Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 15, 1994 TAG: 9405170018
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Geoff Seamans associate editor
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
THE DEATH of Richard Nixon evoked predictable evaluations of his presidency.
The consensus: Nixon (a) displayed a keen sense of American politics as evidenced by the amazing resilience of his career, and (b) exhibited a similar mastery of geopolitical affairs as evidenced by his opening to China, but (c) possessed a deep character flaw as evidenced by the Watergate scandal.
The emphases vary with the predilections of the evaluator. Still, most of the debate centers on how much importance to assign each point, rather than whether those are the main points to make.
Even "Doonesbury," in cartoonist's Garry Trudeau's satirization this past week of the sentimentalization of the Watergate president now that he's dead, falls into place. It's just that Trudeau seems to figure (c) outweighs (a) and (b) by about a ton.
But in the May 16 issue of The New Republic, Jonathan Rauch - author of a new book, "Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government" - looks at Nixon from another angle. Forget Watergate (bad) and the China opening (good), Rauch writes; they more or less cancel each other out. Let's look instead, he says, at the rest of Nixon's presidency.
Rauch's verdict: "easily the worst president of the post-war era, and probably of this century," and one from which America is still suffering.
In foreign policy, Rauch reminds us that Nixon promised as a candidate in 1968 to end America's involvement in Vietnam, then as president pursued the war for another five years - at an additional cost of 15,000 American and 500,000 Vietnamese lives, with nothing more to show for it in the end than what he could have gotten in the beginning.
Agreed, this challenge to Nixon's vaunted reputation for foreign-policy expertise goes too often unmentioned. Still, it strikes me that the bulk of the blame for the incredible Vietnam misadventure must be laid on the shoulders of Nixon's Democratic predecessors, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. It was they and their administrations, after all, who refused to let reality get in the way of nation-building doctrine, and thus gave birth to and reared the monster.
More trenchant today are Rauch's comments about Nixon's domestic policies. In correcting a widespread misperception, they speak directly to the nation's current, seemingly intractable budget mess - a correction that, if understood widely enough, could help build support for solving the problem.
Virtually any serious analysis of the ever-rising national debt and the perpetual federal deficits concludes that the chief culprits now are entitlement spending and debt service (which is also entitlement spending in the sense that Uncle Sam's creditors are entitled to the agreed-upon yield on the loans they've advanced him).
Yet much of the public continues to blame what have become relatively blameless targets - military spending (from the left) and social programs for the poor (from the right). The truth, however, is that such discretionary spending is easy to cut compared with entitlement spending, and much of it has been.
Sure, there's always room to cut more. But Lawrence Welk monuments and overpriced Pentagon toilet seats are penny-ante stuff compared to the big budget-busters: spending not on governmental operations but for payouts to individuals, most of them middle-class - Social Security, Medicare, agricultural subsidies, interest on Treasury bills and bonds, and so forth.
For hurtling the public debt into a spiral that by the mid-'90s has been slowed but hardly stopped, blame Ronald Reagan and his supply-side "insight" that two plus two equals five. By preferring debt to taxation to pay for his programs, he converted a temporary increase in discretionary spending (acceleration of the military build-up begun under Jimmy Carter) into a big new government-funded entitlement (debt-service costs).
But how did other entitlement spending get so unaffordable? For that, blame Richard Nixon.
Between 1969 (when Nixon took office) and 1975 (when he left in disgrace), Rauch reports, federal entitlement programs for individuals shot up from 6 percent of the nation's gross domestic product to 10 percent. Rauch's deepest scorn is for how Nixon, for re-election purposes in 1972, co-opted Democratic Rep. Wilbur Mills' scheme (also concocted for political purposes; Mills wanted to run for president) for a 20-percent increase in Social Security benefits.
A more irresponsible act of fiscal policy is hard for me - and, apparently, Rauch - to imagine. You dole out money you don't have, mostly to middle-class people who don't need it, via a mechanism that convinces them they're permanently entitled to it - and all simply to boost your re-election chances.
Watergate wasn't Nixon's only scandal.
by CNB