The Richard Nixon His Loyalists Knew

Bedeviled by anti-war protests and bomb threats, Nixon’s first year ended in triumph after his “Silent Majority” speech rallied the nation and rocked the left back on its heels, vaulting the president’s approval rating to 69%… Where Donald Trump used social media to communicate with his following, Nixon used national television to go over the heads of a hostile press and reach the country.

Whenever America is polarized, as it is today, people go back in memory and history to recall other times their nation was so divided.

The Civil War of the 1860s and the social revolution that tore us apart in the 1960s come instantly to mind. In that latter time, there was no figure more central to the conflicts of his day than Richard M. Nixon.

And no staff member was closer to Nixon in the campaign of 1968, or for the first four years of his presidency, than his personal aide Dwight Chapin, whose memoir, “The President’s Man,” is published this week.

Coincidentally, this February of 2022 is the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s trip to China that changed the world. Chapin was at Nixon’s side every day of that trip and had negotiated with the Chinese to prepare the schedule for both the president and first lady Pat Nixon.

The campaign of 1968 and Nixon’s first term as president are at the heart of Chapin’s book, as he spent that half decade at Nixon’s elbow when he was on the road, and at the desk outside his Oval Office.

Narrowly defeated by JFK in 1960, Nixon, by 1968, had executed one of the greatest comebacks in U.S. political history and was poised to capture the Republican nomination a second time.

As he declared his candidacy that first day of February 1968, the Communists’ Tet Offensive, which would break the will of the liberal elites who were running America’s war, had exploded all across South Vietnam.

Two months later, Lyndon Johnson, challenged in his party’s primaries by Sens. Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, announced he would not run again. Four days later, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and 100 U.S. cities were burned and looted in a week of riots.

Chapin was the staff man at Nixon’s side when he went to Atlanta to visit Coretta Scott King and her children and Dr. King’s father, “Daddy King,” days before they marched in the funeral procession.

Two months later, in June, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen after winning the California primary,

With the Democratic party torn over issues of race, riots and war, Nixon was elected with 43% of the vote. Chapin snapped the first photo of the president-elect in his suite at the Waldorf Astoria and was at the private emotional meeting in Key Biscayne between the president-elect and the defeated Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Bedeviled by anti-war protests and bomb threats, Nixon’s first year ended in triumph after his “Silent Majority” speech rallied the nation and rocked the left back on its heels, vaulting the president’s approval rating to 69%.

Throughout the book, Chapin describes, from his unique vantage point, the Richard Nixon some of us yet personally recall.

Through anecdote and story, he describes the brilliant complex man for whom he loyally labored all those years, up through the campaign of 1972, the triumph of Nixon’s political life when he swept 60% of the vote and 49 states against Sen. George McGovern.

Where Donald Trump used social media to communicate with his following, Nixon used national television to go over the heads of a hostile press and reach the country. The formats at which Nixon excelled were the presidential press conferences, adversary proceedings all, featuring a president baited by a hostile press, and the nationally televised prime-time address.

Through both, Nixon maintained the country’s allegiance during his four-year effort to extricate America with honor from the war into which the U.S. establishment, the Best and the Brightest, had plunged the nation.

Chapin was with Nixon when he went to Moscow in 1972, the first-ever visit to the USSR by a U.S. president. There, Nixon negotiated the most sweeping arms control agreements — the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty — since the Washington Naval Agreement of the early 1920s.

For Dwight Chapin, however, the triumph of 1972 ushered in the great personal crisis of his life.

He had recruited a friend from his college days to do for the Nixon campaign of 1972 what famed prankster Dick Tuck had routinely done for the Democrats.

But, with the Watergate break-in of June 1972 and the unfolding scandal, some of the campaign pranks turned out to be violations of campaign law. The investigation would cost Chapin his White House job and eventually land him in prison.

How he dealt with this personal disaster then and for the decades following is Chapin’s life story, bravely told in this book

It is a story worth telling and worth hearing.

Indeed, if you would know what it was like to be at Nixon’s side for five years, at the apex of American politics and at the beginning of the greatest fall of a president in American history, that, too, is a reason to read this book.

