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mdye · 8 years ago

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[Editor’s note: Nixon biographer John A. Farrell wrote this comparison of the two presidents in February — well before the firing of FBI Director James Comey. It is reposted here with only light edits.]

We’re barely into the Trump administration and we’ve had war on the press, electronic eavesdropping, a sacked attorney general, humongous demonstrations, fury over a Democratic National Committee break-in, Cold War–style skirmishes, and scandalous intrigues akin to Watergate.

Sound familiar?

“Imagine packing 6 yrs of the Nixon admin into 3 weeks,” tweeted Nicole Hemmer, a scholar from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center (and Vox columnist), in February. “It’s like Nixon speed-dating.”

Veteran hands like Dan Rather, Bill Moyers, John Dean, and William Kristol have joined youngsters like Rachel Maddow in drawing parallels between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.

As the author of a new biography of Nixon, I get asked — a lot — how I plotted the book’s release to coincide with the surge in discussion, in the press and social media, of similarities between the disgraced 37th president of the United States and his latest successor, Donald Trump.

Having lived the past six years with Nixon in my head (I seek no pity; just buy the book), I approach the idea of comparing the two leaders with caution and restraint, for there are important differences.

As bad as Nixon was, for example, he never embraced white nationalists, much less sat one on his National Security Council. Nixon supported every major civil rights bill in the 1960s, and may have lost the 1962 gubernatorial election in California as a result of his spirited denunciation of the John Birch Society, the alt-right wack jobs of their day. “It was time to take on the lunatic fringe,” he wrote to Dwight Eisenhower.

Which is not to cast Tricky Dick as a saint. Fallacious comparisons cut both ways. When Trump dismissed acting Attorney General Sally Yates, a Justice Department holdover from the previous administration, for declining to defend his executive order on immigration, the episode was immediately compared to Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.” But Trump’s move hardly rates with Nixon’s. The stakes were far higher in 1973, with war in the Middle East, a nuclear alert, and the resignation of a corrupt vice president as a backdrop. Nixon’s own attorney general and his successor resigned over principle after refusing to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, before Solicitor General Robert Bork stepped in to do the deed.

So restraint keeps me from overstating the echoes. But then Trump will produce a performance like his rambling, combative February 16 press conference (“Russia is fake news!”) so rich with “narcissism, thin skin and deeply personal grievances,” as NBC’s Brian Williams put it, that the analogies with Nixon’s piteous “last press conference” of 1962, or his Watergate-era clashes with the media, are insistent and appropriate.

And finally, perhaps inevitably, Trump himself joined the game: He alleged that Barack Obama had bugged Trump Tower in an act worthy of “Nixon/Watergate.” (You want to see your book sales leap on Amazon? Have POTUS tweet your topic.)

Why is Nixon the go-to model for presidential misbehavior? For one thing, he is deeply embedded in our lives and culture. The only president to resign in disgrace was famously polarizing long before Watergate. This red-baiter from Southern California was the point man for McCarthyism, earning the eternal enmity of postwar liberals.

In the swinging ’60s, he was the stodgy self-made man: the square in the age of hip. As such, Nixon was a model for Mad Men’s Don Draper and, after stretching out the Vietnam War for four additional years, his reign helped inspire the evil Galactic Empire in Star Wars (according to George Lucas). He may not be the subject of a hip-hop Broadway musical, but he has served as the central figure in an opera (Nixon in China) and played the villain in the X-Men and Watchmen movies.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / Getty It took Nixon a while to provoke protests like these. On the other hand, some two-thirds of the current American population were either not alive or not residents of the United States, when Nixon resigned in 1974. In my Nixon biography, and in what follows, I’ve tried to portray this oft-caricatured scoundrel, in all his glories, for Gen X-ers and millennials who may know him only as the disembodied head on Futurama.

Thinking through the points of similarity between Nixon and Trump, and where they differ, may help us to better understand both men.

