THE APOTHEOSIS OF TRICKY DICK

by Murray N. Rothbard
June 1994
by Murray N. Rothbard

But Supreme Court judges, while close to divine status, sit only at the right hand of the godhead Himself, El Presidente. It is the president, any president, who now embodies the Supreme Power, and must be invested with divine attributes to match the scope of his powers. And so in death, every ex-president, regardless of party, of his status or reputation in life, must become clothed in the robes of magnificence, wisdom, and glory.

It keeps getting worse. For now the very man driven out of office in disgrace, returns, first as Wise Elder Statesman, and now, in death, cloaked in the robes of splendor. His nominal political enemy, Slick Willie, whose wife once helped Bring the Monster Milhous Down, now declares a "day of national homage" to none other than Tricky Dick, and we are even to be deprived of a day of postal delivery in Devious Dick's honor – as if these intrepid couriers needed any encouragement to deprive us of our mail!

And so the State, both parts of our sacred Two-Party System, bands together, swiftly and easily, to pay tribute to one of Their Own, and the rest of us are sucked into Playing the State's Game. And now it turns out that Willie has been receiving Wise Counsel from the Tricky One ever since his accession to the Throne. Would that Tricky had advised Clinton to concoct some potion that would make Willie disappear, once and for all!

And so history is revised and twisted out of all substance. All presidents, and especially ex-presidents, are noble and good, and they all get trotted out, like vultures perched on a wire, every time the current president wants to put across another "bipartisan" scam on the American people, such as Nafta, or Gatt. How long has it been since an ex-president roundly denounced the current occupier of the office? Has anyone done so since Hoover went after FDR?

In this entire scam, the Respectable Media, of course, participate enthusiastically in the anointment. If a man is perceived as an eighth-rater before taking office (such as Truman), then he, inevitably is hailed for "growing in stature" in office, so that he leaves, four or eight years later, close to the gods. And if his term of office is brief or shameful, as in the case of Jimmy Carter or the Tricky One, then the man Grows as ex-president. So that Carter's disastrous term is overlarded by his dotty Good Works ever since – maybe we can send Jimmy to supervise closely, the next "free elections" in, say, Rwanda? And Devious Dick's shattered term is buried in the encomiums for his buttinski role as Elder Foreign Policy Statesman. Even more irritating, if possible, than Nixon's Foreign Policy status as a Kissinger-and-a-half, was his obvious delight in posing as yet another of the host of "Value-Free" Political Pundits that already infest the airwaves. Given a few more years, he might even have surpassed the likes of Wolf Blitzer and Bill Schneider.

But regardless how it's done, the key point is to make sure that by the time the ex-president shuffles off his mortal coil, the Bad is swiftly interred with his bones, and the Good, real or fabricated, lives after him, in a blare of trumpets.

It is fitting, I suppose, that Tricky Dick should go down in life and in History as a "conservative." If any one man may be picked to sum up the victory of statist substance over the tinpot rhetoric, of the triumph of Big Government Conservatism, Richard Nixon is that man.

Let us consider the Nixonian record – in office, that is, and not as the prosecutor of Alger Hiss or the Invisible Man on post-Nixon National Security Councils. What essentially did the Tricky One do? He succeeded in propelling the United States more vigorously toward socialism than even his power-mad, brutish, and blackguardly predecessor, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Tricky One, despite or perhaps because of his "conservative" billing, managed to:

We are told that Nixon was willing to turn over the entire vital realm of domestic policy to the liberals so that he could concentrate on his real love: foreign policy. But what precisely did he accomplish in foreign affairs?

Allegedly trying to end the Vietnam War, he lengthened and greatly widened it, stepping up the mass murder.

But what about détente? Well, yes, he eased tensions a bit in the Cold War, but all that really amounted to is that he didn't go to war against the Russians. But, after all, none of the other presidents, for all their bluster, did either.

But what of Nixon's allegedly supreme triumph, his Opening to China? But, after all, so what? It was nice to ease tensions with China, but, after the Chinese kicked the American rear in the Korean War, there was never a chance that the U.S. would go to war against the ChiComs either.

I submit that Richard Nixon's record was as empty and as bleak in foreign affairs as in domestic. Any achievements at all in the midst of the Nixonian miasma? Well, he did get rid of the draft. And he was personally a bright man, if that's any consolation.

And what of Watergate? What are its lessons? The most fascinating lesson is that the very Liberals who Brought Him Down with such glee are the ones busily rehabilitating his image from the grave, and burying Watergate in all the hoopla about Nixon's alleged wisdom.

But did Nixon deserve to be brought down? And wasn't Nixon's third-rate burglary no worse than the dark deeds committed by his predecessors? Yes, and yes. What Nixon did was no worse than FDR before him, or of course, Slick Willie did after him. The point is that they all, all, deserved to be Brought Down, and the sooner the better. The great thing about Watergate is that it made the unthinkable thinkable at long last, that it established the precedent for impeaching the Monster in the White House. And while they can bury Watergate, and they can rehabilitate the Tricky One's image all they want, they can install him in the Valhalla reserved for all ex-presidents, but they can't take away from us the lovely knowledge that he – and Agnew just before him – was Brought Down, and if it can happen to him, it can happen to any one, even to whoever the current occupant may be. To throw one of the Liberal's favorite words in their face, what I loved most about Watergate was the process" – the process of impeachment, of Bringing the Man Down.

For a heady year or two, I actually believed that Watergate had permanently discredited the Office of the president, and not just the man Nixon, that never again would the American public trust any politician, especially any occupant of the Oval Office. I was of course wrong – especially after Ronald Reagan restored The Trust that the Establishment yearns to inspire in every American sucker. But still he was tossed out; they can never take that knowledge away from us. And for that, in an ironic sense, we are forever indebted to the Man Milhous.