Quote of the Day (Philip Roth, on Richard Nixon’s Funeral)

“I don’t ever remember seeing Gerald Ford looking so focused before, so charged with intelligence as he clearly was on that hallowed ground. Ronald Reagan snapping the uniformed honor guard his famous salute, that salute of his that was always half meshugeh, Bob Hope seated next to James Baker. The Iran-Contra arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi seated next to Donald Nixon. The burglar G. Gordon Liddy there with arrogant shaved head. The most disgraced of vice-presidents, Spiro Agnew, there with his conscienceless Mob face. The most winning of vice-presidents, Dan Quayle, looking as lucid as a button. The heroic effort made by the poor fellow: always staging intelligence and always failing. All of them mourning platitudinously together in the California sunshine and the lovely breeze: the indicted and unindicted, the convicted and the unconvicted, and, his towering intellect at last at rest in a star-spangled coffin, no longer grappling and questing for no-holds-barred power, the man who turned a whole country’s morale inside out, the generator of an enormous national disaster, the first and only president to have gained from a hand-picked successor a full and unconditional pardon for all the breaking and entering he committed while in office.” —American novelist Philip Roth (1933-2018), I Married a Communist (1997)

Twenty-five years ago today, Richard Nixon was laid to rest in a simple service at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in his hometown of Yorba Linda, California.

The occasion brought out all the moral judgment and savagery of Philip Roth, who had imagined a different fate for the 37^th President in the biting pre-Watergate satire Our Gang. At that time in the early Seventies, Roth’s loathing for the man he transparently dubbed “Trick E. Dixon” for his novel was such that, though an atheist, his artistic imagination required the creation of Hell to imagine where Nixon would be consigned after death.

If Roth’s initial vision for Nixon’s end was shrill and over-the-top, the judgment he delivered above, a quarter-century later, was searing. (I have not even quoted the passage in full: Roth’s prior paragraph depicted Henry Kissinger and the Presidential nominees in the 1996 election: President Bill Clinton, eulogizing Nixon for his “wise counsel” and “remarkable journey,” and Senator Robert Dole, with a flood of “lachrymose cliches.”) In a novel that is otherwise the weakest of his 1990s “American Trilogy” because of Roth’s desire for fictional revenge against ex-wife Claire Bloom for writing a tell-all about their relationship, this section stands out as memorable.

The account of the funeral is in the voice of Murray Ringgold, a nonagenarian former teacher with special reason to loathe the ex-President, who had played no small part in intensifying the “Red Scare” that had helped ruin his brother Ira. Fewer other works of fiction have displayed such bracing contempt for America’s ruling class in its hypocritical praise for abusers of the Constitution.

I wish that Roth had managed to continue writing novels at least into the 2016 election. In comments to the press before his death, he left little doubt of his loathing for Donald Trump, and it would have been interesting to see his fictional take on the baleful consequences of the reality star’s rise to power.

For all Nixon’s weirdness, the presence of so many current and former officeholders at his funeral testified to his lifelong membership in the political class. In the end, they may have had an abiding sympathy for someone who had played the game and wound up losing—an eventuality that, in one form or another, they could have foreseen for themselves. The same cannot be said for Trump, who humiliates even members of his own party as he seeks to dominate them. That may mean that unlike Nixon, he might have plenty of convenient allies now, but no friends or even believers when he goes to his grave as a disgraced onetime occupant of the Oval Office.