Richard Nixon’s new GOP fans can’t brush off his stained legacy

Richard Nixon, who never stopped trying to rehabilitate his reputation, would be delighted to know his defenders have had some posthumous success in his behalf. The Justice Department is looking into whether the special prosecutor who investigated Nixon for Watergate was guilty of misconduct, The Wall Street Journal reported last week — part of a Nixon revival among elements of the New Right.

For populists, RN has appeal as an exemplar of a right-of-center politics not beholden to conservative policy commitments; as a counter-cultural rebuke to the left’s radicalism; as a fierce, not to say scruple-less, partisan fighter; and as a hate-figure for the Northeastern establishment and liberal press.

There’s no doubt that Nixon deserves better than the simplistic dismissal of him based on his ignominious exit from the White House. He was a canny and sophisticated political survivor who loomed incredibly large on the mid-20th century national scene.

In electoral terms, he won more than he lost, including a massive re-election victory in 1972 based on the Silent Majority, despite his lack of charisma or charm. He was deeply knowledgeable about foreign affairs and crafted a supple foreign policy with Henry Kissinger , his immensely talented secretary of state.

If you could choose one high-level politician from the last 60 years to help you figure out how to think and maneuver your way out of a political fix, Nixon just might be your guy. All that said, his record is checkered at best — especially from a conservative perspective.

His economic stewardship was a disaster: He inherited a turbulent situation, with the breakdown of the Bretton-Woods system and elevated inflation, but he bears his share of blame for the stagflation of the 1970s.

Get opinions and commentary from our columnists Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. His wage and price controls were perhaps the dumbest economic imposition of the post-World War II era.

They artificially suppressed prices for a time, but created shortages — and when they were lifted, inflation came back with a vengeance. Nixon, in effect, ran the opposite of DOGE, layering on major new bureaucracies on top of an already-growing executive branch.

The Nixon administration gave us the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, among other expansions of the administrative state.

He increased regulation, pursued an unduly expansive monetary policy, did little to reduce high tax rates and imposed new tariffs. The reforms that would put the economy on a sounder footing, creating the predicate for the low-inflation growth of the 1980s and 1990s, had to await Jimmy Carter and then, far more so, Ronald Reagan.

If Nixon was a cultural warrior, especially on issues of law and order, his expansion of affirmative action was a further step toward what we now call DEI. Despite his tough-minded anti-communism early in his career, his policy of peace with honor in Vietnam produced neither.

Nixon wanted détente with the Soviet Union, an accommodationist approach that Reagan reversed to great effect. His opening to China was a clever Cold War stratagem , although China’s full entry into the international system would have deleterious consequences decades later.

As for Watergate, it’s certainly true that Nixon had enemies — but so did Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump in his first term. That Nixon was the only one blown out of office is a testament to his culpability and his grotesque mishandling of his predicament.

It has to weigh heavily against him that his scandal and resignation handed over power in Washington to large, inflamed Democratic congressional majorities that would do extensive damage — and that his vice president, Gerald Ford, would lose a national election in part because he felt compelled to pardon Nixon.

So by all means let’s be fair to Richard Nixon, a flawed but accomplished American who was an expert practitioner of mid-20th century American politics. Yet he shouldn’t be a role model for the right — unless the right is planning to make grievous policy mistakes in the course of losing to the other side in the most spectacular fashion imaginable.