Three Nixons

President Richard Nixon and the bound copies of transcripts of the tapes he had hoped to keep hidden from Congress and the American people. He may have wanted to keep hidden his true character along with his criminal acts. Listen to the tapes and what you hear is a spiteful, angry, fearful, mean, vindictive, dangerous man. Photo courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikipedia.

I’m reading three books about Nixon right now.

One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon by Tim Weiner begins with a flat-out assertion that Nixon was a criminal and a tyrant who “destroyed himself and damaged the nation through deliberate acts of folly.”

January 1973:  Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month that Changed America Forever by James Robenalt opens with the Christmas Bombings of Hanoi and Nixon committing mass murder out of his vanity and ego-driven determination to avoid becoming, as he so solipsistically put it, “the first President to lose a war.”

Being Nixon: A Man Divided by Evan Thomas opens with an anecdote about Nixon in the White House movie theater laughing at the scene in Around the World in Eighty Days where the elephant stops the train.

One of these things is not like the others.

I’m well into One Man Against the World and January 1973. I’ve only managed a few pages of Being Nixon. I’m not sure I’ll manage any more. I stopped in fury and disgust. I would have thrown it across the room if I hadn’t been listening to it in the car.

Instead, I contented myself with talking back to it as people do to their TVs, until I couldn’t take it anymore.

Nixon wanted to be upbeat, to be an optimist. He often tried to, as he put it, “buck up” his followers and his family.

They needed bucking up because he’d let them down and led them into trouble.

Late at night, sitting alone in his Executive Office Building hideaway…

And drinking himself drunk.

…he would take out is yellow legal pad and begin making noises about the leader and person he wished to be. He imagined, in the spirit of his mother’s Quaker faith, “peace at the center”; he would use words like joyful, serenity, and inspirational.

When he wasn’t writing down names for his list of enemies! 

Hope and fear waged a constant battle in Nixon.

Hope? Nixon?

At the end of his Presidency, fear one out.

At the end? From the start! I’d say the fear brought about the end and it started the moment he took office.

Nixon was often driven by fear---he was, he believed, surrounded by enemies.

Well, to be honest, he was, not all of them of his own making.

At the same time, he understood the hopes and fears of others…

He’s sounding a little too much like FDR here.

…the insecurities of the people he memorably named “the Silent Majority.”

My grandmother did love the guy for that.

He was an introvert in an extrovert’s business; incredibly he was one of the most successful politicians in American history.

All right, I’ll give you that one. But it depends on what you mean by successful.

Weak at human relations but cunning at power, he made politics into a science and also an art; “for him it had a cadence, precision, beauty,” wrote his daughter Julie.

Ok, I see what Thomas is up to. The theme being developed is Nixon's divided personality, and Thomas is starting by reminding readers that Nixon had light side, which is fine. But then Thomas proceeds to minimize Nixon's dark side, which was undeniably his dominant side.

Nixon’s inclination toward the dark side has long been a cliché. Less understood (possibly even by Nixon himself) is his heroic, if ill-fated struggle, to be a robust, decent, good-hearted person. In the battle against his darker impulses he fought with a kind of desperate courage. At some level, I believe, he was aware of this struggle, though he gave every inclination of a man with little or no self-knowledge.

It’s one thing to want to avoid demonizing the man. It’s another to try to magic away the demons within him and replace them with an angel fighting to gain control.

Nixon was a tragic figure. But a tragic villain. A Richard III not a Hamlet.

Or, rather, a not as honest with himself Richard III who saw himself as a Hamlet, with whom he shared a tendency towards melancholy and self-pity but little else.

Even so, his constant attempts to be a better man, generous and big-spirited---and to control his fate, knowing, perhaps, that he was destined to fail, are poignant. Improbably, this anxious boy from a pinched background believed that he was meant to do great things. Shy and bookish, he wanted to wake up every morning and ask, “What will we accomplish today?”

He may have wanted to be a better man but mainly he felt sorry for himself because nobody saw him as that better man when he tried to portray himself that way.

And you see what this is?

Though Ronald Reagan gets the credit, it was Nixon who created the modern Republican Party, by breaking up the New Deal coalition and siphoning off disaffected Democrats who sensed that the native Californian, born to the lower middle class, was more sensitive to their wants and needs than the liberal elitists Nixon so enthusiastically scorned.

It’s half the story with the Southern Strategy elided.

