Note: Colorado Christian University asked me to give the Chancellor's Annual Presidents Day Lecture on Feb. 20, reflecting on my experience in the Nixon White House, 1970-1973. Chancellor Donald Sweeting was our gracious host for the evening, and it was an honor for Donna and me to be back on campus, where I had worked for seven years before retiring in 2015. As a delightful surprise our grandson, CCU sophomore Ian Andrews, did the introduction. My prepared remarks were as follows.
We are gathered to observe Presidents Day. Never was there a better example of the proverbial camel—a horse designed by a committee.
Within the memory of many of us here, February each year was a pantheon of patriots. We paid tribute to George Washington, the Father of our Country, on the 22nd, and to Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, on the 12th.
But now, by some bureaucrat’s brainstorm, all that has been synthesized into a generic hybrid called Presidents Day. This would absurdly suggest that Washington equals Van Buren, Lincoln equals Buchanan, Biden and Trump equal Adams and Jefferson. Please.
Why Study History?
No thanks, we are tempted to say. But not so fast. In this age of too many seductive screens, too much mesmerizing software, any occasion to think together about history and biography and greatness is an opportunity not to be missed.
Slow down, quiet down, dig down. Without studying history there is no understanding the human condition or the human soul. Without studying history we’re at a loss to undertake self-government as free citizens.
That’s the trouble with the left and their utopian fantasies, heedless of the cautionary lessons of history. They’ve not bothered to “read the minutes of the previous meeting,” as someone aptly said.
“Remove not the ancient landmarks,” we are warned in Proverbs. Only by studying history and biography can we know where the landmarks are, and why. History in past generations has mapped the territory where this generation and coming generations must now find our way forward.
The 37th President
On this Presidents Day 2023, then, we take up the legacy of Richard M. Nixon of California, the 37th President of the United States. Born 1913, died 1994. US Congressman, 1947-1951. US Senator, 1951-1953. Vice President, 1953-1961. President, 1969-1974.
Fifty years ago right now, in the winter of 1973, President Richard Nixon stood in triumph almost unmatched by any of the three dozen men who had held the presidency before him. He had swept to reelection, carrying 49 states.
He had brought the Vietnam War, ill-advisedly launched by his predecessors in the other party, to what seemed an honorable conclusion. He had turned our Cold War struggle with world communism in America’s favor, brilliantly triangulating China against Russia.
He had transformed the political landscape here at home, mobilizing a bipartisan Silent Majority that shattered FDR’s big-government New Deal coalition.
He had joined FDR in the history books as only the second man to run five times for President or Vice President and win four of them. A far-reaching agenda of policy reforms seemed well within his reach as another term in the White House began.
Worthy of Shakespeare
Yet scarcely one year later, in the summer of 1974, it all came crashing down. Tragedy had overtaken President Nixon. Never in almost two centuries of American history had a president resigned in disgrace. Richard Nixon did. Never had a vice president been driven from office by a bribery scandal. Spiro Agnew was.
Never had the presidency, the most powerful office on earth, fallen to an unelected, accidental occupant. With Gerald Ford, that now occurred—and he soon granted a pardon to spare his predecessor from criminal charges.
Never had the legislative branch brought down a chief executive with the sword of impeachment. Now that too happened, and Ford’s political weakness cut foreign and domestic policy adrift, veering leftward into the national mood of “malaise” under Jimmy Carter.
Triumph and tragedy. From the heights to the depths. Shakespeare could not have written it better. And tragic not only for one man, arguably a man of greatness—with great flaws, yes, but also great gifts.
Tragic for the American people—God’s almost-chosen people, as Lincoln called them, a nation with a special mission in world history—tasked with showing how a free society can contribute to human flourishing. So that when America stumbles, as she did during the Nixon years, all mankind have a stake in seeing her regain her footing.
Those years were a difficult, difficult time. Our political system was in uncharted territory, and so much was at risk. As a young staffer in the Nixon White House, I had a front-row seat on those momentous events. My assignment tonight is to explore what the lessons are for us from Richard Nixon and his historically important though scandal-shortened presidency.
What We Can Learn
I see three enduring lessons.
Lesson One: Freedom is fragile. We the people must guard it vigilantly—and guard our hearts, for we are sure to get only the government deserve.
