Nixonmaxxing: I Told You So

Many of us have been Nixonmaxxing for more than 50 years. I told you so.

For more than 50 years the political establishment, the liberal media, the academic historians, and far too many weak-kneed, lily-livered, white wine swilling country club Republicans have repeated the same dishonest caricature of Richard Nixon.

They told Americans that Nixon was a sinister, paranoid, power hungry president whose resignation proved the righteousness of the Washington, D.C. establishment. They were wrong. They reduced one of the most consequential presidents of the 20th century to a third-rate hotel burglary he neither planned nor authorized. They ignored his enormous accomplishments, concealed the misconduct of his enemies, and conveniently forgot the cowardice of the Republican leaders who abandoned him when he needed them most.

Now, half a century later, a new generation is discovering the truth. Due to the deft marketing skills of two young officials at the Nixon Foundation, James Byron, the President and CEO of the Nixon Foundation, and Chris Barber, their marketing director—a whole new generation of young people is being introduced to Richard Nixon, the truth about Watergate, and his exceptional record as President.

This is an endeavor in which I have been engaged for over a decade—having written two books, Nixon’s Secrets: The Rise, Fall, and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the Pardon, as well as Tricky Dick: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Richard M. Nixon.

This reappraisal of our 37th President was kicked off by remarks at the Nixon Presidential Library by Vice President JD Vance who said, “And by the way, if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people — the same institutions — tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration. There is a parallel.”

Because there was no internet in 1974, Nixon faced a monolithically hostile media. Unlike Trump, there was no internet from which he could launch a defense and counterattack. It’s also not surprising that Nixon himself was dazed and confused by the events leading up to and culminating in the Watergate break-in. In fact, White House Counsel John Dean, the man who planned, pushed, and covered up the Watergate break-in, lied to Nixon about the White House’s knowledge of Watergate for nineteen months and went so far as to exclude the transcripts of his most damning conversations with Nixon from his book, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew, which was supposed to be the definitive transcription of all of the Nixon White House recordings. Nixon-hating historian Stanley I. Kutler went so far as to rearrange the order of Dean’s taped conversations with Nixon in an effort to distort Dean’s true role, as reported by The New York Times.

Watergate prosecutors knew there were glaring inconsistencies between Dean’s testimony to the FBI, the Senate Watergate Committee, and his own book, Blind Ambition. Newsmax’s James Rosen has reported on declassified documents that prove the CIA knew in advance about the Watergate break-in, that at least four of the Watergate burglars had ties to the agency, and that Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman knew this and did nothing.

Senate Watergate Committee Chairman Sam Ervin prohibited Senator Howard Baker and his counsel, later Senator Fred Thompson, from publishing this in the committee’s Minority Report.

There is probably no better or more succinct summary of Nixon’s rise and fall than that by his former speechwriter, Patrick J. Buchanan.

They call this new phenomenon on social media “Nixonmaxxing.” Through the efforts of the Nixon Foundation, utilizing social media videos, archival speeches, photographs, interviews, campaign memorabilia, and a growing fascination with Nixon’s unmistakable style, young conservatives are reconsidering the man they were taught to despise. They see a president who was tough, intelligent, disciplined, patriotic, and willing to challenge the permanent political class. They see a man who rose from poverty through determination and hard work, endured repeated political defeats, and returned each time stronger than before. They see a leader who understood the forgotten Americans long before the consultants in Washington discovered that they existed.

To those now experiencing this Nixon awakening, I have only one thing to say:

I told you so. I was there. I worked for Richard Nixon. I knew the man behind the grotesque media caricature, and he was nothing like the monster portrayed by the professional Nixon haters. Richard Nixon was a fundamentally good and decent man. He loved his wife, Pat. He loved his daughters. He loved his country. He was generous to friends, loyal to those who served him, and deeply moved by the struggles of ordinary Americans because he had lived those struggles himself.

Nixon was not born into wealth or privilege. There was no family fortune waiting for him, no elite political dynasty clearing his path, and no fashionable social circle embracing his ambitions. He came from Yorba Linda, California and grew up in a family of modest means, worked in his parents’ grocery store, attended Whittier College, and earned his place at Duke University School of Law. He served in the United States Navy during World War II and built his career through intelligence, perseverance, and a capacity for work that astonished even those closest to him.

He was not polished in the manner preferred by the Georgetown cocktail circuit. He did not possess the physical grace or inherited wealth of John F. Kennedy, who enjoyed a fawning press corps.

Author Theodore H. White, who wrote the famous Making of the Presidents series of books, starting in 1960, was actually baffled why the Nixon staff would object to his riding the Nixon campaign plane as a reporter while wearing a Kennedy For President button.

