This file is a single polemical political essay by Murray N. Rothbard, written in June 1994 after Richard Nixon’s death. Its scope is not a balanced biography of Nixon but a libertarian attack on presidential memorial culture, media rehabilitation, bipartisan state worship, and the conservative canonization of a president whom Rothbard regards as fundamentally statist.
Rothbard’s central thesis is that Nixon’s posthumous elevation exposes a broader American “statolatry”: the presidency has become sacralized, and even disgraced officeholders are ritually purified once they die. The essay begins by linking Nixon’s funeral honors to a larger pattern of public deification of judges and presidents.
It is another fiendish turn of the screw, the latest acceleration of rampant statolatry in our culture.
For Rothbard, this reverence is not personal sentiment but political theology. Presidents are transformed into embodiments of state power, above ordinary judgment and beyond historical accountability.
It is the president, any president, who now embodies the Supreme Power, and must be invested with divine attributes to match the scope of his powers.
The essay then turns to the spectacle of bipartisan homage. Rothbard is especially scornful that Bill Clinton, whose political circle once opposed Nixon, now honors him as an elder statesman. This becomes evidence that party conflict is secondary to ruling-class solidarity: both parties, the media, and the state apparatus unite to protect the sanctity of the office. The funeral tribute thus becomes an act of historical revision.
And so history is revised and twisted out of all substance.
Structurally, Rothbard moves from this cultural critique to a reassessment of Nixon’s record. His key conceptual move is to separate Nixon’s conservative rhetoric from his governing substance. Nixon, in Rothbard’s reading, is not an exception to conservative statism but its consummate example.
If any one man may be picked to sum up the victory of statist substance over the tinpot rhetoric, of the triumph of Big Government Conservatism, Richard Nixon is that man.
Rothbard’s indictment of domestic policy is sweeping: socialized medicine, welfare expansion, affirmative action, the proposed guaranteed annual income, abandonment of gold, wage and price controls, OSHA, and the EPA. The list functions rhetorically as a bill of particulars against Nixon’s reputation as a conservative. Foreign policy fares no better. Rothbard denies that Nixon’s supposed greatness in diplomacy compensates for his domestic record, arguing that Vietnam was expanded before it ended and that détente and China were overrated achievements.
Allegedly trying to end the Vietnam War, he lengthened and greatly widened it, stepping up the mass murder.
The final movement of the essay reinterprets Watergate. Rothbard does not defend Nixon; nor does he accept the liberal view that Nixon was uniquely criminal. Instead, he universalizes the indictment: Nixon deserved removal because presidents as a class deserve suspicion and, when possible, removal. Watergate’s significance lies not in moral purification but in precedent.
The point is that they all, all, deserved to be Brought Down, and the sooner the better.
This is the essay’s most important inversion. The scandal that respectable opinion wishes to bury is, for Rothbard, the one redeeming legacy of Nixon’s career. Watergate briefly made presidential desacralization thinkable.
The great thing about Watergate is that it made the unthinkable thinkable at long last, that it established the precedent for impeaching the Monster in the White House.
The relevance of the essay lies in its uncompromising anti-presidentialism. Rothbard attacks not only Nixon but the ritual machinery that converts failed rulers into national icons. The piece is also a critique of media memory, bipartisan consensus, and the conservative movement’s willingness to excuse state expansion when managed by one of its own. Its style is caustic, personal, and deliberately irreverent, but its argument is conceptually consistent: the state protects its symbolic continuity by rehabilitating its agents, while libertarian memory must preserve the fact that even a president can be forced from power.
But still he was tossed out; they can never take that knowledge away from us.
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