The Wisdom of A Disgraced Man

 

Reading Richard Nixon’s In The Arena, was an interesting experience for me. Growing up in Egypt and seeing Nixon come to Egypt in the early 1970’s and literally help Egypt out of the Soviet orbit made me like him. When Nixon resigned in August 1974, I was just 14; I didn’t know much about the cultural wars of the 1960’s, Watergate didn’t mean much to me, I only viewed Nixon from the eyes of an Egyptian boy. Today, in my sixties and having left Egypt a year after Nixon resigned and spent most of my life in the US, I’m on the opposite political spectrum of Nixon. While I continue to lean right on issues of Defence and some economic issues, I’m on the liberal left on some economic and most social issues. 

Still, I found these Nixon memoirs fascinating and moving in terms of his journey from the greatest heights to complete disgrace and his ability to build back a productive meaningful life after leaving the White House. There is plenty of regrets and contrition over his role in Watergate, but it’s mostly of the type I should have been firmer, there is some of the I never ordered, my predecessors did worse, I didn’t know and the media this and that. Once there was a clear cut acceptance of the blame of not having set the right moral tone. I felt some sympathy but I suspect it’s carryover from my boyhood admiration. 

After few early chapters on Watergate and some interesting history of his “wilderness” years, following loss to JFK in 1960 and loss of California governor race in 1962, the book is mainly made of short chapters on various fascinating topics ranging from his views on religion, to stories about his wife and parents, to stories about his rise in Congress, winning the Senate in 1950 and fascinating stories of his meetings with Mao and Li and later following Tienman Square with Deng Chao Peng. 

There is plenty of wisdom from Nixon’s life and those he admired the most like Churchill, DeGaul and others. I especially enjoyed some of his saying on various topics. These include: you may not lose what you have if you don’t risk, you certainly can’t win more without risk, small people seek office to make something out of themselves while great people seek office to achieve something and of course several sayings on failure and not defining oneself by failure.  Several of the sayings may come across as cliché, but from Richard Nixon, they came across as wisdom gained from an incredible lifetime of trials, successes, failures, or as he learnt from a friend life is made up of 99 chapters.