Eastern and media establishment hostility toward Nixon began with his successful effort as a House member to correctly identify one of Franklin Roosevelt’s key aides Alger Hiss as a Russian communist spy. That the grocer’s son from a hardscrabble background exposed the urbane Harvard educated Hiss. When the Soviet Union fell, publicly released KGB documents confirmed that Hiss was indeed a Russian communist spy. With Nixon’s hard-hitting 1950 Senate race against left-leaning Hollywood actress and Congresswoman Hellen Gahagan Douglas, who Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Caro correctly identified as a mistress of Lyndon Johnson, both won Nixon the long-term enmity of the American left.

The now-defunct New York Herald Tribune ran a multi-part series on what they believed was the theft of the 1960 election in Nixon’s razor-thin loss to John Kennedy. That series cannot be found online, but I was able to locate it and referenced it heavily in my two books on Nixon. Both outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower and former Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the 1944 and 1948 Republican nominee for president, urged Nixon to challenge the results, but Nixon instinctively knew that not only would he go down in history as a sore loser, but the country could not go through the spectacle of such a dispute, which would telegraph weakness to America’s enemies.

Against his better instincts, Nixon launched a 1962 campaign for governor of California in a bid to hold a political base for another bid at the presidency in 1964. When the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted, weeks before the 1962 election, Nixon’s surging campaign in the Golden State was stymied, and he lost. Nixon had no way of knowing that JFK would be assassinated a little more than a year later. Nixon’s 1962 loss kept him off the 1964 ticket when the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, was certain to lose to Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson.

Then, a miraculous thing happened. The combination of the assassination of John Kennedy, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, the raging war in Vietnam, and the turmoil in America’s cities and on her campuses parted the seas for the most remarkable political comeback in American history, with the exception of Trump’s comeback in 2024.

Nixon was awkward because he was human. He was cautious because he had been attacked. He was suspicious because many of the people surrounding him really were conspiring against him. History has proved that his enemies were not imaginary. They occupied newsrooms, congressional offices, government agencies, universities, and even senior positions in both parties.

Today’s young conservatives recognize the pattern because they have watched the same machinery deployed against President Donald Trump. They have seen intelligence officials manipulate information, judges and prosecutors twist laws, bureaucrats leak classified material, congressional investigators conduct partisan inquisitions, and media organizations publish accusations first and corrections never. What was done to Nixon with mimeograph machines, anonymous sources, secret grand juries, and television networks has been done to Trump with social media censorship, weaponized investigations, surveillance, lawfare, and twenty-four-hour cable propaganda. The technology has changed. The establishment has not.

Richard Nixon’s presidency was far more successful than his critics will ever admit. He inherited the Vietnam War from Lyndon Johnson and ultimately brought American troops home. He ended the military draft and replaced it with an all-volunteer force. He established the eighteen-year-old vote. He pursued détente with the Soviet Union while negotiating historic arms limitations from a position of strength. His opening to China transformed global diplomacy and reshaped the balance of power for generations.

The accusation that Nixon is responsible for the danger of today’s China misses the point that China was a dirt-poor, backward agrarian society, where few had indoor plumbing and rural areas had no electricity. Neither the Chinese economy nor its military was formidable. It was not until some twenty years later, when President Bill Clinton gave China “Most Favored Nation” trading status, later extended by President George W. Bush, that China became the dangerous superpower that it is today. The 37th President had no way to foresee this disastrous decision.

Nixon unilaterally saved Israel from annihilation during the Yom Kippur War, authorizing the massive resupply operation over the objections of his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, and his entire national security apparatus, as well as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which helped save the Jewish state and demonstrated that American friendship meant something when the moment of danger arrived. Israel’s back was against the sea when its vaunted security apparatus failed to foresee the surprise attack by Egypt and Syria.

At home Nixon spoke for the Silent Majority; the working men and women who obeyed the law, paid their taxes, raised their families, served their country, and received nothing but contempt from the radical left. He understood that Americans were exhausted by riots, political violence, campus chaos, and the cultural arrogance of elites who considered patriotism unsophisticated. His campaigns built a durable political coalition by appealing to voters abandoned by the Democratic Party. That coalition would later help elect Ronald Reagan and, decades afterward, Donald Trump.

Nixon also signed landmark environmental legislation, established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), expanded protections for endangered species, and supported significant conservation measures. He desegregated the public schools without bloodshed or uproar. His administration increased federal support for historically Black colleges and universities. Nixon appointed more African Americans to federal office than John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson combined. He signed Title IX, which transformed educational opportunities for women. These accomplishments do not fit the cartoon version of Nixon, which is precisely why they are so often omitted.

The architects of Nixon’s destruction could not defeat his record, so they destroyed his presidency. Watergate was a sloppy burglary committed by men exercising astonishingly poor judgment. Richard Nixon did not order the break-in at Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters. He did not know about it in advance. When the scandal erupted, however, he made the catastrophic mistake of trusting men who were more interested in protecting themselves than protecting the president. The investigation metastasized into a national crusade in which normal standards of fairness were discarded, and every institution in Washington joined the hunt. Geoff Shepard has documented how the trial and appeal were rigged against the Watergate burglars by Judge John Sirica, who met illegally ex parte with the Watergate prosecutors, in his epic book, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President.

