Black declares Nixon ‘not uniquely sleazy'

JAMES ADAMS

Globe and Mail Update

April 21, 2007 at 3:13 AM EST

If it hadn't been for his “legal and ethical shortcomings,” Richard Nixon would now rank with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and possibly Ronald Reagan as one of the greatest U.S. presidents of the 20th century, according to Conrad Black in his much-anticipated new biography of the 37th president.

Lord Black [who knows a bit about losing position due to legal and ethical shortcomings] comes to praise Mr. Nixon in his biography — he knew and interviewed the ex-president before his death, at 81, in 1994 — and whatever damnation he rains on his subject is faint and judicious. Watergate, for example, “reached the point it did because Mr. Nixon allowed the media and the more partisan Democrats” — whom Lord Black variously calls agents or members of “the unctuous and gullible left,” “the eastern left” and “the soft left” — “to create an atmosphere of hysteria.”

Lord Black argues that “in a fair proceeding, it would not have been easy” for Mr. Nixon's hounders, some of whom he characterizes as “psychopathic enemies,” “to prove that he had committed a crime that justified his removal from office.” Mr. Nixon was “not uniquely sleazy,” Lord Black declares, and “always put the national interest above all other considerations.”

A copy of the sprawling, highly detailed biography — its tightly packed text runs to more than 1,100 pages, including bibliography and index, its 16 chapters organized into four mammoth parts — was obtained by The Globe and Mail. The book, likely to carry a suggested retail price of at least $50, is to be published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in late May as The Invincible Quest: The Life of Richard Milhous Nixon, simultaneously with its British release. The U.S. edition is due in the fall.

Lord Black, 62, currently on trial in Chicago on charges of obstruction of justice, fraud, money-laundering and the like, writes that because of Mr. Nixon's “shortcomings” — most infamously the Watergate debacle that forced him, in 1974, to become the first U.S. president ever to resign the presidency — he belongs “in the category of unusually talented presidents who are just beneath the very greatest American leaders.”

All this is not to say that Lord Black whitewashes Mr. Nixon, or his cronies, at least 14 of whom had been sentenced to jail terms by the time of his resignation. Lord Black variously describes the besieged president as “sociopathic, “intermittently deranged,” prone to uttering “endless threats of illegal vengeance on enemies,” “not in all respects a well man,” and occasionally “water-logged,” the last a euphemism, seemingly, for drunk.

Moreover, for a California-born son of a devoted Quaker mother and a hard-working, straight-arrow father, the seemingly pious Mr. Nixon — he told one of his aides he prayed on his knees every night — had a propensity for profanity and ethnic slurs, especially in what Lord Black calls “tense moments.” And even though Mr. Nixon surrounded himself with talented Jews, most notably Henry Kissinger, he was suspicious of them, a suspicion that, while “absurd,” was “not uncommon to people of his generation.”

(Lord Black notes that the Nixon White House had its suspicions in 1973 that Mark Felt, the Jewish then-deputy-director of the FBI, was leaking information to The Washington Post's Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. But it failed to act on them. Last year, of course, Mr. Felt was outed as the so-called Deep Throat. Later in The Invincible Quest, Lord Black describes the Nixon-era Mr. Kissinger — who, more recently, was on the board of Hollinger International in its Black era — as having a “propensity to run for cover when a friend was under attack.” This “irrepressible reflex,” he adds parenthetically, was something “of which he never cured himself.”) Of course, readers of The Invincible Quest will scan its text for parallels of Mr. Nixon's career and ordeals with those of his biographer. By and large, this is not the case.

About the only time that Lord Black seems to comment on his own situation occurs near the end, when he recounts how former Nixon loyalists tried to save themselves during Watergate by striking deals with the authorities. Notes Lord Black: “The American prosecutorial system encourages a system of suborned or intimidated perjury, or at least spontaneous clarity of recollection, to move upwards in the inculpation of officials in any organization where wrongdoing is alleged. Plea bargains are negotiated by threat and financial strangulation and reduction of penalties, as lower echelons roll over in sequence blaming higher-ups.”

It is, he says, “a questionable system, which led decades later to the installation of the ‘whistleblower' — i.e., the squealer — as one of the central figures in American commerce.”