Nixon’s Still the One
Now some might say Richard Nixon was a dark man—Drew and Witcover and Dallek and that crowd—but not Conrad Black. And he would know
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Book Review
OF RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON
By Conrad Black
McClelland & Stewart, 1,152 pages, $45
NIXON AND KISSINGER: PARTNERS
IN POWER
By Robert Dallek
HarperCollins, 740 pages, $32.50
VERY STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: THE
SHORT AND UNHAPPY MARRIAGE OF
RICHARD NIXON AND SPIRO AGNEW
By Jules Witcover
PublicAffairs, 412 pages, $27.95
RICHARD M. NIXON
By Elizabeth Drew
Times Books, 187 pages, $22
There are not-crooks, and then there are not-crooks.
Richard Nixon carried that famously self-proclaimed status to the grave. How long Conrad Black will keep it is for a federal jury to decide. The Canadian media tycoon is currently on trial in Chicago on multiple counts of fraud, racketeering, money laundering, and obstruction of justice. Lord Black alludes to that litany of charges (the last two of which carry a nice whiff of Watergate) in the acknowledgments to his massive, muscular and somewhat demented life of the 37th President. With uncharacteristic delicacy, he mentions his “very distracting circumstances” and “serious judicial problems.” Being charged with criminal behavior is not the worst preparation for the Nixon biographer.
In writing about Nixon, Lord Black joins a very long line of predecessors. All Presidents are worthy of our attention—but some better repay that attention. It’s often preferable that a President not be all that compelling (witness the genuine feeling displayed in so many of the tributes offered Gerald Ford last December). Certainly, Nixon would have been better off—the country and world, too—if he hadn’t had the unique ability to be both bull and toreador in a blood sport largely of his own making. But he did, and in a sense still does: Frost/Nixon is the toughest Broadway ticket of the season, and now we have this quartet of new books.
As Presidential subjects go, not even Nixon can compare to Franklin Roosevelt. Lord Black’s previous book was a biography of F.D.R. This makes him doubly suited to write about Nixon. Criminality helped end Nixon’s Presidency; Roosevelt helped drive it. He was the President under whom Nixon came of political age and, as such, the one Nixon measured himself against. For all that he had highly charged relationships with several other Presidents—Truman, who loathed him; Eisenhower, who elevated him; Kennedy, who defeated him; Ford, whom he elevated—it was the relationship with F.D.R. that did the most to form him.
“Relationship,” at least in the interpersonal sense, may be the last word ever associated with Richard Nixon. He was the Melvillean “isolato” as most powerful man in the world. Richard Reeves knew exactly what he was doing when he chose the subtitle for his fine study President Nixon: Alone in the White House. Yet it’s a relationship that defines Robert Dallek’s exhaustive Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, which concerns itself with the most important relationship of Nixon’s Presidency—and very likely the most singular between any President and subordinate in U.S. history. A far different relationship concerns Jules Witcover in Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. If Mr. Dallek’s book is a tragedy of global proportions, Mr. Witcover’s verges on lugubrious comedy as it details the now largely forgotten pas de deux between not-crook President and nolo contendere Vice President.
Elizabeth Drew’s Richard M. Nixon has a good deal about Nixon’s dealings with both men, of course. Her book is part of the American Presidents Series, edited by the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. When Nixon lived in New York in the early 80’s, his townhouse backed onto Schlesinger’s. Strange things like that kept happening to Nixon. (When he moved to New York in the early 60’s, the apartment he bought was in the same building as Nelson Rockefeller’s.) He had a stunning propensity for the bizarre, something Ms. Drew wastes no time acknowledging. She begins her book thusly: “Richard Milhous Nixon was an improbable President.” That sentence is indicative of her restrained, nicely compressed style. That style is also rather gray, though she does have the occasional purple patch. Sometimes the purple justifies itself. “Nixon’s tumultuous presidency,” she writes, “was for those of us who lived through it the most riveting of our lifetimes, and, perhaps, in all of American history.” Other times, she just gets carried away. The members of the House Judiciary Committee, Ms. Drew declares, “rose to the task before them and some of them became giants—it seemed at times akin to the Founding Fathers—though in most cases and under other circumstances they were actually not even close to that stature.” Next Page >
My apologies for the multiple small 'edits' made in the preliminary version of the immediately succeeding post that was first entered at 9:01 pm on June 2, 2007. I experienced difficulty with editing the post. It may be useful to note that I found it helpful not to rely on the 'memory' of the server for my Username and Password, but to paste them in each time, in place of the automated entries that appeared when the edits were made.
