[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 55 (Monday, May 9, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 9, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                 TRIBUTE TO PRESIDENT RICHARD M. NIXON

  Mr. THURMOND. Mr. President, on January 9, 1913, I was living in 
rural Edgefield, SC, and was a month into my 11th year. It was on that 
day, in the rural southern California agricultural town of Yorba Linda, 
that Richard Milhous Nixon was born. Little did anyone know that this 
son of devout Quakers, born in a humble mail order home, would grow up 
to become the 37th President of the United States of America and one of 
the most important men of the 20th century.
  Americans love to talk about self-made men, but few realize that 
Richard Nixon was one such person. He was raised by God-fearing people 
of moderate means who never enjoyed great financial success in their 
lives. His parents worked hard and were passionately dedicated to their 
family, instilling strong values and qualities in all their children--
values and qualities that would carry one of their sons to the highest 
office of the land.
  From his earliest days, Richard Nixon was not someone who was afraid 
of a challenge or of work. As a student, he distinguished himself at 
Whittier College by earning high marks, taking part in a number of 
campus activities, including student government and football, and 
impressing his professors as a serious young man with a keen mind. His 
determination and drive helped him through long nights of grueling 
study at Duke University's School of Law, where he had to maintain a 
high-grade average in order to keep the meager scholarship that allowed 
him to attend that school. His service in the House and Senate were 
also characterized by hard work. He and his staff often worked late 
into the night, answering constituent mail or carefully preparing for 
his hearings on communism that were catching the Nation's attention. 
Throughout his life, he never failed to adhere to the strong work ethic 
that Hanna and Frank Nixon imparted to their son.
  Richard Nixon was a man who possessed a love for his Nation that 
carried him into a lifetime of public service. At the outset of World 
War II, he was recruited to serve as an attorney in the Office of 
Emergency Management in Washington, DC. As a Quaker and a civil servant 
with a skill critical to war efforts, he could have been exempted from 
military duty; however, his patriotic streak motivated him to volunteer 
for service in the Navy. It was this same dedication and patriotism 
that caused him to heed the urgings of his fellow Californians and run 
for the U.S. House of Representatives 1n 1946. Nixon's successes in 
that race and in the Congress sparked what became one of the most 
important and significant political careers in the history of the 
United States.
  I subsequent years, Richard Nixon would serve in the U.S. Senate, as 
Vice President, and as President. To each of these positions he brought 
an insightful mind, unbridled energy, and a clear vision of the role of 
the United States in the world.
  In 1968, Richard Nixon reentered the political arena, this time as a 
Presidential candidate. This race was significant for several reasons. 
First, after two disappointing political setbacks earlier in the 
decade, Nixon's decision to seek the Presidency was another example of 
his perseverance and his uncanny ability to overcome personal 
challenges and setbacks. Second, it was the beginning of a new era in 
Presidential politics. Richard Nixon was an uncanny politician with a 
sense about him that has been matched by few others.
  Nixon was the first to realize the importance of the South in a 
national election. He knew that the key to winning the White House in 
1968 was to capture that region, which had traditionally been a 
stronghold of the Democratic Party, and he called upon me for my 
assistance at the Republican Convention and for the campaign. I 
campaigned very hard for Nixon throughout the Southeast that year, and 
for the first time in close to 100 years the South cast their votes for 
a Republican Presidential candidate.

  Richard Nixon was undoubtedly one of the most intelligent Presidents 
with whom I ever served, as well as one of the most effective. We have 
all heralded his many significant accomplishments in foreign relations, 
a field he loved and at which he excelled. His grasp of ``realpolitik'' 
allowed him to deal with foreign leaders without being intimidated or 
compromising the strength and security of the United States. I doubt if 
anyone else could have started his career as investigating communism 
and ended it by opening China to the West and ushering in a new era in 
United States-Soviet Union relations. Furthermore, he brokered a peace 
with Vietnam that ended an unpopular war in an honorable manner; and I 
believe that had he stayed in office, Saigon might not have fallen into 
the hands of the North Vietnamese. Nixon's experience as a statesman 
was so valuable, he continued to contribute to the debate on foreign 
policy literally until the end of his life. Each of his successors 
sought his counsel on international matters and there was an 
enthusiastic audience for Nixon's extensive writings regarding world 
affairs.
