Time & Perspective Quote by Richard M. Nixon

Nixon is doing something presidents almost never do in public: shrinking himself. The line borrows the stately language of “forces of history” to argue that even the most powerful office is, at best, a hand on the wheel of a much bigger machine. It’s a sober-sounding worldview, but it’s also a political maneuver. When a leader claims destiny is largely uncontrollable, he’s not only confessing humility; he’s preemptively distributing responsibility away from his own choices and toward the era’s momentum.

The rhetoric works because it wraps agency in fatalism. “Very seldom” is the key phrase: not never, just rarely. That sliver keeps the speaker in the game while lowering expectations for intervention. It’s a carefully calibrated posture for a president who governed through massive structural currents - Cold War realignment, social upheaval, the slow collapse of public trust in institutions - and who, by the time such reflections circulate, is inevitably shadowed by Watergate. The subtext reads like a defense attorney’s brief written in the passive voice of History: events happened, pressures mounted, directions were set.

Yet the irony is that Nixon’s own career demonstrates the opposite lesson. He was famously tactical, obsessed with leverage, certain that systems could be bent if you understood the incentives and applied pressure. The quote’s melancholy determinism sounds less like Nixon the operator than Nixon the narrator, trying to frame leadership as the art of surviving tides rather than causing storms. It’s a line that flatters the public’s sense that history is bigger than politics, while quietly asking to be judged as a passenger, not a driver.