Chapter 16
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What the President Knew and We Don’t (Yet)

On the destructive power of hatred

Few of my students can say when Watergate arrived at its denouement, much less remember the high emotions it aroused 50 years ago this week. Although the drama unfolded in Washington, Tennessee supplied the tagline that, for many observers, summed up the issue around which the entire plot revolved. Tennessee Senator Howard Baker Jr. was the ranking minority member on the Senate committee investigating the scandal in 1973 when he asked, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

Nixon’s farewell speech to his cabinet and White House staff, August 9, 1974. Photo: Oliver F. Atkins / NARA via Wikimedia Commons

It would take another year or so before the answer to that question became clearer. On August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon became the first, and still the only, U.S. president to resign from office. To describe his fall as a tragedy, with comparisons to such characters as Richard III and Macbeth, has become a cliché. The better comparison may be older than Shakespeare, older even than the ancient Greek tragedians, as I learned when I taught Homer’s Iliad to a class of college freshman.

Outwardly, the contrast between the wan, ill-at-ease politician and the god-like Achilles, to whom the blind bard devotes more than 15,000 lines of dactylic hexameter verse, could not be more stark. Homer’s focus is on the warrior’s legendary anger before the walls of Troy, its causes as well as its fateful consequences. The proximate source is the dishonor done to him by the warlord Agamemnon, his superior in rank if not in martial prowess. In a fit of rage, Achilles announces he is going on strike and that his fellow Greeks won’t have him to kick around anymore. This shifts the momentum in the war back to the Trojans.

Three-quarters of the way through the epic, Achilles finally relents and pledges to rejoin his comrades in battle after the death of his bosom friend Patroclus. “I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals,” he says in Richard Lattimore’s 1951 translation, “and … that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man’s heart and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey.”

It’s an arresting description. Anger is supposed to be an unpleasant emotion, yet we all know how satisfying it can be, especially when we believe we are justified in feeling it. Righteous anger is sweet. Certainly there are things worthy of our ire. At the same time, like smoke, it can choke off nobler and saner impulses and cloud one’s vision. Warnings about the corrosive power of rage are scattered throughout the Bible and other ancient writings. Philosophers like the Roman Stoic Seneca describe it as a form of madness. (He had probably witnessed more than his share as an advisor to Nero.) A Buddhist proverb strikes a similar note: “Anger is a sweet flower with bitter roots.” With their limited life experience, my 18-year-old students nonetheless have little difficulty relating.

Nixon knew this all too well, though it was a lesson learned too late. Just before boarding the Marine One helicopter on the White House south lawn, he concluded his farewell speech with advice he probably wished he’d heeded. “Always remember,” he said, putting away his prepared remarks and looking out at the supporters whose trust he had betrayed, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” (Booker T. Washington, who had plenty of reasons to resent the way he had been treated, arrived at the same conclusion without having to undergo humiliation on a national stage: “I would permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”)

The soon-to-be former president was no doubt speaking from personal experience. His insecurities and resentments had driven him down paths that led to his undoing. Gerald Ford pardoned him in part because he knew the tendency of anger to beget more anger and saw that Watergate had already caused serious tears in the social fabric.

Pundits have long known what polls show with increasing clarity, namely, that voters are motivated more by what they hate than by what they love. It is a bipartisan reflex. Neither party has always been entirely enamored with its standard bearer. Yet they know with absolute certainty who they hate. It was true before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last month, and little seems to have changed in the weeks since. Even when such hatred stops short of violence, it is hardly less destructive.

This impulse is not limited to any one part of the body politic. Whether it’s education, the arts, business, sports, or entertainment, indignation is the default mode in many areas of public discourse. No doubt many people reading this are offended that I am not angrier about Achilles’ toxic masculinity or Nixon’s high crimes and misdemeanors. Fair enough. One thing is sure, though: Contempt is not very effective if you want to persuade someone that your views are worthy of consideration. I want to believe that professors like me and my colleagues on campus — ostensibly devoted to the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge — are immune to the tendencies that humbled these larger-than-life figures, but we’re not. Teaching in the humanities has reminded me that we’re all human, for better but also for worse.

A chastened Nixon would live for another two decades, mostly out of the public eye. But he struck a Homeric pose in those last moments of his life in politics. Characters in ancient Greek literature often acquire the gift of prophecy as they draw their final breaths. They reveal future events in melodramatic speeches full of pathos. In the last gasp of his presidency, Nixon saw into the future that we are now living. Perhaps he would be dismayed by the size and strength of the outrage industrial complex, but he wouldn’t be surprised.

What the President Knew and We Don’t (Yet)

Copyright © 2024 by Patrick Gray. All rights reserved. Patrick Gray is a professor in the humanities program at Rhodes College in Memphis and co-teaches a “Great Books” course at the West Tennessee State Penitentiary for Women.

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