August 7th 2026

The Once & Future Nixon

The Watergate hotel is old. Its cement is faded, and the only retail in sight is an old gas station on an awkward corner. The mid-century modernism, once thought glamorous, feels as aged and isolated as the neighborhood itself. Pull into the small circle in front of the luxury hotel, however, and a valet will rush to your door, asking if you’re checking in or just stopping by.

In June 1972, the neighborhood was newly revitalized and prestigious. The Kennedy Center next door had held its first performance just nine months earlier, and the hotel was a hangout for artists, politicians, and celebrities.

In June 2016, after sitting vacant for nearly a decade, the hotel reopened and was finally restored to the glory it held in its eponymous era. Now, the furniture is high-fashion mid-century, the staff wear uniforms created by the costume designer for Mad Men, you can stay in the “Scandal Suite” for a night, and the $22 martini, served “just the way you like it,” is called “The Agent’s Choice.”

You’d have to order yours with gin, only soaking the olives in vermouth, to achieve the dryness of President Richard Nixon’s personal recipe, but as his most famous supporter, Elvis Presley, croons “Suspicious Minds” softly in the background, you can’t help but feel like the “the Old Man” himself is still just a mile down the road.

I invented Nixonmaxxing

The kids call it “Nixonmaxxing,” and I invented it 30 years ago. “I think that his historical record is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so,” Vice President J.D. Vance says about Richard Nixon, who has become, as a recent Wall Street Journal headline put it, “an unlikely new icon” for young conservatives.

Maybe I can’t claim to have been the first teenage Republican to have embraced Nixon chic, but all the way back in 1996 a young Danny, irked by the banality of college application essay questions, decided to make his pitch to higher education by writing about the merits of the president who’d been taken down by Watergate. It was a way of daring colleges and universities to reject me.

It was also a way to rebel against the commodification of rebellion under America’s first boomer president, Bill Clinton. A generation of dope-smoking, draft-dodging, self-righteous hippies had become the Establishment – they were running the government, higher education and the entertainment industry, continuing to pose as outsiders as they made millions on Wall Street in the early days of post-Cold War globalization. Peaceniks were waging war as proof of their humanitarianism. Nixon was more honest. Saying “yes” to him was a way of saying “hell no!” to Pearl Jam.