And the credit for breaking up the New Deal coalition belongs more to George Wallace than to either Nixon or Reagan, but no one who’s read Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, which Thomas lists in his end notes as a source, would fail to give Nixon his due here. Nixon’s part in the creation of the modern Republican Party is a major theme of Perlstein’s book.

Thomas points to Nixon's "liberal" policy achievements without noting he was signing into law bills passed by an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress who’d have over-ridden his vetoes. Nixon was avoiding humiliation more than he was doing anything else. And just because he signed the laws didn’t mean he felt required to enforce them.

Thomas neglects to use the phrase "benign neglect."

But what really got me was when he said that what upsets people when they hear the tapes is Nixon's hubris!

NO!

What does more than upset people, it appalls them, is hearing the President of the United States talking like a mob boss.

And then there is all that fear, paranoia, and hatred. Nixon feared and hated everybody! On top of which he was often drunk.

And depressed.

If you're inclined to find anything sympathetic in the picture of him that's to be drawn from the tapes it's that he was often depressed. Probably clinically depressed and to the point where he couldn't think straight. He drank to self-medicate. "Nixon was slightly inebriated and deeply despondent," writes Weiner at one point in One Man Against the World, and that about sums it up. On days when he wasn’t too depressed to do the job of being President, he was so consumed by Watergate he couldn’t focus on anything else. It got so bad that by late 1973 the country was effectively being run by a duumvirate of Al Haig and Henry Kissinger.

Which is terrifying to contemplate.

But Thomas mentions only the hubris and then, almost offhandedly, he suggests that, because of the hubris, the private conversations of most Presidents, if we could listen to them, would sound like Nixon's.

If this was true, it's a reason to despair for the United States not a mitigation of Nixon's actions and behavior. But I doubt it's true.

I'm fine with being told Nixon loved his wife and daughters and that he laughed at silly movies.

But you'd better not try to sell me on the idea he was basically a likable guy with a few flaws who made some mistakes.

Listen to the tapes and what you hear is a spiteful, angry, fearful, mean, vindictive, dangerous man.

Nixon's "humanity" doesn't lie in his having some likable qualities. It lies in his awfulness. He represents the worst in us.

And he knew it. He didn't want to be what he was. Thomas is right about that. But he couldn't control himself. It's actually his being out of his own control that makes him so compelling. And tragic.

But, like I said, a tragic villain.

And it’s his villainy we sympathize with. Not that we’re all villains. But we know ourselves to be capable of being villains. We don’t find sympathy only with good guys because sympathy isn’t a matter of self-flattering identification. It’s a matter of recognizing ourselves in others.

And them in us.

Thomas isn’t giving his readers credit for having sympathetic enough imaginations.

Or he intends to portray Nixon as a tragic hero.

Not a story I particularly want to read.

But it is just the introduction.

Maybe I should give Being Nixon another chance. Maybe I will. But not before I finish One Man Against the World and January 1973.

By the way, the hubris Thomas describes is there to be heard on the tapes. Nixon was not a modest man, and hubris was one of his several fatal flaws.

Richard Nixon saw himself as a great statesman, a giant for the ages, a general who could command the globe, a master of war, not merely the leader of the free world but “the world leader.” Yet he was addicted to the gutter politics that ruined him. He was---as an English earl once said of the warlord Oliver Cromwell---“a great, bad man.”

That’s from One Man Against the World.

Tim Weiner didn’t put the word “tragedy” in his subtitle to make Nixon out to be some kind of hero.

Comments

[Batocchio]

Time to start digging up your older Nixonland posts as well, perhaps.

[Professorlarry]

Don't bother with "giv[ing] Being Nixon another chance." Since you were put off by the introduction (and your description of it is spot on), you won't like the remaining 500 or so pages any better. Thomas returns again and again to the same themes throughout. All I could think of as I finished it was that fairness in a biography doesn't demand complete balance; Thomas is, as you suggest, so determined to be fair that he can't see the imbalance in Nixon's character and psyche, which ultimately limits the usefulness of his narrative. In short, just because "Nixon’s inclination toward the dark side has long been a cliché" doesn't mean it isn't true--and in the end, biographies should aim for the truth.

[Edward Fleming]

After surviving the George W. Bush regime, I wish we had Nixon to kick around. At least Nixon was removed from office in disgrace.
Bush/Cheney still plague us with their war-mongering natter.

[Lance Mannion]

Thanks, Professorlarry, I'll move on. I've got another Nixon book to add to the pile, anyway.

Crooked by Austin Grossman.