Setbacks only emboldened Tricky Dicky

PATRICK Buchanan describes Richard Nixon’s recovery from two defeats in the early 1960s as ‘‘the greatest comeback in political history’’.

Richard Nixon after resigning as US president in 1974.

WINSTON Churchill once said of politics that it is ‘‘almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics — many times.’’ Perhaps no one personified this dictum better than Richard Milhous Nixon.

From his election to congress in 1946 to his resignation from the presidency in 1974, Nixon had been written off time and again. After each setback, though, ‘‘Tricky Dicky’’ was incredibly formidable on the rebound. Even after Watergate, the disgraced former president transformed himself into a best­selling author and something of an inter­national elder statesman.

But it was his remarkable recovery from two devastating defeats in the early 1960s that represents, according to Patrick Buchanan, ‘‘the greatest comeback in political history’’.

In 1960, Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-president narrowly lost the presidential election to John F. Kennedy. In 1962 he ran for governor in California, and lost again. His post-election press conference remains part of the Nixon legend. ‘‘You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,’’ he told reporters, “because gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

Time magazine, the keeper of liberal received wisdom, declared the end of Nixon’s political career, but the kiss of death amounted to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He recovered, reunited a shattered GOP and won the White House at a time of widespread ­social unrest at home and war abroad.

How did Nixon do it? In The Greatest Comeback, Buchanan, a high-profile conservative polemicist who served as a Nixon aide from 1966 to 1974, points to his subject’s fighting spirit and devout party loyalty that was all too evident during his so-called wilderness years. From 1963, when he moved to Wall Street to practice law, to 1968, when he ran for president again, private citizen Nixon remained in the public arena.

He wrote articles for magazines and news­papers, including a prescient piece in Foreign Affairs on why Washington should end Red China’s angry isolation.

He travelled around the world, including gruelling tours of four continents in 1967 where the former VP would meet leading political figures. (Imagine today’s inward-looking and ­aspiring presidential candidates doing that!)

Nixon, moreover, became a peripatetic campaigner for his party across the nation. He once told a reporter: ‘‘When I’m campaigning, I live like a Spartan.’’

Buchanan, who at the time was in his mid-to-late-20s, recalls how the 55-year-old Nixon was an ‘‘athlete in training’’ during the 1966 congressional campaign: ‘‘Some days he would do three or four appearances, a breakfast in one congressional district, a luncheon speech in the next, a press conference and dinner speech or rally in the third stop, then fly at night to the state where he was to appear the next morning.’’

Using more than a thousand of his own personal memos to Nixon, marked with his scribbled replies, Buchanan tells the story of how this never-say-die politician sought to reconcile the warring factions of the Republican Party. He courted the right-wingers at William F. Buckley’s National Review even as he endorsed the liberal Nelson Rockefeller for governor of New York. At the same time, he fashioned a ‘‘Southern Strategy’’, which helped the GOP recoup losses in the 1966 mid-term elections and pave the way to the White House.

Here Buchanan challenges the conventional view that Nixon made race a polarising issue to drive white Southern Democrats towards the party of Lincoln.

He reminds us that Nixon, like many Republicans, supported the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. When he campaigned for more than 100 candidates in 35 states in 1966, he slammed segregationist candidates.

All true, but the Southern Strategy of soft- pedalling vocal support for the civil rights movement while ramping up the ‘‘law and order’’ rhetoric also allowed the GOP to smash FDR’s New Deal Coalition and create a political realignment for generations.

Still, whatever one thinks of Buchanan’s ‘‘whitewashing’’ of history, as his critics allege, it’s worth bearing in mind that as president from 1969 to 1974, Nixon was no bigot.

He created affirmative action to help break the power of racist trade unions. He expanded the use of racial preferences to provide opportunities for minorities in federal contracting.

And he did more to desegregate southern schools than any previous president.

For Buchanan, though, the real story here is what amounts to the Arnold J. Toynbee theory of ‘‘departure and return’’: the idea that legendary leaders must endure time in the political wilderness before returning to power.

Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Robert Menzies epitomised that trait. So, too, did their friend Nixon.

Tom Switzer is a research associate at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

The Spectator

The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Crown Publishing, 400pp, $54.99 (HB)