To inaugurate proceedings at the Nixon National Security Summit on Thursday in Washington, Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich shared striking writing from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton.
In a recently declassified letter, the 37th president counseled the 42nd: “I have reluctantly concluded that his situation has rapidly deteriorated since the elections in December, and that the days of his unquestioned leadership of Russia are numbered,” remarking on the then-President of Russia Boris Yeltsin. “[Yeltsin’s] drinking bouts are longer and his periods of depression are more frequent. Most troublesome, he can no longer deliver on his commitments to you and other Western leaders in an increasingly anti-American environment in the Duma and in the country.”
Comments on the doomed Yeltsin era can almost seem inane, close to thirty years on, at least amid the largest land war in Europe and in the shadow of Putin, the most fearsome Russian ruler since Stalin. A fait accompli makes for poor copy. Of course, Yeltsin was a shambolic wreck fated to failure (never mind the talent that enabled his ascent), and obviously the vulgarian Russian bear would only ever respect and understand animal force (disregard perhaps the most talented diplomatic force on the globe, and arguably the world’s finest literature).
But one man who understood the truth, that fate is fluid, was Richard Nixon. He spent his sunset years rebuilding a reputation in tatters, crafting himself as a member of the “our son-of-a-bitch” school of foreign policy with the understanding his truest jury would be people he never met. As the last president to enjoy a drink to something like a fault, and whose own darkness seemingly never permitted him to fully trust his fellow man (even as they kept electing him), Nixon’s warning to Clinton about Yeltsin’s personal descent and the limits of democracy’s appeal came during the greatest bear market in history for such a view, the alleged end of history.
Nixon is gone, but much less alone now.
Indeed, something about the man, our Shakespearean president, is fitting for this moment, as the country careens toward its most chaotic presidential election since 1860 and ponders “a world which now seems terrifyingly near to a spiral into a world war,” as TAC’s founding editor Scott McConnell put it last week.
As the 2024 campaign and the national security scene heat up, the ongoing rehabilitation of the 37th president comes into play in the GOP civil war as well. Teasing his new film, the preeminent conservative activist Christopher Rufo said, “I tell a new story about a man, reviled in his time, who left behind a blueprint for counter-revolution—the last hope for restoring the American republic.”
At the very least, something’s in the water.
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