Lesson Two: Our magnificent Constitution, written and unwritten, is the lifeline of liberty. Its pattern is indeed divinely given, as we read in Isaiah 33, verse 22: “The Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king. He will save us.” Strongman government or elitist government will not save us. Psalm 146, verse 3: “Put not your trust in princes, in whom is no help.”
Lesson Three: Statecraft, in this fallen world, is always in shades of gray, seldom in black and white. Statecraft is less like a brightly-colored morality play and more like a dense forest at twilight. Watch out for hubris. Beware the law of unintended consequences. Test each option by asking, “Compared to what?”
I’ll unpack these three lessons in a moment. First, a few lines of personal background to set the scene. I’m as Republican as they come. As conservative as they come. As Midwest as they come. As square as they come.
I’m here as a political practitioner, not a political scientist. Nor am I a scholar of the presidency. I just happened to be there when the deal went down, as Bob Dylan once sang.
Press Office to Speechwriter
In 1960, age 16, I was a page at the Republican National Convention where Vice President Nixon was nominated to oppose John F. Kennedy. I rooted for him in the fall election when he ran and lost, but I was more of a Goldwater guy in 1968 when Nixon ran again and won.
A year later, fresh out of the Navy, I was hired as a junior staffer in the White House press office through a family connection. A year after that, when the speechwriting staff wanted to add someone under 30, I moved over there. An affirmative action hire, plain and simple. Kind of embarrassing, really.
But I loved the work. We were breathing some rarefied air. I was tapped to help the President with several of his nationally televised speeches on America’s fighting withdrawal from Vietnam.
I missed his China trip in early 1972, but went with him to Moscow that spring. His address to a joint session of Congress on June 1, 1972, reporting on arms reductions with the Soviet Union, was my handiwork.
Little did I know that burglars from the Nixon reelection campaign were at that very moment inside Democratic headquarters at the Watergate building, planting the wiretaps that would eventually bring him down.
To repeat: Shakespeare couldn’t have written it better. Two weeks later, during another break-in, police caught the burglars and the Watergate story hit the news media.
Slow Burn, Then White-Hot
It grew at a slow burn for the rest of 1972, past the President’s landslide victory in November. It rose to a white-hot burn during 1973, and finally to the endgame in 1974, with Nixon resigning under threat of impeachment in August.
From the very first, summer 1972, for some reason the unfolding Watergate scandal disturbed me more than seemed to have been the case with other White House staff colleagues. Part of it, I suppose, was simply my oversensitivity as a political neophyte, unused to the seamy side of Washington.
I truly believe, though, that part of it was an answer to prayer. Raised on the Bible, I had learned the daily practice of “putting on the whole armor of God,” Ephesians 6. Alertness to hidden danger, spiritual as well as material, is one result by God’s grace.
As things worsened in 1973, I made various ineffectual efforts to sound a warning with senior staff, trusted reporters, and once even with the President himself. They all came to naught. Junior as I was, poorly informed as I was, what else could I expect?
In late summer 1973, I was tapped to write a so-called “put Watergate behind us” speech for Nixon to give and somehow dispel the storm clouds. The draft became a bizarre mixture of contrition and defiance as it was fought over by rival groups of embattled staffers, the Henry Kissinger faction and the Ron Ziegler faction. The speech was never given.
Out of There
Ford replacing Agnew as Vice President, a few weeks later, was the last straw for me. With confidential advice from Bill Buckley of National Review and George H. W. Bush, Republican National Chairman, I left the White House staff at the end of 1973.
The early months of 1974, prior to moving my family here to Colorado, found me in a glaring media spotlight as I sadly concluded the President should resign or be impeached—and said so on national television. Mine turned out to be the only public protest resignation from Nixon’s staff during the Watergate scandal.
Did I do the right thing? I think so. I hope so. But I doubt that I’ll ever in this life be able to say so with complete certainty. Mr. Nixon had claims of loyalty and gratitude upon me that arguably required my silence, personal convictions of honor and justice aside. But it was the step I felt compelled to take, and I took it.
In the light of strict justice and legality, the 37th President had indisputably violated his oath of office—and thereby forfeited his claim to the office. By that standard, he had to go, had to be removed. By the far more cloudy standard of political prudence and statecraft, perhaps not; about which, more in a moment.
Those Damning Tapes
Impeachment, the removal power of Congress, requires a simple majority in the House of Representatives and then a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Three articles of impeachment against President Nixon were approved by the House Judiciary Committee on a decisive bipartisan margin such that he concluded defeat on the House floor and eventual conviction by the Senate were inevitable. He resigned in favor of Vice President Ford to spare the country that ordeal.
