Victor Davis Hanson: Nixon Was the ‘Most Naturally Bright President’ We’ve Ever Had

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the latest edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: So, Victor, I’m anxious to hear about our John Tyler, but also Richard Nixon, who is probably the more infamous of the two, although I’m not sure he should be.  

Victor Davis Hanson: I don’t think he’s infamous. He’s actually enjoying a renaissance right now among young people.

John Tyler was our 10th president. He was an accidental president. He was the first president who was elevated to the presidency as vice president. It doesn’t really say in the Constitution that the vice president shall become the president. 

It said the vice president can fulfill the duties when the president is incapacitated. So he’s kind of famous that when William Henry Harrison died after 31 days in office, he didn’t just start doing it. He said, I want to be sworn in as the president, and that wasn’t in the Constitution. But that inaugurated that, and later amendments reified that.  

So he was this Virginia slave owner, and he was in the Democratic Party. He was originally a Jacksonian from 1841 to 1845, so we’re getting very close. He’s gonna be followed by [James] Polk, and he followed [Martin] Van Buren, who wasn’t very popular. And we’re getting closer and closer to the big 1861 divide. He did nothing to slow that down. 

He said he abhorred slavery, but he never sold his 40 or 50 slaves he had. He’s famous for having the most children of anybody. I think he had 15 children. Fifteen. He was married twice. Eight children the first time, seven the second. 

Sami Winc: I did not know that. That is crazy. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, he was, and he was very… He was a hotshot young guy in the Jacksonian period. 

And he was a pillar or a primary guy in the Democratic Party, and he arose with a John Calhoun idea of states’ rights. And [Andrew] Jackson had been a big critic of the Adams family elite and the federal government, the Federalists. But once the South Carolinians said they were not gonna pay tariffs in 1832, I think Jackson became a tough Federalist. 

And same thing with the Trail of Tears. He just went in, and he did what he had to do, he thought, and he really empowered the presidency. And that Tyler was on the other Calhoun side and broke with him. But when you look at over the four years, it’s really hard to see anything that he did. He had a treaty with China. 

He tried to finesse the Democratic Party. He didn’t split with the Democrats in the North who were opposed to slavery. And he said, “On the one hand, I’m opposed to slavery. On the other hand, we have all these slave owners in my native state, and we’ll have a civil war if we outlaw it. So let’s just pass it on.” And then the next president will be Polk. 

He was much better. But when you look at presidents that are rated, I mean, there’s, at the very bottom… And these are left-wing historians. Everybody should remember that. People, when you see presidential rankings, I think [Barack] Obama’s like eight or something. They’re all left-wing. The next Lincoln, remember, his Springfield, Illinois, train ride from Chicago or whatever it was, as he was the young Mr. Lincoln saving us from ourselves.  

But in any case, I think he’s rated like 39th or 40th, along there with James Buchanan and Millard Fillmore. And if they put Nixon in there, that’s very unfair. He was a good president. He just made a couple of mistakes. He mussed his hair up, so to speak, as they say in “Dr. Strangelove.” 

Sami Winc: Yeah, but nothing… He didn’t do even half as bad as some of the stuff we’ve seen recently. 

Victor Davis Hanson: I mean, what he did was essentially, he had a bunch of zealots and an ex-CIA officer thought that the Democrats had… Larry O’Brien was crazy, or he was mental, the head of the DNC, and they wanted to get stuff on him. 

So they broke in, and then they contained it, and then they got arrested, and they wanted money. So then they went into the lower rings of the White House. Howard Dean was the presidential counselor. He finally heard about it, and then he came and told Nixon, and Nixon basically said, “What in the blank? Are you kidding me? We’ve got an election.” 

 So they got through the election of ’72. The second largest popular vote landslide in history was Richard Nixon’s 1972 thrashing of George McGovern. Only Lyndon Johnson, playing on the sympathy of the Kennedy assassination, had beaten Barry Goldwater like that. It was just incredible. 

So here he was at the top of the world, and he had all … He was juggling all of these key balls. First of all, he had Vietnamization, and he went into Vietnam, and he was given a mess in 1969, and he had drawn down from about 500,000 troops to almost none. And he was negotiating with them, and he knew that when we were leaving, they would take advantage of them. 

But we had first-generation laser-guided bombs, so he started bombing the North, not like Operation Rolling Thunder, but Operation Linebacker. And they started targeting key personnel of the communists in North Vietnam, generals, agents, etc. And they, that made a profound approach.  

So he had a peace deal, and he thought he could get out, and he did get out. 

So there was a viable South Vietnam. That was the whole point. Of course, after Watergate, they sold the Vietnamese out, and they wouldn’t give them air support, so they got… And then at the same time, he was trying to triangulate with [Henry] Kissinger, his secretary of state and his national security adviser in one office. 

