Coming back from death—real death—has only happened once.
Its political equivalent has been almost as rare. Yet as 2013 gets
under way, recent evidence highlights two examples of this
phenomenon: Richard Nixon and Conrad Black.
Last month marked the 100th anniversary of Nixon’s birth. Most
of the centenary reassessments of his career must surely have
brought a grin of pleasure to the celestial countenance of the 37th
president. A savvy political prophet, he was always expecting his
shares to rise on the stock market of history.
As early as 1978, I accompanied Nixon to a rowdy meeting at the
Oxford Union. Fewer than four years after his resignation from the
presidency, he was still at the nadir of his reputation. Tested by
a hostile student questioner on Watergate, he replied: “Some people
say I didn’t handle it properly and they’re right. I screwed it
up. Mea culpa. But let’s get on to my achievements.
You’ll be here in the year 2000 and we’ll see how I’m regarded
then.”
With an eye on his legacy, Nixon spent the last phase of his
life in the unique endeavor of running for ex-president. Despite
intermittent taunts from his hate club, he clawed his way back to a
position of eminence as a foreign policy sage and well-recognized
geopolitical statesman.
His enduring achievements begin with his ground-breaking opening
of China, which brought that country out of dangerous isolation. He
was the first American president to go to Moscow, where he
negotiated the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. Other Nixonian
achievements, with full honor to the role played in them by Henry
Kissinger, included saving Israel from near annihilation in the
1973 war and eventually signing the peace treaty with North Vietnam
that ended America’s disastrous military entanglement in Southeast
Asia. By the time Nixon left office he had brought peace to
millions, even if he had not found it for himself.
Although this record is well known, what is underestimated is
Nixon’s extraordinary resilience in rebuilding his historical
reputation. He donned his mantle as an elder statesman—a
hyperactive one—and for nearly two decades traveled, spoke, and
wrote influential books and articles. This took courage and effort.
But in the end he emerged from the tomb of political death and
disgrace, if not quite as another “New Nixon,” at least with a
considerable measure of honor redeemed.
IT MAY NOT BE A COINCIDENCE that the Nixonian road to redemption
is currently being well traveled by Conrad Black, for he is both an
unabashed admirer and an acclaimed biographer of the 37th
president. So it is safe to assume that Nixon’s climb back out of
the depths must surely have had an influence on the trajectory that
Black is now pursuing.
Last year Black published his memoir, A Matter of
Principle, chronicling the saga of his extraordinary and
largely successful battles with the U.S. justice system. As the
book was well reviewed in this and many other journals, there is no
need to retread the familiar ground of the story. But it is
interesting to look at how Black has demonstrated his own brand of
Nixonian resilience. Most impressive has been his willingness to
engage in hand-to-hand combat against his adversaries in the most
hostile (for him) bear pit in the world: the British press.
On a recent nine-day visit to London to promote his book, he ran
the gauntlet of media adversaries with feisty aplomb. While Nixon,
albeit through gritted teeth, was coldly courteous to his critics,
Black took a different approach and traded insults with his
interrogators. “You’re a priggish, gullible, British fool,” Black
bellowed at the BBC’s top interviewer Jeremy Paxman, adding that
after what he had been through it was lucky to be able to “endure
discussion like this without getting up and smashing your face in.”
(“Well you…go ahead and…” Paxman muttered in response.)
Black denounced Rupert Murdoch as a “psychopath…like Stalin
except that he doesn’t kill people.” Of his adversarial biographer
Tom Bower, Black warned, “We’ll take the fillings out of his teeth
and the roof off his house when we finally get around to dragging
him into court here. He’s a dead man.”
If these comments seem a little over the top in the dignified
columns of The American Spectator, it should be emphasized
that Conrad Black’s primary mission in Britain was selling books—a
branch of show business in which understatement wins no prizes. It
reminded me of Boswell’s reply when Dr. Johnson said he’d had a
good outing the previous evening: “Yes, Sir, you tossed and gored
several persons.”
Conrad Black came, saw, and conquered on his return to London.
The tossing and goring left blood on the carpet, some drops of it
his own. But he secured good reviews and substantial media
coverage, much of it favorable. His roughing up of certain media
proprietors and journalists tapped into the anti-newspaper mood
here induced by the News International phone hacking scandal. There
was much amusement at his valedictory comment: “The London media
are the lowest mutation of human life I have encountered (except
for American prosecutors), and that does not exclude the many
hundreds of people I met in the U.S. Federal prisons.”
Aside from the histrionics and the colorful quotes, Black’s
British comeback was notable for some hidden emotions that bear
comparison to those of Richard Nixon in the days of his journey
toward rehabilitation.
Both were men who in their heyday exercised great power. Their
falls were prolonged and painful. Most people subjected to such
brutal reversals of fortune would have retreated quietly into
obscurity to lick their wounds. But Black and Nixon found inner
strength to get back into the arena, to fight on, to ignore the
jabs and jokes, and both gained considerable satisfaction from
winning back parts of their reputations.
But where did their inner strength come from? Black has been
fueled by a burning sense of injustice against his U.S.
prosecutors. Nixon, the born-again comeback specialist of six
crises, lived by maxims such as “Failure is not falling down.
Failure is falling down and not getting up to continue life’s
race.” Yet these explanations, though true, are too shallow.
Black and Nixon drew real sustenance from three sources: their
families, their friends, and their faiths. Take a bow, Barbara
Black, Pat Nixon, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, and Tricia Nixon Cox.
Unsung heroes from their private friends were massively important
too, particularly in Nixon’s case those much maligned praetorian
guardsmen Bob Abplanalp and Bebe Rebozo.
In the faith department, Black’s Catholicism and Nixon’s Quaker
roots are significant, for each would have learned that court
justice, to say nothing of media justice, is not to be compared to
the higher justice that awaits us all. All redemptions have a
spiritual factor. I believe that Richard Nixon and Conrad Black saw
this—perhaps through a glass darkly, but clearly enough to
recognize that they did not recover their reputations entirely
through their own endeavors.
