Remembering Nixon's Disgrace: Why Does It Matter?

The Constitutional crisis that ended President Nixon's presidency was a jarring experience for our country. But I fear we are in the midst of a much more serious Constitutional crisis, one that will rival that of the American Civil War. In a time when broken promises and unwelcome changes seem to be the best that we can hope for, one might ask, "how is the way we remember a disgraced president from our past relevant to the problems we face today?" For that question, the old George Santayana quote about failing to learn history and consequently repeating its mistakes is timelessly applicable.

Forty years after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace, how should we remember him? Fox News recently posed roughly this question in a recent headline. But I think their question is a little off point. Perhaps a better question would be "How will History memorialize Mr. Nixon?" I tend to think Nixon's legacy will forever be tied to legacy of Barack Obama. Generations from now students of history will be writing papers on how Barack Obama became the kind of president that Richard Nixon had aspired to be. There will be hard cold analysis of how the Congress that forced Nixon to resign compares and contrasts to the feckless Congress we have today. Scholars will trace the progressive erosion of Congressional dedication to 'doing the country's business' and produce in depth analyses of how America paid a terrible price when the members of Congress adopted Party Loyalty as their supreme political ideal!

Or maybe I am way off base with my predictions! Maybe those scholars will be writing about how Senate Republicans let the country down when they abandoned Nixon! Maybe they will applaud the solidarity the Senate Democrats of today are showing their embattled president. Nah! Not a chance!