Richard Nixon sometimes spoke like a classic anti-Semite in the White House, yet saved Israel. He made some racist remarks, yet he desegregated the public schools of the South and institutionalized affirmative action. He was a conservative who signed more social welfare legislation than any president except LBJ and FDR. He was a free marketer who implemented wage and price controls. He was a leading anti-communist who opened up Red China and established détente with the Soviet Union. He was a good man who could be bad, a bad man who could be good.
How do you explain Richard Nixon? In “Being Nixon,” I tried to get past the cartoon version of the brooding Tricky Dick to understand what it was like to actually be Nixon. He was a profoundly complex and contradictory character, but he was not a malevolent figure. He was human, too human for his own good.
The bad Nixon is on display on the White House tapes, swearing and vowing to crush his enemies. The tapes do not lie, and they reveal Nixon at his worst. But by talking to Nixon’s surviving aides and by closely reading the daily notes of his closest aides, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, I was able to see a different, more complex Nixon, a man who was more vulnerable, more sympathetic, and in many ways more admirable. In private, Nixon often wanted to be a decent person who did the right thing, but, over time, his demons betrayed him.
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