Richard Nixon The Life by John A. Farrell

Nixon would have been recorded as being a very great president had it not been for that fatal character flaw:  he did not believe in anything.
----James Farmer

Farrell's thoughtful book (Doubleday 2017) goes some distance in helping us to understand Nixon but we still have a long way to go.  I remember the chill that went through some of us when Bob Fass announced on Radio Unnameable on WBAI, his voice full of doom, that "Richard Nixon is now President of the United States."  What Nixon accomplished is mostly forgotten now, overshadowed by Watergate and the bombing of Cambodia.  But Nixon helped to enact tax reform, aid for education and food stamp increases.  He hiked Social Security payments, established the Occupation Safety and Health Act, doubled funding for the arts, signed Title IX banning gender discrimination in college, ended the draft, and helped lower the voting age to 18.  He even proposed healthcare reform similar to what passed under Obama and supported Daniel Moynihan's Family Assistance Plan, including a guaranteed annual income and subsidized daycare.  He supported affirmative action and desegregation.  One might even argue that Nixon was a true populist, unlike our current president, whose "populism" is mostly a smokescreen for helping the rich get richer.

Unfortunately Nixon was insecure and paranoid.  He violated the law by secretly warning South Vietnam before the 1968 election that they could get a better deal from him than they could from Johnson and continued to prolong the Vietnam war long after he and Kissinger ceased to believe that it could be won.  Just before I read Farrell's book I had seen Marcel Ophuls's 1976 documentary The Memory of Justice.  Ophuls's film is mostly about the Nuremburg trials but also looks into the parallels with the United States in Vietnam and France in Algeria, raising complicated legal and ethical questions.  Were the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, not considered war crimes because we were the winners?  Barbara Keating, whose husband was killed in Vietnam, says that if we lost the Vietnam war (we had not yet lost when she was interviewed) then Vietnam could try us for war crimes and that made no sense.  Well, why not?  And if Johnson, Westmoreland, Nixon, Kissinger are war criminals can anything be done about it?