The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Interpretation: For those who worked closely with Richard Nixon,
the man was an enigma. According to his chief speechwriter, Ray Price,
there were two Nixons, one light, one dark. The light Nixon was
“exceptionally considerate, exceptionally caring, sentimental, generous
of spirit, kind.” The dark Nixon was “angry, vindictive, ill-tempered,
mean-spirited.” He saw both sides as being “at constant war with one
another.” But perhaps the most perceptive observer of Nixon, the one
closest to figuring out the enigma, was Henry Kissinger, who made a
point of studying him closely so that he could manage and even play
him for his own purposes. And according to Kissinger, the key to Nixon
and his split personality must somehow lie in his childhood. “Can you
imagine,” Kissinger once observed, “what this man would have been
like if somebody had loved him?”
As an infant, Nixon seemed to be unusually needy. He was a
notorious crybaby; it took great effort to soothe him, and he was
continually bursting into sobs. He wanted more attention, more
fussing after him, and he was quite manipulative if he did not get these
things. His parents did not like this aspect of their child. Growing up in
the pioneer days of southern California, they preferred to have a stoic,
self-reliant child. Nixon’s father could be physically abusive and cold.
His mother was more caring but frequently depressed and very moody.
She had to deal with the business failures of her husband and two
sickly brothers of Richard who died at young ages. She had to
frequently leave Richard alone for months to attend to his brothers,
which Richard must have experienced as some kind of abandonment.

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In dealing with his difficult parents, the personality of Nixon was
formed. Seeking to overcome and disguise his vulnerabilities, he
created a persona that served him well, first with his family and later
with the public. For this persona he accentuated his own strengths and
developed new ones. He became supremely tough, resilient, fierce,
decisive, rational, and not someone to mess with, particularly in
debate. (According to Kissinger, “There was nothing he feared more
than to be thought weak.”) But the weak and vulnerable child within
does not miraculously disappear. If its needs have never been met or
dealt with, its presence sinks into the unconscious, into the shadows of
the personality, waiting to come out in strange ways. It becomes the
dark side.
With Nixon, whenever he experienced stress or unusual levels of
anxiety, this dark side would stir from deep within in the form of
potent insecurities (“nobody appreciates me”), suspicions (enemies
everywhere), sudden outbursts and tantrums, and powerful desires to
manipulate and harm those he believed had crossed him.
Nixon repressed and denied this side of himself with vehemence,
even up to the very end in his last words to his staff. He frequently told
people he never cried, or held grudges, or cared what others thought of
him—the opposite of the truth. For much of the time he played his role
well as RN. But when the shadow stirred, strange behavior emerged,
giving people who saw him on a regular basis the impression they were
indeed dealing with two Nixons. To Kissinger, it was like seeing the
unloved child come back to life.
Nixon’s dark side finally became something tangible in form of the
tapes. Nixon knew that everything he said was being recorded, and yet
he never held back or filtered what he was saying. He insulted close
friends behind their backs, indulged in wild bouts of paranoia and
revenge fantasies, waffled over the simplest decisions. He was a man
who greatly feared the slightest internal leak and suspected betrayal in
almost anyone around him, and yet he entrusted his fate to tapes that
he believed would never be made public in an unedited form. Even
when it seemed that they could become public and he was advised to
destroy them, he held on to them, mesmerized by this other Nixon that
had emerged. It was as if he secretly desired his own punishment, the
child and the dark side taking revenge for being so deeply denied.

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