With Donald Trump and his cabal of political partisans and advisors helping him to dig in and refuse to accept the electoral triumph of Joe Biden at the presidential election, it is as good a time as any to remember Richard Nixon. There is, of course, the indelible matter of Watergate, which eventually destroyed his presidency and his reputation.
Even so, there is the equally indelible truth that by August 1974, when it had become obvious that he would be impeached by the Senate unless he exercised the option of resignation, he had come round to an acceptance of reality.
And let us not forget something else. When today, at a time when men like Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Bill Barr, and Mike Pompeo are clearly misleading Trump through building on the illusion that there was voter fraud which propelled Biden to the presidency, there were the truly political men in Nixon’s day not afraid to convey the truth to him -- that he had to go.
A day before he quit office, President Nixon was visited by Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee against the Democrats’ Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and two other Republican politicians. They did not demand that he resign. They simply told Nixon that the arithmetic in the Senate did not hold up for him to stay on. He would be impeached. Nixon, ever the thorough political being, got the message. He resigned the next day. Vice President Gerald Ford took over from him.
There are a number of reasons why Richard Nixon, all these years since his death in 1994, remains a formidable political figure. Take out Watergate from his curriculum vitae and what you have is a politician who understood the pulse of his country and whose worldview made him a statesman the likes of whom we do not see around us these days.
Nixon inhabited an era when politics was conducted on a higher plane. Statesmen did not hesitate to walk away from power when they thought their continued presence on the scene would not only drag their reputations down but also cause grievous wounds to the body politic in their countries.
Willy Brandt did not have to be persuaded to resign the chancellorship of West Germany when an East German mole was discovered among his inner circle in 1974. Charles de Gaulle promised to leave presidential office if he was beaten in a referendum in 1969. He was beaten and he resigned.
Morality matters in politics. Where it is absent, as in the Trump White House, as it is in countries like Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus, it pushes societies into chaos. Let us travel back to Richard Nixon, indeed to the presidential election of 1960. Once the election was over and John F Kennedy was declared the winner, uncertainty over the vote was brought to an end. It was Nixon’s concession speech congratulating Kennedy that helped the process along.
At the election, Kennedy garnered 34,220,984 popular votes to Nixon’s 34,108,157. Until nearly the very end of the counting of votes, no one could predict who would succeed President Dwight Eisenhower in the White House. At the very last moment, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, a Kennedy partisan, released a clutch of votes in rather questionable manner and thus did Kennedy edge ahead of Nixon.
To this day, questions have persisted about the 1960 election being stolen from Nixon, who himself believed that he had been the winner. Despite such sentiments, when his advisors told him, once all the votes were in, that he needed to challenge the outcome, Nixon declined to heed their words. He noted in his memoirs that he did not want to sully democracy and create a bad precedent in American history by challenging Kennedy’s triumph.
It was, as one might note, the mark of a politician who did not wish to lose sight of the future. Whatever might have been said about Nixon’s future after 1960 and especially after his defeat at the California gubernatorial election in 1962, the fact that politics was part of his psyche cannot be overlooked. He campaigned vigorously at the 1966 mid-term for Republican candidates and saw their numbers increase in the Senate and the House of Representatives. The credit for the gains naturally went to him, a factor that was to lead to his resurgence in 1968, when he beat back a challenge from Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the White House.
Richard Nixon was a quintessential political man. Similar were Barry Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller, and Gerald Ford. The Republican Party was an organization based on ideals and idealism, unlike the pusillanimous hollow shell it has today been reduced to by Trump and his cronies. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, President Kennedy invited Nixon over to the White House for the latter’s advice on handling the situation.
We do not expect President Biden to show similar magnanimity to Trump given the latter’s incredibly bad behaviour in these past four years. In 1968, Humphrey was quick to congratulate Nixon, despite the whisker of a victory for Nixon at the election, and the two men met a few days after the vote. Nixon offered his defeated rival the position of ambassador to the United Nations, which Humphrey politely declined. But their friendship and innate decency remained till the very end.
Al Gore, who clearly won the presidency but was deprived of it by the Supreme Court in 2000, took a leaf out of Nixon’s book when he congratulated George W Bush, showing none of the bitterness many had expected him to show. Emulating the 1960 Nixon, Gore in 2000 did not challenge the result. Just as Nixon had reinvented himself, through rebranding his politics and engaging in intellectually rich discourses on foreign affairs, Gore devoted himself to the intricate and necessary job of caring about global climate change and the need to reverse the destructive course to which nations had set themselves.
As Donald Trump and his politically philistine allies strike away at the democratic political structure in the United States through challenging the results of an election they have convincingly lost, it is the image of a decent, educated, astute nature of a vanished Republican Party, personified by Richard Nixon, which today rises out of the past. Nixon would not stay in the White House a day beyond his resignation in 1974. Trump, it appears, may well have to be escorted out of the White House by the Secret Service on charges of trespassing in January 2021.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
