Arizona Daily Star
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http://www.azstarnet.com/public/dnews/091-6846.html
Sunday, 8 August 1999
Beyond scandal
Watergate has obscured Nixon's real presidential legacy
1974 AP photo
Richard M. Nixon offers a last goodbye before leaving the White House after
resigning on Aug. 9, 1974.
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Richard Nixon left an obvious legacy of scandal, but less apparent
is that the man who is disdained as the least worthy of recent chief executives may
have been among the 20th century's most influential presidents.
Nixon was the only president to resign from office, doing so 25 years ago tomorrow,
knowing that, otherwise, the U.S. House of Representatives surely would impeach him
and that the Senate would remove him from office.
Nixon, who died in 1994, became synonymous with the Watergate scandal that claimed
his presidency, but the furor over his misdeeds has obscured the pivotal nature of
his presidency, both for good and bad.
``History will, with few exceptions, say this man made a difference,'' then Senate
Republican leader Bob Dole said in 1994 upon Nixon's death, ``the largest figure
of our time whose influence will be timeless.''
Nixon was a center-right politician at a time of a more liberal U.S. consensus than
exists today. The passage of time shows that many of his domestic-policy initiatives
and efforts to open the United States to better relations with communist nations
likely would fit well with mainstream Democrats of the 1980s and 1990s.
Certainly, Nixon's Watergate misdeeds, along with the furor over the Vietnam War
that occurred before and during his presidency, helped create the climate of distrust
that has become rife in U.S. politics during the past quarter century.
Many of the laws created to combat Nixon's abuses have taken on lives of their own.
Along with the fault line that he left in American politics, those laws have helped
fuel the increasingly bitter, partisan political climate.
``Nixon was the great polarizer of American politics,'' Rice University historian
Earl Black said.
On the positive side, his foreign-policy accomplishments - especially regarding China
and the Soviet Union - helped make this a safer world.
Here's a look at his legacy:
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Nixon's political career - which began shortly after World War II - was premised
upon the notion of strong anti-communism.
His reputation was based on his ``red-baiting'' early campaigns in California, where
he labeled one liberal Democratic opponent the ``pink lady,'' and activities in Washington,
where he tried to outlaw the Communist Party.
But once in the Oval Office in 1968, Nixon began taking steps that as a younger candidate
he might have called treasonous.
He pledged a new ``era of negotiation'' with America's communist foes and, by the
time he ran for re-election in 1972, surprised critics who thought he had just been
seeking votes.
That year, after two decades of the United States refusing to acknowledge that China
was governed by communists, Nixon shocked the world by visiting Beijing and opening
up relations between the two nations.
That May, he also negotiated the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the
Soviet Union, one that later presidents built upon to greatly reduce the arms race
before the Cold War ended a decade ago.
Nixon also inherited the Vietnam War from Lyndon Johnson and campaigned with a promise
of a secret plan to end the conflict.
In 1973, Nixon signed a cease-fire and withdrew U.S. troops, ending the worst American
military defeat in history.
POLITICS
His ability to see the forest through the trees led Nixon to formulate the ``Southern
strategy,'' which has become the fundamental political reality of U.S. politics in
the past 30 years.
Nixon, a Californian, saw the historically Democratic, but conservative, South as
a promised land for the GOP. In his 1968 election, he began making inroads into the
South and, in his 1972 landslide re-election, carried the entire region by big margins.
Today, Dixie is the most Republican of all regions, with huge majorities among white
voters who respond to the GOP's emphasis on lower taxes, smaller government and social
conservatism.
Nixon's misdeeds also were responsible for two of the biggest political reforms of
the past half-century - federal campaign-finance legislation that was revolutionary
at the time (but is now widely unpopular) and creation of a mechanism of special
prosecutors to investigate White House wrongdoing.
Because of reports of briefcases stuffed with cash going to Nixon's 1972 campaign,
Congress approved, beginning with the 1976 campaign, new laws that limited donations,
required that they be made public and created federal subsidies for presidential
campaigns.
After Nixon's resignation, Congress, unhappy with the role the Justice Department
had played in the Watergate investigation, decided that future White House probes
should be handled by special prosecutors from outside the government to avoid any
conflict of interest.
Administrations from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton have been the targets of such inquiries
since, and Congress this year let the special-prosecutor statute die because of concerns
that it had created an uncontrollable monster.
DOMESTIC POLICY
Richard Nixon was vilified by liberals for his anti-communist zeal and political
tactics, but his domestic policy was much less conservative than today's mainstream
GOP philosophy.
It would be hard to imagine any Republican, or many Democrats, for that matter, in
today's era of global markets suggesting wage-price controls to handle burgeoning
inflation.
Yet Nixon first imposed and then removed such controls in an unsuccessful effort
to stem inflation.
It was Nixon who established the Environmental Protection Agency and the Council
on Environmental Quality.
On race, welfare and crime, his policies were not ideological. His emphasis on crime
as a political issue led to charges that he was using race for political gain, which
- whether an accurate evaluation of his motivation or not - correctly pegged the
effect.
But on today's most explosive racial issue - racial preferences - he could be mistaken
for Bill Clinton and other of today's Democrats, at least initially.
Nixon's ``Philadelphia Plan'' pioneered the change in affirmative action from programs
aimed at outreach and recruiting to those that set quotas, in this case for the construction
trades, for specific numbers of minority hires.
But, showing his ideological flexibility, especially as the issue began gaining traction
among angry whites, he spoke out against the policies his own administration founded.
Goldwater was the father of the GOP's conservative movement, a man whose integrity
and ideological commitment contrasted sharply with those of Nixon.
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Visit the Richard M. Nixon home page provided at this Stanford Web site.
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