Richard Milhous Nixon
Polarizers-in-Chief - Episode 1
(Polarizers-in-Chief will be a intermittent series on American presidents that will appear throughout my Substack posts)
I could talk all day and deep into the long, dark Scottish winter night about Richard Milhous Nixon. (One must always include that wonderful middle name, which would later inspire The Simpsons’ Milhouse character).
I’m not alone. In speaking to a professor who wrote an excellent biography of Nixon, he told me that when he started teaching in the 1970s, the only thing his students wanted to talk about was Nixon. Mainly because they hated him (Nixon, not the professor).
Nixon, love or loathe him, is as fascinating as he is unintentionally hilarious.
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My favourite Nixon story - drawn from a selection so rich that it would shame an XL box of Quality Street chocolates - revolves around his clumsiness.
When Nixon ascended to the presidency in January 1969, he inherited a little-known White House taping system that had been used by his predecessors to secretly record important presidential meetings and phone conversations. This taping system was activated by the President pressing a button behind his desk.
Nixon’s extreme clumsiness, however, meant he was unable to accurately press the button at desired moments.
To combat this troublesome issue, the White House installed a voice-activated system that would trigger an automatic recording when the President spoke.
Unfortunately for Nixon, this meant that when the Watergate investigation team discovered the existence of such recordings and subsequently unearthed secret tapes of the President of the United States organising illegal bribes to protect himself, they had a ‘smoking gun’ to prosecute Nixon and remove him from office.
Nixon then jumped before he was pushed, and became – and remains – the only president to ever resign the presidency.
Without his habitual clumsiness, I’d argue that it’s likely that Nixon would have stuck it out and history would remember the Watergate Scandal very differently. As a 6ft4 lanky fellow with permanent stitches in my head from accidental falls myself, I sympathise with Nixon’s predicament.
Such stories are all well and good, but the purpose of this Substack is to explain the roots of American polarization that have led us to Election 2024, an event which looms ominously, much like a tornado zeroing in on a fragile, termite-infested wooden shack (the American body politic) across the barren plains of Kansas.
Here’s three reasons why, to understand the present day US, you should care about Nixon:
Nixon - The Architect of American Division
Richard Nixon, more than any other 20th century president was comfortable dividing and conquering the American people.
Which, as always with Nixon, is quite amusing, given he came into office amid the tumult of the late 1960s promising to ‘Bring Us Together’. Perhaps his greatest legacy should be America’s Chief Gaslighter.
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According to his excellent and even-handed biographer Iwan Morgan, Nixon consciously made himself the president, not of all Americans, but of his supporters.
He relentlessly looked for wedge issues to divide Americans to his political benefit.
His most famous White House oration was his October 1969 ‘Silent Majority’ speech , when he called for the silent majority of Americans to rally behind his controversial Vietnam War policies.
Implicit in Nixon’s remarks were that there was a nefarious, loud minority who should be ignored and condemned (the anti-war movement).
In case this subtlety was lost on anyone, Nixon soon began referring to anti-war protestors as ‘bums’ and the Silent Majority as ‘heroes’. A framework that contributed to a tense climate in which four American students were gunned down by the Ohio National Guard in the Kent State Shootings during an antiwar protest.
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Modern American politics is awash with conflict entrepreneurs, who seek to divide Americans as a way of achieving and maintaining power or for their own self-aggrandizement and enrichment.
Nixon was almost certainly not the first American to play such a role, but he was the OG conflict entrepreneur to occupy the White House.
Nixon: Keeper of Enemies and Destroyer of Trust
Richard Nixon kept an enemies list.
And no, I don’t mean he kept a rough list in his head of people he didn’t much care for.
His White House had an actual enemies list, with peoples names, the (often petty) reasons why they were foes, and how they should be punished.
While it’s clearly not an ideal way for the most powerful man in the world to spend his time, it did lead to one of the best live news broadcasts in US history, when reporter Daniel Schorr discovered he was on Nixon’s Enemies List, while reading out the list live on air.
That Schorr was on the list was unsurprising, as Nixon was also the first president to make the media an enemy.
As Morgan notes, Nixon railed against the media as a ‘biased, unrepresentative, liberal elite, out of touch with the real America that supported him’. Sound familiar?
Nixon - The Trump Whisperer
Which leads me onto my final point.
Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, even his supporters would acknowledge that he thrives on polarisation and has played his part in dividing Americans further (indeed, for some Trump fans, that’s part of his appeal).
And who was perhaps the first significant person to suggest Trump might make a successful politician?
You guessed it, none other than Richard Milhous Nixon.
That’s all for this post, but I can confidently say that this will not be the last you hear of Nixon.