Beyond Peace

The Eulogies

from

THE STATE FUNERAL

for

PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON

Wednesday, April 27th, 1994
The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace
Yorba Linda, California

I
Our Challenge Beyond Peace

II
A New World Beyond Peace

America Must Lead

Russia and the Victory of Freedom

America and Europe: New Missions for Old Friends

Asia and the New American Century

The United States and Japan: In Lockstep into the Next Century

China: “The Biggest of Them All”

Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea: The Closed Door or the Open Door?

Building New Bridges to the Muslim World

The Developing World: Freedom's Last Frontier

III
America Beyond Peace

Strong Government, but Limited Government

Equal Opportunity, Not Equal Outcomes

Hardheaded Idealism and Enlightened Realism

The Media: Freedom Without Constraint

The Myths of Government

Health Care “Reform”: More Steroids for Big Government

Old-fashioned Learning for a New Era

Welfare: Sickfare for America's Cities

Crime and Race in America

The Corruptions of Popular Culture and Drugs

God and Family: Rediscovering the True Heart of America

Individual Mission, National Mission

Author's Note

Index

For Patricia Ryan Nixon

Ambassador of Goodwill

Opening Remarks

On behalf of the family of Richard Nixon, I welcome you who have gathered to join with them in paying final respects to the memory of Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th President of the United States.

Today, in this service, we remember with gratitude his life, his accomplishments and we give thanks to God for those things he did to make our world a better place. Through this service, may our dedication to serving others be deepened, and may our eyes be lifted to that which is eternal. Let us hear the word of the Lord. Now, help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. Our God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, let not your heart be troubled. Neither let it be afraid. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Now, we have a program, you all have one, and we are going to follow that program without any further announcement. You may be seated. Thank you.

Former Secretary of State

During the final wake of Richard Nixon's life, I often imagined how he would have reacted to the tide of concern, respect, admiration and affection evoked by his last great battle. His gruff pose of never paying attention to media comment would have been contradicted by a warm glow and the ever so subtle hint that another recital of the commentary would not be unwelcome. And without quite saying so, he would have conveyed that it would mean a lot to him if Julie and Tricia, David and Ed were told of his friends' pride in this culmination to an astonishing life.

When I learned the final news, by then so expected yet so hard to accept, I felt a profound void. In the words of Shakespeare, “He was a man; take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again.”

In the conduct of foreign policy, Richard Nixon was one of the seminal presidents. He came into office when the forces of history were moving America from a position of dominance to one of leadership. Dominance reflects strengths, leadership must be earned. And Richard Nixon earned that leadership role for his country with courage, dedication and skill.

When Richard Nixon took his oath of office, 550,000 Americans were engaged in combat in a place as far away from the United States as it was possible to be. America had no contact with China, the world's most populous nation; no negotiations with the Soviet Union, the other nuclear super power; most Muslim countries had broken diplomatic relations with the United States; and Middle East diplomacy was stalemated. All of this in the midst of the most anguishing running domestic crisis since the Civil War.

When Richard Nixon left office, an agreement to end the war in Vietnam had been concluded and the main lines of all subsequent policy were established. Permanent dialogue with China; readiness without illusion to ease tensions with the Soviet Union; a peace process in the Middle East. The beginning, via the European security conference, of establishing human rights as an international issue, weakening Soviet hold on Eastern Europe. Richard Nixon's foreign policy goals were long range, and he pursued them without regard to domestic political consequences.

When he considered our nation's interest at stake, he dared
confrontations, despite the imminence of elections and also in the midst of the worst crisis of his life. And he bore with some pain the disapproval of long-time friends and allies over relaxing tensions with China and the Soviet Union.

He drew strength from a conviction he often expressed to me: The price for doing things halfway is no less than for doing it completely, so we might as well do them properly.

That's Richard Nixon's greatest accomplishment. It was as much moral as it was political to lead from strength at a moment of apparent weakness to husband the nation's resilience and thus to lay the basis for victory in the cold war.

Shy and withdrawn, Richard Nixon made himself succeed in the most gregarious of professions and steeled himself to conspicuous acts of extraordinary courage. In the face of wrenching domestic controversy, he held fast to his basic theme that the greatest free nation in the world had a duty to lead and no right to abdicate.

