Matt Wuerker At 100, still little love for Nixon

Richard Nixon would have turned 100 Wednesday, but about the only people marking the occasion are historians, family members and loyalists from the disgraced 37th president’s administration.

And even they’re slowly dying off.


It’s a stark, if unsurprising, contrast to the national bash thrown two years ago to celebrate Ronald Reagan’s centennial. For “The Gipper,” there were statues unveiled and tributes delivered around the world — with the blessing of a Democratic president, no less.

( Also on POLITICO: Happy birthday, Tricky Dick)

In honor of Nixon, there will be a dinner for 400 at the Mayflower Hotel on Wednesday night, put on by the foundation bearing his name. His family participated in a ceremony by his gravesite last weekend, which included a military flyover. The foundation will also organize a May trip to trace Nixon’s historic visit to China.

But despite his best late-in-life efforts at reputation rehabilitation — and a complex legacy that extends beyond the events that caused his downfall — Nixon will always get more attention on the anniversary of the Watergate break-in than on his birthday.

Bob Woodward believes now that the Watergate scandal was much worse than he realized as a young Washington Post reporter, chasing the story in the 1970s.

“Those tapes are a tire iron wrapped around the Nixon legacy that no one’s going to ever get off,” he said in an interview. “You listen to those tapes, and he literally is using the presidency as an instrument of personal revenge and reward.”

Modern Gallup polling shows that 2 in 3 Americans still disapprove of the job Nixon did as president, making him by far the most toxic president of the past 50 years.

“Ultimately, the Nixon we remember is ‘Tricky Dick,’ so you’re not going to have people clamoring to celebrate his birthday,” said Rutgers professor David Greenberg, who wrote a book called “Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image” on the contest over his public image. “That dark side, that shadowy side of Nixon who got into Watergate is the Nixon who remains with us most strongly … Just like the one thing you remember about Warren Harding is [the] Teapot Dome” Scandal.

“The Nixon tribe is a very, very small group of loyalists,” added historian Tim Naftali, who was sent by the National Archives to transform the Nixon Library as its first federal director from 2007 to 2011. “Other people get remembered or associated with movements. There’s a Reaganite movement, certainly. But there’s no Nixonian movement.”

Instead, his name has become an adjective with nefarious connotations: Nixonian.

Conservatives like Rick Perry, Mitch McConnell and The Heritage Foundation, to name a few, have each accused President Barack Obama of being “Nixonian” within the past year. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan criticized Mitt Romney in September by saying he “ looks like Richard Nixon.”

Many of Nixon’s marquee accomplishments would make today’s Republican rank and file apoplectic. He signed a bill creating the Environmental Protection Agency, proposed universal health care and supported an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. He even imposed wage and price controls.

The GOP keeps its distance in other ways. It’s inconceivable that Republican candidates in 2016 would agree to a debate at the Nixon Library. But the Reagan Library — also in the Los Angeles area — is expected to again host the GOP candidates, as it did in 2008 and 2011.

Ron Walker, chairman of the Nixon Foundation, sees an opportunity to shift public opinion. He recalls Bill Clinton’s eulogy at Nixon’s 1994 funeral, in which he said that the Californian should be judged on the totality of “his entire life and career.”

“That’s what we’re hopeful for,” said Walker, who headed Nixon’s White House advance team. “We’ve only got three Cabinet members that are still alive. A lot of us that were young at the time are not so young anymore. But … we can help introduce R.N. to a whole new generation that’s not going to really understand what Watergate was all about.”

“There’s still any number of Nixon haters around,” he said. “A lot of them are in the press … but if we can just get the positive side [out]. There was a lot of good that was done, and then some stupid things that were done at the end.”

While it would be naive to expect Reagan-like treatment, friend and foe agree that Nixon deserves attention — even if they disagree what for.

“He has really been the most influential political figure of the last 60 years, for good and for ill,” said Stanley Kutler, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin who successfully sued Nixon and the National Archives to force the release of Oval Office tapes.

But, he added with an allusion to Macbeth, “Watergate is the spot that will not out.”

Nixon died nearly two decades ago, at 81, but those tapes he secretly recorded of his Oval Office conversations continue to trickle out. Fresh batches have revealed disparaging comments about blacks, gays, Jews and ethnic groups that make it awfully hard to have sympathy for the man. More are being processed.

“You’ve got a self-portrait by him — he installed the tape system, he knew it was functioning,” said Woodward. “It’s the perfect irony that he thought he was so powerful that no one would ever find out about the tapes or ever get them.”

Roger Stone, who at 19 was the youngest staffer on the Committee to Reelect the President in 1972, said the tapes give Nixon a bum wrap by providing ammunition to people who always hated him.

“We’ve seen all of Nixon’s warts in public. That’s not true of any other president,” he said. “FDR made anti-Semitic comments from time to time, but no one recorded them.”

“If you’re a Nixon fan, you’re kind of used to it,” Stone added. “Given the enormous media assault over his flaws, it’s going to be very hard for him to make a comeback. … He’s never going to get the kind of acclaim that JFK gets but doesn’t deserve.”

That’s not stopping Nixon loyalists from trying.

A fundraising drive under way aims to double the size of the foundation’s roughly $30 million endowment this year. That money would help modernize the museum and fund new programs to highlight Nixon’s accomplishments. GOP moneyman Fred Malek is playing a leadership role in the effort.

The foundation has reprinted all 10 books that Nixon wrote and plans to release them as e-books, too.

Yet the warts are unavoidable.

Naftali had to fight a contentious battle with the Nixon Foundation to remodel the Watergate exhibit at the presidential museum in Yorba Linda, Calif., so that it accurately reflected what actually happened.

“Nixon remains the only president to have resigned, and you can’t push that away,” he said. “We celebrate George Washington’s decision to give back power. That’s important. We learn a lot from that. And in the case of Nixon, he needs to be remembered for his abuse of power. If you forget that he abused power, then you open the door to future abuses of power by presidents.”

Nixon does have this much going for him: Most presidents have been largely forgotten, but he has avoided such a fate. His demons and dark side, along with a huge paper trail, inspire a steady stream of artists and biographers. Recall the Ron Howard “Frost/Nixon” movie in 2008. Doug McGrath has just written a play called “Checkers,” based on Nixon’s famous 1952 speech. The paperback version of Thomas Mallon’s 2012 book, “Watergate: A Novel,” came out this week.

Consider that Gerald Ford would have turned 100 this July, and he seems likely to get even less fanfare than Nixon for his centenary. But the 50th anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination, Nov. 22, will most likely spark a spike in Kennedy nostalgia. Unlike for Nixon, most of the public outpouring will be organic, but at least two new documentaries are planned.

“Nixon will be studied. He will be an object of derision but constant attention,” said presidential historian Robert Dallek, who wrote a 2007 book on Nixon’s relationship with Henry Kissinger. “Historical reputations, like the stock market, rise and fall. But I think this one is pretty well set in stone by now. It’s not going to change.”