John Aloysius Farrell is the author of biographies of House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill Jr. and attorney Clarence Darrow, as well as a forthcoming book on the life of Richard Nixon.

“The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption – and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream.”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby


***

I In April 1974, Richard Nixon went to the movies. His presidency was collapsing, a casualty of Watergate. Seeking escape, or insight, he ordered the projectionist at Camp David to screen “Becket” for him.

The film’s climactic event is the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket by a knight seeking the favor of King Henry II. Furious over a dispute of church and state, the king is said to have inspired the killer by muttering: “Won’t someone rid me of this meddlesome priest?”

Nixon, who died 20 years ago this week, secure in our history as the only American president to resign in disgrace, was also given to regal murmuring. (“They’re using any means. We are going to use any means.”) If one concurs with the historical consensus – that the president did not issue a specific order for the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters – then “Becket” solves the riddle of the crime. A sovereign mutters; a lackey acts. Watergate with swords, in the cathedral at Canterbury in the year 1170.

“Becket” was a compelling choice, but Nixon’s next selection is really intriguing. He asked to see “The Great Gatsby,” the 1974 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, with Robert Redford as its pink-suited protagonist.

The novel tells the tale of Jay Gatsby, an iniquitous bounder who pursues a dream beyond his lot to its, and his, ineluctable destruction. It’s a concise, affecting American fable of desire, delusion and the sham of possibility. After clawing his way to riches and fame, his dream at last at hand, Gatsby is shattered on the “hard malice” of the ruling class; crushed for his presumption.

If in “Becket” Nixon found a clue to his destruction, in “Gatsby” he was engulfed by grand biographical theme. Sitting there, in the dark at Camp David, did he not see? Could he not help but recognize? “The Great Gatsby” is the story of his life.

Having spent much of the last few years poking through Nixon’s papers, writings and psyche, I find the comparison convincing. They were each, Gatsby and Nixon, strivers from the west, sons of pedestrian parentage, fugitives from the tedium of the frontier farm and small-town monotony. They spun their daydreams beneath wide skies, and lay awake in bed at night, plotting the unfolding of their incumbent greatness. On the fly leaf of a book, Gatsby drafted a self-help plan: “Rise from bed….Exercise….Read one improving book or magazine per week.” Now hear from President Richard Nixon, scrawling notes to himself on his ever-present yellow pads: “Add element of lift to each appearance….Pithy, memorable phrases….Stop recreation except purely for exercise….Need for more reading.”

Nixon as Gatsby is a sturdy notion – kicked around the periphery of Nixonian exegesis for half a century.

Reading up on the Sixties for a book about Nixon, I came upon a 1968 letter from the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, applying for a job as a speechwriter in Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. “I spent about two weeks in New Hampshire, following Nixon around with the idea of finding out if he really existed,” Thompson wrote Kennedy adviser Ted Sorensen. Nixon was the spawn of the “bad genes and broken chromosomes” that have corroded “the American Dream,” Thompson wrote, a “twisted echo of Jay Gatsby.”

The conservative scribe R. Emmett Tyrell was more forgiving in a published piece a few years later, which noted the common melody that runs through Fitzgerald’s novel and Nixon’s life: that theme of the corruptible man with an incorruptible dream. It was Nixon’s audacity that did him in, Tyrell contended. Had Dick not dared, the liberal aristocracy would have let him govern.

They each had their patrons: old buccaneers, wise in the ways of money and men. As a young Army officer, fresh from World War I, Gatsby got his schooling from the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim, who fixed the 1919 World Series and wore human molars as cuff links. “Start him! I made him….I raised him up out of nothing….I knew I could use him good,” Wolfsheim says. “He was so hard up he had to keep on wearing his uniform because he couldn’t buy some regular clothes.”

Nixon’s political godfathers included Herman Perry, a Whittier, Calif., bank president, and Roy Day, a small-town ad man and booster from Pomona. They discovered Nixon fresh from wartime service, full of possibility. Like Gatsby, Nixon made his first appearance in uniform; he didn’t own a suit. “That’s saleable merchandise,” Day marveled after hearing the young Navy officer speak. “This man can be sold.”

They each, Jay and Dick, had romantic quests – dreams of “colossal vitality” and an “inconceivable pitch of intensity,” as Fitzgerald writes. For Gatsby the enchanted object was Daisy Buchanan, the rich girl whose voice, the author tells us, rang with the sound of money. Nixon had won Pat, pretty and loyal, but his goals were ultimately grander: acclaim, the presidency, peace. Each met only sneers from the moneyed East and its elites.

“I will not break bread with that man,” the lofty Averill Harriman, his own family’s piratical keel obscured by the barnacles of time, is said to have remarked before storming from a Georgetown party at which the young arrivistes, Dick and Pat Nixon, were guests.