Richard Nixon would be so proud that President Clinton and all living former presidents of the United States are here symbolizing that his long and sometimes bitter journey had concluded in reconciliation.

I wish that in his final hours I could have told him about Brian McDonald, who, during the Cambodian crisis, had been fasting on a bench in Lafayette Park across from the White House until, as he said, President Nixon redeemed his pledge to withdraw American forces from that anguished country in two months; a promise which was, in fact, kept. Across the chasm of the decades, Brian called me the day Richard Nixon fell ill and left a message, “When you talk to President Nixon, tell him that I'm praying for him.”

So let us now say good-bye to our gallant friend. He stood on pinnacles that dissolved into precipice. He achieved greatly and he suffered deeply, but he never gave up. In his solitude he envisaged a new international order that would reduce lingering enviousness, strengthen historic friendships and give new hope to mankind, a vision where dreams and possibilities conjoined when Richard Nixon ended the war. And he advanced the vision of peace of his Quaker youth. He was devoted to his family. He loved his country and he considered service his honor. It was a privilege to have been allowed to help him.

United States Senator
Senate Republican Leader

I believe the second half of the 20th century will be known as the age of Nixon. Why was he the most durable public figure of our time? Not because he gave the most eloquent speeches, but because he provided the most effective leadership. Not because he won every battle, but because he always embodied the deepest feelings of the people he led.

One of his biographers said that Richard Nixon was one of us, and so he was. He was a boy who heard the train whistle in the night and dreamed of all the distant places that lay at the end of the track. How American. He was the grocer's son who got ahead by working harder and longer than everyone else. How American.

He was a student who met expenses by doing research at the law library for 35 cents an hour while sharing a rundown farmhouse without water or electricity. How American.

He was the husband and father who said that the best memorial to his wife was her children. How American.

To tens of millions of his countrymen, Richard Nixon was an American hero. A hero who shared and honored their belief in working hard, worshipping God, loving their families and saluting the flag. He called them the silent majority. Like him, they valued accomplishment more than ideology. They wanted their government to do the decent thing, but not to bankrupt them in the process. They wanted his protection in a dangerous world, but they also wanted creative statesmanship in achieving a genuine peace with honor. These were the people from whom he had come and who have come to Yorba Linda these past few days by the tens of thousands, no longer silent in their grief.

The American people love a fighter, and in Dick Nixon they found a gallant one. In her marvelous biography of her mother, Julie recalls an occasion where Pat Nixon expressed amazement at her husband's ability to persevere in the face of criticism, to which the President replied, “I just get up every morning to confound my enemies.” It was what Richard Nixon did after he got up every morning that not just confounded his enemies, but turned them into admirers.

It is true that no one knew the world better than Richard
Nixon, and as a result, the man who was born in a house his father built would go on to become this century's greatest architect of peace.

But we should also not underestimate President Nixon's domestic achievements, for it was Richard Nixon who ended the draft, strengthened environmental and nutritional programs, and committed the government to a war on cancer. He leap-frogged the conventional wisdom to propose revolutionary solutions to health care and welfare reform anticipating by a full generation the debates now raging on Capitol Hill.

I remember the last time I saw him at a luncheon held at the Capitol honoring the 25th anniversary of his 1st inaugural. Without a note, President Nixon stood and delivered a compelling speech, capturing the global scene as only he could, and sharing his vision of America's future. When it was over, he was surrounded by Democrats and Republicans alike, each wanting just one more word of Nixonian counsel, one more insight into world affairs.

Afterward the President rested in my office before leaving the Capitol, only he got very little rest. For the office was filled with young Hill staffers, members of the Capitol Police and many, many others, all hoping to shake his hand, get an autograph or simply convey their special feelings for a man who truly was one of us.

Today our grief is shared by millions of people the world over, but it is also mingled with intense pride in a great patriot who never gave up and who never gave in. To know the secret of Richard Nixon's relationship with the American people, you need only to listen to only his words: “You must never be satisfied with success,” he told us. “And you should never be discouraged by failure. Failure can be sad, but the greatest sadness is not to try and fail, but to fail to try. In the end what matters is that you have always lived life to the hilt.” Strong, brave, unafraid of controversy, unyielding in his convictions, living every day of his life to the hilt, the largest figure of our time whose influence will be timeless. That was Richard Nixon. How American. May God bless Richard Nixon and may God bless the United States.