Nixon’s enemies were not searching merely for the truth about a burglary. They wanted his head on a spike. The media smelled blood. Congressional Democrats saw an opportunity to reverse the verdict of the 1972 election, in which Nixon had won 49 states and one of the greatest landslides in American history.

The consequences were disastrous. Nixon’s fall demoralized Republicans, weakened the presidency, encouraged hostile powers, and produced years of instability. Nixon was essentially forced to choose House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, a deeply compromised member of the Warren Commission as his Vice President after Vice President Spiro T. Agnew was forced to resign in a venal corruption scandal. Ford actually made a spirited run at election in 1976, falling short largely because his liberal Republican advisors had him appear and pumped late resources into New York and Pennsylvania instead of Missouri and Texas—both of which he narrowly lost along with the presidency.

The nation had to endure the feckless administration of Jimmy Carter, the humiliation of Americans held hostage in Iran, Soviet expansion, economic stagnation, inflation, and a collapse of confidence at home.

There is a direct line from the surrender of Richard Nixon to the deep state attacks on Donald Trump. The forces that destroyed Nixon expected Trump to respond as Nixon had responded. They expected him to accept the judgment of hostile institutions, retreat for the supposed good of the country, and allow Washington, D.C. to return to business as usual. They misunderstood Donald Trump. He had studied the lesson of Nixon and reached the correct conclusion.

Never resign. Never surrender. Never believe that appeasing your enemies will cause them to treat you better. Nixon believed that resigning would spare the country a prolonged constitutional crisis. It was an act of personal sacrifice by a man who placed the nation above his own power. His enemies interpreted that sacrifice as an admission of every accusation they had made against him. They spent the next five decades writing the history books, producing the movies, teaching the college courses, and constructing a mythology in which they were the heroes and Nixon was the villain.

But history has a long memory, and truth has an inconvenient habit of surviving. Young Americans now watching Nixon speak are discovering a leader of extraordinary depth. They hear his warnings about political violence, radical extremists, media power, bureaucratic arrogance, cultural decline, and the dangers of a ruling class disconnected from ordinary citizens. They see his command of foreign policy and compare it with the shallow slogans offered by modern politicians. They see his resilience after defeat, his discipline under pressure, and his refusal to apologize for loving America.

They also recognize something the old establishment historians never understood. Nixon was interesting. He was complicated. He was brilliant. He was funny in a dry and often self-deprecating way. He possessed an extraordinary understanding of human nature, international strategy, and political power. He could discuss history with scholars, negotiate with world leaders, inspire enormous crowds, and speak directly to working Americans who felt invisible to the governing class.

The Nixonmaxxing phenomenon may involve humorous videos, fashionable merchandise, and the ironic language of the internet, but beneath the entertainment lies something serious. A generation that distrusts the media, the intelligence community, the permanent bureaucracy, and the political establishment is examining Nixon without first seeking permission from the gatekeepers who destroyed him.

Naturally, the surviving Watergate industry is horrified. The prosecutors, informants, media personalities, academics, and professional Nixon critics who built careers on the accepted narrative cannot tolerate reconsideration. Their authority depends upon Americans never asking whether the story was incomplete, whether punishment was selectively imposed, whether government agencies manipulated events, or whether Nixon’s removal served interests far more powerful than the burglars arrested inside the Watergate complex.

The guardians of the official story call this revisionism. I call it what it is: the truth. Historical understanding does not require pretending that Richard Nixon never made mistakes. He made serious mistakes, as every president does. He trusted the wrong people. He allowed himself to become isolated. He permitted his justified anger toward his enemies to cloud his political judgment. Most importantly, he failed to recognize soon enough that the institutions surrounding the presidency were not neutral and that many Republicans would abandon him the moment their own positions appeared threatened.

None of those mistakes erase his achievements, his patriotism, or his essential decency. They do not justify the selective prosecution, partisan spectacle, and institutional manipulation used to drive him from office.

At last, he may be receiving vindication from a generation that was not alive during Watergate and therefore has no emotional investment in the mythology. These young people are not obligated to defend the reputations of Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, or John Dean. They can examine Nixon’s entire life and presidency with fresh eyes. Strangely enough, it was President Bill Clinton who said at Nixon’s funeral, “May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”

When they do, they discover what some of us have said all along. Richard Nixon was a great American. He was a formidable president. He was a statesman of rare strategic vision. He was a good man with human flaws who was targeted by enemies more ruthless than he understood them to be at the time, and was abandoned by allies far less honorable than he deserved.

So, to every young conservative posting Nixon videos, wearing Nixon hats, studying his speeches, and challenging the establishment’s official history, welcome to the arena. Many of us have been Nixonmaxxing for more than 50 years. I told you so.