How to be unhappy, Richard Nixon and Leonard Bernstein

All sorts of amazing, interesting things happen in my life every day.Yesterday I watched an interview with Allen Shawn talking about his new biography of Leonard Bernstein, and later, in the evening I watched a movie of the play, Frost//Nixon by British playwright, Peter Morgan. The theme common to these two was that late in their lives, both Bernstein and Nixon were deeply disappointed, unhappy men. By everyone else's standards both men were successful beyond the imagination of ordinary mortals.What more can you achieve than to become the President of the United States, or the conductor of the New York Philharmonic and one of the most popular composers of the age. Yet Nixon was so worried about his legacy, so pressured to win under all circumstances, that he let his judgement be clouded and authorized the criminal break-in to the Democratic Party headquarters, which lead to his fall from grace and his resignation as President. Bernstein was concerned that the world would remember him not as a great composer, not included in the canon of great composers of the century, but only as a brilliant conductor (!!!) a fine pianist, and a composer in his spare time. Had Nixon not been so driven by ambition, had he been more at ease with people, more trusting, and less worried by the fear of failure, he would have gone down in history as one of the great Presidents, who ended the Vietnam War that he inherited from his predecessor, bridged the Cold War abyss between the great powers by meeting both Brezhnev and Mao. He had a lot going for him, but he also had a huge monkey on his shoulders, the resentment of the privileged, who never treated him with the sort of respect he believed he deserved, the boy who came from the wrong side of the track who had to foot it with the gilded sons from the right side of the track like the Kennedys. And Lenny Bernstein was the hugely talented Jewish boy among the over achiever goys in Harvard, for whom the whole world was his to conquer. Teaching the Vienna Philharmonic how to play Mahler after the war, composing West Side Story, one of the most popular musicals of the century, would have been more than enough for any other mortal, but not for Lenny. The huge egos of Nixon and Bernstein caused them to be unhappy instead of glowing in their success and treasuring their great achievements.