Psychobiography — correlation: modest

The differences in their upbringing — Trump came from a wealthy home in New York, Nixon from the California outback and a family wracked by illness, death, and poverty — make any comparison between the two men on this score somewhat strained. Yet both are known for self-centered, narcissistic personalities — and these, perhaps were sired by the emotional austerity of their childhoods. Trump exhibits insecurity, harbors grandiose fantasies, and shows a tetchiness about criticism. So did Nixon.

The Nixon home was known for its physical and emotional severity. Frank Nixon was a crotchety and abusive dad described, by a nephew, as “a highly acquisitive person and a slave driver” who “worked all his children and he worked his wife.” Nixon’s mother, Hannah, a devout Quaker, gave the future president his sense of idealism: He really did want to bring peace to the world. But she was preoccupied with his four brothers, two of whom died as youths, and the demands of the family store. Dick craved her approval, but she never, as Nixon famously confessed, told him that she loved him.

Historians tread lightly when it comes to psychobiography, but Nixon’s career “vindicates one of that maligned genre’s most trustworthy findings: The recipe for a successfully driven politician should include a doting mother to convince the son he can accomplish anything, and an emotionally distant father to convince the son that no accomplishment can ever be enough,” wrote Rick Perlstein in Nixonland.

Much of that may apply to Trump. As biographers Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher describe him in their book, Trump Revealed, the president’s father, Fred Trump, was also a disciplinarian, a workaholic, and a skinflint. At 13, Donald was culled from his family and exiled to military school as a disciplinary remedy. It may not be unreasonable to suggest that, like Nixon, Trump has spent his life seeking to fill an emotional void.

The press — correlation: high

It is no accident that both Nixon and Trump are famous for waging war beyond reason with the press. In men with their backgrounds, criticism may be interpreted as rejection, ripping the scabs from old psychic wounds and inducing emotional pain and hostility.

It’s also no small irony that each was quite successful at courting the press in their early years. Nixon was a protégé of the Chandler family, which owned the then-right-wing Los Angeles Times and promoted Nixon’s career through the simple tactic of imposing news blackouts on his opponents. Trump was a dealmaking playboy in New York’s tabloid jungle. The experiences left both men spoiled by the media’s fawning, cynical about its professed values, and reckless with the truth.

Mark Wilson / Getty Trump surveys the “enemy of the people.” Trump’s well-documented disregard for veracity was well matched by Nixon’s: He lied repeatedly about Vietnam and Watergate as president. When announcing that he was dispatching troops to invade Cambodia, Nixon solemnly assured the nation that the US had been scrupulous, to that point, in observing that poor country’s neutrality. In fact, he had been bombing Cambodia, secretly, for a year.

Nixon was as brash about his lying as Trump. On one occasion, when he thought the camera had stopped filming, Nixon told an interviewer how he had inserted a crude obscenity into a quote from Lyndon Johnson, because it made for a more colorful story — and portrayed Johnson as a vulgar bumpkin. When his aides could not find the chopsticks he used during his famous trip to China, Nixon told them to use any pair for a museum display, as the public would never know the difference.

Striving to maintain control, Trump rages over leaks. Nixon, too, confessed to being “paranoid” about leakers, and famously declared: “The press is the enemy.” Trump has friends in some corners of the media, and his declaration of war may be cynical and manipulative. For Nixon, the hate was real.

Trump, erupting in nocturnal tweets — emissions quite similar to those captured on Nixon’s White House tapes, except that they are instantaneously blasted out to tens of millions of Twitter fans — has taken it further. The press is not just his enemy, he tweeted, but the “enemy of the American people.”

Their politics — correlation: modest

Trump and Nixon both rode the politics of grievance — particularly white grievance — to the White House.

“I am your voice,” Trump told the disaffected electorate of the South, West, and Midwest, who responded by giving him an Electoral College majority. In his speeches, Trump called for the return of “law and order,” just like Nixon in 1968. “The silent majority is back,” Trump said, identifying his voters precisely as Nixon did. “We are going to take the country back.”

The division between coastal elites and the heartland is a hardy theme in American political history — the tension between frontier farmers and the Founding Fathers led to open rebellions in 1787 and 1791. In crises, the country draws together, then the old divisions reemerge in times of peace.