Mark Feeney, author of the lively and entertaining 'Nixon At The Movies', focused his remarks on the 'phrase-mongering' aspects of the four books [NOTE: Feeney praised the subtitle used by Richard Reeves, 'Alone In The White House', which Reeves used for his valuable record of the Nixon presidency. It is perhaps relevant to note that a closely related title ('One Man Alone') was used by Ralph de Toledano for his Nixon biography about 3 decades earlier (1969), in the year Nixon first assumed the presidency]. Feeney chose to provide little perspective about the contents or novelty of the four books, and I thought it might be useful if I did so, at least for the two I have read. Because I haven't yet read Witcover's 'Very Strange Bedfellows ...', I can only anticipate that, if it is of the same high quality as Witcover's earlier books about Nixon ('The Resurrection Of Richard Nixon') and Agnew ('A Heartbeat Away ...'), it will likely be an informative and highly entertaining 'read'. Likewise, I have not read Elizabeth Drew's 'Richard M. Nixon'; however, in this instance, it seems fitting that Ms. Drew's book appears in a series that was once edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. whose pathological views of Nixon are legendary and whose lifelong inability to comprehend the very meaning of 'historical writing' was recently memorialized in a searing (and accurate) obituary in the Manchester Guardian, where Arthur might have expected to be treated more kindly. In brief, I'll take a pass on any of Ms. Drew's 'work product'. Rightly, Feeney mocks Drew's ludicrous quasi-analogy between the 1974 House Judiciary Committee & The Founding Fathers [see Jerry Zeifman's 'Without Honour' for a close-up of the scabrous bunch that comprised the HJC].
However, I have read the other two books, and it is a pleasure to volunteer an opinion on each. The Dallek book is fatally flawed because the author fails to address the context in which the Nixon presidency began, with the Soviet Union having reached nuclear parity with the U.S., with U.S. power in general decline as a result of the Vietnam conflict, and with the nation in the thralls of what Patrick Moynihan memorably described as a "Second U.S. Civil War.". Of more than passing interest in the context of this assessment, Black, in his book, deals with the very same matter in an incisive way, remarking in passing, as few others have, that the preceding Democratic (Johnson) administration had allowed parity to be reached without public discussion or apparent well-ordered contingency planning of any recognizable kind -- of the sort that Nixon brought to the presidency in 1968. Further, because of his enslavement to the modern conceit that personal relations between/among the principals in historic events are more important than their doctrinal agreements, Dallek fails to recognize that the Nixon Doctrine and its unwritten corollary -- that many states don't, at a given time, have the traditions and institutions to make democracy work -- were to produce Nixon's 'generation of peace', a highlight of his 1972 State Of the Union address. Between the Vietnam Peace Treaty (1973) and the Bush adminstration's invasion of Iraq (2003), a full generation (30 years) of Americans grew to maturity as the U.S. enjoyed its longest respite from high-casualty warfare in the 20th century.
