In 2014, then-President Barack Obama sat for a pre-Super Bowl interview with Bill O’Reilly, then of Fox News. They were in the Blue Room of the White House. O’Reilly asked, “Are you the most liberal president in U.S. history?”

Obama didn’t think so. “You know, the truth of the matter is that when you look at some of my policies, in a lot of ways Richard Nixon was more liberal than I was,” he said, pointing to Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. 

Nixon did, in fact, create the EPA, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Minority Business Development Agency, and organized both domestic and foreign volunteer efforts through a national service program called ACTION. Oh, and the Office of Management and Budget. That was Nixon, too. And he empowered the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, growing its staff from 359 employees to 1,640.

“On the stock exchange of history, shares in Nixon are a good buy,” Jonathan Aitken, a conservative British politician who wrote a biography of Nixon, judged in a perceptive Telegraph column some years back. On a world stage as tumultuous as our own, Nixon calmed tensions with both China and the Soviet Union — or, as Aitken artfully puts it, “By the time Nixon left office he had brought peace to millions, even if he had not found it for himself.”

Domestically, Aitken said Nixon “was a creative innovator.” It is true enough that those innovations required more government interventions that today’s libertarian-minded conservatives may like. But when Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is advocating a $15 minimum wage bill, the Koch network is pushing criminal justice reform, and conservative thinkers are reevaluating their fealty to the free market, it is high time for a little Nixon-style creativity.

It may be difficult for some to allow that Nixon is more than Watergate, but any serious student of history will have to do so. A student of the present may also note that Nixon’s particular style could serve as a crucial correction to our age of gestural politics. “Of course Nixon was a partisan, and few possessed such seasoned political antennae as he did. But above all, he was a pragmatist, not an ideologue,” wrote Bob Dole, the late Republican senator from Kansas, in a 2017 article for Politico Magazine.

The first significant, and still the finest, corrective to Nixon’s record was Joan Hoff’s Nixon Reconsidered, published in 1994. “The 2027 days Nixon spent in office have been remembered most for Watergate, next for foreign policy, and least for domestic reform. I think this order should be reversed,” she wrote. It was a novel argument, one arguably more trenchant today than when she first made it.

Were it not for a recalcitrant Congress, Nixon’s ambitious Family Assistance Plan would have provided indigent people with a universal basic income. His Family Health Insurance Plan would have similarly covered millions of people — if, again, he only had the political capital to see it through.

“Nixon was more liberal than such Republican presidents as Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan, or Bush,” his former aide and Interior Undersecretary John C. Whitaker wrote in 1996. “At the same time, Nixon’s domestic record seems more conservative than recent Democrat presidents such as FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton, putting Nixon squarely in the middle of the political spectrum of modern presidents.”

James Brown endorsed him in 1972, after performing at his inauguration in 1969. That’s not either liberal or conservative, necessarily, but you must be doing something right to earn the respect of Soul Brother No. 1. How do you reconcile that with the ugly things he said about black people? You don’t. Real people are complicated, often uncomfortably so. Lyndon Johnson was complicated, and so was Martin Luther King Jr. Winston Churchill was nothing but. Our digitally mediated world tries to strip away that complexity, but it is still there.

“Nixon was determined to use his presidency to protect and to change the lives of those living in peril at the edge, in frightening uncertainty and great economic risk, facing terrible costs for health care with no stable employment and ability to provide for a family,” wrote John Roy Price, author of the recent The Last Liberal Republican: An Insider’s Perspective on Nixon’s Surprising Social Policy, a necessary corrective to the public image of our 37th president. 

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal who had been exiled from the establishment for his iconoclastic ideas on race, was invited to join the Nixon administration. From an office that radiated original thinking, Moynihan pushed for transformative ideas like universal basic income. He thought that “a framework of economic security would have reduced racial antagonisms,” wrote Price, who worked closely with Moynihan.

