[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 46 (Monday, April 25, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: April 25, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
DEATH OF RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA
Mr. MICHEL. Mr. Speaker, I offer a privileged resolution (H. Res.
411) and ask for its immediate consideration.
The Clerk read the resolution, as follows:
H. Res. 411
Resolved, That the House of Representatives has learned
with profound regret and sorrow of the death of Richard
Milhous Nixon, former President of the United States of
America.
Resolved, That in recognition of the many virtues, public
and private, of one who served with distinction as
Representative, Senator, Vice President, and President, the
Speaker shall appoint committees of the House to join with
such Members of the Senate as may be designated, to attend
the funeral services of the former President.
Resolved, That the House tenders its deep sympathy to the
members of the family of the former President in their sad
bereavement.
Resolved, That the Sergeant at Arms of the House be
authorized and directed to take such steps as may be
necessary for carrying out of the provisions of these
resolutions, and that the necessary expenses in connection
therewith be paid out the contingent fund of the House.
Resolved, That the Clerk communicate these resolutions to
the Senate and transmit a copy of the same to the family of
the former President.
Resolved, That when the House adjourns today, it adjourn as
a further mark of respect to the memory of the former
President.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The minority leader, the gentleman from
Illinois [Mr. Michel] is recognized for 1 hour.
Mr. MICHEL. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
(Mr. MICHEL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his
remarks.)
Mr. MICHEL. Mr. Speaker, the death of President Richard Nixon is a
great loss, especially to those fortunate enough to have personally
known him, worked with him, and learned from him through the years. He
was truly one of the last of the giants of the generation that helped
to shape America's and the world's destiny after World War II.
His grasp of the nuances and complexities of foreign affairs was
unique in its mastery. No President in my lifetime ever had a better
understanding of the Soviet Union and its leaders, and his bold move in
establishing American relations with the People's Republic of China is
one of the high spots in the entire history of American diplomacy.
In 1949, the year I came to Washington as a congressional assistant,
he had already established a national reputation, and it was in those
days I first got to know him through my predecessor. And as the years
passed, my wife Corinne and I got to know Pat and Dick Nixon well, and
I knew I could always count on him for advice and counsel.
Just a few weeks ago, before we made our most recent trip to the
Soviet Union with the majority leader and Members of Congress, I talked
to the former President by telephone to ask again for his thoughts and
advice on who we ought to be seeing and what we ought to be doing.
President Nixon's long career of public service was a unique mixture
of triumph and tragedy, and the emotions he evoked among supporters and
detractors alike were always intense. From the beginning of his public
career he was at the center and often was the cause of political
turmoil. His favorite political image was ``the man in the arena,'' the
political activist fighting for what he deeply believes in, never
giving up or giving in, and he never wished to stand on the sidelines
and watch others carrying on the sometimes grand, sometimes petty
battles of politics. It was this fighting spirit that so many Americans
will remember about him long after the details of his long and exciting
public life are forgotten.
Mr. Speaker, our deepest sympathies go to his daughters and their
families on the death of their father, coming so soon after that of
that grand lady, Pat Nixon.
Mr. Speaker, I am happy to yield such time as he may consume to my
friend and colleague, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Emerson].
{time} 1210
Mr. EMERSON. Mr. Speaker, Richard Nixon has departed this life.
For a person of my age and vintage, but perhaps not uniquely so, the
loss of him makes so very poignant the age through which we have lived.
I first personally saw Richard Nixon in that most quintessential
political experience noted in this century, the Whistle Stop Campaign.
As a boy, 14 years of age, I was excused from school one bright October
morning to go with my grandfather to Festus, MO, where the then-Vice
Presidential candidate exhorted the onlookers in the interests of peace
and prosperity as a part of the campaign of 1952. Richard Nixon was
then, of course, Senator Nixon--the Vice Presidential nominee on the
ticket with Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower. I last saw and had a word
with former President Nixon at a luncheon in January hosted by Senator
Bob Dole in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of President Nixon's
first inauguration as President of the United States. That intervening
period in which Richard Nixon has been such a preeminent player
constitutes a most remarkable chapter in American history, and I feel
very blessed to have been alive and to witness and to participate in
this era.
