Richard Nixons Presence and Presidency in the 1970s Research Paper

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Introduction

While Nixon may not represent or symbolize the height of the Cold War, he does represent an era in American history plagued by government corruption and large-scale public dissatisfaction with the government in general. Nixon came to power on the heels of four politically motivated assassinations: JFK in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and MLK, Jr., and RFK in 1968. Robert Kennedy had been running against Nixon in the 1968 election, and his brother had beaten Nixon in the 1960 election. The deaths of both Kennedys were a reminder that something was not right in the state of Washington, D.C.—and Nixon seemed to be right in the thick of it. His famous words, “I am not a crook,” became lampooned in pop culture, and his presidency came to an early end with his resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Nixon has been the subject of several films, both directly and indirectly: he was the focal point in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, a political follow-up to the director’s previous hit JFK. Nixon was lampooned in the film Dick, a comedy which focused on the Watergate scandal. His relationship with Elvis Presley was described in the film Elvis & Nixon. The 1976 film (based on a book by the same name) All the President’s Men focused on the Watergate reporters trying to break the story on Nixon’s cover-up. It portrayed the reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in a heroic light (and why should it not?—they wrote the book on themselves). Another film, The Post, directed by Spielberg, adopted a similar approach in its characterization of Katherine Graham as a female crusader for the truth. Robert Altman’s Secret Honor in 1984 put Nixon front and center in a stream-of-consciousness yet ultimately unapologetic portrayal of the president coming to terms with his failed presidency. These films vary in their approach to Nixon and the 1970s—and some, like Stone’s and Altman’s, are more sympathetic than others. They are, however, but one approach to the man and the decade. Numerous books and articles have been written on Nixon, all of which tell their own stories. This paper will explore a variety of these works to show how the history of Nixon and the 1970s has been shaped in diverse ways. It will look at Stone and Kuznick’s, Untold History of the United States, John Dean’s The Nixon Defense, Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda, Elliot and Schenck-Hamlin’s “Film, Politics and the Press: The Influence of ‘All the President’s Men’,” Tyler’s A World of Trouble, and several others to show how historians and other writers have depicted Nixon and his time to tell their take on the man.

The Nixon Shock

There are many different places one could start when analyzing the various works that people have produced when covering Nixon. To understand how historians and writers have covered him, however, one has to start somewhere—and the Nixon Shock is as good a place as any. When Nixon shut the window on the gold standard in 1971, it “shocked” the world. Prior to that, foreign nations holding USD could still convert them into gold (though the average American could not—that window had been closed decades earlier). The Nixon Shock as it came to be known has been one of particular interest to writers more focused on the economic effect of Nixon’s presidency in the early 1970s than on the scandals. One writer who has taken a unique perspective on the Nixon Shock is G. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, a book that is highly critical of the Federal Reserve, which was essentially born on Jekyll Island shortly before Nixon himself was born in California in 1913. Griffin viewed Nixon’s move as part of a power play by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to control the global money supply. A dollar that was tied to gold could only be supplied in a limited or finite amount. A dollar that was backed by nothing but full faith and credit could be supplied in seemingly unlimited amounts. As the world’s reserve currency, the USD had to be infinite for the IMF to achieve its aim.[footnoteRef:2] [2: G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island (Westlake Village, CA: American Media, 1995), 91.]

The idea that Nixon was just a pawn in a much bigger game was one that other writers, such as Patrick Tyler, or filmmakers like Oliver Stone, have suggested as well. Tyler in his book A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East from the Cold War to the War on Terror, highlights the issues that Nixon faced in attempting to deal with the problematic issues emanating from the Middle East during his presidency. Tyler puts much of the blame squarely on the shoulders of Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Decolonization in Africa had led to an era of neo-colonization, and alliances were very unsettled and unstable as Egypt sought support from both East and West against Israel, and vice versa.

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Who was playing whom was a big question, and one that Nixon might have more readily asked. Kissinger, essentially acting like a double agent for Israel, quite often proved that it was Nixon, in the end, who was being played, as Tyler shows in his research.[footnoteRef:3] Tyler’s focus, along with that of Stone and Kuznick in their Untold History is on the meaning of events that typically do not get told in the popular representation of Nixon on the decade. The complex interrelationship of events linking the Shock with Middle East activities and the rise of the petrodollar along with the appeasement of Israel all are explored by Tyler and Griffin as they construct a complex narrative that shines a light on the various aspects of the times. [3: Patrick Tyler, A World of Trouble (NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2010), 24.]

Stone and Kuznick pay particular attention to the effect that Nixon’s legacy had on the latter half of the 1970s. After Nixon’s resignation…

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…wondering anything other than what is new to watch on Netflix. They were like the prisoner in the cave, just flipping through channels of flickering light, not minding what was causing it or why, but just simply being amused and happy and satisfied to be amused. Yet upon turning off the TV and getting outside and looking at the world and reflecting in silence, one begins to have a sense that one is meant to do more than just watch TV—that there is something one should know about oneself. Is there a point to all this?—one might ask. This is why Plato ahs the line about making the upward journey in the Allegory. As Plato says in the Allegory of the Cave: “The visible realm should be likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the fire inside it to the power of the sun. And if you interpret the upward journey and the study of things above as the upward journey of the soul to the intelligible realm, you’ll grasp what I hope to convey…”[footnoteRef:24] What this means is that the person has to make an upward journey by thinking about the reality of things and not just the presentations of reality produced by the culture industry—the mainstream media, the streaming networks, the social media sites—they have to think about the actual real reality. If they do so they will begin to think about other things, such as what is the meaning of this life—who put this life here? Who put this life in us? What are we to do with this life? Where does it come from? How does it exist? What happens when we die? These are questions that can be very uncomfortable to ask, to face, to struggle with and to seek answers to—but Plato says that seeking those answers is the true purpose of life—and one who never turns off the TV to stop and think and attempt to answer them is one who is just wasting his life. [24: Cahn, S. Classics of Western Philosophy (Indianapolis, IN: Hacket, 2012), 176.]

Conclusion

To understand the role that Nixon played in the 1970s and how historians have shaped that role into narratives that reflect some aspect of the culture conflicts, one has to look at the whole picture. One has to see the culture industry from the standpoint of Adorno and Horkheimer, Elliot and Schenck-Hamlin. One has to consider how the stories told by Woodward and Bernstein or by Dean and Hougan offer different perspectives that shape and are shaped by that same culture industry. Whether a historian or writer or filmmaker is put off by the culture industry and thus focuses more on the conspiracies behind the scenes, which even the House Select Committee and Church Committee both acknowledged likely played a role in the events leading up to Nixon’s presidency, or whether the historian, writer or filmmaker wants to promote the pop culture stereotype and depict Nixon as the “crook” so many….....

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