Nixon may well occupy the elusive middle ground where most people remain on most policies but where both parties, pulled by their extremes (the Freedom Caucus on the Right, the “Squad” on the Left) and further frightened away from moderation by cable news blowhards, increasingly fear to tread.

“Nixon wanted to be a good prince,” observed Nixon biographer Evan Thomas. “He wasn’t always a good prince, but he wanted to be.” Everyone knows about the cynical “Southern Strategy” he used to wrest white voters away from the Democrats in states such as Georgia and South Carolina. Fewer, I suspect, know that he brought school desegregation to the very same places.

During the Yom Kippur War, he provided crucial assistance to the fledgling Jewish state. “Richard Nixon: The anti-Semite Who Loved Israelis and Saved Israel,” read a 2018 headline in the newspaper Haaretz.

Section 8, the affordable housing program that made city living possible for the indigent? Yup, that was Nixon. 

Though it ultimately failed, the Model Cities program initially begun by Johnson put the renewal of urban America at the center of America’s renewal as a whole, necessary as that was after the social unrest that swept through the country in the summers of ‘67 and ‘68. Indirectly, he was responsible for the fascinating experiment in African American self-governance that was Soul City, North Carolina.

It was Nixon who decreed that Aug. 26 would be marked as Women’s Equality Day. In 1970, he signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse recently called “the most significant pro-labor legislation since the 1930s” in an op-ed for that newspaper.

Don’t worry, Nixon was most definitely a Republican, from his 1946 entry into national politics with a challenge to Rep. Jerry Voorhis in California’s 12th Congressional District, running on an anti-communist line (and how delicious it must have been, for the Whittier College graduate, to defeat a Yale man), to the day he died in New York City in 1994, at the age of 81. 

The problem is that Nixon is a terrible pitchman for Nixonism. “Throughout his career, Nixon allowed ambition to corrode his nobler principles,” wrote Freddy Gray in a generally approving assessment of Nixon’s career in the Spectator, a conservative British journal.

Only he was also more than his party affiliation. His convictions were always checked by his ambitions, but even so, those convictions were always his own, forged in childhood trauma — two brothers died from tuberculosis — and his mother’s Quaker faith: “What made Nixon a liberal is not quite secular,” Price wrote.

Days after Barry Goldwater was routed by Johnson, Nixon, who had lost the California gubernatorial campaign two years earlier, declaring with his trademark self-pity that the press would no longer have him “to kick around anymore,” said Johnson’s triumph “was a rejection of reaction, a rejection of racism, a rejection of extremism.”

The New York Times put his warning on its front page, above the fold. “Nixon Recommends Move to the Center — Rejects Rightist Extremism,” the headline said.

One way to look at the last half a century or so of Republican politics is quite straightforward: The establishment chose the politics of Goldwater over the politics of Nixon. In the closing days of Goldwater’s campaign, Ronald Reagan had given his “A Time for Choosing” speech, which announced his ascent to national significance — he would soon run for, and win, the same California governorship that eluded Nixon. The former union president and registered Democrat concluded the speech by warning that bad political decisions — i.e., electing people who espoused the same political beliefs he had only recently renounced — could lead to “a thousand years of darkness.” You can already hear, in that apocalyptic warning, House Speaker Newt Gingrich declaring, decades later, “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.” 

The figure who best embodied the Goldwater-Reagan strain of conservatism and articulated its motives was National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. National Review boosted Goldwater’s candidacy. He and Buckley remained friends after Goldwater returned to the Senate, where he became a sort of éminence grise. As for Reagan, he and Buckley were so close that Buckley wrote an entire book about their friendship. During the 1980s, National Review served as both road map and a chronicle for movement conservatives.

