Talk:Richard Nixon/Archive 12

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Three questionable sources

I think there are serious reliability issues with the Nixon biographies by Jonathan Aitken, Conrad Black, and Stephen E. Ambrose, the three main sources used in this article.

Nixon: A Life (1994) by Jonathan Aitken

• Aitken is a Conservative Party (UK) politician who was a Member of Parliament in 1994, and this biography is from Regnery, which explicitly publishes politically conservative books. He is also a convicted criminal, having gone to prison in 1999 for perjury.
• In a 1994 review titled "Accentuating the Positive" in The New York Times, John Judis states that Aitken has written a biography of the late President that places him in the most positive light. If Nixon's biographies are arranged on a favorability scale of 1 to 10, with Nixon's own memoirs at a 10 and the post-Watergate psychohistories at a 1, then Mr. Aitken's book ranks as a 9.
  • Judis also writes: Mr. Aitken makes a case that Nixon was the "most innovative and successful foreign-policy President of the 20th century" and that he is either blameless or deserving of praise for many of the actions he has been condemned for, from his conduct in the 1946 Congressional campaign to his 1972 Christmas bombing of North Vietnam. Mr. Aitken contends that the Watergate burglary and its cover-up were peccadilloes for which Nixon should not have been driven from office. "The forcing of Nixon's resignation was a political overreaction, a human injustice and a strategic mistake," he writes.
• In a 1994 review titled "The Remaking of a President" in The Washington Post, Michael Beschloss notes that Aitken's biography is a partisan's book, sometimes overstraining the praise.
• In a 1994 review in Foreign Affairs, Stephen E. Ambrose (of all people) writes that No politician is ever embarrassed by an excess of flattery, but Richard Nixon should have been by this one. He adds that Aitken praises Nixon for every decision he ever made.
• In a 2015 review of some other Nixon biographies in The New York Times, David Greenberg calls Aitken's biography a dubious source and a hagiography.
• The first chapter, by Iwan W. Morgan, of the 2011 book A Companion to Richard M. Nixon (edited by Melvin Small and also a source that's used in this article) is a survey of Nixon biographies. Morgan writes that

Four of the nine Nixon biographies written since [Nixon] resigned the presidency reflect authorial admiration or disdain for him and stake little claim to historical objectivity. Significantly, the three favorable studies came from the pen of non-Americans, possibly suggesting that it was easier for outsiders to give more weight to Nixon's virtues than his vices than was the case for his fellow Americans. Also of interest, personal experience endowed each of the authors with a strong interest in redemption for law-breakers.

Morgan notes that although [Aitken's] Nixon biography predated his downfall, he showed an affinity with his subject for not telling the truth. He also states that Aitken's insistence that Nixon's high ideals were the strongest current in his river of life despite its occasional passages "through strange ill-smelling pools" could also stand as his own hoped-for valediction.

• Beschloss notes in his review that Aitken became close to Nixon after his resignation, and Judis writes that Aitken played a personal role in Nixon's rehabilitation after Watergate and arranged a triumphal post-Watergate visit to Britain for [Nixon] in 1978, which is backed up by the Richard Nixon Foundation.
  • In a 1993 review and a 2017 article, The Independent and the Financial Times note that Aitken suffers the dangerous complication of personal acquaintance and that [Aitken] and his wife honeymooned at the ex-president's California house, a courtesy extended because of Aitken's organisation of Nixon tours to Britain.

Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (2007) by Conrad Black

• Black is a Canadian businessman but is also a Conservative Party (UK) politician and member of the House of Lords. His biography of Nixon was published shortly after his conviction in the US for criminal fraud and obstruction of justice, for which he was sentenced to six years in prison.
  • In 2019, Black was pardoned by Donald Trump after he published a biography of Trump in 2018 that was described by The New York Times as "flattering" and by The Washington Post as "glowing".
• The Globe and Mail noted that many US publications did not or declined to review Black's book and stated that it accords a largely sympathetic treatment to Nixon.
• A brief 2007 review in The New Yorker states that Black's biography merely provides an exculpatory gloss for seemingly every grimy facet of Nixon's career and that [h]oping to be Nixon's redeemer, Black comes off as his apologist.
• In a 2008 review in The Washington Post (that doesn't seem to be accessible on its website but can be viewed here via WP:TWL) titled "Nixon Revisited; A conservative former newspaper publisher buffs the president's image.", Joan Hoff writes that Black's personal and professional friendship with Henry Kissinger led him to adopt Kissinger's suggestion that historians should ignore the president's conversations (i.e. the Nixon White House tapes), leading to an out-of-date account of Watergate that didn't show Nixon's deeper involvement.
  • According to Hoff and 2003 and 2007 articles in The New York Times, Kissinger and his wife sat on the board of Hollinger International, the company that Black controlled and defrauded. Black also hosted black-tie dinners at Hollinger that included Nixon and Kissinger as guest speakers.
  • Black himself declared in 2022 that [i]t is my privilege to have been a friend of Henry Kissinger's for more than forty years.
  • Hoff states that Black denied US involvement in the 1973 Chilean coup d'état and ignored evidence that Nixon and Kissinger allowed clandestine CIA funding of opposition media, politicians and organizations and that they brought American financial pressure to bear on Allende's democratically elected government.
• Morgan writes in A Companion to Richard M. Nixon that [a]nyone reading ... Black on Nixon is struck by [his] personal investment in his humanity and capacity for greatness in spite of his flaws. Hoff writes that

Black's deep identification with the 37th president of the United States is obvious throughout his book. It portrays Nixon much as the Canadian-born media tycoon sees himself: as a self-made man of great talent, industry and conservative political principles who is tragically thwarted by liberals and a hostile press.

Nixon biographies (1987), (1989), and (1991) by Stephen E. Ambrose

• Ambrose was an American historian who authored multi-volume biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nixon, among other books. However, his work has attracted serious criticism: Stephen E. Ambrose § Criticism.
• In 2002, Ambrose was found to have plagiarized content in several of his books (see, for example, this NYT article), including one of his Nixon biographies.
• A more serious flaw came to light in 2010, when Richard Rayner published an article in The New Yorker showing that Ambrose had fabricated interviews with Eisenhower.
• Irwin F. Gellman, in his 2015 book The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961, writes starting on page 4 that

While some Eisenhower scholars questioned Ambrose's research after [his] book's publication, the enormity of his falsifications was not revealed until after his death. Ambrose lied about his relationship with Eisenhower. He claimed that Ike was so impressed with his book on the Civil War general Henry Halleck that he called Ambrose out of the blue and asked him to write his biography. Two Ambrose letters contradict this account.

...

Ambrose also claimed that he had talked with Ike alone for "hundreds and hundreds of hours" over five years; his footnotes record nine separate interviews. But Ike's daily logs show that the historian met with the former president only three times, for a total of less than five hours. They never met privately; one of Eisenhower's aides was always present.

...

The most damaging charge to result from these phantom sessions concerns the issue Ambrose singled out as the major failure of Eisenhower's presidency: civil rights.

...

Ambrose also manufactured events that never took place.

• Greenberg writes the following in The New York Times about Ambrose's Nixon biographies:

Stephen E. Ambrose banged out a solid, breezily written trilogy, but his wanton acts of plagiarism and the posthumous revelation that he fabricated interviews with Dwight Eisenhower have rendered his work unusable.

• Another critique of Ambrose's work is that it is simply too old. In his 2017 biography of Nixon, Richard Nixon: The Life, John A. Farrell states the following about Ambrose in his Acknowledgments chapter (page 559):

Stephen Ambrose, writing during Nixon's lifetime, took three volumes to tell the story of the thirty-seventh president. And he did not have access to any but a few of the thirty-seven hundred hours of White House tape recordings, or the four hundred oral history interviews of Nixon's friends and family members conducted by Whittier College, or Nixon's grand jury testimony from the Alger Hiss and Watergate cases, or H. R. Haldeman's diaries, or the transcriptions of Henry Kissinger's White House telephone conversations—all of which have since been opened to scholars.