The first article of impeachment concerned obstruction of justice. The second concerned abuse of power. The third concerned contempt of Congress.
That last one was mere political posturing—recall that Attorney General Eric Holder, a Democrat appointee of President Obama, was held in contempt of Congress and ignored the charge—but the first two articles of impeachment for Nixon were substantial and backed with solid evidence.
The secret taping system Nixon had installed in the Oval Office clinched the case against him. Greek tragedy once again.
When the nation’s chief law enforcement officer can be proven to have facilitated law-breaking and then tried to cover it up, there have to be severe consequences. I don’t regret having aligned myself with that self-evident course of action.
‘Cui Bono?’
Setting aside my personal involvement with the matter, however, I believe that as students of history and patriotic citizens we must ask what was the ultimate result of reversing the landslide presidential election of 1972. What was the long-term impact? Who benefited? As the Latin phrase has it, Cui bono?
This is where, for me, hindsight becomes murky. My words calling for Nixon’s removal weighed scarcely a feather in the scales of history. His leaving or his remaining would have been none of my doing either way. Yet it’s disturbing to look at the company I was keeping, the team jersey I had suddenly put on. The outcome of Watergate empowered all the wrong forces in American life.
My party, the Republicans, committed to liberty, limited government, traditional values, peace through strength, and the survival of a free South Vietnam, was brought low.
The Democratic Party, opposed to all those things, exalted on high.
The elite liberal media, scornful of all that Nixon’s Silent Majority held dear, preened itself on the kingmaker status it still holds today.
Dick Nixon himself, the face of Main Street common-sense conservatism and anti-communism ever since the Hiss case in the 1940s—and as such, hated by the left more venomously than even Joe McCarthy or Barry Goldwater—was now exiled to San Clemente.
His defeated leftist opponent George McGovern, darling of the campus radicals, point man for “acid, amnesty, and abortion,” now had the last laugh. All the wrong forces.
The “living constitution” crowd, impatient to be rid of the time-honored 1787 document, rid of the Senate, of the Electoral College, of the nine-member Supreme Court—rid of the Second Amendment and the First Amendment—sanctimoniously cloaked themselves in that very document to be rid of a duly-elected president. Shameless.
Honor, Pride, Patriotism
Who benefited from disgracing and destroying President Nixon? The left. Who took a severe setback, a body blow? The right. And the after-effects are with us to this day. It’s just something we have to live with. It can’t be undone, and it could scarcely have been brought to a different outcome at the time.
Yes, Nixon could have destroyed the White House tapes. There would have been a firestorm of outrage, but he would probably have survived in office. Or he could have taken his chances on a trial in the Senate and might have held onto the needed 34 votes for acquittal, mostly Republicans and a few Southern Democrats. Unlikely—but conceivable.
But Richard Nixon was too much a man of honor to have taken either of those desperate courses. And he had too much fierce pride, too much cold realism, to have wanted to limp through 30 interminable months as a mortally wounded stag, a political dead man walking.
His high patriotism figured into that calculation too. This was a man, remember, who may very well have been robbed of the presidency by dishonest votes in Illinois and Texas way back in 1960.
He was urged by President Eisenhower himself to fight it out in court. Nixon said no, he didn’t want to put the country through that. Not amid the tensions of the Cold War, tensions that still prevailed in this 1974 crisis.
Bloodlust
To those of you now in college, 50 years since Watergate sounds like forever. To us with grey hair, it feels like yesterday. Impeachment, the ultimate weapon in Washington political combat, was used but once in the first 185 years of the Republic.
In these past 50 years it has been used four times—Nixon, then Clinton, then twice against Trump. Rumors of impeaching Biden are already buzzing, now that Republicans have taken back the House.
Is such frequent resort to the ultimate weapon a good thing? It’s permissible, sure, but this political bloodlust ought to concern us. Even just the use of “gate” as a universal suffix for every scandal shows a coarsening of public discourse, a cheapening of language itself. No sooner were the document boxes found next to Biden’s Corvette than we began hearing about “Garage-gate.” Give me a break.
Speaking of which, it’s fascinating to note that classified materials, today’s hot-button issue, were also a link in the fateful chain that took down Nixon. The anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg leaked the secret Pentagon Papers. Which led to the White House Plumbers Unit snooping on Ellsberg. Which then led to ex-plumber Gordon Liddy snooping on the Democrats.
