Broke my heart when I saw Nixon break down at the funeral, knew it wouldn't be long. I may not have agreed with everything Nixon did, but he was a good man, and the Democrats who went after him all have a special place in Hell reserved for them.
I'll go to my own grave believing Nixon sought the wrong office. What he
should have been was a Secretary of State, and for more than one president. With his knowledge of the world, its intricacies, hypocrisies, and contradictions alike, he'd have been one of the greatest such secretaries in our history.
I saved a column written by Murray Kempton (maybe the last liberal columnist whose brains didn't go on permanent vacation) when Nixon was near death in 1994. Here's an excerpt:
. . . His sheer vulnerability so fills the memory as to expel all musings about his place in history and clear out all but the personal. We first met in the summer of 1950, when I found us sharing the same hotel and called him with a view to worming out one or another of the House Committee on Un-American Activities' dirty little secrets.
He proved to be an earnestly agreeable host, and we sat up for hours sharing a bottle of Scotch. What struck me from the first was how much he wanted strangers to like him. There was honest wistfulness in the voice that said how often he had wished that he could feel the commitment shown by the hostile witness he had no doubt been severely chastising that very afternoon . . .
. . . In exile he once or twice invited me for refreshment by his sovereign if insufficiently serene wisdom. He once sent a note describing me as an old friend and trusted adviser. That was far from the first honour I have owed to someone else's fantasy.
To meet the Kennedys was sometimes, through no fault of theirs, to feel like a social climber. To be met by Nixon was to sense how much he felt that he was the social climber and that you were the distinguished person who, he would later boast, had treated him as an equal. He was in that way, as in so many others, so much kin to the rest of us that I have never felt the faintest impulse to apologise for liking him.
It's to mourn that neither Kempton nor his old friend William F. Buckley, Jr. had lived to eulogise George H.W. Bush. (Buckley, alas, had the sad but lyrical job of eulogising Kempton, who died eleven years prior.) If they had, Mr. Bush would have been sent to the angels' transport with lyricism and his loss would have been cauterised with grace.