In the days and weeks ahead, much will be said about Richard Nixon;
and at an appropriate time for formal eulogies, I will wish to say
more. But in the immediate aftermath of his passing, I want to share
several items that, to me, speak volumes about Richard Nixon.
Theodore Roosevelt could not have had Richard Nixon in mind when
speaking at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910, he said:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out
how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could
have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is
actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat
and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short
again and again, because there is no effort without error and
shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds;
who know the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who
spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in
the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the
worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so
that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls
who know neither victory nor defeat.
But, to my way of thinking, if ever a statement could sum up a man,
Theodore Roosevelt's comments depicts the life of Richard Nixon.
Second, in yesterday's edition of the Washington Post, Curt Smith, an
author and former Saturday Evening Post senior editor and a
speechwriter for President Bush, summed up so very well the Nixon that
I and so many Americans found so appealing. I wish to share ``What
Peoria Knew'' at this point in my remarks.
[From the Washington Post, Apr. 24, 1994]
What Peoria Knew--Washington Never Got Why We Middle Americans Loved
Nixon
(By Curt Smith)
The town I grew up in--Caledonia, N.Y. (pop. 2,188)--had
one bar, six churches and no traffic lights. Its people had a
belief in work, God and family, a fondness for the familiar
and a reverence for everything American. We were for Richard
Nixon.
Disdaining pluralistic ignorance, where the members of a
majority--mine, the Silent--felt outnumbered, we found it
natural to admire Nixon's hardscrabble roots and his
tenacity. ``No matter what you say,'' gibed Jimmy Carter in
1976, ``he was a leader.'' Better yet, he was our leader. As
for the ``trendies'' and ``beautiful people'' and
``academics,'' he told me once, they ``couldn't even butter a
piece of toast.''
In backing Nixon in places like Caledonia, we defended our
past and found what my parents and grandparents--like
millions, bullied by a liberal ruling class former
congressman John Anderson dubbed the ``Volvo and brie cheese
crowd''--had rarely known. A Voice.
Meg Greenfield has written of the ``Nixon generation,'' and
not a day of my baby boom life has passed without Nixon at,
or near, the center. Aide Bryce Harlow likened him to a
bobbing cork. Only FDR ran as many times for national
office--five. More people voted for him for president than
any man in history. In post-World War II America, his history
was our history. Nixon `R' Us.
For Nixon, for all those years, we felt nostalgia and even
love--something akin to a gentle protectiveness--for Pat's
cloth coats and the Nixon family, decent, much-wounded, and
as straight and resolute as they came. We saw him as brave
and vulnerable and thoughtful and sentimental. It was a view
so divorced from Washington's as to rival a dialogue of the
deaf. It stuns that he is gone.
In 1967, I mailed a hand-written letter to the senior
partner at the Manhattan law firm of Nixon, Mitchell, Mudge
and Rose. I was an admirer, I said, and president of my
church's ecumenical fellowship. Our group would be in New
York in August, and was there the slightest chance I could
meet him, and if there was it would be grander than anything
I had known.
In early April, I received an answer from Rosemary Woods,
his secretary. Nixon would be out of the country, writing for
Reader's Digest. However, schedules change, and would I call
upon arrival? I did, and was invited to Nixon's office at 20
Broad St., off Wall, a world and Weltanschauung from Upstate
New York. For half an hour we talked of sports and college.
Nixon suggested Cornell--``Thank God, the least of the
Ivies''--and the physic need to work your way through school.
I still think fondly of how Nixon need not have met me, but
did, as a kindness. Later I was to find this typical not
of the Old nor New but Real Nixon--shy and solicitous. I
did not know this at the time. Instead, I joined Youth for
Nixon, learned politics in a mock convention and June
county primary--Milhous wins vs. Rockfeller--and gloried
when on Jan. 20, 1969, he took the oath of office, that
fall, I entered college. It was then, as America
entrenched itself in belligerence, that Nixon fused person
and president like no chief executive since FDR.
