I started Daniel Frick's Reinventing Richard Nixon: A Cultural History of an American Obsession.
My
latest reading was about how Richard Nixon's story about himself
reflected rags-to-riches stories in American culture. There was
Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, in which Benjamin Franklin goes to a
city and is all alone, with only a few loaves of bread to eat, and yet
Franklin manages to make a success of himself. There were Horatio Alger
novels, which portrayed street urchins who rose to a position of
middle-class respectability. And there were Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People and Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking,
which essentially communicated that people could attain success by
having the right attitude and by practicing certain strategies.
Nixon depicted himself as one who got ahead through hard work. There was a rugged individualistic tone to Six Crises;
for example, Nixon portrayed himself as the main protagonist in the
Alger Hiss case, as he chose not to reveal that Father Cronin fed him
information about Alger Hiss before Hiss even appeared before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). (Cronin would deny in 1990
that this was the case, after years of saying otherwise, but Frick notes
that Cronin even in that particular interview says that he helped Nixon
out. I should also note that Anthony Summers, on page 490 of The Arrogance of Power,
asks how Cronin was even able to retract his long-standing claim in
1990, for Cronin in January 1991 "was in a home for the aged, deaf,
and...unable to hold a cogent conversation.") Even later, Nixon would
portray himself as a lone sage. A 1972 campaign poster showed an
apparently solitary Nixon staring outside of a White House window; the
thing is, that picture originally had Henry Kissinger standing close to
Nixon and speaking to him, but Kissinger got cropped out of that picture
in the campaign poster.
Frick acknowledges that there was more
nuance in the rags-to-riches motif from which Nixon may have been
drawing. Benjamin Franklin and a protagonist in one of the Horatio
Alger novels, for instance, needed outside support, for some prominent
people helped Franklin out of debt, and the Horatio Alger protagonist
advanced after he saved a prominent man's son from drowning. They
didn't get ahead all by themselves. I would add that Dale Carnegie's
book presumes that people need others, which is why one might want to
win friends and influence people. (Carnegie himself, however, says that
he's presenting a way of life of giving to people, not merely a
strategy to get ahead.) Frick likens the Nixon narrative to Westerns,
in which a lone hero comes forward and saves the day.
The
narrative that Nixon rose through hard work came into play at Nixon's
funeral, as Bob Dole said that Nixon got ahead by working longer and
harder than anyone else. According to Frick, Dole was depicting America
as a land of opportunity, in which anyone could get ahead, and he was
tying Nixon with Americanism. But Frick says that some might have
deemed even Dole's comments to be divisive. Nixon arguably started his
political career by portraying his opponent as insufficiently
patriotic. Was Dole doing something similar, by implying that being a
patriotic American coincided with appreciating Richard Nixon as one who
epitomized American values? Frick notes later in the book that Richard
Nixon's Six Crises came out at around the same time as Michael Harrington's book on poverty, entitled The Other America, and also Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Is Frick implying that there was a growing acknowledgment that things were not as rosy in America as Nixon was indicating in Six Crises:
that America was not a place where everyone could get ahead through
hard work? (That's not to suggest that Harrington and Friedan were
responding to Six Crises.)
On the topic of getting ahead
through hard work, I see some value in that narrative. I agree with the
Puritan Frick quotes who asked how one could go to sleep at night
without having done a hard days work. I'm all for working hard and
persevering because that increases the chance of me arriving at
success. What I don't like is people appealing to that narrative to
imply that everyone who is poor is somehow at fault, for there are
plenty of people who are poor yet work long and hard. I one time read a
conservative friend of mine appeal to his father's folksy wisdom about
being a hard-working employee in arguing that the minimum wage should
not be increased. I agree with that friend's father that an employee
should show his or her worth to an employer by working hard. But that
should have nothing to do with the debate over whether or not to raise
the minimum wage. When an economy does not pay people enough to support
themselves or their families, then that is problematic, and no amount
of folksy wisdom will change that.