The Reactionary Utopian
                      August 2, 2007


THE NIXON I DIDN'T KNOW
by Joe Sobran

     I liked Richard Nixon, and he seemed to like me. I 
met him a couple of times after he resigned from the 
presidency. He was nothing like the ogre liberals 
described. 

     I found him kind, decent, gracious, intelligent, 
well-spoken, charming, witty, easy to like, and, though 
able to relax sociably with strangers, indisposed to 
share his innermost thoughts. I realized I'd never really 
know him. 

     He was impressive but not awesome. And he completed 
my disillusionment with politics. 

     He had been the most powerful man on earth, with 
life and death power over billions. I'd expected to be 
awed. But the only thing that awed me was that he was so 
little different from the rest of us. I was shocked and 
awed that we should have permitted any man to hold such 
power. You and I aren't fit to have it. Nobody can be. 
Jesus didn't want it. 

     The genius of the original American constitutional 
system was simple. It just dispersed power. The "free and 
independent states" kept their sovereignty and 
"delegated" (that is, lent them, with the right to take 
them back) only a few specific legislative powers to a 
congress. The executive was not royal. He could be 
impeached and peacefully removed for any act the congress 
deemed criminal. The federal courts were also weak. 

     The states, being sovereign, could secede for any 
reason. That is, they could reclaim the powers they had 
only delegated to the Union. In principle, they still 
can. The "Civil War" was actually the North's war on all 
the states and the Constitution. Michigan and Maine were 
fighting to destroy their own sovereignty! Apart from the 
late and accidental war aim of abolishing slavery, the 
Northern victory was a defeat for liberty. 

     All this had been forgotten by most Americans long 
before Richard Milhous Nixon came along. The "imperial" 
presidency the anti-Nixon liberals deprecated was merely 
part of the monolithic imperial state -- yea, a global 
empire -- those same liberals had already been cheering 
on for several generations. 

     How amusing to recall that Thomas Jefferson had had 
well-founded constitutional scruples about grabbing the 
greatest real-estate bargain in history -- the Louisiana 
Purchase. Lincoln also doubted his own constitutional 
authority to free any slaves. When we teach kids history, 
we teach them the wrong things, superficial things like 
mere dates and events instead of deeper changes in the 
way our ancestors thought. At least Jefferson and 
Lincoln, both brilliant men, might have understood each 
other; but could either have made himself intelligible to 
President Bush? 

     Bush is often ridiculed for his stupidity, but his 
real defect is an embarrassing incuriosity. Like so many 
people in our media-stunted age, he doesn't want to know. 
In the great aphorism of Richard Whately, "He who is 
unaware of his ignorance will be only misled by his 
knowledge." 

     Bush reasons from crude abstractions about freedom, 
religion, history, and so forth, terminating in banal 
slogans; he has the kind of mind an Ivy League education 
like the one he received is supposed to prevent. Nixon 
emerged from undistinguished Whittier College with a far 
subtler mind because he had the drive to educate himself 
and also had a humble awareness of history. He was 
intelligent enough to have written his own speeches if he 
had wanted to, and his extemporaneous speech, in contrast 
to Bush's, was poised and literate. It has been said that 
a striking difference between America and Europe today is 
that European leaders speak English. 

     Bush, to do him justice, seems aware of his own 
deficiencies. He jokes at his own expense, as when he 
recently praised Britain's Tony Blair for being 
articulate; last year he was reading Shakespeare's HAMLET 
and MACBETH, better late than never. But even this 
reading betokened a shallow mind, as if he assumed that 
the profoundest works of Western literature could be read 
once, like whodunits, and possessed. (Lincoln knew and 
loved Shakespeare, often reading him aloud to friends; he 
probably saw John Wilkes Booth star in MACBETH, his 
favorite!) 

     If the thought of Nixon wielding enormous power is 
unsettling, given the constraints of the Cold War, the 
thought of Bush ruling the world's only superpower 
without such constraints is downright terrifying. Nixon, 
a man who had the virtue of prudence, knew when to stop. 

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