[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 50 (Monday, May 2, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 2, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                       TRIBUTE TO PRESIDENT NIXON

  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I have not had an opportunity since former 
President Nixon died to be able to say anything about our relationship 
and what a great man I felt that he was. So I would like to take this 
time right now to say a few things about our former President, a man I 
knew well, who certainly befriended me at times in my life when it 
meant a great deal.
  Mr. President, I am profoundly saddened by the passing of former 
President Nixon, a great man and a great leader who I was proud to call 
my friend. Because of his life, our world was profoundly changed for 
the better; because of his death, the lives of those he has touched, 
including my own, have suffered a loss from which they will never fully 
recover.
  I wish, first of all, to express my deep condolences to Julie and 
David Eisenhower and Tricia and Ed Cox, as well as his grandchildren 
Jenny, Alex, Melanie, and Christopher. Because they knew President 
Nixon not only as a statesman but also as a loving father and 
grandfather, their loss is immeasurably greater. They are in our 
prayers.
  Like most Americans, I spent many hours over the last week reflecting 
on President Nixon's life, what he stood for, what he achieved, and 
what his life meant to our country and the world. It has been striking 
to see the way even those who fought President Nixon at every turn have 
now come to see his extraordinary qualities and abilities.
  I had the privilege of meeting one-on-one with President Nixon for 
about 2 hours in 1991, shortly after the confirmation of Justice Thomas 
to the Supreme Court. To be in the former President's presence was to 
understand that you were in the presence of a major historical figure, 
a man cut from a difficult cloth, a leader who had painted on larger 
canvas and who always worked in bold strokes and bright colors, not 
pale pastels.
  We discussed the Thomas hearings, world affairs, domestic issues, and 
politics, as well as the political scene in Utah. I can still see him 
in my mind's eye, slouching in a comfortable easy chair, feet propped 
up on a small ottoman, eyes intently engaged as I spoke, and mind 
totally focused as he explained his views. His mind was like a powerful 
searchlight, moving from one issue to another and illuminating the 
critical questions and decisions before our Nation.
  As have other Members of this body, I was privileged to be able to 
attend briefings by President Nixon, the most recent of which was 
earlier this year. He spoke without notes in almost lyrical terms. He 
was fond of saying that politics at its best was poetry not prose. 
Anyone who has heard him speak knows that he not only understood that 
insight but also lived by it.

  I have read all of President Nixon's nine books, and I was looking 
through some of them last night. One passage that I happened upon from 
the opening of his book ``Leaders'' captures the feelings friends and 
foes alike are experiencing as we mourn his death. He wrote:

       What makes the role of [great] leaders so compellingly 
     interesting is not just its drama, but its importance--its 
     impact. When the final curtain goes down on a play, the 
     members of the audience file out of the theater and go home 
     to resume their normal lives. When the curtain comes down on 
     a leader's career, the very lives of the audience have been 
     changed, and the course of history may have been profoundly 
     altered.

  With the passing of President Nixon, we know that a great leader has 
left the stage, that our national life and each of our lives has been 
forever changed by his leadership and policies.
  Biographers will summarize his achievements better than I can in this 
short statement. But I wish to register a note of dissent from the 
prevalent theme that President Nixon was a leader interested primarily 
in foreign rather than domestic policy.
  His administration was just as active domestically as it was 
internationally. He peacefully desegregated the schools of the South, 
created the Environmental Protection Agency, initiated the research 
programs to find a cure for cancer, fired the first volleys in the war 
against drugs, fought for welfare reform that would help keep families 
together, made strides toward restoring judicial restraint in the 
Supreme Court, and ended the military draft and established the all-
volunteer Armed Forces.
  He was an activist on civil rights. His program for Black Capitalism 
sought to foster economic growth in the cities. He opened the doors for 
employment of Hispanic-Americans into the Federal Government. Today, we 
call that economic empowerment.
  I would also add that he achieved something all his successors have 
failed to do: the last balanced budget was achieved under President 
Nixon in 1970.
  All of these were impressive feats, especially because both Houses of 
the Congress were controlled by the opposition party during all of his 
tenure. President Nixon faced gridlock. But he understood that gridlock 
was not an excuse for inaction. He fought for what he believed in 
despite the odds. Even if he sometimes had to accept compromises that 
achieved only part of his objectives, he advanced his cause, he made 
progress, he improved the lives of countless Americans.
  President Nixon's international achievements are well known. The 
rapprochement with China, detente with the Soviet Union, the honorable 
end of American involvement in Vietnam, the support of Israel in the 
1973 Mideast war, the tilting toward Pakistan in the 1971 Indo-Pak war, 
the return of Okinawa to Japan, and the restoration of close Franco-
American cooperation are only a sampling of the achievements of his 
years in office.
  If you look at a globe, there is hardly a country on earth that was 
not touched by his life, hardly a nation that did not in some way 
benefit from the choices he made as President.
  Unlike most Western leaders, he took the long view of history. His 
opening to China and his diplomacy with the Soviet Union contributed to 
historical processes of change that resulted in the democratic 
revolutions from 1989 through 1991.
  China's integration into the world community has unleased powerful 
forces that, I believe, will peacefully transform that totalitarian 
dictatorship within a decade.
  In his recent trips to Russia and other states of the former Soviet 
bloc, President Nixon was heralded as a leader who was a prime mover in 
creating the international conditions for internal change. The contacts 
between the West and the East--which President Nixon initiated--sewed 
the seeds of democratic ideas and values, which in turn bloomed in the 
revolutions all of us have celebrated in recent years.
  The former President combined the idealism of a Wilson with the hard-
headed calculation of a Metternich. He had a vision--preserving peace 
while promoting freedom--but he approached it with steely realism not 
with woolly headed naivete. He was pragmatic, but he did not compromise 
easily. In every crisis, he was determined to achieve every inch of 
what was achievable--to give history a firm push in the right 
direction. The world is immeasurable better off for his having done so.
  However, his greatest achievement was the restoration of the American 
spirit. He became President at the most difficult moment in 20th-
century American history. The Nation was bogged down in Vietnam, 
without a strategy for winning. The campuses were in rebellion. The 
inner cities were burning.
  He knew his principal mission as President had to be addressing the 
crisis in the American spirit. In his inaugural address in January 
1969, he said:

