Dropping himself in the soup

One of Richard Nixon’s salient characteristics was his clumsiness. No one ever called him a man of the Left politically, but in the other figurative sense he was quite unusually gauche or linkisch. By the last grim days of his presidency that might have been explained by the martinis he was downing as if they were mineral water, but even sober he was always accident-prone. He bloodily cracked his forehead getting into a motor-car, he stopped serving soup at White House dinners after spilling it down his shirtfront, and, when asked to look in on a Cabinet meeting by Harold Wilson, President Nixon upset an inkwell on the hallowed table at No. 10.

This gaucherie was not merely physical. There have been better presidents and there have been worse, including the present incumbent, but was any other such a strange, awkward creature? Nixon was intelligent and industrious, but tense, resentful, a walking definition of what we call chippy and of what the French call a man unhappy in his skin. ‘He was nervous and fidgety,’ Lord Black of Crossharbour writes in this absorbing new biography — and that’s only at the 1950 election when Nixon became senator for California.

The words could apply to the rest of his life, above all to his nervous and fidgety last days in office. If you were told that someone had been a congressman, senator, served eight years as vice-president, had twice been elected president and that his administration’s achievements included two historic decisions — to get out of Vietnam and to go to China — you might suppose that this was a successful political career. In Nixon’s case, even he seems to have known that there was always something wrong, something missing, even before the cataclysmic final disgrace.

He once said that people shouldn’t ask whether India was well governed, they should wonder that it was governed at all.