Tom Switzer

The many lives of Richard Nixon

A review of The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority, by Patrick J. Buchanan. Tricky Dicky’s time in the wilderness was key to his success

[ANTON EMDIN]

Winston Churchill once said of politics that it’s ‘almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics — many times.’ Perhaps no one personified this dictum better than Richard Milhous Nixon.

From his election to Congress in 1946 to his resignation from the presidency in 1974, Nixon had been written off time and again. After each setback, though, ‘Tricky Dicky’ was incredibly formidable on the rebound. Even after Watergate, the disgraced former president transformed himself into a bestselling author and something of an international elder statesman. But it was Nixon’s remarkable recovery from two devastating defeats in the early 1960s that represents, according to Patrick Buchanan, ‘the greatest comeback in political history’.

In 1960 Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president narrowly lost the presidential election to John F. Kennedy. In 1962 he ran for governor of California, and lost again. His post-election press conference remains part of the Nixon legend. ‘You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more,’ he told reporters, ‘because gentlemen, this is my last press conference.’ Time magazine, the keeper of liberal received wisdom, declared the end of Nixon’s political career. But the kiss of death amounted to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He recovered, reunited a shattered and fractured GOP and won the White House at a time of widespread social unrest at home and war abroad.

How did Nixon do it? Buchanan, a high-profile conservative polemicist who served as a Nixon aide from 1966 to 1974, points to his subject’s fighting spirit and devout party loyalty that was all too evident during his so-called wilderness years.

From 1963, when he moved to Wall Street to practise law, to 1968, when he ran for president again, private citizen Nixon remained in the public arena.

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