       We have endured a long night of the American spirit. But as 
     our eyes catch the dimness of the first rays of dawn, let us 
     not curse the remaining darkness. Let us gather the light.

  President Nixon healed the American spirit not by giving in to the 
demands of every protester or interest group but by providing 
leadership at home and abroad. He defined a positive agenda in domestic 
policy. And by exploiting the split in the Communist world, he put the 
United States in a pivotal position in world politics.

  Charles de Gaulle once wrote, ``Nothing great is done without great 
men, and these are great because they willed it.'' President Nixon was 
such a man. When you met him, his resolve and determination was 
palpible. You could sense it, almost feel it. It is what enabled him to 
navigate the turbulent times in which he governed.
  Unfortunately, the white heat that forges the steel in a leader's 
personality also creates flaws. The leader who commands extraordinary 
capabilities in politics or statecraft can also fall prey to 
extraordinary mistakes in other areas. His mistake in Watergate was not 
to root out those responsible but to ride out the political storm. In 
the heated partisan atmosphere of the early 1970's, this tragic error 
led to a constitutional crisis and ultimately to his resignation.
  President Nixon made mistakes in Watergate. He admitted to them. He 
paid the price for them. Most important, however, he moved on.
  In a sense, President Nixon taught us just as much about how we 
should live life as he did about how to change the world. Above all, he 
cared passionately about making a difference. In my meetings with him, 
I could feel that this motivation is what drove him, what gave him his 
life energy. Also, it gave him the strength to overcome the devastating 
defeat of leaving office in 1974.
  In the scores of articles I have read about President Nixon in recent 
days, the most insightful was a column by William Safire, one of his 
White House speechwriters. Its theme was that President Nixon was the 
man who defeated defeat. As Mr. Safire concluded, ``Defeat be not 
proud; in Richard Nixon, ruination met its master.''
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of this article 
appear after my remarks in the Record.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 1.)
  Mr. HATCH. All of us who admired Richard Nixon are rightly saddened. 
But We should take heart from the fact that President Nixon lived his 
life without compromise right up to the end. He traveled to Russia and 
Ukraine to press for policies to assist in the free-market and 
democratic transformations of those countries. He finished his 10th 
book, entitled Beyond Peace, that addresses the foreign and domestic 
issues we face after the cold war, as well as the philosophical 
questions the next century will present. He could not have lived more 
fully in the final days of his life.
  President Nixon had a philosophy about life and about how to live the 
twilight years. He expressed it with profound eloquence in the closing 
pages of his book, In the Arena. He wrote:

       I shall always remember my first visit to the Grand Canyon 
     sixty-five years ago. I did not believe any view could be 
     more spectacular than the one from the heights of the South 
     Rim until I hiked seven miles down to the river below and 
     look back up. It was only then that I fully appreciated the 
     true majesty of one of nature's seven wonders of the world. 
     Only when you have been in the depths can you truly 
     appreciate the heights.
       . . . Life is a rollercoaster, exhilarating on the way up 
     and breathtaking on the way down. If you take no risks, you 
     can enjoy a life that is comfortable, trouble-free, placid--
     and dull. Without risks you will suffer no defeats. But 
     without risks you will win no victories. You must never be 
     satisfied with success, and you should never be discouraged 
     by failure. Failure can be sad. But the greatest sadness is 
     not to try and fail, but to fail to try at all. Above all, 
     you should remember that defeat which does not destroy you 
     can strengthen you.
       In the end what matters is that you have always lived life 
     to the hilt. I have been on the highest mountains and in the 
     deepest valleys, but I have never lost sight of my 
     destination--a world in which peace and freedom can live 
     together. I have won some great victories and suffered some 
     devastating defeats. But win or lose, I feel fortunate to 
     have come to that time in life when I can finally enjoy what 
     my Quaker grandmother would have called ``peace at the 
     center.''

