Richard Nixon’s most prominent childhood memory was of him falling and then running. He was riding in a horse drawn buggy with his mother and when the horse turned a corner too fast, Nixon fell out and the buggy wheel ran over his head, inflicting a deep cut. Despite this, he somehow managed to get up and run after the buggy while his mother tried to make the horse stop. This incident aptly sums up his whole life as Nixon always seemed to be running and falling and running again. He was a man of many masks and few, if any, can say they saw the real Nixon. To many, he was a shadowy conspirator; someone who was coarse, vindictive and paranoid, harbouring hatred within and lacking any sense of emotion or sentimentality. To some, he was an intellectual genius, a foreign policy statesmen and one of the great liberal Presidents. To twenty-first century historians and political junkies, he will forever remain an enigma-a character from a Greek tragedy perhaps; doomed to self-destruction due to fatal character flaws.
He grew up on the poorest lemon ranch in California and his dad, a social outcast, always struggled to make ends meet. Thus, Nixon was condemned, at a very young age, to a childhood of work and labour. To add to his woes, his two older brothers died when he was just twelve. Nixon’s refuge was his schoolwork. Having graduated first from his local school, he won scholarships from both Harvard and Yale but even with the tuition paid for, his family could not afford to send him so far away and instead enrolled him in a local Quaker institution. This event fed into Nixon’s deep rooted feelings of insecurity and inadequacy as he was never able to shake the sense of having missed out on the Ivy League, which in his eyes was, ‘an exclusive club populated by the bright young men.’ Nevertheless, Nixon continued to work with trademark determination. However, even at college, he struggled to overcome his outsider status. Intensely private and socially awkward, he never felt truly accepted by anyone and instead drowned himself in self-pity. These feelings of inadequacy continued to torment him for the rest of his life.
His lack of self-esteem though, never dulled his burning sense of ambition and his rise to Washington was nothing short of spectacular. Building himself up as a fierce anti -Communist crusader, Nixon won a seat in the Senate aged only thirty-seven. Two years later, he became the youngest Vice-President ever, serving under Eisenhower. Eight years on, he had his eyes on the big one and nothing, it seemed, could stand in his way. He was up against John F. Kennedy, the youthful Senator from Massachusetts. Kennedy challenged Nixon to a series of debates, a novel idea at the time. Nixon agreed and on September 26th, 1960, 70 million Americans switched on their television sets to watch the first ever televised Presidential debate. Those who listened to the debate on their radios believed that Nixon clearly seemed the stronger candidate. However, the television audience thought JFK won the debate, claiming that he was more confident, better looking and simply ‘sexier’ than Nixon, who looked tired, stiff and unsure of himself. Nixon went on to lose the closest general election in US history. He was bitter and developed a deep animosity towards the Kennedy’s. JFK exemplified what Nixon was not: charismatic, handsome and extremely likeable. Thus, Kennedy exacerbated Nixon’s lack of self-worth as he highlighted the flaws within Nixon’s character. (While looking at a portrait of JFK hung in the White House, Nixon once remarked, ‘when they look at you they see what they want to be, when they look at me they see who they truly are). Unable to recover from the defeat, Nixon resigned himself to eight years of political wilderness but in 1968, in an amazing comeback, something that perhaps only he was capable of, Nixon secured his party’s nomination for President and then defeated the Vietnam-burdened Democrats. The six years of his presidency would alter the balance of power in the world and change the face of politics forever…..
During his first term, Nixon made some surprisingly liberal innovations: he cut military spending, expanded Social Security and set up the Environmental Protection Agency, awakening the American conscience to climate change and sustainable development. Nixon was not like the Republicans of today; instead, he was intelligent and was willing to reason rather than cling onto right-wing ideology. However, it was in the sphere of foreign policy that Nixon wanted to make his mark and ‘give history a nudge.’ He certainly left his mark, making peace with the Russians and stunning the world by travelling to Beijing to open up diplomatic relations with China. These impressive achievements meant that Nixon won comfortably in the election of 1972.
In the lead up to the election though, Nixon was paranoid of defeat. This fear led him to draw up an official ‘enemies’ list and the creation of a re-election committee which was filled with ex-CIA operatives. They bugged, planted false evidence and knew no limits when it came to tainting Nixon’s opponents. It was this group that bungled up the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters but it was Nixon and his aides who bungled up the handling of the affair, choosing to engage in an elaborate cover-up, filled with lies and deceit that culminated into the ‘long national nightmare’ of Watergate. The scandal has tainted the image of politics and politicians ever since and has made people lose faith in the systems of government all over the world. According to Nixon, it was the ‘mistakes of the heart and not the head’ that led to his downfall. Unfortunately though, Watergate was a burden that Nixon always had to carry for the rest of his life. In the final meeting with his staff before his resignation, Nixon was overwhelmed with emotion. ‘Always remember,’ he said, with tears in his eyes, ‘others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them-and then you destroy yourself.’ Talented in so many ways, but always harbouring an inner core of hatred, Richard Nixon had destroyed himself.