Which ultimately led to the pathetic spectacle of the US President asserting on national TV, “I am not a crook.” That line, by the way, was not one that I contributed as a speechwriter.
Double Game?
In some ways, little has changed in half a century. The actual goal of the Watergate break-in, that which the burglars were specifically looking for, is unknown to this day. I have a yard or two of bookshelf at home to prove it. As death silences more and more of the players, it may never be known.
But one thing we do know: there is good cause to suspect that the FBI and CIA in the 1970s were playing a double game for some reason. Have they also been playing a double game from 2015 to the present? It can’t be ruled out.
The national-security state, erected to meet the Soviet threat after 1945 and expanded to meet the Islamic threat after 9/11, is at best a necessary evil. It has spawned secret operations, secret tapes, secret deals, and secret betrayals on a scale unrecognizable to the heroic wartime leaders we venerate on this Presidents Day—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt.
It tends to taint everyone who touches it, however good their intentions. Its vast unaccountable power is susceptible to grave abuse, as we see in the case of Richard Nixon—but as we might also see in a closer look at JFK or Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, time permitting.
Three Lessons
Confining ourselves to President Nixon, though, I said there are three lessons we can take from him. The fragility of free institutions, the priceless value of our written and unwritten Constitution, and the moral ambivalence of statecraft.
(1) Freedom is fragile. In our fallen human condition, there’s always that sneaky little temptation to cut corners, bend the rules, rest on our oars, sleep an extra hour. Don’t go there. It’s deadly. Hush money to the Watergate burglars was not about to turn the USA into the USSR, but when uncovered it had to be punished.
One step by government onto the slippery slope is one too many. We are sure to get the government we deserve. Freedom without responsibility cannot endure. I’ve tried to explain why in my little book, Responsibility Reborn. Every American home should have one.
(2) Freedom’s lifeline is the Constitution. With three branches checking each other and with federalism enforcing decentralization, the written charter curbs the corruption of power. With civic virtue, free expression, voluntary associations, and a self-reliant citizenry, the unwritten charter keeps sap flowing through the tree of liberty.
Impeachment rightly removed Nixon. Impeachment rightly rebuked Clinton and Trump. But watch out for the pious hypocrites who give our Constitution lip-service while conniving to annul it.
(3) On the huge and crowded canvas that is world history, political prudence and statecraft paint not in bold colors but in subtle shades of gray. If it’s a simple morality play you want, look elsewhere. Good and evil have a way of getting tangled. We must always ask ourselves, “Compared to what?”
What If?
To illustrate, consider some of the what-if scenarios, counter-factuals as historians call them, from the remarkable career of Richard Nixon.
Had Nixon won the presidency back in 1960, for example, there may have been no Vietnam War as we know it. He was a far shrewder and tougher strategist than JFK or LBJ, a better poker player and chess player.
Then again, what if Jack and Bobby Kennedy had lived longer and established their own presidential dynasty? But maybe then Reagan would never have taken the White House and won the Cold War.
Ditto if Nixon had burned the tapes. Under that scenario, arguably, no resignation and no Jerry Ford, hence no Carter and alas, no Reagan.
In the real world, of course, the world where we live, this complex and uniquely American figure did depart in deserved dishonor in 1974. But he then courageously fought his way back to worldwide respect as an elder statesman before passing away in 1994. There was greatness in that man.
The Danger Within
To have known him at least a little, to have served four years as a deckhand on the great ship of state under his brave captaincy, was for me the experience of a lifetime.
I will always be grateful for it—and grateful to Mr. Nixon personally. He took a chance on me. I learned a lot from him, and he still has a lot to teach all of us.
He deeply loved our country, and he gave his all in public service, as imperfect as that turned out to be.
His sins and errors, such as they were, stemmed not from self-aggrandizement, but from an almost desperate concern that dark forces not be permitted to destroy America from within.
I believe his stature in history will steadily increase as the decades pass, because he was not wrong about that danger—as wrong as he was in some of his actions to combat it.
For combat it we must, and the urgency of doing so has only heightened since Nixon’s time, as the encroaching darkness has deepened.
What can you and I do now, to serve the light? That’s the question before us on this Presidents Day.
President Nixon greets the author, his wife, and his parents in the White House Rose Garden, 1971