Caffeinated Politics

Every year when August 9 rolls around, I find my memory back in the living room of my childhood home in Hancock, Wisconsin, twelve years old, legs crossed on the carpet, watching a president resign. The sun was out, and its beams were falling across the carpet through the south windows, with green drapes hanging.

Even at that age, I recall the enormity of the moment. My parents and grandparents were talking about it. The morning he left the White House, he had parting words for the presidential staff. I recall how his words about his mother impacted me for a lifetime.

“Nobody will ever write a book, probably about my mother. Well, I guess all of you would say this about your mother–my mother was a saint.”

That line—his invocation of her character, her quiet strength—was the opening of my book Walking Up the Ramp. I used it because it captured something essential about my life: my roots ran deep. It also set up the tone for much of the book, which was, in large part, an homage to my parents, Royce and Geneva Humphrey.

It was also placed in the book as I am a decades-long Nixon history buff. I view Nixon as both deeply flawed and unexpectedly human, capable of criminal abuses of power yet also capable of worldwide significance in shaping events that made us better and safer as human beings. While I understand that the moral scaffolding of his life receives much attention, I would argue that the contradiction inherent in a highly well-read and intelligent man deserves at least the recognition of what he pursued and achieved for the greater good.

And maybe that’s why, all these years later, I still return to him. Not to absolve him. Not to rewrite the record. But to acknowledge that history rarely gives us the luxury of simple figures.

Nixon was a criminal president. Full stop. The tapes, the cover‑ups, the corrosive paranoia and let me say, none of it can be softened. But he was also a man who saw the world with a breadth that many of his contemporaries lacked. His opening to China wasn’t just a diplomatic maneuver; it was a tectonic shift in global politics. His understanding of the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and the emerging post‑colonial world was sharper than the caricatures we’ve allowed to be created about him.

He thought internationally in a way that feels almost alien in today’s politics, with the rot now residing in the White House. Nixon understood the chessboard of international affairs like few others in that position.

And then there were his later years in political exile, when he was in deep reflection and also reinvention. The man who once tried to bend the machinery of government to his will became, improbably, one of the most compelling writers on politics of the late 20th century. His books were not apologies; they were analyses. They were the work of someone who had been inside the engine room and wanted to explain how the gears turned. You didn’t have to like him to admit he wrote with clarity, force, and a kind of earned authority. Every book of his resides on shelves over my head as I write this column.

That’s the Nixon I return to on this anniversary. The complicated one who has had my attention for over 40 years. The one who reminds me that history is not a morality play but a ledger of human behavior. Sometimes brilliant. At times reckless. Toss in visionary. Add a large dose of destructive. Sprinkle with vulgarity.

When I watched him resign at twelve, I didn’t understand all of that. I only knew that something enormous was happening, and that the man on the screen seemed to be wrestling with himself to contain his emotions. He talked about his mother. His upbringing. His sense of destiny. It was all there, flickering through the television static.

Decades later, I still see it. And I still believe that acknowledging Nixon’s international vision does not excuse his crimes, just as condemning his crimes does not erase his contributions. It simply means we’re willing to hold the whole picture up for a better understanding.

History demands that kind of honesty.