It is hard for post-boomers to understand how early-1970s
America seemed at once alive, passionate and coming apart at
the seams, Upheaval embraced values and morality, civil
rights, feminism, drugs, whether police were pigs, love
should be free and grades abolished and America--as George
McGovern said--should ``come home.'' The University of
Pennsylvania avoided confrontation with student war
protesters by removing its American flags to storage. Jane
Fonda went to North Vietnam and thundered against ``those
blue-eyed murders--Nixon and the rest of those ethnocentric
American white male chauvinists.''
On April 30, 1970, vowing that American would not be ``a
pitiful, helpless giant,'' Nixon announced the invasion of
Cambodia. Campuses exploded when four students were shot dead
at Kent State University and two at Jackson State College.
Radicals bombed university buildings as buses ringed the
White House to ward off protesters. It was a time of hawk vs.
dove, Maine Street vs. counterculture, hard hat vs. hippie.
Mayberry felt besieged.
Nixon upheld it consciously, defianty--less through policy
than through personality. His programs were often moderate--
liberal by Reagan-era standards. Welfare reform, revenue
sharing, the all-volunteer army, the Environmental Protection
Agency. Despite Vietnam, he engaged in diplomatic summitry,
and helped end the bipolar world. In February 1972 Nixon
ended decades of estrangement in the land of Shanghai and the
Forbidden City. Three months later, treking to Moscow, he
became the first U.S. president to visit the Soviet Union--
joining Communist Party leader Leonid Brzhnev in the first
agreement of the nuclear age to limit strategic nuclear arms.
Nixon loved foreign policy--global, conceptual. He was more
direct fighting America's cultural war. My generation loved
the amplified beat of rock. Said Nixon at a White House
dinner with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, ``If the
music's square, it's because I like it square.'' Nixon liked
sports, hated cocktail parties, despised ``front-runners, the
social climbers,'' and thumbed his nose at the fashionable.
``My family never had the wild, swinging times many trendies
think of,'' he told me. ``What we did have, of course, was a
lot of fun. I, for example, and depending on the season,
naturally, loved to sit down and belt out some Christmas
carols.''
Middle America could see Nixon as Father Christmas and not
be deceived. That is why it could accept what a top aide,
Raymond Price, called Nixon's ``dark side''--the taped
Milhous of ``expletive deleted''--knowing that his good far
outran the bad. He wore the flag in his lapel pin, disdained
the idea that draft dodgers were ``idealistic. What they
wanted was to protect their ass,'' and grasped the Forgotten
American's joys, worries and confessions of the heart.
``Farmers. Shopkeepers,'' a PBS documentary dubbed them.
``People with an inbred respect for authority and unyielding
belief in the American Dream.'' Mocked by the maniac '60's,
they felt not bigotry but injured pride. Sharing it, Nixon
gave them what the Establishment withheld--a decent measure
of respect.
Nixon's public lay among the ordered and traditional--
``good, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens''--not Eric
Goldman's ``MetroAmerican,'' privileged by lineage to rule.
Duty mattered. To them, Vietnam was a test of character--
whether as America conceded the limits of its power, its
adversaries respected the power of its will. Too, religion.
Once, Nixon told Charles Colson, ``You know, I could be a
Catholic. I honestly could. It's beautiful to think about,
the fact that there is something you can really grab ahold
of, something real and meaningful.''
Even Nixon's awkwardness played in Peoria. It was unslick,
endearing. Nearly four years ago, at the dedication of the
Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., George Bush told the
story of how one afternoon at an airport, Nixon heard a
little girl shouting ``How is Smokey the Bear?''--at that
time living in the Washington Zoo. Nixon smiled as the girl
kept repeating her question. Baffled, he turned to an aide
for translation. ``Smokey the Bear, Mr. President,'' he
whispered. ``Washington National Zoo.'' Triumphant, Nixon
walked over, took the girl's hand, and beamed, ``How do you
do Miss Bear?''
