Resiliency

Resiliency

By

Leonard Zwelling

I would like to give some praise to two men I usually don’t laud—Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. Why?

Both of these men have shown bottomless wells of resiliency in their careers.

Mr. Nixon became known to me when I was at a very young age. My parents hated him and with good reason. He ascended in politics as a Commie chaser, calling his 1950 California Senate opponent, the former actress Helen Gahagan Douglas, “pink right down to her underwear.” He rode that to the vice presidency despite accusations of financial impropriety that led to his Checkers Speech of September 1952 disclaiming these allegations. Eisenhower kept him on the ticket and they won. Nixon survives again. By the way, Checkers was his daughter’s dog.

In 1960, Mr. Nixon lost a very close race for President to John Kennedy. Then, in 1962, he lost a bid for California Governor and claimed “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” But once again, back he came and was elected President in 1968 only to be felled by Watergate for crimes the Supreme Court has recently deemed not crimes at all. Nixon was right all along when he told David Frost in 1977, “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” He was just 50 years ahead of his time.

Nixon is the epitome of resilience even as he proved to be a small, bigoted man on the White House tapes. Nonetheless, you have to give the guy credit. He kept coming back.

I think the same can be said for Donald Trump. He declared bankruptcy several times and was not a business success at all, despite his claims to the contrary. His father had to bail him out of his financial difficulties and his failure to pay his contracting and legal bills is notorious. He saved himself when he became a television star on The Apprentice and parlayed that into an escalator ride to the White House in 2016, much to everyone’s surprise.

His performance in his first term was so-so and he lost his re-election bid to the already elderly Joe Biden. Trump also paid the price for Covid. People thought they were through with Trump. Hardly. He came storming back with more vigor than ever and won easily in 2024 and is now the President of the United States with, perhaps, more power than any Chief Executive since Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Trump owns Congress and has the Supreme Court at his beck and call. We are probably closer to autocracy than we have been since the presidency of FDR and this is all being run by a man who has been broke several times. That’s a comeback!

There are many other stories in American history of resiliency from George Washington, to Abe Lincoln, to Jack Kennedy himself who almost died in the Pacific during WWII and suffered horribly from a host of illnesses throughout his life even from childhood.

There may be no asset a parent can try to instill in a child that is more important than resiliency. Whatever amount of this I have ever had, I owe to my parents. My mother was orphaned by the age of eleven, but persevered to make it to college and become a school teacher. My Dad survived WWII, antisemitism at college, and even more anti-Jewish sentiment trying to find work in New York after graduation. Both of my parents demanded that we (my sister and I) be tough. I think the demands were excessive in some instances, but who is to know when I needed to reach back for just a little more and it was their imparting a little extra grit in me that kept me going. It sure was needed after I got fired as a vice president to be able find myself a place on Capitol Hill.

So, thanks Mom and Dad for toughening me up. I may have a few scars on my psyche. Too bad. Scars can be resilient, too.

You can’t get through life without many ups and downs. Resilience allows you to stay on the roller coaster. Without it, you may just retreat into yourself. Resilience can save you in sports, in a career, in life. It is something you cannot have too much of.