Recently an article by Conrad Black looking back on the Presidency of Richard Nixon appeared on the National Review Online website. Longtime FR friends Tom Fuentes and Bruce Herschensohn both were moved by the piece. Herschensohn, who worked as a staff member in the Nixon White House once upon a time, penned a brief introduction to the Black people, and encourages you to read it…
The trouble with history is that it is written by historians.
Some of them are fine but too many contemporary historians have opinions of their own and have tried to justify their own actions and inactions during the period of time covered by their books by condemnations of those of prominence with whom they scorned during those times. Therefore it is certain that future generations will have countless volumes of books critical of President Richard Nixon written by those who, during his times, despised him before, during, and after he was elected President of the United States.
There will, however, be a recently written jewel on future bookshelves which is not a book at all but a brief article written by Conrad Black. It will take a horizontal position on future bookshelves, not physically thick enough to compete with the vertical spines of volumes surrounding it. By so doing, he gives evidence to the Lincolnian tradition that truth takes up little room whereas lies call for mountains of explanation.
In his brief paper on the Presidency of Richard Nixon, Conrad Black has passed to future generations a statement of accuracy which has largely been missing. He raises the prestige of historians by actually writing history…
Bruce Herschensohn
Nixon: Half Way to Mount Rushmore
by Conrad Black for National Review Online
The latest drop from the interminably repetitive and rather innocuous Nixon Tapes has caused the customary outburst of confected indignation against Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger as anti-Semites, and, in the case of Kissinger, as effectively a self-hating Jew. This is the final spluttering of the Nixon demonology movement and its subcommittee for the smearing of Kissinger. Nearly 40 years after Watergate, it is long past time that the Nixon presidency be seen as the imaginative and generally successful administration that it was. Throughout that time, the myth has been imposed that Nixon was a deranged and morally depraved man who inexplicably outwitted the presidential screening process and was exposed only when Bob Woodward pulled back the president’s White House shower curtain and discovered a cloven foot. For good measure, the Left has gone to unheard-of lengths to debunk Kissinger, one of the country’s greatest secretaries of state.
Read the full article on the NRO website…here.