Nixon's flaws, we saw as virtues. His virtues, critics saw
as sins. His solitude, they termed isolation; his reserve,
arrogance; his propriety, aloofness; his sentimentality,
corn. It was this--``This traumatic clash of cultures,'' Meg
Greenfield called it: a schism embodied by Nixon as Grant
Wood vs. the age's temporal fashion--that divided families,
legislators, above all, generations. As it lodged in the
White House, in a man who despised--and was despised by--
America's hip, camp and pop art intelligentsia, it cemented
his rapport with America's great middle masses before helping
to bring about his fall.
Ironically, Nixon had an intellectual's complexity. He
relished nuance, respected the writing craft, and wrote 10
books--many best-sellers. Once he told Ray Price, ``I am an
introvert in an extrovert's profession.'' Yet he became the
tribune of people who never read the New York Times. His goal
was a new cultural, even political, majority. He almost made
it. Instead, his triumphs were etched by photos in his office
that catapulted a visitor back in time: Nixon with Brezhnev;
Nixon with Sadat; Nixon speaking, waving, deplaning; Nixon in
Bejing; Nixon in a motorcade, with Pat, flinging high the V.
When I left college in 1973, the shadow on those walls was
a president seeking to reshape the world--bold yet retiring,
believing that ``politics is poetry, not prose,'' When last I
saw him, in 1990 in Washington, he was frail, slightly
hunched, clad in a dark blue suit. He quizzed me about the
Bush administration and suggested that I run for Congress.
Respectfully, I declined. He was wary of raising taxes,
supportive of Bush in the Gulf, and proud of the woman whose
Secret Service code was ``Starlight''--his wife of 53 years.
Pat Nixon overcame poverty and tragedy to become a mirror
of America's heart, and love. Is it coincidence that by 10
months his death followed hers? In March 1991, on the eve of
Mrs. Nixon's 79th birthday, I took to their New Jersey home a
giant card arrayed with photos of her life and signatures of
more than 200 White House staffers. Trying to unpack it, I
pled for patience:
``I'm the most unmechanical person you'll meet.''
Playfully, she replied, ``No, you're not. Dick is.'' I had
never met Mrs. Nixon before. For two hours we spoke of
family, work and travel. It was like talking to your own
mother.
Later, Nixon wrote to call it ``the most memorable birthday
card she has ever received.'' Asked once what word would be
engraved on his heart if it were opened after he died, he
said, simply ``Pat.''
A favorite picture showed them on a bench, in San Clemente,
watching the Pacific. In it, her head rests on the shoulder
of the man who extolled freedom and security and,
campaigning, upheld ``peace without surrender'' and ``the
spiritual values of America'' and who each election, as
autumn dawned, communed with rallies in the rain--the most
remarkable American of our time.
It would be very difficult to ever put Richard Nixon in context--if,
indeed, he can be put in context--without relating him to the
phenomenon of modern mass communication, television. Richard Nixon used
and was used by this medium through the many stages of its development
to this date; indeed, the relationship of Richard Nixon to television
is one of the era's more notable relationships. Tom Shales, in today's
Washington Post under the heading ``Nixon and TV: A Strange But
Fascinating Fit,'' gives the subject good perspective. I include this
article at this point in my remarks.
[From the Washington Post, Apr. 25, 1994]
Nixon and TV: A Strange But Fascinating Fit
(By Tom Shales)
Television and Richard Nixon were always irresistibly drawn
to one another, not like a moth and a flame but like one
flame and another flame. From the beginning of his life as a
national figure, Nixon was on TV, and all over TV, and
throughout his very public career, he was never off it for
very long.
On TV he could be mesmerizing, exasperating, galling, campy
and immensely entertaining. Curiously enough, he never quite
mastered the medium, but it never rally mastered him, either.
It was kind of a draw.
