I finished David Greenberg's Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image.
In this post, I'd like to comment on Greenberg's discussion of three
books about Richard Nixon. The first two I have read, and the third is
one that I am thinking about reading.
1. Well, actually, the
first book will be two books: the ones by Monica Crowley about her time
working for Nixon during the 1990's. On pages 299-300, Greenberg
states:
"A final challenge to Nixon's reputation as a wise man
came, ironically, from a book that aspired to showcase Nixon's acumen.
In 1996 and 1998, Nixon's former assistant Monica Crowley published two
volumes of her conversations with her own boss as she recollected them.
Crowley understood that Americans still craved a glimpse of the 'real'
Nixon behind his public facades; by reprinting Nixon's comments to her
about Watergate, politics, and world affairs, she hoped to humanize him
and to show off his wisdom. But to many readers Nixon's
undifferentiated remarks, from everyday chatter about the 1992 election
to freshman-level musings about various political philosophers, came
across as embarrassingly banal. Instead of peeking into the mind of a
visionary, readers found themselves eavesdropping on an elderly
kibitzer. If Crowley had hoped to highlight Nixon's mastery of
geopolitics, the president's old friend Len Garment thought, her gambit
backfired. Her books, he said, showed Nixon 'at his worst:....craven,
pompous, vain, vindictive, and, most unforgivably, silly...'"
I
actually thought that Monica's books about Nixon were pretty good. I
wouldn't say that Nixon particularly impressed me in those books, for he
did come across as rather vain and petty. (I did admire him, however,
for standing up for his wife after she died and some of the articles
about her were negative, for, as Nixon said, Pat didn't ask to be in
public life.) On whether Nixon's political or philosophical insights
were "banal" or "freshman-level," well, I can't say: they're probably
better than anything I can come up with, and they don't seem to me to be
any more banal than other things that I have read. To be candid, I
have read plenty of good books, but I am rarely blown away by people's
attempts to be profound.
What I liked most about Monica's books was their description of Nixon the man. One of the saddest parts of her Nixon in Winter
was on page 338, when Nixon got into Monica's car, but he was afraid to
go home to see his sick, dying wife and his children who were mourning
for her. Monica drove him around for a while, and they saw Nixon's
previous home, "where Mrs. Nixon had enjoyed better health and happier
times with her family and death had not loomed as immediately as it now
did." I thought that Monica effectively captured Nixon's vulnerability
in the final years of his life.
2. Greenberg has a chapter about
revisionist historians who interpreted President Nixon as a liberal on
domestic policy, and, on pages 328-329, he discusses where Stephen
Ambrose comes out on that in Ambrose's Nixon trilogy:
"As it
turned out, Ambrose's three-volume biography didn't deal with Nixon's
social policies much at all...Hewing to the familiar narrative, Ambrose
emphasized Watergate and foreign policy more than domestic affairs. And
despite his comments at Hofstra, his judgment of Nixon's domestic
policies echoed the journalists of Nixon's own day: 'On the domestic
side, Nixon has no claim to greatness,' Ambrose wrote. '...Nixon might
have achieved that level of accomplishment in a number of areas, such as
welfare reform, or national health insurance for all, or government
reorganization, or revenue sharing, but in each case he failed.'
"In
the closing paragraphs of his final volume, Ambrose turned
sentimental...Ambrose concluded his trilogy with a ringing endorsement
of Nixon's presidency that was informed by the conservatism of the
Reagan years. 'Because Nixon resigned,' Ambrose wrote of the man he
once hated, 'what the country got was not the Nixon Revolution but the
Reagan Revolution. It got massive, unbelievable deficits. It got
Iran-contra. It got the savings and loan scandals. It got millions of
homeless and gross favoritism for the rich....When Nixon resigned, we
lost more than we gained.'...Ambrose seemed disinclined to end his
biography on a bitter note and, by appending his fond summary, inched
his judgment toward the revisionist camp."