  In speaking of life in the twilight years, Richard Nixon was fond of 
quoting the poet Sophocles, who wrote 2,000 years ago, ``One must wait 
until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.'' In his case, 
we can look back and say that the day was indeed splendid.
  Mr. President, my friend Richard Nixon is at peace now. I will miss 
him. Our Nation will miss him as a senior statesman. But let us not 
despair at his passing but rather celebrate his life. More than 
virtually any postwar American leader, he made a difference.

                               Exhibit 1

                              Mr. Comeback

                          (By William Safire)

       Washington.--Late one night in the White House working on a 
     speech, Richard Nixon tried to encapsulate his more recent 
     predecessors in a single word or phrase: ``Truman--a fighter. 
     Eisenhower--a good man. Kennedy--charisma. Johnson--work. 
     Me--what?''
       I did not have a good answer that night in 1970; I do now. 
     Nixon--an inspiring resilience.
       In the 60's, he rose up after his political obituary and 
     employed his unique combination of grit, guile and greatness 
     to seize the moment that had been denied him before. He 
     expressed the secret of overcoming adversity in a private 
     note to Ted Kennedy after Chappaquiddick: ``A man's not 
     finished when he's defeated; he's finished when he quits.''
       Nixon liked ``the comeback theme'' because it identified 
     his return from defeat with the careers of Churchill and de 
     Gaulle. During another break in speech collaboration, he 
     recalled a meeting with de Gaulle at which Nixon aides took 
     notes. ``They got everything down of substance. But then de 
     Gaulle said, in a kind of an aside, `All the countries of 
     Europe lost the war, but only two were defeated.' They never 
     wrote that down. And that's the one thing I'll never forget 
     from that meeting.''
       He instructed those of us in the Five O'Clock Group to 
     ``get the word out'' about his 60's comeback, which made the 
     media all the more resistant to our image-making. But as 
     Henry Kissinger once said of a selling argument, ``it had the 
     added advantage of being true.''
       We had no idea how true it was, or how soon the essence of 
     Nixon's character would be put to the test again.
       From the pinnacle of success--the vote of confidence of a 
     49-state landslide--he plunged to the nadir of forced 
     resignation. After Watergate, he stood naked to his enemies, 
     who had become legion.
       Stripped of power, denuded of honor, deserted by supporters 
     rightly dismayed at the cover-up, he had no reservoir of 
     public trust and no visible means of defense. His only assets 
     were his mind, his pride and his hard-bought experience.
       I visited him at San Clemente during one of the most 
     depressing moments. It was April 29, 1975, the day the 
     capital of South Vietnam fell to the Communists, and he took 
     personal responsibility for the debacle. ``Terrible day for 
     freedom, and all my fault,'' he said, his phlebitis-inflamed 
     foot elevated on a cushion. ``The fall of Saigon is the 
     direct result of the way I messed up Watergate.''
       Then the second and even more difficult comeback began. He 
     thought, he traveled, he wrote. He took no fees for speeches 
     and ended the public expense of Secret Service protection. 
     Despite the glares of the guardians against his feared 
     ``rehabilitation,'' he slowly, over two decades, worked his 
     way back first to a tentative acceptability, then to grudging 
     respect, finally to an honored role as leader to opinion 
     leaders and adviser to Presidents.
       How did he resurrect himself? By learning a great lesson 
     and by living an example.
       The lesson was the need to rise above the us-against-them 
     ethos of the political gunfighter. ``Those who hate you don't 
     win,'' he told his White House staff on his way out, ``unless 
     you hate them--and then you destroy yourself.'' Nixon-haters 
     go to their graves hating him; he goes to his grave knowing 
     better than to hate them.
       The example he set in his subsequent full generation of 
     peace was that of a man who again refused to accept personal 
     defeat.
       Richard Nixon, in becoming America's greatest ex-President, 
     proved there is no political wrongdoing so scandalous that it 
     cannot be expiated by years of useful service; no humiliation 
     so painful that it cannot be overcome by decades of selfless 
     sagacity; no personal doldrums so deep that they cannot be 
     dispersed by a gutsy engagement with life.
       That's why, to sum up Nixon in a phrase, this former aid 
     would choose: an inspiring resilience. By resolving a second 
     time to earn his way to political redemption--and then by 
     doggedly, brilliantly triumphing in that second comeback--he 
     justified the faith of all those millions who ever believed 
     in him.
       Defeat be not proud; in Richard Nixon, ruination met its 
     master.

                          ____________________