The Nixon amnesia.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Richard M. Nixon - Pundit Watch - Column - Obituary

Call me a heartless bitch, but I found the media eulogies of Richard Nixon revolting. The fulsome praise lavished on this lifelong, red-baiting paranoiac was bad enough, but the two things that were truly infuriating were the incredible simplifications of his legacy and the wholesale rewriting of American and world history. Most commentators divided his biography into two chapters: Watergate (bad) and foreign affairs (good).

Through this particular bifurcation, Watergate could become the main - and only - site of his sins, while his foreign policy then could be placed atop some untouchable, sacred altar. The kind of amnesia this permits about the foreign policy of the past contributes to confusions and misrepresentations about foreign affairs today. It perpetuates the myth of American innocence and goodness when dealing with other countries, when the facts, if they ever get reported, paint a different picture.

Since every news division felt it had to feature Henry Kissinger, we got to hear him self-servingly elevate Nixon (and thus himself) to near-genius stature for his "conceptual" approach to China and the former Soviet Union. The New York Times really tugged at my heartstrings when it repeated Kissinger's bathetic assessment that Nixon "would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him."

William Safire quipped that "if Churchill was the man of the first half of the Twentieth Century, then Nixon was the man of the second half." The words "statesman" and "vision" were used repeatedly by all sorts of commentators. Time touted its issue with the Nixon book excerpts as if they were some newly discovered stone tablets from the mount (The Last Testament of Richard Nixon). On top of this, Nixon was cast by pundits from George Will to Nina Totenberg as the most liberal President we've had since World War II, with the exception of Lyndon Johnson.

On This Week with David Brinkley, the two guests brought in to comment about Nixon were Kissinger and Howard Baker. Baker described Watergate as "a great waste" because "we lost a successful and potentially very great President."

I wonder how some other guests - oh, say, the descendants of Helen Gahagan Douglas, or Salvador Allende, or any of the thousands of antiwar, feminist, or civil-rights activists who were spied on, lied about, and harassed during the Nixon years - might have responded to this assertion.

Many of us remember a different Nixon, and he was no liberal and no statesman. Sam...