Nixon's story is our story

Reading Rick Perlstein’s magnificent Nixonland and in my head watching Richard Nixon nursing his grievances and resentments as he outwits and outmaneuvers one rival after and another, defeats and destroys various political opponents, survives setbacks personal and professional that would have convinced other men that it was not meant to be, I can’t help admiring the man even as I cringe and wince as he crawls and connives and plots and finagles and cheats and lies his way towards the White House, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Watergate.

But it’s really not Nixon himself I’m admiring.  It’s his story.  The bare bones outline of it.  I admire that story because it is a great American story.  It’s in fact the American myth.

Nixon’s story has been acted out again and again throughout our history, but usually with this one slight difference.

The hero of the story is a hero.

At least as we like to tell it.

Nixon’s story is the story of the talented and ambitious kid born in obscurity, raised without privilege, lonely and out of place in his family and among his friends and neighbors, working hard, surmounting obstacles, and with each obstacle overcome finding a new one springing up in his path, earning his way, succeeding at long last despite everything.

We know this story because we’ve been told it over and over with the intention of the people telling it to us being that we admire the heroes and heroines of the various versions of the story and model our own story after theirs.

Nixon’s story is exactly the same as Abraham Lincoln’s story.

It’s the same as Barack Obama’s story.  And Bill Clinton’s story.

It’s Thomas Edison’s story, and Andrew Carnegie’s, and Mark Twain’s, and Helen Keller’s.

It’s the story of many inventors and writers and reformers and agents of social justice and progress and change.  It’s the story of most of our movie stars and half our sports legends and God knows how many successful businessmen and women.

But it is also the story of many robber barons and the story of Frank Lucas and countless other gangsters.

It’s Nixon’s story most of all.

We tell the story to inspire ourselves, but no matter how much emphasis we place on the virtues of the heroes and heroines of the tale—Lincoln walking all that way to return the books he borrowed, Bill Clinton standing up to his drunken step-father, Nixon, that’s right, Nixon, Nixon the kid, sitting out in the family’s small citrus orchard till all hours on schoolnights, minding the smudge pots—no matter how much we try to insist the story is about being decent, hardworking, thoughtful, and good, in the end the story is about success.

It’s probably a necessary story, but it’s also a dangerous one, because it plants the seeds of disappointment, self-doubt, self-hatred, and an anger that often looks as far outward as within.

The truth that almost all of us have to face is that no matter how decent we are, no matter how hardworking, how thoughtful, or how good, no matter how much we try to be like Lincoln or Edison or Helen Keller, even if ultimately our ambitions are far more modest than theirs, we are doomed to failure.

In some way we are not going to measure up. We are going to be disappointed.  It’s not just that we won’t get what we want, we won’t get what we earned or deserved.

And who’s fault will that be?

Our own?

But how could it be?  Didn’t we do everything we were supposed to?  Weren’t we decent?  Didn’t we work hard?  Weren’t we thoughtful and good?

No?

Can’t be.

It can’t be!

I won’t let it be!

But whose fault is it then if it’s not mine?

And this is why I say our story is Nixon’s story.

Because it’s a success story that is also the story of a failure.

He was a failure from the start even as he succeeded and advanced with every step.

Nixon knew the story.  He knew it best as Lincoln’s story, probably, which would explain why he picked Lincoln’s portrait to talk to when he was wandering drunk through the White House late at night during Watergate.  Lincoln was Nixon, Nixon was Lincoln, at least as far as you could tell from the bare bones outlines of their stories.  Nixon deserved to be as beloved as Lincoln.  Wouldn’t you think?

Nixon did.

He thought it too soon, that’s all.

He thought it from when he was young.  He thought because he was starting out like Lincoln he would finish like Lincoln and since he was destined to finish like Lincoln he ought to be already beloved and admired like Lincoln.

He wanted what he hadn’t yet earned because he knew he would earn it eventually.

And when it wasn’t handed to him right away, when he wasn’t rewarded right then for his decency and his hard work and his thoughtfulness and his goodness, he was infuriated.   He couldn’t stand the insult of it, he couldn’t bear the injury.  He felt aggrieved.  He felt cheated.  He felt entitled.  He felt he had the right to take what he hadn’t yet earned but of course every time he did that he undermined himself.  Every time he rewarded himself with what he knew he would eventually deserve to be rewarded with, he proved that he didn’t deserve it.  He showed himself up as the very opposite of what he believed himself to be, of what he could have been, might very well have been, if he’d been patient, if he’d been less angry, if he’d ignored more slights, forgiven more enemies, accepted more defeats, taught himself not to see so many things as defeats.

If he’d been more Lincoln.

All his life, no matter how much achieved, no matter how high he rose, no matter how apparently successful he became, Nixon saw himself as a thwarted man.

What he could never see was that he was his own worst enemy.  Except on those days when he did, and on those days he was even more miserable, more resentful, more angry, more himself

That’s the double-edged temptation built into the American success story, to see our failures as other people’s fault and to see them as too much our own.

And that's why I'll say it again.  Nixon’s story is our story. 

Comments

[Bob]

Politically I’m far left. My family and friends have all expressed bewilderment over my fascination with Nixon. I try to explain it and end up hopelessly muddled. I’m gonna print your post and from now my retort will be a simple one: read this.

[Bob]

Were Shakespeare alive and writing today there are only two people in America’s history he would find worthy of a play: Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon. Brilliant, complex men with more inner demons than anyone should have to share flesh with. Lincoln succeeded in holding his demons at bay. Nixon failed.
It’s a thin line between greatness and ignominy. A very thin line.

[Chris Quinones]

Yeah. I think Nixon is fascinating, too, or I did when he was the worst president of my lifetime, way back when.

In a way, our current president is the anti-Nixon; the failure who succeeded. I read this yesterday and too much of it rings true.

[minstrel hussain boy]

i am currently reading it and am captivated. i especially like the way the author inserts his little asides to the reader. how, after one or another, political rival does something unspeakably crass or underhanded the author inserts, in a paragraph all its own,

and nixon is the one who is supposed to be a dirty campaigner.

perspective babies.

[Anne Laurie]

All true, Mr. Mannion, and brilliantly explained (as ever). But Nixon was also very specifically a man of his own American generation. Bill Clinton contested Newt Gingrich (inheritor of Nixon's "first as tragedy, then as farce" mantle) for the top spot as exemplar of the succeeding American generation. And now it looks like Barack Obama will herald another generational shift, deftly displacing Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign to cap McCain's race as the last "Greatest Generation" president (yes, I know J. Sidney's a Viet vet, but his marketing has always presented him as the last WWII-style campaigner, a "good soldier" who avoided all Kerry's DFH mess and Dubya's/Cheney's/Clinton's other-priorities maneuvering by spending the we've-lost-Walter-Cronkite period in the confines of the Hanoi Hilton).