I thought that Greenberg left out the best passage in volume 3 of Ambrose's Nixon that reflects some attempt at Nixon revisionism. On pages 596-597, Ambrose states:
"It
was Nixon's advocacy of such programs as student loans and grants and
national health insurance for all that most infuriated conservatives
like the Buckley brothers. As did the liberals, the conservatives
always assigned to Nixon the worst motives; in this case, the
conservatives charged that Nixon was trying to pander to the liberals to
save his own skin. That hardly seems fair. By the time he was pushing
these proposals, in early 1974, Nixon knew that he had no
liberal supporters left. He knew his fate rested with the conservatives
in Congress. Nevertheless he made the proposals. Would it be too much
to suggest that Richard Nixon, who grew up in near-poverty conditions
because of the crushing medical expenses his family had to pay and who
could attend college only on scholarship, made these proposals because
he believed in them?"
That is an excellent question, within a
beautiful and a thought-provoking passage. But I thought the same thing
as Greenberg as I was reading Ambrose's revisionistic stance near the
end of the Nixon trilogy: it did not fit all that well with the rest of
Ambrose's biography. Ambrose in the first volume of his trilogy does
depict Nixon as somewhat progressive on racial issues, but, overall, his
trilogy did not strike me as a glowing account of Nixon's domestic
policies, at least in comparison to other things that I have read. I
would have been more moved by what Ambrose said near the end had it been
more consistent with the rest of the biography.
3. One of the Nixon revisionists was scholar Joan Hoff, who wrote the book Nixon Reconsidered. On page 336, Greenberg states the following:
"But
while the list of Nixon's progressive programs ran to several pages, it
still read as a laundry list; Nixon as a person hardly entered the
picture. Richard Norton Smith had criticized Nixon Reconsidered
because 'process crowds out personality' in the book. 'Instead of
biographical context,' he wrote, '...we get eye-glazing accounts of
White House policy toward American Indians, and of the turf wars between
the Council on Economic Policy and the Commission on International
Trade and Investment Policy.' Smith's boredom notwithstanding, the
book's problem was not so much its purported tediousness as its
sacrifice of context, flavor, and meaning. No president, especially not
Nixon, can be adequately measured as the sum total of his policy
decisions, and to dwell only on policy is to reduce the president to
just that. 'In pursuing her vision of Nixon without Watergate,' Smith
wrote, 'Ms. Hoff comes dangerously close to giving us Nixon without
Nixon.'"
I have not yet read Nixon Reconsidered, though I
have looked through the book and have read bits and pieces of it. I
have been reluctant to read it because my impression is similar to that
of Richard Norton Smith: that Nixon Reconsidered would be a laundry list of Nixon's progressive domestic accomplishments. Moreover, I've feared that it would be a one-sided
laundry list: that Hoff would simply list all the great things that
Nixon did, without going into the disadvantages of his policies. That,
in my opinion, would be pretty boring. But I'll still read her book at
some point and see what she does.
I will say, though, that her
account in her book of meeting Richard Nixon was quite remarkable. She
said that she had heard that Nixon was shifty-eyed, but that the Nixon
she met looked her straight in the eye. Moreover, from what Greenberg
says, Hoff has an interesting story herself: she was part of the New
Left when Nixon was President, and she was surprised as a scholar to
learn about Nixon's domestic accomplishments. I hope that her book has some personal dimension to it. Something that I liked about her protege Dean Kotlowski's book, Nixon's Civil Rights,
was that it was not just a tedious, wonky description of Nixon's civil
rights policies, for it also got into Nixon the man: Nixon's attitudes
about race, Nixon's relationship with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jackie
Robinson, etc. I'm not sure if I felt that I truly knew Nixon after reading that book----it's hard for me to read any book about Nixon and to walk away concluding that I truly know him. But I did appreciate the personal dimension in Kotlowski's book.