On the other hand, Black's book is a genuine novelty and a delight to read. Black combines an arch style of commentary -- of the sort used by onetime 'Nixon hater', Stephen Ambrose, in his admirable trilogy of Nixon biography -- with an objective and often admiring respect for the historic importance of Nixon's achievements. Notwithstanding Feeney's remark in his review, that "Eisenhower...elevated [Nixon]", it was, in another sense, 'Nixon who elevated Eisenhower' by skillfully finessing Earl Warren and Robert Taft at the 1952 GOP convention, a saga Black relates in gripping fashion, as being a masterpiece of the political arts and sciences. Appropriately, Feeney makes fun of some of Black's gratuitous expositional fluorishes, but Black's textual adornments give him a 'voice' [as Feeney notes, "a man who is on a first-name basis with the Deity"] that does nothing to disturb the 'feng shui' of his narrative. On the contrary, these fluorishes afford a distinct style and a solid measure of amusement. There have been other 'friendly' Nixonographers during Nixon's post-presidency (e.g. Jonathan Aitken, Lord Longford, Ray Price), but none of the others has been as comprehensive and specific as Black in dealing with Nixon's likely place in history. Notwithstanding the spinning sound that emanates from the tomb of Arthur M. Schlessinger, Jr., Black cogently ranks Nixon with the great U.S. presidents. Black concludes that Nixon "ranks in that category of unusually talented presidents who are just beneath the very greatest American leaders [Washington, Lincoln and FDR, with some argument to be made for Jefferson and Reagan] with Jackson, Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Truman and possibly Eisenhower."
With due allowance for the influence Nixon had on the elevation of two of the other worthies in this array (Eisenhower, Reagan) to the presidency, it occurs to a reader, after reading Black's book, that there is a good case to be made for including Nixon among the very greatest American leaders. For example, if there is any criticism to be made of Black's absorbing narrative, it is likely that, after making a very strong case for Nixon's role in engineering and contributing to a successful and relatively serene Eisenhower presidency, Black falls shy in making what might be a forceful case for Nixon's role in contributing to the successful Reagan presidency. To begin, it was during Nixon's senatorial run in 1950 that Reagan chose to abandon his support for the candidacy of Democrat Helen Gehagen Douglas and to campaign for Nixon while Reagan was still a registered Democrat. Later, in 1980, Nixon's best-selling book, 'The Real War', published well in advance of the presidential election, focused public attention on Carter's failings in foreign policy, 'storyboarded' Reagan's first-term arms buildup and provided much of the fodder used by Reagan's speechwriters in his first term (e.g., in 'The Real War' Nixon described the difference between the US and the USSR as the difference between good and evil). The "well-thumbed" (Richard Reeves) 'position paper' Nixon gave Reagan, and Nixon's timely intervention with Gorbachev, were arguably formative events in 'storyboarding' Reagan's second term, as 'the Gipper' retreated from the truculence of his first term rhetoric to the pathway of detente, by greatly extending (with INF etc.) Nixon's own seminal arms-limitation agreements of 1972 (SALT I).
Black brings a wealth of historic knowledge about military campaigning to the table and deploys it to unravel, insofar as possible, the intricacies and deceits of political campaigning, as in the case of the Mme. Chennault component of the 1968 presidential campaign, in which LBJ ordered the FBI to 'wiretap' Agnew, in an action that exceeds the subterfuge of 'Watergate' in the sense that Nixon had no foreknowledge of the 'Watergate' bugging whereas LBJ personally ordered the FBI to bug the vice-presidential candidate of the opposing party in mid-campaign. One thing seems beyond dispute: with the passing from the scene of the ageing 'engineers' of what the NY Observer's own Nicholas Von Hoffman once appropriately called a period of "hysterical contagion" in U.S. society, 'Watergate' has become nothing but a footnote to the Nixon presidency. To his everlasting credit, by 1976, Von Hoffman -- who was once fired by CBS-TV (from Sixty Minutes) in 1973 for having called Nixon "The dead rat/mouse on America's kitchen floor" -- realized and categorically stated in the Washington Post, the hallowed home of Woodward & Bernstein, that "Future historians will make short work of the idea of a diabolic Nixon and will, instead, interest themselves in how and why virtually a whole society lost the remnants of balanced judgement and fell on the man like a compacted mob .... These past three years Nixon has had a worse press than Stalin at the height of the Cold War. The only name for it is hysterical contagion .... To the very end, Nixon contended that he conducted the office in much the same fashion as his predecessors, and he was right."
Black is one of the "future historians" Von Hoffman was writing about in 1976.
Each time I see 'All The President's Men' listed in the TV summaries, I'm reminded of the apoplectic look on Ben Bradlee's face as 'Deep Throat' (W. Mark Felt) told Larry King's national and international viewers on April 26th, 2006, that he, Deep Throat, thought Nixon had done a good job as president.