ALTAR OF NIXON

Dear Spike:

As I slipped into our bedroom, late last night, your mother lifted her head from her pillow and blinked some of the sleep from her eyes.

“I was dreaming that I was having a conversation with Richard Nixon,” she said.

“Really? What did he say ?” I asked.

She shrunk her head into her shoulders, shifted her voice into a quivering barritone and said: “Hello, this is Richard Nixon.”

“And that was it?” I asked.

She mumbled something about a telephone call, but I couldn’t understand it. Soon, she was back asleep and snoring.

Your mother’s always had a rather perplexing fetish for our 37th president. In fact, it used to be that whenever she was having trouble sleeping, she would ask me to tell her about Watergate.

No kidding. It was like singing her a lullaby, only this song was about a group of third-rate burglars known as plumbers, a disgruntled FBI agent known as Deep Throat and a slush fund known as CREEP.

After a while, though, she knew the story better than I. And so that was that.

I never really understood your mom’s fascination with Tricky Dick. She’s about as liberal as they come, after all, and he was, well, Tricky Dick. And yet I think if he were still alive and running for office this year, he’d have her vote (and probably a lot of our money, as well.)

She’s a strange creature, your mother.

Or maybe she simply understands that history can be crueler than it needs to be.

The first thing I learned about Herbert Hoover was that he was President of the United States during the Great Depression and that the shanty towns that sprung up across America during this time were known as “Hoovervilles” — so named in deference to the perception that the president was particularly callous and uncaring about the plight of his poorest fellow countrymen during those terrible years.

And that was it. In fact, I’m pretty certain that I managed to graduate high school without learning a single additional fact about the 31st president.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned that Hoover was perhaps the most compassionate and experienced economist ever to sit in the Oval Office, that he had been largely responsible for keeping Europe fed in the wake of World War I, that he had in fact made it a point of his presidency to battle poverty in America and that the Great Depression was caused by a great and horrible confluence of domestic and international factors, none of which had anything to do with Hoover’s presidency.

Hoover died just about 14 years before I was born, and yet my entire formal education about his legacy was that he had a bunch of slums named after him. Talk about a bum rap.

By some matter of coincidence, Nixon died just about 14 years before you were born. And such as it is, I don’t expect your formal education about him to include much more than the fact that he was forced to resign due to his involvement in the Watergate scandal.

Alas, you’re less likely to learn that Nixon crafted an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, negotiated with Russia for a historic reduction in nuclear weapons, opened China to the world community and oversaw unprecedented environmental reforms.

That said, I’m certainly not going to tell you that you should kneel down next to your mother at the altar of Nixon. But I guess I hope you’ll learn more than a few rote facts about the men (and women?) who lead our nation.

To that end, I won’t mind one bit telling you a bedtime story, or two, about Watergate and Stagflation, Iran-Contra and The Blue Dress...

... then again, perhaps that last story might have to wait until you’re a bit older.

In any case, I think what you’ll find is that no one can be so simply defined.

That’s true for presidents.

And for me.

And for you.

And for anyone else about whom we might dream.

Love,
dad