  What is often overlooked is the strong role he took as a domestic 
leader. Perhaps it was his humble origins, or having lived during the 
Depression that President Nixon was extremely aggressive in fighting 
inflation and even introduced wage and price controls at one point. He 
took a very strong role in desegregation an affirmative action matters; 
and he became the Nation's first environmental President when he 
created the Environmental Protection Agency and the Endangered Species 
Act. Richard Nixon assumed the Presidency at one of the most fractious 
eras in our Nation's history, but under his firm leadership, America 
became a calmer place and the world became a little less dangerous.
  As I watched the television coverage of President Nixon's casket 
being loaded aboard his old Air Force One, I was struck by the image of 
a young Marine in the Honor Guard. He was the epitome of Marine Corps 
``spit and polish,'' standing rigidly at attention with his rifle at 
``present arms''; there was, however, a noticeable exception to his 
military appearance--he had a tear streaking down the left side of his 
face. Perhaps this marine was caught up in the emotion of an 
overwhelming and somber event, but I doubt it. Funeral details are 
common duty for honor guards. I believe his tear was caused by grief. 
Despite the fact that this young man was probably not even alive when 
Richard Nixon was President, I think he realized that we had lost one 
of history's most important figures and one of this Nation's greatest 
leaders; and he, like the rest of us, was deeply saddened by this 
realization.
  Mr. President, it is almost impossible to sum up the life of Richard 
Nixon in just a few minutes here on the Senate floor. Historians will 
spend years studying and interpreting this very complex and gifted man, 
and they will write volumes sharing with us their discoveries. Suffice 
it to say, Richard Nixon is one of the few figures in American history 
who has truly gained immortality. His contributions transcended 
generations and have forever changed the international community, even 
laying the groundwork for the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union.
  I ask unanimous consent that a recent article written by Nixon 
biographer and British Member of Parliament Mr. Jonathan Aitken be 
included in the Record following my remarks. Mr. Aitken interviewed me 
for his excellent book, ``Nixon: a Life,'' and I believe the tribute he 
wrote for Human Events does a very good job of summarizing President 
Nixon's life and giving us some insight into what made him such an 
amazing man.
  Mr. President, I know that President Nixon was proud of his heritage 
and that all he accomplished in his life was the result of grit, 
determination, hard work, and intelligence. I also know that the one 
thing he truly loved in this world was his family. He came from a 
tightly knit family and he idolized his mother. As a husband and 
father, he carried on the tradition of closeness and he was deeply 
committed to his devoted and lovely wife, Pat, and their two beautiful 
daughters, Tricia and Julie. It seems only appropriate that Richard 
Nixon will spend eternity next to his wife in the place where he 
learned his most important lessons--the site of his parents' home.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                    [From Human Events, May 6, 1994]

                     A Tribute to Nixon (1913-1994)

                          (By Jonathan Aitken)

       Nixon the man was even more intriguing than Nixon the 
     statesman. ``Complex'' was the adjective most used by 
     journalists to described his multi-faceted personality, not 
     least because he camouflaged that most elusive of characters, 
     the real Nixon, behind a battle-scared carapace, which he 
     himself described as ``an over-developed wall of privacy.'' 
     Surprisingly few people even got behind this wall. I think I 
     may have been one of them, so I have concentrated this 
     tribute on the lesser-known private qualities that lay behind 
     this extraordinary public figure.
       To begin near the end: Passing through London last month, 
     aged 81, on the outward leg of his ninth visit to Moscow. 
     Nixon telephoned unexpectedly on the morning of Saturday, 
     March 5, and asked if I would like to come with him to the 
     theater. The invitation, like his choice of show, and his 
     somewhat disorganized arrangements for the evening seemed out 
     of character but we duly set off for the Shaftesbury Theatre 
     like a couple of tourists and settled unrecognized into our 
     seats to see the revival of Rogers and Hammerstein's 
     ``Carousel.'' As the musical got underway it became apparent 
     that Nixon was word perfect in many of the lines and most of 
     the songs. As the story reached its climax, he seemed to be 
     in the grip of powerful emotions, especially during the 
     famous number ``You'll Never Walk Alone'' when tears started 
     to trickle down his cheeks.
       As we walked away from the theater Nixon felt it necessary 
     to provide an explanation for the display of his feelings. He 
     said that ``Carousel'' had been the favorite musical of his 
     late wife Pat; that they had seen it many times together; and 
     that he had chosen ``You'll Never Walk Alone'' as the music 
     for her funeral last year.