9 replies
    • Servenet
      Servenet says:

      Buchanan has been a System man from the beginning. Sure, he talked a good ¨no foreign entanglements¨…bit, but to remain a mere paleocon after all these years is to be encased in an era that showed itself feckless thirty years ago or more. He profited by and prospered under this evil system his whole life. I got off the Buchanan admiration society to nowhere some years ago. It´s just dumb to think his rhetoric now is relevant or that he was ever anything other than a Republican apparatchick.

  1. Jez Turner
    Jez Turner says:

    Excellent review. The similarities between Trump and Nixon, especially their pugnacious characters and styles, allowing them to leapfrog the hostile mass media and appeal directly to the electorate, should make this book a bestseller – despite the best efforts of the mass media.

  2. Hillary Goldberg Levin
    Hillary Goldberg Levin says:

    Nixon’s misdeeds were very small potatoes compared to Obama, HRC, and Biden. (And Bush)
    He was jew wise and very smart.
    Sad what they did to him.

    • charles frey
      charles frey says:

      I will continue to believe, that the Watergate burglary and bugging was a set-up. Far too simple an enterprise to go so dismally wrong.

      Ehrlich, in German, means honest. Nixon must have talked with others, in addition to Billy Graham, [ tapes ] about his opinion of Jews.

      Ehrlichmann, per net citation, ” is a name and proud symbol of ancient Jewish culture “.

      One of the burglars or bosses of them.

  3. BEIR BUA
    BEIR BUA says:

    Wonderfully lucid writing. Pity Pat did not include JFKs foundational work with Khruschev on ending the Cold War 10 years prior to the Moscow summit. Further, it was CIA/Military Industrial Establishment who murdered JFK and promoted the adventure in Vietnam- presumably at the behest of the worst and the darkest- and these could hardly be described as Kennedy Democrats

  4. James Bowery
    James Bowery says:

    I decided to read the book because I’m exploring the hypothesis that Maoist intelligence has been far more influential in degenerating the West than is widely believed — a feat accomplished primarily by having enough cultural distance from the West not to be mentally handicapped by Jewish mind control. In this hypothesis, Maoist intelligence recognized Jewish virulence as the biological weapon of mass destruction it was, and set about understanding how to leverage that biological weapon in The Art of War (aka “Unrestricted Warfare”).

    This cultivation of Jewish virulence is pretty easy to accomplish once you are freed from Jewish mind control:

    Just identify the few righteous Jews who might constrain Jewish virulence and distract them with “dirty tricks” (to use a Nixon-era idiom). The usual homeostatic mechanisms at evolved within in the Jewish Organism to constrain its virulence to optimal levels vanishes and your adversary catastrophically dissolves in a puddle of protoplasm, ripe for the digestion of your intact ethny’s civilization.

    That’s where we are now.

    Where Nixon fits into this picture should be obvious but just in case people are oblivious:

    Not only did Nixon open the door to China gutting the West’s industrial capacity by harvesting its creativity borne of individualism, he is suspected of having been captured by a Chinese lover and quite possibly had at least one Chinese child under the control of the Maoists. This is a tactic that I know has been used on my colleagues who did business in China. A passage in the book talks about Nixon becoming profoundly emotional about east Asians (in the context of foreign policy toward China) and anyone who doubts the capacity of Maoist intelligence to leverage such emotional attachments needs to bone up on the brainwashing techniques used against POWs in North Korea which had undoubtedly been developed by Maoist intelligence. It is entirely plausible that Henry “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Kissinger may have facilitated sexual compromise of Nixon by Maoists — plausibly rationalizing it as “foreign relations strategy” in the typically Jewish mentality. Of course the primary “foreign relation” of concerned to Jews is their relation to goys like Nixon — and having sexual blackmail material always comes in handy — something that any intelligence agency free of Jewish mind control would recognize and exploit. Nixon’s recognition that Jews represented a powerful “vote” (euphemism for the votes they manipulate with media mind control) would have represented to Kissinger a strong inducement to get Nixon in a compromising situation utilizing Nixon’s possession of that “ultimate aphrodisiac” — and Maoist intelligence would certainly have recognized this Jewish weakness in Kissinger and exploited it for long-term advantages.

    The anecdote in the book about Nixon’s daughter’s debutante ball and the young Jewish man, as evidence he was far from antisemitic, I found interesting since she had invited _him_ to escort her. What sort of “Matchmaking” was involved here? We aren’t told but it is reminiscent of the Jew who was involved more recently with the marriage of Prince Harry and that thing.

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