Note: This piece had been bubbling up in me for at least five years before I finally wrote it on August 9th, 2024, a day after summitting Mount Shasta and about two months before a very deep valley. Having found no publications that would take it, I have finally decided just to put it up here (and in retrospect, that was always the right choice.) It is just a wistful little reflection on Nixon’s Farewell Speech to the White House Staff.
The piece I wrote the same day for The National Interest, a reading of Nixon’s significance for the young people of my generation, is far better.
Read that piece here: “We’re All Nixon Now”
This one, with all its woozy saccharinity, inaccurate metaphor, questionable interpretation, and maudlin indulgence of prose, is far less readable and of much lower quality. But since nobody else seems to have taken the speech seriously for its 50th anniversary, I am compelled to produce SOMEthing.
-LNP
Nixon’s was one of the great American lives, an epic personal life in the public eye channeling and exemplifying the passions and dreams and terrors and blindnesses of the ages he passed through, a life of high achievement, grand defeat and poignant, mythic moments whose meanings will come to life opaquely in posterity’s literary, physical, and living monuments. As with all truly great Americans, his greatest moments were personal, not public—the two years’ chase of Pat, the nighttime chat with the student protestors at the Lincoln Memorial, the many greatest comebacks—but a few of them hit that little mark where personal and public destiny meet and, for a shining moment, intertwine, and the man stamps his soul on the age. The most important of these happened fifty years ago last summer, August 9th 1974—the day President Nixon and First Lady Pat left the White House South Lawn on Army One for the last time.
In his last hours as President, Nixon addressed the White House staff, to say goodbye and to thank them for their patriotism and service. He was as awkward as ever—he’d never been an electrifying speaker, and watching the speech today, one feels both heartened and a little strange. He thanked the staff, celebrated their patriotism and their decency, their unconditional and idealistic devotion to public service at the expense of their own personal gain, and linked that decency to the great and simple virtues of Middle America.
And he knew Middle America; he reminisced on the ordinary people he came from, he remembered his father’s honest work and his mother’s unconditional goodwill to all, the suffering they’d been through which so many had been through in the tumults of the century, and the decency they held onto through it all. He recalled the long dark night of his great hero, Theodore Roosevelt, of sadness and perseverance and the vigor of the greatest fights, how he stood as a man, “tempestuous, strong, sometimes wrong, sometimes right,” in all his duties. He was talking about other people— the patriotic White House staffer, the ordinary American, his father and his mother, his models of citizenship and manhood—but beneath it all he was talking about his idea of himself. For in the stories he told were the values and the ways of he life he treasured most in America, values and ways of life by which he measured his own worth.
Anyone who’s spent time with Nixon knows what these were. He genuinely felt for the average American, and unlike the Roosevelts and Kennedys, he knew the average American, for he’d grown up as one of them. He believed, too, in that midcentury ideal of propriety and decency expressed in Frank Capra films and Norman Rockwell paintings—the democratized Cincinnatus, the All-American young man going off to public service with an uncorrupted and admirable innocence and earnestness. He saw these people in his father and mother, in the Republican activists he’d worked alongside his whole life, in the people he counted on for his base to the end of his career. And these people had been swamped as badly as anyone by the Great Depression, that looming experience of Nixon’s young adulthood. So the younger Nixon found in Theodore Roosevelt’s strenuous life in the arena a moral model he intuitively embraced and matured with, as he wrestled with the hardships of his time and his own life’s great defeats.
These great traits—simplicity, earnestness, unflinching perseverance amid great defeat—are indisputably golden virtues. In Nixon they were also aligned with his most self-destructive vices: his paranoia and habitual suspiciousness, sometimes leveed randomly and other times leveed at more serene opponents; his lifelong resentments at those endowed with natural personal magnetism or family wealth or institutional status, and occasional refusal to believe that their motives could ever be pure; his deep, raging insecurities of his own worth, craving for adulation, and unbecoming descent into pettiness. These vices, of course, became the foundation for the cartoon-villain caricature his enemies dogged him with for life, and his awareness of that caricature’s ubiquity probably brought those traits out in him even more. In predicting Gerald Ford’s presidential performance, he’d noted that every President’s “abilities become more obvious, and his faults become more glaring.” He knew of what he spoke.
