President Nixon endured a career of ups and downs

President Richard Nixon was often described as being “awkward” and uncomfortable in the limelight outside the Oval Office of the White House. Katelyn Fossett of POLITICO Magazine commented that Nixon’s staff “struggled tirelessly to humanize him for public consumption.”

When Nixon appeared on the television comedy show “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” during the 1968 presidential campaign to deliver the classic “Sock it to me,” catchphrase, producers were kind to him.

 

The line had been popularized by cast member Judy Carne (shown below). “As a running gag on the show, Carne gamely bore the brunt of such pranks as having buckets of water thrown at her or being dropped through a trap door,” which were set in motion whenever she said: ‘Sock it to me,’” wrote Ben Zimmer of The Wall Street Journal.

 

“Nixon wasn’t doused by water, dropped through a trap door, bombarded with marshmallows or subjected to any additional indignities – much as some in the audience might have enjoyed it,” Zimmer said.

After Nixon moved into the White House in 1969, he was occasionally called on the telephone by “Laugh-In” character Ernestine Tomlin, the nosy switchboard operator (played by Lily Tomlin). She familiarly referred to him as Milhous, which was Nixon’s middle name.

One monologue inquired about Milhous’ astronomical telephone bill, with 175 extensions at his residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C., and the number of long-distance calls being made to foreign capitals.

Ernestine dryly asked: “Don’t you have any friends in this country?”

 

Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew became a liability. 

He was the butt of many jokes. Nixon weathered a lot of political storms as well. Yet, he was easily re-elected in 1972, defeating Democrat George McGovern (shown below) of Avon, S.D., in one of the largest landslide victories in American history.

 

Gerald Ford was selected as Nixon’s second vice president

Nixon’s demise was his connection to the Watergate scandal. He resigned from office on Aug. 9, 1974, the first president in American history to voluntarily vacate the presidency.

 

Through it all, Nixon remained loyal to Duke University in Durham, N.C., where he had earned his law degree in 1937. It was not a reciprocal relationship. 

In 1954, when Nixon was vice president to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the left-wing leaning faculty rescinded an offer for Nixon to be the commencement speaker, refusing to award him an honorary doctorate degree.

Nixon was rebuked once again in 1981, when Duke’s faculty group vehemently opposed an effort, which was championed by Duke president Terry Sanford (shown below), to establish a Nixon memorial library on the Duke campus.

 

The wisdom of that decision still haunts the Durham community. The economic benefits that presidential libraries bring to their host communities is enormous.

After Nixon died in 1994, at age 81, the university did offer a tepid memorial tribute to the former president. It was authored by Pamela B. Gann, dean of the law school, and published in the Duke Law Journal. She wrote, in part:

“President Nixon had a distinguished and innovative record in international affairs during his presidency. His 1972 visit to China was probably his greatest foreign policy triumph, creating the opportunity for the United States later to establish formal diplomatic relations with China for the first time since the Communists controlled China.”

Pamela Gann later served as president of Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.

“President Nixon will be considered by many to be the most interesting president in this century in the conduct of foreign affairs, both as president and as a subsequent senior statesman,” Gann wrote.

In 2013, Mousa Alshanteer, a Duke freshman from Trinity, N.C., wrote an essay suggesting that Duke University should exercise some forgiveness and not downplay his status as an alumnus.