IN a sense, Richard Nixon’s long-nursed hope that time would vindicate his presidency looks even more unlikely now than it did on that overcast August day in 1974 when the helicopter bore him away from the White House, and into history, covered in Watergate’s disgrace. Thirty-four years and six presidencies later, he still gets dreadful marks in historians’ polls and public-opinion surveys alike. And every attempt at rehabilitation-Conrad Black’s doorstop of a biography is probably the most impassioned recent example of the genre-finds itself quickly undercut by the release of yet another salvo from the arsenal of Nixon tapes, featuring our 37th president at his snarling, profane, and paranoid worst.
Yet part of Nixon might be pleased with how he’s remembered even so. We may not like him much, but more than almost any of his presidential peers, our culture can’t seem to let go of him. Reagan and Kennedy may be more beloved, but both have become plaster saints, remembered more as icons than as human beings. Nixon the man, meanwhile, is somehow more alive today than ever. Any president can earn the approbation of historians: Only Tricky Dick has become a figure out of Shakespeare. All the world’s a stage, and he stalks its floorboards even nowin literature and cinema, high culture and low culture alike. The book titles testify to his grip on our imagination: Nixon at the Movies, Nixon’s Shadow, Nixonland. You can almost imagine him cackling to Haldeman, in whatever dim purgatorial cell they share: They can’t get enough of me! They’ve got Anthony Hopkins playing me at the movies! You don’t see Academy Award winners lining up to play Jimmy Effing Carter, do you? And Nixon in China, my God . . . Nobody ever wrote an opera about Lyndon Johnson, did they?
Comments