First person to do that. Marco Rubio is doing it now. And Kissinger said, Well, you have to triangulate. Triangulate. And they said, Well, wait a minute. They’re all comm- He said, “They’re both communists. They’re both bad, but we can play off one against the other.” So we said no. China, under Nixon, he went to China. 

He saw a decrepit old Mao [Zedong]. He didn’t hold… He was the arch anti-communist during the McCarthy period, and he was Ike’s vice president for eight years. Ike treated him really badly, too, when they… That famous thing when they said when Nixon ran for president in 1960, when he lost to JFK, “Well, can you, say something in praise of your former vice president, now candidate?” 

He said, “Give me a week” or something like that. Give me a few days to think about it. So Ike could be very cruel to people for all of his… He was a good president, too, but… And so he was solving the Vietnam. It was solved by the time of Watergate. He had really started the détente process by being really tough. 

He saved Israel in the Yom Kippur War of ’73. He was under enormous pressure. Kissinger was sort of working on getting Anwar Sadat to flip from the Russians and have a new peace deal if he got the Sinai back. But Kissinger was kind of tinkering around like, “Let’s not give them too many Phantom jets and try to help tit-for-tat.” 

And Nixon said, “Get those transports and you put anything on it and you get over there and save the Jews.” And that’s very ironic because when he had his tapes come out, he just used derogatory language about everything. He didn’t really mean it, though. He was just, “The Jews are, they’re smart people. You got to be careful, don’t you think?” Stuff like that. And that hurt him.  

But my point is, if you look at what he did about the Vietnam War, and then the Left started liking him. He created the EPA. He created the endangered species list. He created the toxic waste list, all of that. He was really good on the environment. 

And the problem with him was I think he was probably the most naturally bright president we’ve ever had. He was smart. He was the best poker player in in a large group in the Navy. I know my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, was a Democrat. He got my parents really angry. And they said, “You can’t vote for Dick Nixon.” 

And he said, “Well, he was the best poker player in the Navy. He, five-card stud, you couldn’t beat the man. It’d be good to have him as president. He’s sharp, Pauline. He’s sharp.”  

And so, I remember that, and a couple of other things we forget now. 1960, you can make an argument… I know the Left says, “Well, Victor, you’re just a conspiracy theorist, but you could make the argument that Richard Nixon lost that election by 0.2%.” 

In Cook County,in Illinois, Chicago, there were some questionable ballots, and there were some questionable ballots in Texas. And had he demanded a recount and got… there might have been. The Democrats might have lost Illinois and lost the Electoral College, and he was very good about that. 

He said, “A losing candidate does not question, or if we do that, our reputation worldwide…”  

He always thought of things in terms of foreign policy. So when all of these things were going on, and he’s thought that… And he got us off the gold standard for good or evil, but he was working on all of these things to end the Cold War, and he might have done it. 

And then when it came to John Dean, he was looking at the papers every day, Woodward and Bernstein, Nixon’s gonna be guilty. We’re gonna finally get Nixon. Tricky Dick. They hated him, and so he dug down. And so he said, basically, “Well, what do they want? They got caught, so take care of them, meaning when they get out, give them money.” 

And that looked really bad because they denied he did. Said Nixon didn’t know, and Dean turned state’s evidence. Dean was a sneaky blank mean… I remember he took money and borrowed it out of the White House to remodel his patio or something like that. But in any case, once the Watergate started, today, when you look at today, I mean, there was Deep Throat. 

That was just a disaffected Mark Felt, FBI agent. He just wanted to be FBI director and was gonna rat everybody out. So when you look at… I mean, Barack Obama in the Oval Office had [John] Brennan, [James] Clapper, and [James] Comey, and he knew that Steele dossier was fake, and he was basically saying, “Go back and give me assessments that show me that Donald Trump is a Russian collusion,” when there was no evidence. 

We know that. We know that he spied on the AP reporters. We know that. We know that Obama spied on James Rosen, spied on his grandmother’s text messages. They got mad for the secret bombing of Cambodia. Well, it wasn’t secret with Barack Obama. He detailed 500 assassination drone missions on the Pakistani border and killed two citizens. 

Maybe they deserved it, maybe not. And he bombed Libya. They said [Iran’s] an illegal war. What are you doing? Well, what was Libya for seven months of bombing with no congressional authority. I could go on, and you saw what [Bill] Clinton did.  

So, given how astute he was and what a great president he was in foreign policy and why he had really silenced the Left, they wanted to get rid of him, and they got rid of him. 

He resigned in the summer of ’73. They knew that Jerry Ford was kind of a nice guy but not really sharp and that they could manipulate him.  

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