Did President Nixon Try To Warn Us? His Words From Thirty Years Ago Sound Prophetic

Love him or hate him, former President Richard M. Nixon, regardless of your feelings on the Watergate Scandal had some significant successes to his name. We could point to him opening up relations with China… er… or taking America off of the gold standard… Okay, bad examples.

Maybe on balance, he was not the greatest conservative President, but we can say this: in a stunning interview in 1983, nineteen years after his resignation from the White House, Nixon gave us a stern warning. Where former President Ike Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex, Nixon sounded the alarm about the media-elitist complex. And my.. oh my.. if he could see the media today… oof.

In an interview from the oral history collections of the University of Georgia recorded in 1983 and preserved by the Richard Nixon Foundation, Nixon said in part:

Well, they have much more power than most people would like to think. When we think of the media in this country the problem is that they have a sense of self-righteousness, a double standard on issue after issue after issue. They can find everything wrong with somebody else but they will not look inside and ever admit that they could be wrong themselves. And what was involved here in the Watergate thing was the unfairness of it. Oh, there was a legitimate thing to investigate, but they refused to balance it.

They allowed their advocacy to get ahead of their reporting, which is their job to do. You know? President Eisenhower in his farewell address wrote about and warned against the power of the military industrial complex.

I didn't get a chance to make a farewell address but uh when I get old enough and decide to retire and I'm not planning it at the moment. But when I get that old if I make a farewell address I think I would warn against the media-elitist complex.

You know the media is always talking about the imperial presidency, the power of the imperial presidency. I think we ought to hear a little bit of discussion of the Imperial media and its power. You see: Presidential Power is limited: limited by the courts, limited by the Congress. The media's power is unlimited and some would say but what about libel suits forget it. After the Supreme Court's decision in Sullivan v. New York Times a few years ago a public figure cannot collect a libel suit against newspaper or television unless he can prove malice and there's no way uh that that's going to be possible.

As far as the media is concerned all we can hope from them if they're going to be responsible is self analysis self-criticism and and some of them are trying with their ombudsman and the rest. The other thing is competition but what we see in terms of newspapers across the country is more and more places where there's only one paper. Take Washington DC since the Star left the scene. The Washington Post is the only major newspaper being printed in the most important capital in the world. I wouldn't like to leave the fate of this country to the editors of The Washington Post.

How would the man whose political fall defined the decay of American politics and lionized the press for over three generations see today’s media hellscape? Perhaps it’s time we took a harder look at Nixon, and particularly what he had to say about them in his later life. After all: It seems that he wasn’t wrong about everything.