Thursday
One hundred years ago, as of
January 9, in a small home in Yorba Linda, a suburb of Los Angeles,
Richard Nixon was born in a house his father built.
Without family connections, without family money, with a natural
shyness, he became a U.S. Representative when he was in his early
30s, and a U.S. Senator very shortly afterwards, and then Vice
President to Dwight Eisenhower from 1953-61.
He lost a squeaker of an election that many observers believe
was stolen by the Chicago Democratic machine in 1960 to John F.
Kennedy. He then traveled the world, practiced law, wrote and came
roaring back to win the White House in 1968, against a genuinely
great man, Hubert Humphrey, and then win re-election by the widest
margin in history against George McGovern in 1972.
He was always a controversial figure, falsely painted as a smear
artist and a witch hunting McCarthyite by a media and academic
class that loathed him with an abiding hatred.
During his campaign in 1972, serious wrongs were done by his
people, and he connived to cover them up, and then tried to cover
that up. For that, and for the residual hatred the beautiful people
had always felt towards him, he was tormented, tortured, impeached,
and finally made to leave office in August of 1974. My father at
that time was his chief economic adviser and I was by then a very
junior speechwriter for him. If you look carefully at the tape of
his address to the White House staff the day he resigned, you can
see me chewing gum and crying while my parents looked on, grief
stricken, a few feet away.
I have looked up to Richard Nixon all of my life and still do,
and I always will. And if I were to say why, I would say, as
briefly as possible:
Despite every possible obstacle put in his path by his enemies,
always with an obstructionist Congress, he brought us the EPA,
desegregated the last holdout Deep South school districts,
enormously promoted equal opportunity hiring for black people on
federal projects. He was also the first President to send to
Congress proposed legislation for universal health care. I wrote
the message sending it to the Hill long ago when I was young. He
was also the only GOP President ever to support the ERA. Also the
last GOP President to have a balanced budget.
But far more than that, he was a peacemaker. He ended the war in
Vietnam, brought home the POWs, saved Israel from having to use
nuclear weapons to survive in the Yom Kippur War, signed the first
strategic arms limitation treaty with the former Soviet Union, and,
of course, opened up China. This last one made the Cold War
unwinnable for the Soviets, setting the stage for the end of that
entity, and opened up vistas of unimaginable prosperity for the
Chinese people. He was by far the best friend that the friends of
peace have ever had. He was by a million miles the best friend the
Jewish people have ever had in high office anywhere in the Western
world.
Friends here in Hollywood, close relatives, colleagues, have
asked me for decades how I can still love Nixon, after Watergate,
after his questionable comments about Jews on tape, and I have an
answer.
I will never turn my back on Richard Nixon, the peacemaker.
Blessed are the peacemakers, and God bless Richard M. Nixon.
