To Nixon, And Beyond

Paul Newman, the actor who turned America’s love of salad dressing and popcorn into $250 million for charity, died this Friday. I’d forgotten Newman’s quotable take on being #19 on Richard Nixon’s enemies list: “The highest single honor I've ever received,” he’d said.

But when a Watergate felon convicted of conspiracy, burglary and illegal wiretapping makes commercials touting gold as an investment, I think we can safely say that I’m not the only one with a foggy memory of the Nixon years. About the time I was born, the White House was a bunker, far more obsessed with preserving its own power and destroying its enemies than with governing the nation. Nixon showed Americans that Presidents will lie to their faces, and then try to get away with it.

For the next twenty years, garden-variety Presidential lying came and went (e.g., Reagan claiming he “can’t recall” anything about Iran-Contra, that loving gaze Bill casts on Hillary), but nothing was genuinely Nixonian. Until George W. Bush attacked another country on the basis of a lie. We were told that we’d greeted as liberators…blah, blah, blah. Or as Chief of Staff Andy Card explained: “From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.” And so “this government does not torture people” shot right past “I am not a crook” as the new benchmark for Presidential hypocrisy.

Fast forward to the present, where bankers are moving from TriBeCa to Jersey City, and ordinary Americans who spent like drunken sailors are waking up on a pier, hung over and broke. The bill? At least $700 billion, every dime of which will be paid by issuing Treasury notes (printing money, for those of you that didn’t attend Wharton). Bush’s demeanor at the White House summit of Congressional leaders and Presidential candidates reminded me of Queen Elizabeth opening Parliament—a head of state in title alone. Like the boy who cried wolf, Bush most likely can’t fathom why nobody believes him that sheep are dying. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” said Bush, speaking to reporters after a Nixonian trouncing of his opponent to win a second term. Too bad America can’t call the Chinese and Saudis for a refund.

Nixon’s rehabilitation began in his farewell speech to the White House staff: “Always remember others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself,” he said. At least the man knew who he was, and what he had done. It looks like the understudy still has one more lesson to learn.