The gulf yawned after World War I, when the carnage of industrial warfare and the doctrines of scientific and moral relativity inspired a fundamentalist response in the midlands. Americans came together during the Second World War, but the rifts reappeared thereafter. In 1946, a young Navy veteran, running as a Republican, unseated a New Deal Congress member in rural California with a campaign that promised, “Richard Nixon Is One of Us” — not one of the pointy-headed pinko elitists running things in Washington.

Arriving in Washington, as a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Rep. Nixon embraced journalist Whittaker Chambers, a reformed communist agent, and went to war with the establishment by identifying one of the New Deal’s golden lads, the former diplomat Alger Hiss, as a Soviet spy.

It was “an epitomizing drama,” Chambers wrote in his memoir Witness, a book that would become a bible for the conservative movement. There was “a jagged fissure” between “the plain men and women of the nation and those who affected to act, think and speak for them … from their roosts in the great cities, and certain collegiate eyries.” The left “controlled the narrows of news and opinion,” Chambers wrote, but “my people, humble people, strong in common sense, in common goodness” were led and inspired by Nixon — “the kind and good.”

Nixon used the Hiss case as a launchpad to the Senate, and then to a spot as Eisenhower’s running mate. He survived a brush with scandal over a campaign slush fund filled by wealthy businessmen with a now-legendary televised address, in which he made memorably mawkish mention of his mortgage, his wife’s cloth coat, and the family cocker spaniel, Checkers.

“The sophisticates … sneer,” wrote columnist Robert Ruark, but Nixon’s speech “came closer to humanizing the Republican Party than anything that has happened in my memory. … Tuesday night the nation saw a little man, squirming his way out of a dilemma, and laying bare his most private hopes, fears and liabilities. This time the common man was a Republican.”

That was 1952. Long before the ’60s, the culture war was raging. The ’50s were “the Nixon years,” columnist Murray Kempton would write, when “the American lower middle class in the person of this man moved to engrave into the history of the United States, as the voice of America, its own faltering spirit, its self-pity and its envy, its continual anxiety about what the wrong people might think, its whole peevish resentful whine.” And so Trump and his legions follow Nixon down a well-worn path in American politics.

However, there is one significant difference in how Nixon and Trump got elected. As circumstances had it, in all three of Nixon’s campaigns for the presidency —against John Kennedy’s “New Frontier” in 1960, amid the chaos of 1968, and against George McGovern in 1972 — he ran as the candidate of moderation, of calm and experience. His speeches were generally soothing.

A young Navy officer named Bob Woodward cast his vote for Nixon, convinced he was the candidate who could end the Vietnam War. Even Hunter S. Thompson bought in.

“For years I’ve regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad,” Thompson wrote in 1968. But “the ‘new Nixon’ is more relaxed, wiser, more mellow.” Nixon’s were campaigns, as the political scientists Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg put it, of “social stolidity.”

Trump is anything but stolid.

Monkey-wrenched elections — correlation: high?

It is a testament to the efficacy of the Republican cover-up that four months after a foreign power affected — may even have determined — the outcome of an American presidential election, we still don’t know the facts. The timidity of the electorate, permitting Congress to let this pivotal question go unanswered, is stunning.

Ira Gay Sealy / Getty Anna Chennault was Nixon’s secret liaison with the South Vietnamese government before the 1968 election. The extent of President Trump’s possible contacts with a foreign government before the 2017 election has come under scrutiny.

From what we do know, it is safe to say that the Russians sought to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, in favor of Donald Trump. We don’t know how or if he and his advisers, in contacts with Russian officials, acted to further the illegal hacking of Democratic organizations and officials. We know that Trump publicly encouraged the Russians to do so (though whether this was a serious request or a glib comment is debatable). This has been written off, like several such misdeeds, as “Trump being Trump.”

In Nixon’s case, it has taken almost half a century for the truth to come out about the 1968 election — about his own conspiring with a foreign power, and the steps that he took to affect that year’s outcome.

