Richard M. Nixon

Today is the anniversary of Richard Milhous Nixon’s birth.

We have become a culture of single sentences.  Of final judgments written early and held forever.  Of lives compressed into one paragraph, one headline, one word.  Nixon is the casualty of that habit.  So is history.

The poem that follows skips Watergate on purpose.

Not because it did not happen.  Not because it did not matter.  But because a life, especially a public life, is never the sum of its worst day.  Because knowing more than one thing at the same time is the beginning of wisdom. Because a man can fail and still leave the world changed for better.

Nixon came from nothing.  He fought a world war.  He entered public service when the century itself was on fire.  He stared down the long gray machinery of communism and did not look away.  He opened China.  He brought the Vietnam War to an end with something the nation still needed, which was the illusion of honor.  He played the long game against the Soviets and history, eventually, recorded the result.

He also erred.  Grievously.  Publicly.  Humanly.

Those two things coexist.

This poem is written in that space.  The space where contradiction lives.  The space where legacy becomes complicated and therefore real.  The space where America itself has always existed.

We mark his birthday not to excuse him, but to remember him whole.

Richard M. Nixon

Raised in spare Quaker rooms, he learned the nation’s fire,

In early years of work that taught him how to stand,

Carrying that hunger into halls of power,

He met the century with a steady hand;

Ambition burned, but yoked to civic wire,

Resolve not born of praise but what was planned,

Duty becoming habit, then the one,

Making the private boy the public one.

In war he served, then turned to sterner fields,

Learning the maps of fear that govern men,

Holding the line when red ambition wheels

Over half the earth with rifle, flag, and pen;

Under his hand the American will congeals,

Strength in an age of doubt and when,

Each treaty weighed against the gathering cold,

Never confusing caution with the bold.

Into Beijing he walked and the world shifted,

X-ing out decades of frozen fear,

Out of Vietnam he brought back honor,

Nations felt the balance change that year.