``Richard Nixon defined the postwar era for America,'' Carl
Bernstein said on CNN yesterday, ``and he defined the
television era for America.'' Bernstein also said of his old
adversary, ``We've lost somebody who's been a part of our
life, and part of our family and there's no need to
mythologize.''
Nixon was never what one could reasonably call a brilliant
communicator in a class with Ronald Reagan, or a media-savvy
smoothie a la Bill Clinton. He would try to tailor himself
for TV and to be tailored for it by the perceptologists and
the vidiot savants, but in the end it was always Richard
Nixon, but some synthetic composite, who came seeping
through.
``Tenacious'' is the world most often being used to
eulogize Richard Nixon. I prefer ``defiant.'' His defiance
was one of his saving graces, part of his makeup as a tragic
hero, and it was at the heart of his first major national TV
appearance, the ``Checkers speech'' of 1952, undertaken in
defiance of Republican Party bosses and even of beloved
national grandfather figure Dwight D. Eisenhower.
When I was in college, kinescopes of the Checkers speech
would be shown at student film festivals or at midnight
screenings and people would laugh themselves goofy. Mostly we
were laughing at the technical primitivism of the broadcast,
and those strange slow pans over to a rigidly motionless Pat
Nixon, whom makeup and lighting conspired to turn into a
marble statute.
But we were also laughing at the shameless transparency of
Nixon's message, the cloying appeals to sentiment, the mush
not only about the little dog Checkers but also about Pat's
Republican cloth coat. We could laugh and think ourselves
very smart, but there were two important facts to be
remembered: The speech was a genuinely gutsy gesture, and it
worked.
In the decades ahead, Nixon would try to use television and
television would try to use him, and the relationship
remained a fascinating tug of war virtually until the end.
Even Nixon's wish that he not lie in state in the Capitol to
be observed by, among others, television cameras seems
something of a defiant gesture, a refusal to be the subject
of gawking or ogling in the hour of his final defeat.
Nixon served up a bounty of great TV. His famous ``kitchen
debate'' with Nikita S. Khrushchev was one of his outright
television triumphs. His later debate against fellow
presidential candidate John F. Kennedy signaled a seminal
shift from substance to style in American political life and
began the era of telepolitics in earnest. Suddenly, how a
candidate came across on TV was all that really mattered.
Jack Paar, who had played host to both John and Robert
Kennedy on his TV program, brought on Nixon one night in the
early `60s to chat and reminisce. This appearance may have
marked the first remaking of Richard Nixon; it showed him in
an uncharacteristically relaxed and convivial mood. Paar
induced him to play an original composition for piano, and
Nixon engagingly complied. It was as close to charming as he
ever got on the air.
This restylization of the Nixon image reached its climax in
1968 when Nixon popped up in a cameo on NBC's top-rated Rowan
& Martin's Laugh-In'' to utter one of the show's recurring
mantras. His rendition of ``Sock it--to me?'' ranks as
probably the most important five-second appearance in the
history of political television.
During the long unfolding of the Watergate scandal, we
watched as Nixon's defiance turned to defensive desperation.
Howard Baker said yesterday on ``This Week With David
Brinkley'' that he was certain Nixon knew nothing of the
Watergate burglary and that if he had just come clean
instantly and fired those responsible, ``maybe on
television,'' his presidency could have been saved.
Perhaps there was something self-destructive in the Nixon
character that prevented him from doing that. Or perhaps even
the coverup can be seen as another act of defiance, a case of
Nixon saying ``I'll show them'' but this time spectacularly
failing to do so.
Nixon sometimes seemed like the party guest whom no one
wants to talk to, who is consigned to a corner and shunned
but is determined to make his presence known. That he never
fit in with the Eastern power elite, that he always gave the
Harvard boys fits, were among the things about him that
remained endearing. He didn't go to the right school, he
didn't say the right things, he didn't have the right
pedigree. Richard Nixon was politically incorrect long before
political correctness was codified and became the law of the
land.
