A chapter from Wild Dog Circumnavigates The Lower Forty-Eight. 1992ish.
“The average guy is not on the golf course, the tennis court or the speed boat because he doesn’t have one.” – Richard M. Nixon suggesting the lifestyles of George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle may not play well with the public.
The day?
November.
The time?
California.
Dateline: Yorba Linda. Bright and sunny day in this suburb of Los Angeles. Early on a Monday. Plenty of free parking at The Richard M. Nixon Reclamation Project & Video Museum.
A big yellow school bus fills with yammering children. Some look like the sons and daughters of Vietnamese refugees. Some look like mall squirrels.
Their bus pulls out. I wave and one boy reaches his hand out a window. He flips me the bird.
He must have read some of my stuff.
We’re here because we didn’t get invited to the opening of The Ronald “Duke” Reagan Trickle-Downarama And Presidential Showroom. Which is happening now. Right where we were a few days ago.
No smoking.
The Pat Nixon exhibit is closed today for a face lift.
Cost money for us to get past the guards; This is the nation’s only presidential museum that is not funded by the taxpayers. Tickets are $4.95 each for adult, $1 for children under twelve. Under seven, you’re in free. The more likely you are to know the truth, the more money it takes to get inside.
The gift shop is surreal. I came within $9.50 of buying a “I AM NOT A CROOK” baseball cap. Best value? Probably the Richard M. Nixon Library & Birthplace frisbee for just $2.50. The only books visible anywhere are written by Nixon about Nixon and they’re for sale.
First thing – along with four (4) other people – we’re in an otherwise empty movie theater watching Ronald Reagan, in a supporting role, nominate Tricky Dick to head the Republican ticket in 1968. The Dick assures his party faithful that “the long dark night for America is about to end.” He even called for “a new dawn.”
I almost called for a medic.
In the Seventh grade, Nixon was already saying whatever it took to win. Debating then, the young Dick argued it was more economical to rent a house than to own one. Running for the class presidency in college, Nixon based his campaign on the then-controversial notion of allowing dances on campus. (You probably remember Kevin Bacon as Dick in the movie.)
A non-dancer himself, Nixon won the election and invented The Name Game. You know, “Chuck, Chuck, Bo Buck, A Lama Rama….”
In law school, RMN applied for employment with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Even had an interview. Never hearing back from the FBI, he became a lawyer. Which inevitably leads to a career in insurance sales or politics.
Newly married, Dick, swollen with hope, eschewed commission sales for the security of public service.
Nixon ran for office first in 1946. His ads asked: “Are you satisfied with present conditions? Can you buy meat, a new car, a refrigerator, clothes you need? Where are all those new houses you were promised?” Then, “A vote for Nixon is a vote for change.”
Nixon, pandering to the lowest fears of an ignorant electorate, branded his opponent, a very good woman, as a communist. He rode his red-baiting to the U.S. Senate in 1950. The Mercury Woody Station Wagon he drove then is here.
Another video monitor plays his famous Checkers speech. Hiding behind his Spaniel puppy, Nixon denies being crooked. “I never did it. Nobody saw me.” I kept expecting him to break into an impersonation of Rich Little.
Everything that went right during his presidency, Nixon takes credit for. He signed the legislation authorizing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), so he claims to be “the country’s first environmental president.” He takes credit for the first American on the moon. Nixon claims he gave the country “Peace With Honor” when he ended the Vietnamese war. Which he inherited from Kennedy and Johnson. An update suggests that the fall of the Soviet Union was begun when Nixon took Nikita Kruschev to task in the Kitchen Debate. He opened up China. We still don’t know what good that did.
Anything that went wrong, well, that was just “scurrilous rumors.” Here’s how the Library explains Nixon’s fall from power:
“Given the benefit of time, it is now clear that Watergate was an epic and bloody political battle fought for the highest stakes, with no holds barred.
“President Nixon’s reputation and ability to govern was the battlefield. Control of the direction the nation would take as it entered a third century was the prize.
“Nixon himself said he made inexcusable misjudgment during Watergate. But, what is equally clear is that his political opponents ruthlessly exploited those misjudgments as a way to further their own, purely political, goals.”
“Whoa,” I found myself saying. “Wait a minute here.”
“Who?,” I found myself asking. “Which opponent? What goals?”
I don’t get the sense RMN himself remembers accurately, not anymore.
Through the magic of interactive video, puzzled visitors can play twenty questions with the great man himself.
“Was the 1960 election stolen from you?,” I queried.
“My family thinks so,” Mr. Nixon’s image responded.
“Many of my supporters do,” Mr. Nixon’s image responded. “No doubt, there was hanky panky going on.”
