Teaching Tricky Dick - academic conference on Richard M. Nixon

National Review, March 4, 1988 by Brice Peyre

Teaching Tricky Dick

AT A THREE-DAY session on Long Island, New York, a jury of press and professors gave their preliminary assessment in the strange case of Richard Milhous Nixon. The "Retrospective on the Nixon Presidency" held at Hofstra last November was the first major academic conference on Richard Nixon. The scholars found in Mr. Nixon's "complex" history the potential for a thriving cottage industry. They came not to bury Nixon, but to reappraise him.

In foreign affairs, detente was a big hit, but Nixon's style wasn't: his policies were "without moral content," and conceived "in a crafty atmosphere," said Kenneth Thompson of the University of Virginia. Nixon "thought on a larger scale," admitted his biographer Stephen Ambrose, but ultimately, "it was the continuation of the Vietnam War which prepared the ground and watered the seed of Watergate."

Ah yes, Watergate--a happy hunting ground for unreconstructed critics of the Nixon and subsequent GOP Administrations. Alan Westin of Columbia saw Nixon as the architect of a "totalitarian democracy" that serves as an important sociopolitical "model." A model for what? Why, of course: "Iran-Contra is like the faithful remake of a movie classic with a new set of players."

Nixon had more luck on the domestic side. Paper topics included "Outflanking the Liberals on Welfare" and "Richard Nixon Reconsidered: The Conservative as Liberal?" Nixon's main achievement? He presided over the major expansion of the welfare state, including constructing more public-housing units than any other Administration, indexing Social Security payments, and proposing a guaranteed annual income for every American. As Joan Hoff-Wilson of Indiana University pointed out, Nixon's Presidency was the first in the postwar era to record higher domestic than military spending.

The point was hammered home by Nixon domestic-policy counselor cum suspense writer John Ehrlichman, who drew a stark contrast between Nixon's economic activism and the "sense of almost governmental indifference to the problems of needy Americans" of the Reagan Administration. Barry Riccio of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign summed up the scholars' verdict. Nixon, he said, was a Republican leader who demonstrated that "the party of conservation could also be the party of innovation."