Whatever else you might say about Richard Nixon—and you might say a lot—the man knew how to write a memo. He wrote an untold number in the twenty years between his resignation from the Presidency, forty years ago this week, and his death, on April 22, 1994, at the age of eighty-one. He wrote memos to his successors, to their White House aides, and to his designated political heirs—memos on foreign policy and press strategy, memos of political pre- and post-game analysis. He wrote serious-minded memos, ingratiating memos, and incendiary memos. (In the run-up to the 1992 Presidential election, Nixon sent a long and vehement memo to dozens of foreign-policy mandarins, attacking President George Bush’s support for democracy in Russia as “pathetically inadequate.”) He wrote secret memos—as well as nominally secret memos he intended to be leaked, so that he could be caught, time and again, in the act of offering wise counsel to Presidents and all the Presidents’ men.
This, of course, was the point: not merely to influence events but to be seen as influencing them. The flurry of memoranda was part of Nixon’s rolling campaign for redemption and, not least, relevance. The former will always elude Nixon, but he needn’t have worried so much about the latter. Twenty-first-century Republicans (with a touch of self-regard) trace their genealogy to Ronald Reagan, but, if you squint at just about any of them—from “establishment” figures like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to Tea Party irregulars like Senator Ted Cruz—you will see a strong familial resemblance to Nixon. Nixon’s internationalism is of no interest to them now; his domestic achievements are overlooked (Supplemental Security Income, or S.S.I.) or disowned (the E.P.A.), but today’s Republicans were weaned on Nixon’s sour brand of politics: the politics of resentment. Which makes his influence on the party every bit as profound, in its way, as Reagan’s.
During the 1968 campaign, Kevin Phillips, then a young Nixon aide, said to Garry Wills that “the whole secret of politics” was “knowing who hates who.” There was nothing secret about this, and nothing new; as Wills later observed, Pascal said much the same thing, albeit in impeccable French, in the seventeenth century. Politics has always been an exercise in mutual antagonism. But what was startling about Phillips’s comment was its note of satisfaction, even celebration: 1968 was a banner year for bitter grievance, and Nixon rode a wave of resentment to the White House. Governor George Wallace, the Alabama segregationist who ran for President that year as a third-party candidate, wore his resentment more openly than Nixon; Reagan, who posed, for a time, a credible threat to Nixon in the primaries, displayed his more deftly; but it was Nixon who turned it into a winning strategy at the national level.
What Nixon knew in his gut, reinforced by the latest tools of gauging public opinion, was that the white middle class—the “silent majority,” in Nixon’s famous phrase, the “good people” who “paid their taxes and go to church”—had come to feel humiliated by college students, civil-rights activists, anti-war protestors, intellectuals, journalists, and other liberal élites who were said to spurn and mock the traditional values of family, faith, and love of country. James Reston, of the Times, noted the irony: Franklin Roosevelt’s “forgotten men” had gained employment through the New Deal and become, a generation later, Richard Nixon’s “forgotten people.” “They have bought houses and now resent taxes,” Reston observed in September, 1968; they reacted with disgust and rage at the “militant poor whites and blacks” in their midst, as well as “the racial turmoil, the demonstrations in the cities and all the permissiveness of contemporary American life.” Nixon, along with his Vice-Presidential candidate and insult comic, Spiro Agnew, stoked these resentments, attacking the Democratic nominee, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, as indulgent and effeminate.
Government itself became a target, just as it had been during the Goldwater campaign of 1964, but Republicans hit the mark this time. Nixon’s tone was one of sorrow, in contrast to Goldwater’s anger, as he recounted the failures of liberalism (which were more manifest by 1968). “For the past five years,” Nixon said in his acceptance speech, “we have been deluged by government programs for the unemployed; programs for the cities; programs for the poor. And we have reaped from these programs an ugly harvest of frustration, violence, and failure across the land.” Reagan, years later, put the point more memorably—“government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem”—but “ugly harvest” resonated in the late nineteen-sixties.
There is a temptation to locate Nixon’s politics deep in his psyche—that wellspring of loathing, humiliation, and lonely desperation, in the diagnosis of biographers, former White House aides, and co-conspirators, and the rest of what the historian David Greenberg calls “Nixon’s army of analysts.” “Can you imagine what this man would have been had somebody loved him?” Henry Kissinger famously asked. “I don’t think anybody ever did—not his parents, not his peers.” (Nor his national-security advisers.) It is clear that, for Nixon, resentment was not just a cynical strategy but an authentic expression of the self. (Our fifty minutes are up, Mr. President, but I’ll see you next week.)
Yet this resort to psychology, or psychopathology, places too much emphasis on Nixon and not enough on Nixonism, which has endured well beyond Watergate, and long past the point when our national nightmare, to paraphrase Gerald Ford, was supposed to have ended. The resentments, racial and cultural and economic, are still real, if not nearly as raw as in 1968, and invoking them has become a kind of reflex on the right, to the point of self-parody. Agnew’s “effete corps of impudent snobs” begets George Bush’s “Harvard boutique liberals” begets Rick Santorum’s attack on President Obama as a “snob” for urging all kids to go to college. “I don’t come from the élite,” Santorum said in 2012. “Élites come up with phony ideologies and phony ideas to rob you of your freedom.” More recently, Ted Cruz attacked President Obama for “doing a lot of pop culture” and acting with “condescension” toward young Americans. It is Nixon pastiche.
It is also a substitute for new ideas and ambitions. In their place, today’s G.O.P. offers only old, recycled grudges (“the press is the enemy,” as Nixon said) and new enemies: climate scientists, unaccompanied immigrant children (who might carry Ebola, Representative Todd Rokita, an Indiana Republican, warns). Every charge now, however farcical, is promulgated by an infrastructure of perpetual grievance—cable news, talk radio, blogs, and the like—that channels middle-class discontent in the right direction (toward “liberal fascists,” judges, lawyers, and “takers”) and not the wrong one (indifferent Republican legislators and their enablers). The portraits on the walls, the marble statue in the courtyard, all these say “Reagan.” But please take a memo: this is the house that Nixon built.