Those conservatives — evangelicals, supply-siders, pro-lifers — mostly had little use for Nixon. Buckley, for his part, was infuriated by Nixon’s rapprochement with Mao Zedong in 1972. “We have lost — irretrievable — any remaining sense of moral mission in the world,” Buckley fumed at the time of what would, within a few years, come to be seen as one of the great diplomatic developments of the Cold War era. Talk about a bad take. Buckley mistrusted Nixon on domestic policy, too. “Theirs was a fraught relationship from the beginning,” wrote historian Alvin S. Felzenberg.

Nixon wasn’t a fan of Buckley, either. For him, Buckley was merely the conservative version of John F. Kennedy, who had defeated Nixon in 1960: long on style, short on substance. “The problem with far-right conservatives like Buckley is that they really don’t give a damn about people, and the voters sense that,” he said, according to Whitaker. 

Still, it should not be especially surprising that the conservative movement chose the charming, urbane Buckley, just as the nation at large had chosen Kennedy, over stodgy, surly Nixon. But what if that choice was a mistake and a rather big one at that? And what if that mistake explains the Republican Party’s predicament today? What if the theatrics of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) trying to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-GA) over his principled stance on aid to Ukraine and Israel is a direct product of the GOP’s rejection of Nixonism as both political attitude and policy program?

In a 2018 essay for the Atlantic, Matthew Continetti, the preeminent historian of conservative thought and a conservative commentator himself, as opposed to an interloper like yours truly, wondered about the path American conservatism would have taken if it had spurned the hard-edged, combative style of Buckley. Continetti yearned for a more nuanced, thoughtful, and ecumenical conservatism, which for him was embodied by Russell Kirk. 

Kirk was far too supple a thinker, infinitely more so than Buckley, in my view, to allow himself to be pigeonholed politically by posterity. But he was a fan of Nixon, praising him in a 1960 essay for the New York Times (“The Case for Nixon”) as “cool, prudent, and a good mediator.” Nine years later, writing in the New York Times again, Kirk gushed: “What Lyndon Johnson only talked about, Richard Nixon has achieved in his first six months as President: a substantial consensus. And that is precisely what the country needed more than anything else.”

Nixon saw enemies everywhere, which blinded him to the fact that he had no enemies quite like himself. Yet he could also transcend the meanness of his own spirit in a way that few politicians could. There was an evening in 1970, for example, when anti-war protesters gathered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Having awoken in the White House at 4 a.m., Nixon saw the protesters from his window, and decided, right then, to join them. “Nixon went to the Lincoln memorial at dawn Saturday and pleaded with young peace demonstrators for understanding of his efforts to end the Vietnam war,” a wire report from the following day said.

Photos show Nixon, in suit and tie, as hopelessly and authentically unhip as ever, talking to young people who look like they should be at Woodstock.

Nixon was far too self-conscious not to know how the protesters felt about him. “I told them that I know you think we are a bunch of so-and-sos — I used a stronger word to them — I know how you feel. You want to get the war over. Try to understand what we are doing,” he would recollect. At one point, he chatted about surfing.

During the Trump presidency, “the cruelty is the point” became a favorite shibboleth of a certain type of liberal who needed to dismiss the administration’s policies wholesale, without evaluating those policies on their own merits. When it comes to Nixon, the cruelty was the byproduct. Of his insecurity, power lust, arrogance, range. His paranoia, above all. But it was never the point itself. He could be mean as hell, but he was not mean-spirited in the style of some contemporary political figures.

“The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interrèd with their bones, it goes,” Shakespeare’s Mark Antony says in his famous funeral oration for Julius Caesar.

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There has not been better proof of that observation than the afterlife of our 37th president, who died 30 years ago in April. For all his sins, Nixon tried to do some good, proferring policies that were sometimes ahead of their time.

It is tragically ironic that our politics today has come to imitate the very worst of Nixon, from his casual disregard for the rule of law to the stoking of racial and religious animosities. As for the good, we have forgotten it entirely. Yet it is still there, interred with Nixon’s bones, waiting for an Indiana Jones to plunge in. It’s about time. 

Alexander Nazaryan writes about politics and culture.