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The Nixon I Didn’t Know
 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.
![[Breaker quote for The Nixon I Didn't Know: He made me an anarchist.]](2007breakers/070802.gif) 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.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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