“I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife,” Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan, smirks in his showdown with Gatsby. “She’s not leaving me! Certainly not for a common swindler.”

Each, wounded, became corrupted.

Fitzgerald has to remind us to disapprove of Gatsby, his charismatic anti-hero – thus Wolfsheim, and those grisly cufflinks. With Nixon, so decidedly short on charisma, the challenge is just the opposite. Two decades after his death, we struggle to grant him his humanity, much less his good.

Bill Clinton, another arrivistic American president, declared at Nixon’s funeral that the time had come to judge the man for nothing less than his entire life. Twenty years later, we have not met that challenge, issued at the gravesite in Yorba Linda, in the shadow of the humble house, on the grounds of the lemon farm where Nixon spent his childhood.

His father, Frank Nixon, was a blowhard – a grade-school dropout who married into Quaker gentility, was staked in farming by his in-laws, and managed to flop at growing lemons in one of the planet’s most bountiful citrus belts. Through Richard’s childhood, Frank moved from farming to pumping gas, and then opened a store. They lived not in the tree-lined neighborhoods in town, but out on the highway, where Frank sold groceries from an abandoned church. When Dick did go into Whittier, four miles away, for his last two years of high school, and college, there were those who smirked. He met others as a scholarship student at Duke law school and when, after graduation, august Wall Street law firms rejected his applications.

“What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid,” he told a former aide who visited him after Watergate. “But if you are reasonably intelligent and your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.”

Frank’s wife Hannah was a self-effacing martyr. When she found time from birthing and raising five sons, working in a packinghouse, baking pies and running the store, Hannah retreated into a closet to pray. When her responsibilities overwhelmed her, she left the home for weeks at a time. She never did tell Richard she loved him; it wasn’t the Quaker way. Chasing love would give her son his profound sense of purpose.

Two of Dick’s four brothers died in their youth; the beloved baby Arthur, he of golden curls, from a sudden affliction, and the wide-grinned gallant Harold, the oldest son – interminably, wasting from tuberculosis, and wrecking the family’s finances. Why was it, a grief-stricken Frank asked friends after Harold died, that “the best and brightest is always taken?” Dick, the sensitive, cerebral second son, felt called to fill the void. “He may have felt a kind of guilt that Harold and Arthur were dead and he was alive,” his mother would recall.

Dick lived ever by the virtues with which the Nixons survived: toil, self-reliance and resilience. But the hard times left their mark. Like Frank, he came to resent those who had it easy – who with good looks, illustrious ancestry, wealth or personality seemed to glide through life. Like Frank, he gnawed on grievances, was prone to outbursts of temper. In politics, they called him Tricky Dick. His great drive carried him to the pinnacle in Beijing; his gnawing to the abyss.

Here, the analogy to Jay Gatsby falters. After his dream crumbles, Gatsby may delude himself, but he does not rage against, or seek revenge upon, his enemies. He doesn’t succumb to hate. He doesn’t give them a sword.

***

These days Nixon is a man without a party. He will never be forgiven by the left, for he made his political bones dispatching liberal icons – Jerry Voorhis, Alger Hiss, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Adlai Stevenson – sired the Watergate scandals, and insisted, as president, on that long, strategic withdrawal from Vietnam.

Yet Nixon was no ideologue. And the right can’t embrace an opportunist who devised détente, desegregated southern schools, ended the gold standard, adopted wage and price controls, created the Environmental Protection Agency, let Medicare and Medicaid thrive in their cribs, proposed his own version of the Affordable Care Act and shook hands with Mao and Zhou Enlai.

Nixon won’t be on the currency. No big airport bears his name. The Washington Nationals have added John F. Kennedy and William Howard Taft to their stable of racing presidents, but not soon Richard Nixon – though, really, who would be more fun to root for or against?

And so, for the 100th anniversary of Nixon’s birth last year, the celebrations were modest – as they’ll be on this, the 20th anniversary of his death. Friends and family gathered at the Mayflower Hotel. The TV reporters found an old favorite to talk to, the saturnine Henry Kissinger. Nixon’s boyhood pal, Hubert Perry, told tales of young Dick, warming the bench for the Whittier College football team. Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower showed their still formidable skills at the celebrity mosh, evoking the words of Norman Mailer from the 1968 conventions: “A man who could produce daughters like that could not be all bad.”

Modest, yet there was no denying the warmth of the celebrants. For those whose hearts this strange man, Richard Nixon, touched, the touch is deep indeed. It fell to Pat Buchanan, the old Nixon speechwriter, to give the eulogy, which he capped with a quotation from “The Great Gatsby.”

“They were a rotten crowd,” he said of Nixon’s persecutors. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”