Nor could Ambrose tap such treasures of the Nixon presidential library as the 150 oral history interviews conducted in the past decade with the leading aides and figures of his presidency, or Pat Nixon's correspondence with her friend Helene Drown, or Herman Perry's accounts of the Nixon family finances and the 1946 congressional campaign, or Aylett Cotton's diary of the 1952 Republican convention. The "contested" and "returned" segments of the White House Special Files—which Nixon and his legal team battled for decades to keep private—were not made public until 2007, and have yielded illuminating details for this book, especially on the 1968 "southern strategy" and his actions in the "Chennault affair."

In summary, I believe that the first two books are too biased and have authors who are too close to Nixon to be reliable, and the last series of books is simply too old and written by someone who has lost his credibility.

I'm aware that WP:BIASED states that reliable sources are not required to be neutral, unbiased, or objective. However, the guideline also mentions that editors should consider the level of independence from the topic the source is covering. I think that Aitken's and Black's personal ties to Nixon and Kissinger may cross this line. There's also no justification to quote such hagiographies several times throughout this article, including in the Legacy section, while not also quoting from polemics like The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon by Anthony Summers.

The main issue with this article's sourcing probably stems from what Greenberg noted in 2015: there remains no authoritative cradle-to-grave biography. Morgan also wrote the following in 2011:

One of the most written about of all America's leaders, Richard Nixon still remains one of the most elusive for biographers. None of the many studies produced to date on the life and character of the thirty-seventh president has fully captured this complex man. The absence of anything approaching a definitive biography of Nixon stands in marked contrast to those gracing the lives of most of his significant predecessors.

Luckily, it's now 2023, and well-received books like Farrell's, which was a 2018 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, have now been published. Malerisch (talk) 15:10, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

It would seem worthwhile supplementing the existing sources with some from Ferrell and perhaps other recent books, which could also provide useful perspectives on Nixon. I tend to agree with you that earlier sources are not necessarily complete in and of themselves; for one thing they did not have the benefit of many of the files at the Nixon Library. Wehwalt (talk) 16:48, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

That would be a start, but my concern is more "should these books be used as the main sources for this article?" rather than "should more perspectives be added?". I note that the Ronald Reagan article, for example, doesn't seem to significantly cite any overtly biased books for or against him. Malerisch (talk) 19:40, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

I think whether authors admire Nixon, or hate his guts, is a secondary matter. The question is whether what is drawn from those sources is NPOV. Nixon was first elected to Congress in 1946. It really doesn't matter who is cited for that indisputably true proposition. Presumably Farrell has a perspective on Nixon, and he makes it clear in his writings. The pattern on this article is that people have come along, said that the article lacks some area of coverage (like you did with South Asia) and civil discussions ensue, not over the nature of the sources, but over whether the matter is of sufficient moment to include in this article, rather than the article on Nixon's presidency or some other. Aside from Ferrell, the other author whom you cite, Gellman, is included in this article. It's hard to see how you would improve the article, other than transferring cites from sources you do not like to sources you like better. Wehwalt (talk) 22:53, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

As I stated above, I fully recognize that WP:BIASED allows opinionated sources. However, my argument is not merely that Aitken and Black are biased, but that they are not sufficiently WP:INDEPENDENT (a key point in satisfying WP:RS) to be used as reliable sources. Sure, it's possible to create a well-written article in a neutral point of view using unreliable sources, but I don't think that's how the policy works. Also, none of the above addresses my issue with Ambrose, who I don't think is reliable for an entirely separate reason. Malerisch (talk) 05:45, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

I don't see that they are not independent (you cite to an essay, by the way). Nixon died in 1994. Nothing you have cited (organizing a UK tour for Nixon, being pardoned by Trump, even saying (!) that one has been (in 2022) a friend of Henry Kissinger (someone who is not Nixon and has spent the second half of his life running from Nixon) for forty years (something that backdates to 1982, when Nixon and Kissinger were not exactly close), makes one an alter ego or sockpuppet for Nixon. I'll even cede that we describe Regnery as politically conservative, but none of these things makes its authors patsies of Richard Nixon, who incidentally certainly was not a conservative.

You asked me to address Ambrose. The concerns regarding Eisenhower are, at least according to our article on Ambrose, inconclusive, and none of the concerns regarding Ambrose stop his books from being heavily used across Wikipedia--the Eisenhower article almost 100 times. Like any older biography, it is used with caution.