Nixon feared that Lyndon Johnson’s election year initiative to negotiate an agreement that would bring an end to the Vietnam War was nothing more than an “October Surprise” designed to elect Vice President Hubert Humphrey. (LBJ had pulled such a trick in the off-year elections of 1966.) And so Nixon employed a campaign official, Anna Chennault, to act as a go-between and persuade South Vietnam to drag its feet and scuttle peace talks with North Vietnam. He — and she — promised the South Vietnamese better terms if Nixon won.

Tragically, peace was indeed close at hand in 1968. The Soviet Union, wanting to promote Humphrey, had promised Johnson a “breakthrough” in the talks and vowed to pressure North Vietnam. But Nixon’s attempts to monkey-wrench the talks were successful. In a telephone call to Sen. Everett Dirksen, a bitter LBJ, who had been getting details of Nixon’s machinations from electronic eavesdropping conducted by US intelligence agencies, accused Nixon of “treason.”

(Trump has offered no evidence for his claim that his campaign was “tapped” by President Barack Obama last fall, but there is no doubt that LBJ was eavesdropping on Chennault, a Nixon campaign official, in her discussions with the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington.)

There is a law — the Logan Act — that makes it illegal for a private citizen to interfere in the foreign affairs and diplomacy of the United States. Nixon appears to have crossed that line; without more facts, we cannot say that Trump did too.

The deep state — correlation: modest

Like Julius Caesar, cut down by Brutus and a gang of conspirators, Richard Nixon fell victim to a coalition of mutinous forces. He had clashed repeatedly with Congress over its power to declare war, to appropriate funds, and to have access to presidential documents and tapes. He declared war on the press. His antipathy for the State Department, the CIA, the military brass, and other power centers was well-known, and his reliance on backchannel diplomacy with China and the USSR spurred the Joint Chiefs of Staff to plant a spy in the White House. Nixon may also have alienated the federal judiciary by pledging to end its lifelong terms and security.

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

The FBI offers an instructive test case on what Nixon’s rash antipathy yielded. Nixon had come to power in Washington with the help of Director J. Edgar Hoover, but after Hoover died, the president provoked the bureau by trying to install a Nixon loyalist as a replacement. “Deep Throat” — the legendary anonymous source for Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward — was Mark Felt, a deputy director that Nixon passed over when choosing Hoover’s successor.

Trump has been tormented by leaks he blames on Obama holdovers in the national security agencies and other entrenched bureaucracies. Trump profited during the campaign from FBI Director James Comey’s eleventh-hour revelation about Hillary Clinton’s emails. But Comey was reportedly outraged by Trump’s allegation that Obama tapped Trump’s headquarters during the campaign and, according to leaks, demanded a public repudiation of the imputation. (And now, of course, Comey has been fired.)

Scandals — correlation: to be determined

There are more than half a million responses to a Google search for Trump and Watergate. But as much as his critics hope to see the 45th president exit the White House like Nixon, we have a long way to go before “Russiagate” is reasonably equated to Watergate.

There are obvious parallels. Both scandals stem from break-ins at the Democratic Party headquarters, whether real or virtual. Both involve electronic eavesdropping. And credit must be given to Roger Stone, a minor figure in the Watergate wars, who managed to survive the decades since and surface once more in the Russiagate stew.

Yet Nixon had years to dig his grave, and the Watergate scandals were, as Woodward and Bernstein famously wrote, “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage.”

The DNC headquarters at the Watergate were one of a half-dozen targets for burglary and/or bugging, including the campaign headquarters of Sens. Edmund Muskie and George McGovern and the offices of the psychiatrist who treated Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. By the time Nixon resigned, Watergate was a vast umbrella. The scandal brought to light subsidiary issues — like whether Nixon shortchanged the Treasury on his income taxes, and used taxpayer funds to protect and improve his Florida vacation home — that have obvious correspondence to Trump’s behavior.

But there will have to be some remarkable revelations — proof that Trump and his aides offered inducements to the Russian hackers — before Russiagate can be compared to Watergate. On the other hand, if it is proven that the Trump campaign, in league with a foreign power, stole the White House, it could supplant Watergate as the greatest political scandal of them all.

John A. Farrell is the author of Richard Nixon: The Life, which is being published March 28.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at [email protected].

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