To his credit Nixon seems to have known this about himself, although he didn’t talk about it often. Which is why it is all the more stunning that as he concluded his speech to the staff, he delivered some of the profoundest and most personally self-reflective words ever uttered by a sitting head of state, anywhere, almost as an afterthought to his sense of self, little words of wisdom from a departing friend:
“Always give your best; never get discouraged; never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
And yet these are not merely hard-earned words of wisdom, won in the crucible of late Watergate and scribbled as an eleventh-hour conversion to the ethos of kindness, the too-little-too-late excretions of a guilty conscience pinned down. It’s more reasonable to say, that Nixon had known and acknowledged the power and danger of his own personality for some time, perhaps since the fund crisis and Checkers Speech in 1952; and had harnessed it and oftentimes indulged it, but never seriously tried to conquer it. His law partner Len Garment had said “Nixon has an angel on one shoulder and a dark angel on the other. He is both.” When the exhaustion and shame of the Watergate scandals, coinciding as they did with his most glorious victories in China and the 1972 election, finally brought everything crashing down and he lay prostrate before the American people, then the fundamental reality of the absolute necessity of inner peace became as undeniable to Nixon as it does to a broken alcoholic. It had been in his head a long time; he knew himself. Grace could preserve his brightest virtues and remove his darkest vices, and his tragedy is that he realized it too late. But the moment he did was captured by history, the silverest lining imaginable.
Had he followed his own advice—had he never been petty, had he refused to hate those elites who hated and tormented him, had he given his best and not his worst—he still would’ve been hated, the necessary fate of all great men, the currency of power. But he would not have destroyed himself, and the hatred of those he did not hate would’ve been just another tactical piece of his political and geopolitical environments, not a dragon to slay. He’d eulogized his chief Eisenhower as “a man who did not know how to hate.” Those Americans who’ve appeared to hover above the brawling pettiness of public life in their own times, and come down in myth as heroic figures long after their times, all share a sort of serenity amid their rage, a mystique of aloofness, Washington-like, as though they were too contemptuous of contempt to feel contempt, or as Nixon again eulogized Eisenhower, were “too proud to be arrogant.” And these are the ones whose counsels of reconciliation, whether heartfelt or not, have come down in the American civil religion’s expanding yet coherent testaments of scripture, and the quiet but real political psychology and character required for greatness in a free and self-governing people. The two highest counsels—Franklin Roosevelt’s admonition that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and Abraham Lincoln’s invocations of “the better angels of our nature,” “with malice toward none, with charity for all”— point us toward magnanimity, against our fear from one side and against our malice from the other side. “Others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself,” carries the point down into one’s own destiny.
This is not merely a personal bit of heroeology for the true keepers of the Nixonian flame to banter about in the magazines. The nuggets of insight in that final farewell speech have majestic implications for the structure of our civil religion and public discourse, both in historical interpretation and contemporary political practice, and in the lives of each and every one of us touched by politics. We live in a moment when mind-numbing contempt is the norm in politics with no accompanying blessings, when the absolute demolition of mutual trust across populations and within institutions has led to the serious question of whether there is an America anymore. Surely all our leaders and every one of us might have a thing or two to reflect on, had we a few minutes with the chastened Richard Nixon of August 9th, 1974.
We live, more or less, in the ashes of an era he’d tried and failed to inaugurate, the stulted half-realignment of the 1970s whose dysfunctional structural flaws and decadent cultural neuroses echo louder and louder each succeeding decade. It is not wild to predict we live through the last gasps of the Age of Nixon, something unclear and unborn a little bit over the horizon. But should we learn the structural and cultural lessons but fail to keep the moral lessons of a half-century ago, we will just be punting the question a little further down the road.
But whether anyone takes a moment today to think about Nixon’s last presidential advice or not, it is best not to despair of America even should we all fail. Nixon knew better than anyone that defeat brings the seeds of victory. That he said so as he resigned the Presidency, gives us the second-greatest glimpse we’ve got of the true character of the man:
“We think that when things don’t go the right way… we think that when we suffer a defeat that all is ended… Not true. It is only a beginning, always. The young must know it; the old must know it. It must always sustain us, because the greatness comes and you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes. Because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.”
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