I've also taken the opportunity of downloading Ferrell. It is not a cradle-to-grave biography, it really starts with Nixon at age 32 at the end of World War II, though there are digressions back to childhood. I will continue reading and see what I can do with it as time permits. However, I don't see replacing all sources you object to as feasible. Wehwalt (talk) 12:43, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

I added a link to Aitken's honeymoon in Nixon's house above. How many other presidential biographers share such a connection with their subject? I'll concede that the argument for Black relates to his connection with Kissinger rather than Nixon, but Nixon's foreign policy is pretty much a subset of Kissinger's, regardless of what Nixon and Kissinger thought of each other later on. Citing Black for other parts of the article might be okay, but I don't think he should be cited for anything related to Nixon's foreign policy.

I don't see how Wikipedia's article on Ambrose is "inconclusive"—Rives states pretty clearly that Ambrose fabricated interviews with Eisenhower. In 2015, Irwin Gellman took Ambrose's fabrications as fact, although he notes that Ambrose's books continue to be sold. Ambrose is only used in Eisenhower's article because no one has raised this issue, not because there's any affirmative consensus to use him as a source despite his unreliability. (Also, Dwight D. Eisenhower is not a featured article like this one.)

The beginning of Farrell's book is told in a nonlinear fashion, but that doesn't mean it's not a cradle-to-grave biography. Nixon's childhood starts in Chapter 3: As American as Thanksgiving. Malerisch (talk) 13:59, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

Ah so. More interested in his telling of the 1946 campaign at present. Wehwalt (talk) 14:01, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

If you acknowledge "there remains no authoritative cradle-to-grave biography" on him....then I don't see the issue with going with what is available. I don't think there is enough (say) post-2017 to really build a bio that would conform to such rules as PRESENTISM or give us the breadth of info we would need. I have no issue with adding some of the sources you mention.....but to disqualify Aitken's and Black's books because of their "personal ties to Nixon and Kissinger" ignores the fact PRIMARY says (assuming you really could call these PRIMARY) we can use these sources...just to be careful about their use. Rja13ww33 (talk) 18:14, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

To be clear, my point with that quote was that it was true as of 2015, but no longer in 2023 since Farrell's biography (published in 2017) now exists. If you consider Aitken's and Black's biographies as primary sources, that sounds like another strike against them, right? WP:RSPRIMARY says that Wikipedia articles should be based mainly on reliable secondary sources. There's no reason for the article of such a well-known figure as Nixon to be based on any primary sources.

If I were writing this article from scratch (I have no plans to), I'd use Farrell's biography as my main source since it seems to be the most authoritative (and anecdotally, it seems to be the one that a lot of people recommend: [1] [2] [3]). I might supplement that with Evan Thomas's 2015 biography Being Nixon (also well-reviewed, although less so than Farrell). Then I'd include books that aren't full biographies but are still considered reliable, like Irwin Gellman's books The Contender (1999) and The President and the Apprentice (2015). Additional reliable sources on other parts of Nixon's life can be added as needed. Malerisch (talk) 19:40, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

PRIMARY also states that "Primary sources that have been reputably published may be used in Wikipedia, but only with care, because it is easy to misuse them". So like I said, even if they are PRIMARY....that doesn't mean they can't be used. Furthermore, I am not so sure they could be called PRIMARY. I looked at a number of the citations, and I don't see how Aitken & Black could have been "close" to the event or "directly involved" (as PRIMARY is defined). For example, some of those citations are from a point before Nixon knew either one. And we use a lot of sources.....granted the ones you mention are a big part of it, but I count about 35 print sources alone that are from other sources than the 3 authors you mentioned. Rja13ww33 (talk) 20:35, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

As I said, I'll work on replacing cites. It will be gradual. Wehwalt (talk) 19:22, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

'Thumb' article linked under 1968 campaign section?

Is there any reason in particular that the article for 'thumb' is linked right alongside the articles for Nixon's campaign and the '68 election as a whole?

Seems a bit out of left field for it to be the only mention of thumbs in the entire page, so I wanted to double-check here before I removed it.

