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Nixon, Now More Than Ever
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Nixon, Now More Than Ever
A native son of Yorba Linda reflects on the deep state and its power to take down presidencies.
President Richard Nixon stared out intensely from behind the Resolute Desk on August 7, 1974. “I have not cried since Eisenhower died,” Nixon told a captive audience of three, Sen. Barry Goldwater, Sen. Hugh Scott, and Rep. James Rhodes. Nixon had begrudgingly determined he would resign the presidency the next day, and, just prior to the quartet’s meeting, Nixon was marking up a draft of what would become his resignation speech. There was no time for tears; only time to consider what was best for the country and what to tell it.
It was a drizzly, hazy summer day in Washington, D.C., on August 8. Towards its end, at 9:01 p.m., Nixon addressed the nation from the Oval Office. “I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as president, I must put the interest of America first,” Nixon said in the 16 minute address. “Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.”
Fifty years on, America finds itself hurtling towards a critical presidential election. The personalities and plots defining this election carry their own curious similarities to the life and times of Richard Milhous Nixon. Perhaps it really is Nixon now more than ever.
The Richard Nixon Presidential Library, with its annex built to resemble the West Wing of the White House, Nixon’s small childhood home, and (my favorite as a kid) Marine One stationed outside, is the epicenter of my hometown, Yorba Linda, California. My preschool, elementary school, and church were just across the street. So was my favorite deli. The little league fields were a quarter mile west. To the east, Main Street and town center. The trail that runs right behind it was where we’d walk the dogs. In the more than half a dozen times my family moved around Yorba Linda, I was never more than two miles as the crow flies from the Nixon Library. When I was really young, for some reason I assumed every town had a presidential library.
Yorba Linda remains reliably red for the blueing Orange County. It’s always a treat returning home and bumping into old friends at the grocery store who are eager to know what life in Washington is like and what I think about the news of the week. Though Yorba Linda has developed much since my childhood, it has managed to retain a lot of its small-town feel. There’s a natural conservatism to the people there. They still have a taste for the familiar, for family, for faith in God. By no means is anyone surprised by my political disposition or place of employment. As a hometown hero of sorts, Nixon always interested me, but it was President Ronald Reagan—his own library is just two hours up the road in Simi Valley—who drew the most admiration from the adults in my life.
Around the 2016 election, something started to shift. The old GOP heads who kept their non-regime-approved opinions about Watergate to themselves started to speak up. “Nixon was one of the best damned presidents we ever had,” an elderly man told me at a Republican get-together when I was around 18. “The deep state took him out because he was about to go to war with them.”
It sounded bizarre to me then; now, not at all. From a historical perspective, Nixon’s first term was rather moderate (sometimes to the dismay of the founder of this magazine, then one of Nixon’s longest and closest aides), Nixon’s second-term agenda was more aggressive and conservative—gut the antagonistic bureaucracy.
The country has watched as the establishment and deep state have stopped at nothing to get President Donald Trump for the last eight years. It was Russian collusion, then impeachments one and two, then election interference, then indictments, and now a white-washing of his new opponent’s record less than 100 days before the election. If permanent Washington does all of this today, what is to say they didn’t in June 1972?
Nixon’s Yorba Linda had almost died out by the time I was born. His mother’s side, the Milhouses, made their way to California in the 1880s and joined the small Quaker community of Whittier, named for the famous Quaker poet and activist John Greenleaf Whittier. His mother Hannah Milhous would meet another migrant to California, Frank Nixon, at a church function some years later. The pair wed in June of 1908.
The Nixons moved from Whittier to Yorba Linda after Frank bought a ten acre plot from his father in law. He planted a lemon tree grove, which never panned out the way he had hoped, and built a small clapboard house, which still stands on the Nixon library grounds today. While Frank didn’t have much luck with growing lemons in the coastal desert climate, further land development and better farming techniques led to an explosion in citrus growing throughout the region in the early 1900s. The communal ethic was rooted in agriculture—hard work, reliability, diligence—and Christian religion, especially the Quaker values of temperance, asceticism, contemplation, and education. Nixon’s parents loved him without much physical affection. “No one projected warmth and affection more than my mother did,” Nixon once claimed. “But she never indulged in the present day custom, which I find nauseating, of hugging or kissing her children or others for whom she had great affection.”
My mother used to ride horses through the citrus groves and alongside the irrigation canals of Nixon’s youth. Now, it’s a farm stand here and there, with most of the region’s agricultural history relegated to town and street names: Orange, Lemon, Orchard, Avocado. The trend holds statewide. Agriculture continues to decline. Even more worrying, so does Chrisitianity.
Now, a politician who epitomizes the new California has her eyes on the presidency. If the California of my birth looked much different than Nixon’s, then the California of today, long dominated by Vice President Kamala Harris and her ilk, is unrecognizable.
Both Nixon and Harris served as senator from California and vice president, but that’s where the similarities end. Nixon shares more, it seems, with two other men involved in the present election.
