Why Richard Nixon wanted to be a rapper in 1990
It was a herculean political task on the desk of the PR team of Richard Nixon when he put his first presidential campaign together.
This is a man whose name has gone on to become a byword for “shifty, untrustworthy politician”, yet even before Watergate, Nixon had some serious image issues. If anything, before he was elected, his name was shorthand for a stodgy, glamourless charisma vacuum, whose first opponent as the Republican nominee for President of the United States in 1960 just so happened to be some upstart pretty-boy Yankee named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Bollocks.
JFK was young, handsome and effortlessly charming. That was just as important to the electorate as Nixon’s years of experience as Dwight D Eisenhower’s Vice President, so the Nixon campaign had to find a way of making him appear accessible.
What they stumbled upon was something that would go on to have huge success 40 years later, when Bill Clinton would don a pair of shades and rip a kick-ass sax solo on The Arsenio Hall Show. That’s right, the Nixon campaign played on their nominee’s love of (and actually quite special talent for) music.
Nixon was a fairly accomplished piano player who composed his own music, playing a concerto of his own composition on The Jack Parr Program in 1963, three years after his first presidential election loss. Fast forward over a decade, and he’d play the piano at the Grand Ol’ Opry itself, leading the assembled hicks in a sing-along of ‘God Bless America’.
However, none of that explains a quite frankly baffling quote published by The Washington Post in 1990. Trust me, I’m very glad I could source this because otherwise I shouldn’t have believed it for a second, but it’s true. The Post, in searching through the audio tapes at the Nixon Library, found one that saw the disgraced former president reminiscing about his early life and comparing it to the life of a young adult in the then-modern times.
Which leads to Tricky Dick saying the quite frankly incredible line, “I have often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.” Straight Outta Yorba Linda, indeed.
The jokes really do write themselves, but there is some genuine pathos there. The guy wasn’t kidding about his love of music, and there’s a sign that he understood that all youth culture was basically the same. Rather than do what most people of all generations do and assume that their youth culture was great and that youth culture after they get old is a complete waste of time. There really did seem to be an understanding, somewhat sensitive person in there somewhere.
However, that person was buried underneath tons of paranoia, bigotry and cruelty, so don’t go feeling too bad for the lad.