       After a pause he added that the show's lead male character, 
     Billy Bigelow, reminded him of Harold, his elder brother who 
     had died of tuberculosis during Nixon's childhood. In two 
     days' time, he continued, it would be March 7, the 
     anniversary of Harold's death. That date was also his 
     mother's birthday, but she could never bear to celebrate it 
     again. After another pause he said that before Harold had 
     died, the family had often gone out for birthday picnics like 
     the one in ``Carousel.''
       For a man who normally shunned personalized small talk, 
     Nixon's urge to share these poignant memories was a revealing 
     reminder that his deep family roots and Quaker upbringing 
     were central to his odyssey--which is surely the closest 
     20th-Century approximation to the ``log cabin to White 
     House'' legend.
       Nixon was born on Jan. 9, 1913, in a rustic Californian 
     clapboard cottage, which had no electricity, running water, 
     wireless, telephone or inside privy. He had a hardscrabble 
     childhood, one step away from poverty, with his formative 
     years made difficult by a domineering father and sad by the 
     deaths of two of his brothers, Arthur and Harold. Their 
     medical bills created many financial hardships for the 
     family. One painful consequence of these came when the young 
     Nixon won a scholarship to Harvard University and had to turn 
     it down because his parents could not afford the associated 
     travel and accommodation costs. Nixon overcame these early 
     sorrows and disappointments with the help of two strong 
     pillars of the Milhous matriarchy--his grandmother Almira and 
     his mother Hannah.
       Grandmother Almira Milhous was a poet and a teacher. She 
     was the first to recognize that the young Richard was a 
     gifted child and the first to say, ``That boy will one day be 
     a leader.'' She disciplined him into the habits of 
     intellectual curiosity, iron application and deep reading of 
     history that stayed with him for the whole of his life.
       Still more important was the influence of his mother 
     Hannah. Long before her son became famous, she was known in 
     her local community of Whittier as ``A Quaker Saint.'' She 
     instilled into him the belief that equality between races and 
     peacemaking between nations were Christ's most important 
     teachings. In return he loved her deeply, but strangely. Time 
     and again in my many hours of biographer's conversations with 
     Nixon he spoke movingly about the great debt he owed to his 
     mother for the inspiration and idealism she gave him 
     throughout his career, but on one occasion he added the 
     unexpected information that she had never kissed him.
       When I expressed surprise, Nixon grew quite angry, saying 
     that my comment might have come from ``one of those rather 
     pathetic Freudian psychiatrists'' and added, ``My mother 
     could communicate far more than others could with a lot of 
     sloppy talk and even more sloppy kissing and hugging. I can 
     never remember her saying to any of us `I love you'--she 
     didn't have to!''
       Although suppressed emotion may have been part of the Nixon 
     heritage, this did not mean that he was an unfeeling or 
     unemotional man. Far from it. He put his passion into his 
     politics and it powered him to early stardom. Unknown 
     freshman congressman at 33. Re-elected unopposed at 35. 
     National celebrity as a result of the Hiss case at 35. 
     Senator at 37. Vice President 11 days after his 40th 
     birthday. This meteoric ascent owed far more to a zealous 
     mastery of complex issues and a burning intensity to fight 
     the evils of communism than it did to political opportunism. 
     There was plenty of that too, but as he always acknowledged, 
     Nixon would never have risen to the office one heartbeat away 
     from the presidency had it not been for the granite support 
     of his wife Pat, who in many ways was the tougher partner of 
     the marriage.
       It was she who persuaded him to put their life savings into 
     what at the time seemed the reckless gamble of running for 
     Congress in 1946 against safe Democratic incumbent Rep. Jerry 
     Voorhis. It was she who nurtured his health through a stress-
     related breakdown in 1951. It was she who pulled him through 
     the Fund crisis, literally dragging him in front of the 
     television cameras seconds before the ``Checkers speech'' 
     broadcast. Above all, it was she who gave him the contented 
     family life with two daughters that created the happier 
     hinterland of his hidden persona--a kind, generous and loving 
     father and grandfather.
       Yet for all his private virtues, it is as a public man that 
     Nixon would wish to be judged. Even here the two sides of his 
     existence were more connected than has been recognized. 