I’m certainly not the first to compare former President Donald Trump to the 37th president. “Worse than Watergate” was a common refrain for Carl Bernstein, one of the journalists who broke the scandal in 1972, and the corporate media echoed the line on everything from Russiagate to January 6. “Trump is no Nixon—He’s Much Worse,” read one headline from The Hill in September 2023. “Trump Can’t Just Erase History Like Nixon Did,” one writer groaned for The Atlantic. “This Nixon-Trump comparison is so perfect it barely needs elaboration,” stated The New Republic.
The parallels exist, just not in the way Bob Woodward, Bernstein, and the rest of the corporate media would have you believe. In their first elections, the difference between Trump’s and Nixon’s electoral college vote totals was only three. Their share of the popular vote was unimpressive, though Trump lost the popular vote while Nixon won it by half a point. Both men inherited a government rife with bloat and excess. Both had resolved to do something about it.
Through their first terms, both Nixon and Trump left something to be desired in this regard. Both men were quick to enter the fray against the media or their political adversaries, but bringing the administrative state to heel was another task entirely.
The first step was to consolidate control over the party. Nixon went to great lengths to wrangle the Rockefeller and Goldwater wings of the party, an effort undertaken mostly out of the limelight in his wilderness years of the mid 1960s. Trump’s battle to control the party was much more public. The establishment, uber-hawkish wing of the party, defined by the likes of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan, refused to change course. Small government conservatives, the Ron Paul or Ted Cruz types, simply did not take Trump at his word. Some Republicans left and never came back. But Trump was able to bring enough of the party, and the American people, alongside to win the election that November.
Nevertheless, control over one’s party is never total. Upon entering the White House, Trump had his host of personnel problems—John Bolton, H.R. McMaster, and Alyssa Farah Griffin among them. Nixon did, too. As Pat Buchanan recounts in Nixon’s White House Wars, during the transition, “the conservative staffers who had played major roles in Nixon’s comeback were scattered.” Leaks, backstabbing, and a revolving door of cabinet officials beleaguered both presidents. Going to war with the bureaucracy is impossible without good soldiers. Trump and Nixon needed more.
In 1972, despite Watergate, Nixon won in a landslide. Nixon racked up 49 states, equalling 520 electoral college votes, and more than 60 percent of the popular vote. Nixon had a mandate to be transformational.
Buchanan wrote of what he wanted Nixon to prioritize in his second term: “We should move against the media monopolies as TR moved against the trusts… We should defund the Great Society in the first six months of the new term as we had failed to do in our first term. We should not only clean out the bureaucracy but ‘credential’ a generation of Republicans for future administrations.”
These desires “Nixon agreed [with] emphatically.”
The administrative state had other plans. With heavy involvement from CIA associates and the FBI deputy director leaking Watergate stories to the Washington Post, Nixon’s undoing was already under way when he started his second term.
Trump faces the same countermeasures to his own second term. Media companies and tech giants brazenly collude with the Democratic party and permanent Washington to prevent his return to the White House. The ostensible justification is that “democracy is at stake.” Progressive district attorneys, special prosecutors, and attorneys general have spent the last four years attempting to keep Trump in court rather than on the campaign trail. Promise to drain the swamp, and you’ll encounter a few alligators. Whether Trump goes the way of Nixon or follows through on the 37th president’s vision will be decided November 5.
The more interesting parallel, however, is between Nixon and President Joe Biden.
Biden has just issued his own resignation of sorts, apparently outliving his usefulness to the deciding class in the Democratic party. The president, despite all members of his staff and party claiming he remains in good health and is more than capable of doing the job, will not be seeking reelection. Days after his announcement on social media, Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office. Rather than providing a clear explanation for his decision like Nixon, Biden said he believed his record “merited a second term” but was dropping out to “sav[e] our democracy.” More than two weeks removed, the nation has not been given any real answers.
Just as Nixon was replaced by Ford, Biden is in the process of being replaced by Harris, who never earned a single Democratic primary vote in 2020 or 2024. With Biden in his current vegetative state, Harris is seen as a more reliable ally of permanent Washington. As border czar, Harris has opened the American economy to a floodgate of cheap labor. She’s committed to not only continuing the Ukraine war but giving Ukraine NATO membership. We’re also told that Harris is currently figuring out her position on the war in Gaza, a conflict that is nearing its anniversary.
At the very least, Harris is a candidate more controllable than Trump that is capable of beating him—of course, with the right controls placed on the people before the election.
The ugliness of presiding over the administrative state and the duties of the presidency have a curious way of making enemies friends. In an Oval Office meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms on June 23, 1972, Nixon told Helms, “I know who shot John,” referring to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
If Trump does prevail where Nixon could not, maybe he’ll be able to find out who shanked Joe.
The post Nixon, Now More Than Ever appeared first on The American Conservative.
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