign appearance in TV history. When the baby boom came, Nixon's children were pictured in Life magazine. When men walked on the moon, Nixon welcomed them home. He turned his back on China and later opened his arms to it. The race riots, Vietnam, the arms race, Earth Day, Woodstock, Watergate: Nixon hovered over it all.
The Forties, the Fifties, the Sixties, the Seventies, the Eighties, the Nineties - in every decade, Nixon was on the front pages, in the headlines, before the cameras. He sparred with Truman, served with Eisenhower, ran against Kennedy, succeeded Johnson, appointed Ford, set the stage for Carter, advised Reagan, sponsored Bush, counseled Clinton. Five times he was nominated to run for national office, more than any other figure in American history.
"He was able to make himself current for every moment of his life from 1946 until 1994," said presidential historian Michael R. Beschloss. "He never faded into history."
You could say he towered over his times, but there was something about Nixon that did not "tower." He was, like the rest of us, clay. Veteran columnist Murray Kempton, who chronicled the Nixon age from start to finish, remembered his ordinariness, his one-of-us quality. John F. Kennedy, one of dozens of rivals Nixon survived, was a gleaming figure, eternally the kid picked first for the playground baseball game. Nixon, you had to believe, knew what it was like to be chosen last.
He was graceless, a man who actually rehearsed his "small talk" and repeated the same asides each time he met you. He ate cottage cheese with catsup and wore hard black shoes on the beach. His smile looked like he practiced it in front of a mirror, his sweat glands were active, his thick beard needed twice-a-day shaving.
Showing up was Nixon's secret. Ceaselessly he strove, kept working, kept thrusting himself forward. He made himself, then remade himself. There was a Nixon and a New Nixon and New, New Nixon. He rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell, and rose again.
"There was never anything obvious to generate the kind of radiance he achieved. And yet it happened," said William F. Buckley, the conservative patriarch. "There was no Churchill there, no DeGaulle there - he lacked the natural equipment one would assume he would need. The fact that he continued to be ubiquitous was a heroic feat."
What Nixon had going for him was an unsurpassed head for politics. Campaign strategists speak of Nixon the way basketball players speak of Michael Jordan. He was simply the best - intuitive and visionary. As early as his 1952 campaign for the vice presidency (he went from unknown to vice president in just six years), Nixon had figured out that television was the future. He saved his own neck by delivering the maudlin "Checkers speech" in front of the cameras. Later, he became a hero for facing down Khrushchev on camera in the hilarious "kitchen debate."
Television turned against him in 1960, when he looked pale and nervous alongside cool John Kennedy. So Nixon updated again. His 1968 campaign was run by advertising executives.
Breathes there an American over the age of 30 who cannot evoke, at a moment's notice, at least one Nixonian image? The upstretched arms flashing the V-for-victory sign (his coat puckering behind his neck because he always forgot to unbutton it); the frown of concern coupled with a waggling of the jowls; the stiff president posing with a bleary Elvis Presley; the bass-baritone voice intoning: "Let me say this about that . . . "
He was to politics what Sinatra has been to music: Permanent, easy to parody, a mixed bag of genius and ugliness and incomparable endurance.
To paraphrase Sinatra, America got Nixon under its skin, and once he got there, he polarized and galvanized, frightened and thrilled. He got into hearts and spleens; snippets of his language lodged in your head like a popular tune. Anyone who ever talked about "deep sixing" a problem, or said "we could do that, but it would be wrong" or "you won't have me to kick around anymore" or laughed about a "Republican cloth coat" or said "my mother was a saint" - that was Nixon talking.
Remember: "pumpkin papers," "the pink lady," "Tricky Dick," "Quemoy and Matsu," "Six Crises," "law and order," "a secret plan to end the war," "the Silent Majority," "stonewalling," "I am not a crook."
When World War II ended in 1945, thousands of young men with big dreams rushed home to their lives, feeling detoured, delayed, hungry. And 50 years later, those still alive were, virtually all of them, retired and giving over their days to yellowing memories. Nixon was writing books, giving interviews, touring Russia.
What was it that drove him? Courage? Patriotism? Pathology? A mix, perhaps, of all this and more. Whatever the source, the result was that Nixon overcame more inner demons and survived more humiliations than a hundred ordinary public figures. Nixon was ridiculed, mocked, jeered, spat upon. His sweat, his whiskers, his swearing, his drink, his panicked prayers - all of it was aired and pored over. He kept coming back.
Many today will remember Nixon the way Greg Mueller does. Mueller, 31, a Republican media consultant, grew up in a staunchly anti-communist home, where Nixon was admired even when he was disappointing. "He will be remembered as a Cold War hero, and students of politics will study him for centuries," Mueller said.
And many will remember Nixon more in the way of Celinda Lake, 41. A Washington pollster, Lake left the Republican Party and joined the Democrats over Nixon's Vietnam policy. "Vietnam and Watergate marked the first time Americans learned that the government will lie to them. Now, that cynicism is the norm. The fault was not all Nixon's, but it was marked by him. He is a metaphor for so many things."
Only the children will remember Nixon not at all.
For 50 years he was ever-present. Now, for the first time, he can begin to recede. Richard Nixon, who shaped so much history, finally joins it.
Keywords:
INFOLINE
by CNB