W0nderhat (talk) 09:02, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I removed it. It was accidentally added in this diff. Malerisch (talk) 09:44, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Got it, thanks. W0nderhat (talk) 11:18, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Stance on LGBTQ+ matters

Nixon was very much against homosexuality, it sees. It feels like airbrushing history to not include this fact whatsoever.

Source. Electricmaster (talk) 11:18, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

I think we would want high quality reliable sources that would treat that in the context of the times. Fifty years ago, when Nixon was president, very few politicians would differ from that stance. If I'm remembering correctly, saying someone was gay, using more course terminology, was one of LBJ's favorite insults.--Wehwalt (talk) 13:18, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

Agreed, we are talking a era when homosexuality was considered a mental illness by some. (It wasn't until 1973 that the American Psychological Association removed it from its list of mental illnesses.) Rja13ww33 (talk) 19:15, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

In the hope of weakening the Soviet Union

There is a line (I think it is new) that describes Nixon's visit to China as being "In the hope of weakening the Soviet Union". I know that was the ultimate aim.....but I think the immediate intent was more basically to drive a wedge between the two communist nations in the Cold War. That is what most RS says. In (for example) 'The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World' (2010), Lorenz Luthi refers to this as a "wedge strategy" several times. (A good example is on p.145 where he calls it a "U.S. wedge strategy designed to split the Sino-Soviet alliance".) I may be nitpicking here....but does anyone think it is worth changing?Rja13ww33 (talk) 19:31, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

I added that, and I’m comfortable if you want to change to wedge. The point of wedge strategy is to weaken. I think it this will be understood in either phrasing. The particular source I used casts it in terms of weaken. JArthur1984 (talk) 20:07, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't think the "wedge strategy" really applies to Nixon. The Sino-Soviet split had basically happened by 1962, before Nixon's presidency. The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (2010) by Lorenz M. Lüthi mainly covers the years from 1956 to 1966 and only mentions Nixon once in the Conclusion chapter. I think it's more accurate to say that the Sino-Soviet split gave Nixon and Mao the opportunity for rapprochement, rather than that Nixon's visit to China was intended to drive a "wedge" between two countries whose relations had already deteriorated. Consider this passage from the chapter in The Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010) that I linked above: After the 1969 war scare (the Sino-Soviet border conflict), internal assessments in Beijing concluded that the USSR was China's greatest external threat. Mao moved swiftly toward a rapprochement with Washington, seeking improved relations with the United States as a measure of security against perceived Soviet expansionism. Malerisch (talk) 20:12, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

It still don't think "weaken" is the right way to put it. It is probably true more sources (in Nixon's case) refer to it as "triangular diplomacy" than anything else. So maybe that is it. (Then again, I may be getting too caught up in semantics here.)Rja13ww33 (talk) 01:36, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

I think it's more like "isolate" or "marginalize", though I don't know if the source would support that. Wehwalt (talk) 04:31, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

Could someone please correct the specifics of Nixon's younger brother's death?

The description is that his younger brother died as a short illness; I wanted to clarify that he died of tubercular encephalitis. See: "The Nixon’s lost their son Arthur to tubercular encephalitis in1925 and their son Harold to tuberculosis in 1933" from the Nixon library, at Microsoft Word - FA Family Collection at https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/forresearchers/find/textual/findingaids/findingaid_nixonfamily.pdf Jeanmarine (talk) 18:00, 11 February 2024 (UTC). I often make cleanup / clarifying edits like this but noticed that this page is locked, wasn't sure who can edit it.

Why is that considered more accurate than the existing source? Wehwalt (talk) 20:05, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

No mention of "summa cum laude" in source as specified in "college and law school" section

After graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Whittier in 1934, Nixon was accepted at the new Duke University School of Law [25]

[25] (https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/president-nixon): "a student and sailor" says: "Richard Nixon enrolled at Whittier College in September 1930. He was an active student, pursuing his interests in student government, drama, and football while living at home and helping to run the family's store. Nixon won a scholarship to attend Duke University School of Law in May 1934" Simonmikk (talk) 08:37, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Good point. I'll look at what sources I have and either modify or add a source. Wehwalt (talk) 11:37, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

I've added a Whittier College source that so states. Thanks. Wehwalt (talk) 11:44, 29 March 2024 (UTC)