18 September 2014updated 24 Jun 2021 12:58pm

Rethinking Nixon: forty years after Watergate, can the 37th president be rehabilitated?

It is now four decades since Richard Milhous Nixon resigned in disgrace as US president – he remains reappraised but not rehabilitated.

By John Bew

(Photo By Statesman and street fighter: Nixon showed foresight and skill in foreign policy but repeatedly resorted to sharp practices on the domestic front. Photo: Don Carl Steffen/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

In February 1969, the New Statesman was the nearly subject of an embarrassing incident in Anglo-American relations. Expecting a Democratic victory for Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon in the US presidential election of November 1968, Harold Wilson had appointed the former Labour MP and New Statesman editor John Freeman as the new British ambassador in Washington, DC. During his editorship from 1961 to 1965, Freeman and his paper had been brutally critical of Nixon, once describing him as a man of “no principle whatsoever except a willingness to sacrifice everything in the cause of Dick Nixon”.

As the newly elected president headed to London for a summit with Wilson – to discuss the future of Nato, the cold war and Vietnam – the prime minister’s choice of ambassador now looked as though it might backfire. Freeman’s previous condemnation of Nixon was well known to the president’s battle-hardened entourage, particularly his chief of staff, H R Haldeman, and the White House counsel, John Ehrlichman. Known collectively as the “Berlin Wall”, because of their German-sounding names and the fortress they built around the Oval Office, these two uncompromising loyalists had been with Nixon for more than a decade. They wore the scars of a succession of brutal campaigns in which critics and enemies had often been steamrolled by the Nixon machine. They would play leading roles in the Watergate saga.

Born on 9 January 1913, Richard Nixon was the son of a lemon-farming Quaker in small-town California. Two of his brothers died young from tuberculosis and nothing was handed to him as it was to the Kennedy boys. Although his memoirs breeze over the early years of his life, countless historians and psychologists have pored over personal and family details for evidence of trauma, or to try to find some clue to the insecurity, taste for conflict and paranoia that infected his whole career.

Saigon finally fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975, an outcome for which Nixon always blamed Congress, accusing it of blocking military aid to South Vietnam. Behind the scenes, however, he and Kissinger were aiming at nothing short of a revolution in US foreign policy – which had more impact on 20th-century international affairs than anything outside the two world wars. It was to be achieved by a “triangular diplomacy” that made the United States the power broker between the world’s two great communist powers; as Nixon described it, the aim was to assume the “position the British were in in the 19th century when among the great powers of Europe they’d always play the weaker against the stronger”.