His hatred/jealousy for the "East Coast elite" utterly drove him to a darkside way of governance and thought.
Richard Nixon: the nightmare president of his age
His fans never realised how dark, scheming and vengeful he was. And, astonishingly, he got away with many of his crimes
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/10/richard-nixon-the-nightmare-president-of-his-age/
In this giant, prodigiously sourced and insightful biography, John A. Farrell shows how Richard Milhous Nixon was the nightmare of the age for many Americans, even as he won years of near-adulation from many others. One can only think of Donald Trump. Nixon appealed to lower- and lower-middle-class whites from the heartland, whose hatred of the press and the east-coast elite, and feelings of having been short-changed and despised by snobs, held steady until their hero and champion unmistakably broke the law and had to resign his second-term presidency.
Nixon won a smashing re-election in 1972, even as it was apparent that the White House was awash with skulduggery. His closest aides were caught, arrested and charged with breaking into the Watergate complex, where there were Democrat offices — though Farrell contends that Nixon gave no express orders for these and similar acts.
Other cronies hoped to discover embarrassing documents in the files of the psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the revealing Pentagon Papers, and preserved the infamous Oval Office tapes in which Nixon confided his darkest thoughts against his enemies. The president nearly got away with all of it. Farrell quotes Nixon as longing to be feared as a madman. The only two men he truckled to were Dwight Eisenhower, who used Nixon for his dirtier tricks, and Mao, to whom Nixon promised he would betray Taiwan.
Even when he was totally exposed as a villain, liar and schemer, he was able to resign from the White House and was pardoned by his vice-president rather than having to undergo the ordeal of impeachment and ignominious removal from office. And he lived on, wealthy, often admired, and conceding only gradually, in an evasive, self-justifying way, that some of the things he had done
were unwise, careless, wrong and even possibly illegal.
Nonetheless, Farrell shows, the China breakthrough — until Nixon’s trip to see Mao in 1972, for the US Taiwan was China — and his promotion of school desegregation, were significant achievements. Without venturing too deeply into psychoanalysis, Farrell, a journalist who specialises in big biographies, argues convincingly that Nixon’s early years as a middle child with a violent father and an undemonstrative Quaker mother resulted in life-long self-doubt, vengefulness and the pursuit of power. He was always leery of the true love of his wife and daughters.
He grew up in a small California town, attended the local college, went on to an almost first-rate law school, and then began his political climb towards the power he craved; but that was never enough because, of course, he really needed the love and affection he felt he had been cheated of as a child. This resulted in endless secret hatreds.
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