Time Essay: Richard Nixon: An American Disraeli?

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Both Disraeli and Nixon were rather elusive figures in their native land—the one a Sephardic Jew who, as Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb puts it, "created himself in the likeness of an anti-Semitic cartoon," though he became an Anglican; the other a man who often seemed shallow and without strong roots. Both made their contemporaries uneasy for reasons that could not always be spelled out. Each in his time was underestimated by others, Disraeli because of his rakish dilettantism, Nixon because of his bland ordinariness. Both were dismissed as opportunists; few perceived the fire within. Neither of them ever gave up. "Disraeli," admitted his great rival William Gladstone, "is a man who is never beaten. Every reverse, every defeat is to him only an admonition to wait and catch his opportunity of retrieving and more than retrieving his position." Though he phrased it a bit more elegantly, Disraeli offered several equivalents of "You won't have Disraeli to kick around any more." Both men returned more than once from the political dead. Dizzy was defeated four times before he finally was elected to Parliament. His flowery maiden speech was greeted with gales of laughter and catcalls. Prophesied an enraged Disraeli: "I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me." He had to wait so long to become Prime Minister that nobody thought he would make it. But at 63, he reached the top of what he fondly called "the greasy pole."

In an uncanny way, Nixon and Disraeli fought similar political battles—which may support the liberal charge that conservatives never change or the conservative charge that conditions never change. Though both believed in a strong government that would not flinch from taking resolute action, they were hostile to big bureaucracy, with its overcentralization and deadening uniformity. They preferred to accept society in all its luxuriant if inegalitarian variety; they made a policy of trying to pump life and vigor into local government. As an American politician, Nixon can hardly endorse aristocracy but he would surely agree with Disraeli's praise of the aristocratic system in England as ready to receive "every man in every order and every class who defers to the principle of our society which is to aspire and excel."