A Nixon postscript.

For the better part of five years, from his inauguration in January 1969 to my departure from Washington journalism in the summer of 1973, 1 covered Richard Nixon's Presidency for The Progressive. I attended his press conferences and the White House briefings conducted by his aides. I wrote about him, his promises, his policies, his personality. I interviewed some of his defenders and many of his enemies. I speculated on the scope of the Watergate scandal that would ultimately bring about Nixon's downfall. I found my name on his infamous "Enemies' List."

I had a hard time recognizing the Nixon I knew so well in the endless, fulsome tributes to his memory that clogged the airwaves and cluttered the newspapers and news magazines after he died. It was Nixon's posthumous rehabilitation - his final metamorphosis into still another "new Nixon," the last of the dozen or so transmogrifications he had foisted off on the gullible news media and a susceptible public over the years. In death, he was the intellectual titan who had foreseen and ushered in the end of the Cold War, the architect of domestic prosperity, the sage elder statesman who had overcome the "tragedy" of Watergate.

Utter nonsense!

Nixon's contribution to the American Presidency was his total rejection of even a pretense of adherence to the democratic ideal. He was the total cynic who wore an American flag in his lapel - a practice he instituted to show that he and his supporters were true patriots, whereas those of us who criticized him were un-American. He prated about achieving an "honorable peace" in Indochina while allowing a brutal and dishonorable war to claim hundreds of thousands of additional lives. He piously defended freedom of speech while egging on the hard-hat hooligans who beat up peace demonstrators and the triggerhappy National Guard troops who mowed them down at Kent State and Jackson State. He trumpeted the virtues of the "free world" while arranging the overthrow and assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile.

He proclaimed that he was "not a crook" while surrounding himself with as felonious a gang of sociopaths as had infested the White House since at least the days of Warren Gamaliel Harding. He sanctimoniously scolded Harry Truman for his rough language, but when we finally got to read his tape-recorded conversations in the Oval Office, we found they would bring a blush to any seasoned sailor's cheeks.

The Nixon who despised the democratic ideal wasn't recalled by any of the television specials about his life and times, or by the lugubrious tributes on the op-ed pages. So I went searching through the yellowing volumes of The Progressive for what I had written in my Washington column about the man when he occupied the White House, and I found this account in the January 1973 issue of an interview Nixon had given on the Sunday before his landslide re-election victory to Garnett D. Horner, the White House correspondent of The Washington Star:

"It was in that interview that Mr. Nixon divulged the astonishingly patronizing view he takes of his countrymen: |The average American,' he said, |is just like the child in the family. You give him some responsibility and he is going to amount to something. He is going to do something. If, on the other hand, you make him completely dependent and pamper him and cater to him too much, you are going to make him soft, spoiled, and eventually a very weak individual.'

"The President also had a few choice words about what he called |the leadership class in this country.' He said that |those of us who basically have a responsibility of leadership' must bear in mind that |above everything else you must not weaken a people's character.' We are not in the habit of using nasty political invective in this space, but if that isn't fascist rhetoric, what is it?"

That was the real Nixon. Too bad we didn't get to see him in all the retrospectives at the end of April. Maybe we would have learned - or relearned - something.

Morris H. Rubin, my predecessor as Editor of The Progressive, wrote this in the October 1956 issue about then-Vice President Nixon: "To achieve power he has corrupted the truth, smeared his opponents, betrayed his friends, invoked ugly innuendo and the furtive insult as his major instruments of political battle, and relied heavily on a nimble capacity for evading commitment to principle that enables some of his supporters to hail him as a conservative and others to embrace him as a liberal."

That will do nicely as an epitaph.