Collectors of Nixon videobilia prize especially a piece of
tape never meant to be seen by the public. Prior to the TV
address in which he resigned the presidency in 1974, Nixon
clowned with members of the TV crew and his staff, and
someone turned on a video recorder. On the tape, he jokingly
tells the White House photographer that he doesn't want to be
caught ``pickin' my nose.''
For me, one of the most unforgettable pieces of veritably
Shakespearean political theater ever seen on television came
the next day: Nixon's farewell to his troops in the East
Room, a rambling and nakedly emotional autobiography in which
the president called his mother ``a saint'' and told the
crowd: ``Always remember: Others may hate you, but those who
hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy
yourself.''
His last visible act that day was that broad wave to the
crowd before boarding the helicopter that took him into
retirement. It was, yes, a defiant wave.
In his post-presidential TV appearances, Nixon surrendered
some of whatever dignity remained. At times he came across
like a baggy-pants Willy Loman out peddling yet another new
revised version of himself and trying to salvage his place in
history. He appeared never, however, to mellow on his dislike
of the press; nor apparently did it of him.
Reporting on Nixon's death Friday night, Dan Rather of CBS
News couldn't refrain from mentioning again and again that
Watergate involved ``criminal acts'' and from saying more
than once not only that Nixon resigned but that he resigned
``in disgrace.'' Good grief. Give the man a break. He's dead.
CBS News had prepared not a comprehensive biography of
Nixon but an arduously detailed recap of the Watergate
affair. They didn't have the class to leave him alone even
then.
On the Brinkley show Sunday, Sam Donaldson pontificated
self-righteously about Nixon having done things ``not
permissible in American life'' but allowed as how Nixon was a
key figure in ``the modern use of television, or misuse of
television, by politicians.''
Brinkley himself merely marveled in a temperate and
forgiving way at ``the incredible career of Richard Nixon''
with all its ups and downs and said at the conclusion of the
program, ``It is hard to believe all of that really
happened.'' Indeed it is. And yet much of it happened before
our very eyes.
Men and women of my generation all used to say that we
would love to have met John F. Kennedy. I would love to have
met him too, and was bowled over when he came to my staunchly
Republican Midwestern home town to campaign against Nixon in
1960. But I always wanted to meet the maddeningly engimatic
Richard Nixon too, and wanted to meet him more and more as
the years went on, and as he continued his struggle to remain
in the public eye.
He was not the noblest Roman of them all, but he was surely
the most Nixonian Nixonian. Future generations will envy us
for having had Nixon to kick around, or at least they should.
At times like this, it is common to talk about legacies.
Nixon's is right there--right there on the videotape. And so,
forever, is Nixon.
Finally, today, Mr. Speaker, I wish to offer my condolences to the
wonderful family of Richard Nixon and to say thank you, Mr. President,
for having been ``in the arena.''
Mr. MICHEL. Madam Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentleman from
Missouri for his very appropriate remarks on this particular occasion.
Madam Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the
distinguished gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Montgomery], who likewise
has been a long-time friend of the former President.
Mr. MONTGOMERY. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman in the well [Mr.
Michel] for yielding.
Madam Speaker, we were close friends. I served 5\1/2\ years, as the
gentleman in the well did, with President Nixon. I thought he was an
excellent President. He certainly understood foreign policy, and he
really understood this Government. He served in the Congress, he served
as Vice President, and he served as President. Yes, he made some
mistakes. We all make mistakes in life.
What impressed me, after serving as President, he just did not
disappear. He was out trying to help our country, and in any way he
could, he did. He certainly had a great effect in later years on the
actions taken over in Russia, after the Soviet Union had fallen, and we
all give him credit for going to China and to the Soviet Union. He was
the one that could do it and represent our Government with those
nations. Finally, he brought the Vietnam war to a close, an unwinnable
war that we all were concerned about.
Madam Speaker, I therefore think it is appropriate that we have this
resolution, and I thank the gentleman for bringing it forward.
Mr. MICHEL. Madam Speaker, I move the previous question on the
resolution.
The resolution was agreed to.
A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.
____________________