Contributors >> Choudhury, Mehnaz Ara ('04)

Biographical statement (June 2009)

After graduating from Lehigh University in 2004, Mehnaz Ara Choudhury went to graduate school for History at the University of Chicago and will be graduating with a Masters in History in Fall 2009. She plans on continuing at the PhD. level and applying to law school so she can also earn a J.D. with the hopes of becoming a legal academic. Her area of specialization is American legal history. Currently in 2009, Mehnaz is finishing several seminar papers including one on the conservative legal movement and 1950's era tax law. She is also looking to return to the Nixon Library and Birthplace Foundation to begin research on several Nixon papers she has been wanting to write for some time.

Reflection

I completed my Reel American History project on Oliver Stone's Nixon. RAH was seminal to my becoming a student of history, to my growing obsession with American legal history, and was also important to my secondary interest with the modern conservative movement.

My interest in Richard Nixon as a president started when I was in grade school – his funeral was the first presidential funeral I remember watching on television. Even though I read several biographies, I didn't study Nixon when I first came to college. At Lehigh University, I was an English and American Studies major – I'm still uncertain about why I didn't commit to History since some of my favorite professors (Gallagher, Doty, Keetley) do work in a historicist tradition, but I blame it on the fact that I didn't discover Gallagher's classes until junior year, and by then it was too late. The RAH course took place around the time that I participated in a conservative theory reading group. When I started the reading group, I wasn't an American citizen. I was interested in the history of party ideologies beyond the battles I saw the College Democrats and College Republicans waging in the Brown and White. The book that had the biggest impact on me was Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater. Goldwater came across as more thoughtful than William Buckley in God and Man at Yale, and his passion resonated more than Edmund Burke's classic works. I became obsessed with Goldwater and learned from his biography that he detested Nixon. I knew little about Nixon at this point and wanted to understand why he was so disliked by a conservative leader I would have expected him to have much in common with. This reason probably seems opposed to the work I produced for Gallagher and the RAH Project. My paper was a gender and politics analysis, and I think it shows my reach as an English major. Even when Gallagher sent me to the Nixon Library and Birthplace Foundation, the highlight of my undergraduate experience, I reported back on the archives but didn't complete a seminar paper on the work I saw there.

I continued the conservative theory reading group as I worked on the RAH project. I partially understand now why Goldwater disliked the power-mongering that Nixon participated in, but my reading convinced me that Nixon's conservative world view did match Goldwater's in significant ways. He believed in protecting the environment – "the great American land" -- equal rights, and, significantly, wanted to extend and enlarge America's role abroad. He created the EPA and extended the vote to 18-year-olds. Nixon went against his party in ways that reminded me of Goldwater's conservatism, so I found the animosity even more perplexing and rooted in a divide over Nixon's divisive ideology of a "silent majority."

However, politics has always come across as a divisive game in history books and what amazes most from watching Stone's film is Nixon's legacy. Even as Nixon lost the Vietnam War, he is acknowledged as having an era – the Nixonian Era. As was noted in the last presidential election, very few presidents get their own eras. Obama will. Clinton didn't. George Bush Sr. did. George Bush Jr. didn't. Nixon's era is perhaps the most fraught of the presidential eras, but even that adds to its potency – as a politician Nixon worked to guarantee he would be remembered in this way, and perhaps this is what so frustrated Goldwater, a man who didn't "politic" in the same way, and who, even with the title "Mr. Conservative," couldn't guarantee an era for himself. My obsession with Nixon continues today mostly because his legacy has been usurped by a fever over President Ronald Reagan. Duke University, his law school stomping grounds, never awarded him an honorary doctorate. As a Republican president, Reagan was visionary in certain ways, but Nixon embodied a less flashy academic-style conservatism, authoring more than a dozen books on policy, which I find more lasting and significant.

Finally, the RAH project pushed me to want to study American legal history at the graduate level and created a secondary interest in the conservative legal movement. At the center of the Watergate debacle were several legal questions; however, these were not the first legal inquiries that Nixon would have been associated with. Campaign fraud, the early HUAC hearings, executive privilege – Nixon, the lawyer, and Nixon, the president, would be at the center of several legal questions and would himself leave behind a long legal legacy. Nixon is the only U.S. president to be a named party in four Supreme Court cases; he was responsible for the passage of the War Powers Resolution and the Independent Counsel Act; and he began several influential discussions on campaign finance reform. His role as diplomat to China was shaped by his sharp legal mind and can be seen in several of his works, especially Beyond Peace. Studying Nixon means studying Nixon as a lawyer. My historical passion was born because of the hours I spent looking at documents associated with Nixon's legal legacy, and I plan on completing a dissertation that will most certainly be an American legal history topic. I hope my second book will be on Nixon as a lawyer.