And yet I increasingly fear we would have. When Nixon lived and worked in New York and New Jersey in the eighties and early nineties, he admired and probably envied Trump’s ease with the media. His last chief of staff, Kathy Hannigan O’Connor, typed his famous 1993 letter to Trump saying he’d have a great future in politics. He is said to have displayed it in the Oval Office. Nixon also said that charisma like Trump’s could be both well and ill used. Trump evinces nothing comparable to Nixon’s lifelong preoccupation with global comity and stability, especially among Washington, Moscow, and Beijing. In the current crisis with Israel and Iran, Nixon would be trying to look ten years ahead. Trump has no such interest or gifts.
It’s in the realm of politics, not geopolitics, where they unfortunately conjoin. In his 2018 book, “They Said No to Nixon: Republicans Who Stood Up to the President’s Abuses of Power,” scholar and journalist Michael Koncewicz methodically unpacks the Nixonian tactics that foreshadowed Trumpism. These included Nixon’s mostly thwarted efforts to use federal agencies against political enemies and slash federal support to MIT (look out, Harvard), along with his second-term plans to cut the number of federal employees and demand loyalty from those who remained. It was only because of Watergate that the U.S. DOGEd all that for the time being.
Nixon apologists liked to say that abuses of presidential power didn’t start with Watergate. Nor did Trumpism with Trump. After reading Koncewicz’s book, I’ve found it hard to avoid the suspicion that while Nixon would have wished Trump had softer hands when dealing with Putin and Netanyahu, he would probably have applauded him for playing better hardball.
Kathy and I are in a Nixon state of mind after our visit to our old hang, the Nixon library in Yorba Linda, where we were both executive directors of the associated private foundation (as we had both been Nixon chiefs of staff). She negotiated the joint operating agreement that enabled the private library’s federalization. Over lunch with library director Tamara K. Martin, her deputy, Natalia Visante, and our old buddy Greg Cumming, now the staff historian, we learned that Kathy’s JOA is still in effect, governing the library’s relationship with the foundation.
After telling more old stories than our hosts perhaps had bargained for, Kathy and I wandered the library’s new exhibits. I rode in the Rose Parade with RN, and Kathy sat at his desk. Otherwise, you’d never know we’d ever worked there — though in display cases, we spotted her handwriting on top of a copy of a letter Nixon sent President-elect Reagan in November 1980 and mine on a letter George H. W. Bush sent Nixon nine years later.
