In the Trump era, one of Richard Nixon’s worst moments as president looks a lot better

Wednesday is the anniversary of one of Richard Nixon’s most Nixonian moments — a surreal confab with student protesters in the wee hours of the morning on May 9, 1970 that went viral for all the wrong reasons.

A PBS documentary calls it “the day the 60s died.” At the time it read as farce, an emblem of the president’s sweaty desperation to connect. “Most of what he was saying was absurd,” reported a Syracuse undergrad. “Here we had come from a university that’s completely uptight, on strike, and when we told him where we were from, he talked about the football team.”

Today, Republicans like Nixon — interested in actual dialogue and sincerely attempting, however ineptly, to bridge cultural divides — barely exist. Is it possible that, in Donald Trump’s America, we should not kick Nixon around quite so much?

His daily diary laconically recorded the incident: “4:58am-5:55am: the President met with College students, eventually numbering approximately fifty, at the Lincoln Memorial.” The Kent State shooting on May 4 had spurred plans for a demonstration on May 9 to mourn those lost and protest the Vietnam War. On May 8, Nixon held a 10 p.m. news conference to reassure protesters driving to Washington he sympathized with their desire to get America out of Southeast Asia. He promised to withdraw all U.S. troops from Cambodia by the end of June.

Exhausted, Nixon spent the next three and a half hours phoning everyone from Billy Graham to two-time presidential candidate Thomas Dewey to reporters before going to bed, briefly, at 2:15. At 4:30, he summoned his valet and security team (all of them “petrified with apprehension,” the president noted), put on a suit and tie and decided it was a perfect time to visit the memorial, already occupied by a handful of students awaiting the next day’s rally. ...