     During his wilderness years period between 1960-68, Nixon 
     told his intimate friends that the real reason he wanted the 
     presidency was to honor his mother's ideals. It was a promise 
     he did much to keep. For Nixon was the President who ended 
     U.S. involvement in Vietnam (while giving South Vietnam a 
     chance at survival), who terminated the draft, who saved 
     Israel from possible annihilation, and who initiated the 
     process of detente with the Soviet Union with a series of 
     ground-breaking disarmament agreements. Through wily 
     diplomacy, moreover, he managed to help put a check on Soviet 
     aggression by bringing China back into the family of nations.
       Nixon also undoubtedly had a dark side to his character. In 
     his private musings, now embarrassingly preserved on the 
     White House tapes, he could be vindictive and paranoid, 
     particularly when talking about his liberal tormentors in 
     Congress and the media.
       As for Watergate it was a sordid and shameful mess, but 
     Nixon's alleged villainy in it has been much exaggerated. It 
     is true that he covered up for his closest friends and aides 
     with mendacious maneuvers that were political folly of a high 
     order. Yet contrary to the media's hysterical claims at 
     the time, he had nothing whatever to do with the break-in; 
     he was unaware of the enemies list; there never were any 
     mission tapes and he destroyed no evidence. Even the 
     notorious ``expletives deleted'' contained none of the 
     familiar four- or six-letter sexual swear words. What 
     Nixon actually excised were a mass of hells, damns, craps 
     for Chrissakes and other puerile examples of Sunday school 
     swearing. He explained to an aide that he could not 
     publish the uncensored transcripts (which would have been 
     far less damaging) because his mother ``would turn in her 
     grave'' if such epithets saw the light of day.
       So Watergate, like Nixon, deserves reevaluation. It was a 
     bad episode in a great career and it has made Nixon the most 
     controversial and complicated character ever to sit in the 
     White House. If he had died, as he so nearly did soon after 
     his resignation, his obituary notices would have been a 
     undiluted chorus of vilification. They will read differently 
     now because the last 20 years of his life were perhaps the 
     most remarkable of all in terms of the development of his 
     character. Transforming himself from exiled pariah to honored 
     elder statesman was nothing less than a miracle of political 
     resurrection. How did he do it?
       I came to know him well during his two decades of 
     rehabilitation or ``the Fighting Back years'' as he sometimes 
     liked to call them. Running for Ex-President was a good label 
     to describe his energetic globe trotting, writing and speech-
     making, but the reality was far more profound. The secret of 
     his resilience was that he had developed his own new credo. 
     It owed something to the religious counselors whom he saw 
     regularly, such as Dr. Billy Graham and the Rev. Norman 
     Vincent Peale, but was more a spiritual and philosophical 
     concoction of his own.
       It included several quintessential Nixonian ingredients, 
     among them tenacity, reflective reading and the desire to 
     perform useful public service by influencing great events. 
     But there were other more unexpected elements, such as 
     magnanimity. For he had put his past disappointments firmly 
     behind him, forgiven his enemies (most of them!); and dropped 
     recrimination from his mind. ``Remember the story of Lot's 
     wife. Never look back,'' was one of his favorite lines, and 
     he meant it.
       Instead, he worked unremittingly to influence the future. 
     During his pensionable years, he wrote eight best-selling 
     books on foreign policy and dispatched a steady flow of 
     influential private memoranda to Presidents Carter, Reagan, 
     Bush and Clinton. He launched his presidential library and a 
     new Nixon Center for Peace and International relations. He 
     continued to travel and speak widely, winning increasing 
     acclaim as America's leading foreign policy expert. Longevity 
     brought him the serenity and fulfillment that had for so long 
     eluded him.
       By chance, the last audience he addressed was a gathering 
     in my house on March 17. The still-ambitious octogenarian was 
     keen to convey his latest impressions of the situation in 
     Russia to a group of ministers, defense chiefs, intelligence 
     experts, editors and parliamentarians. He prepared for the 
     occasion with his usual intensity and delivered a tour de 
     force of a speech without a note. Including question time, he 
     was on his feet for nearly 90 minutes. The details of his 
     knowledge, the lucidity of his presentation and the incisive 
     brilliance of his judgments, dazzled all of us present.
       Nixon enjoyed his evening. As he got into his car he said 
     to me, ``Went well, didn't it? Clever group. But I've spoken 
     in your house eight times in 14 years. I think that will have 
     to be the last one.''
       I said I hoped that he might come back one more time. 
     ``Nine speeches, eh? Nine lives? Who knows?'' he mused. 
     ``Anyway keep on fighting!'' and with that characteristic 
     salutation he waved and was gone. We shall not look upon his 
     like again.

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