Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 9

What has been salient to me in my reading of Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life are Aitken's stories about Richard Nixon's compassion, generosity, and kindness.  Aitken tells two stories that I particularly enjoyed.

The first story was Aitken's story about the Donnellys.  Dorothy Cox Donnelly was Richard Nixon's appointments secretary when he was Vice-President, and her husband was a lobbyist who served on the Civil Aeronautics Board's staff.  Both were Republicans, and there was a strong possibility that both would be removed from their jobs once President John F. Kennedy entered office.  Their finances were fragile, and they were worried.  But Richard Nixon interceded for them with Kennedy.  Nixon asked if a job could be found for either Donnelly, and Kennedy replied, "Oh yes, sure, I remember Dorothy from your Senate office----the little one with the bun on the back of her head."  Aitken goes on to narrate that "To the amazement of the CAB, its Republican appointee was confirmed to his post a few days later on the orders of the White House" (page 292).

The second story was set in 1969, when Nixon was about to enter to Presidency, while President Lyndon Johnson and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey (against whom Nixon ran for President in 1968) were about to leave.  On the day of his inauguration, Nixon remembered what it was like back when he was the departing Vice-President, and President Kennedy and Vice-President Johnson were taking over.  Aitken calls it Nixon's "Cinderella-like exit from the Vice Presidency in 1960, when all facilities, including his car, were withdrawn at the stroke of midnight" (page 371).  Aitken narrates how Nixon resolved to treat Humphrey differently when Humphrey was exiting the Vice-Presidency:

"In addition to the warm public and private tributes he paid to his election opponent, Nixon personally supervised all the arrangements for Humphrey's last hours in Washington.  These included putting an Air Force jet at the ex-Vice President's disposal, choosing a bouquet of Muriel Humphrey's favourite flowers to be handed to her as she got on to the aircraft, and attaching to them a handwritten note of presidential thanks for the couple's twenty-five years of public service.  The son of Hannah Nixon had not forgotten the importance of small acts of kindness."

Bruce Mazlish, in In Search of Nixon, said that Nixon could be generous from a position of strength, but he usually could not ask for help himself.  What are reasons to be compassionate for others?  So we can feel good about ourselves and have power as benefactors?  Because we don't want someone else to experience the pain that we experienced?  Because we have genuine compassion for people in a predicament?  Because we believe that we have an obligation to do so, either to God, or to the goal of creating a humane and generous society?

These are all reasons that people are generous.  Some may be generous for a mixture of one or more of these reasons.  In a number of people, one reason may predominate.  I hope to be generous out of a genuine sense of compassion, or a recognition of the shared humanity and vulnerability of both me and also the person I am helping.  There has been a tendency within me to treat people who need help as charity-cases for my benevolence, and perhaps the reason for that is that I have a hard time appreciating their humanity, since I am primarily looking to make myself feel better, or I think that looking at their humanity will turn me off from them, since I don't particularly like people.  (I can, say, help a blind person as a blind person who needs my help, but, once I look at the blind person as simply a person, I can begin to feel alienated from him or her, the same way that I feel alienated from most people.)  What I should remember is that we are all selves, that even those who may not like me are people with thoughts, feelings, experiences, and lives, and thus they deserve my compassion when they are experiencing hard times, the same way that I would deserve compassion were I experiencing hard times.

Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character 10

My latest reading of Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character was a summary of Brodie's psychological analysis of Richard Nixon.  Brodie essentially argues that Nixon was unloved as a child, and she states that Nixon's father was for winning at all costs, whereas his mother tended to stretch the truth when it suited her.  As a result, Nixon had a hunger for adulation, and he sought that through political success.  In the process of this, he stretched the truth, and he tried to win at all costs.  Earlier in the book, Brodie states that Nixon's environment enabled him to have the confidence to pursue his political dreams.  Had Nixon been at Harvard, the competition would have made it much harder for him to do so, but Nixon was at Whittier, where his ambitions were more attainable.

Elsewhere in the book, Brodie raises other considerations.  She speculates that Nixon's lying may go back to when he had to lie or adroitly manipulate the truth in order to avoid the discipline at the hands of his harsh father.  In the endnotes, she cites Bruce Mazlish's claim that Nixon did not rebel as a youth, and, "as a result," he did not bow "so totally before authority" (Mazlish's words, quoted on page 524).  The idea here may be that Nixon was rebelling against his parents' authoritarianism when he did ethically-compromising things as an adult.  Brodie also states that Nixon may have lied to make himself feel better: when someone prominent criticized him, Nixon went on to tell the story that this person had actually praised him.  Lying made it easier for him to cope, in short.

Another point that Brodie makes is that Nixon felt rather strangled by Quaker Whittier, which was one of the places where he grew up.  Brodie states that Nixon liked the "erosion of even the stoutest Quaker virtues" (Brodie's words) that occurred when oil was discovered in the 1920's, and she believes that this sentiment underlies Nixon's frequent statements as President that America was "the richest and strongest nation on earth" (Nixon's words), with "richest" coming first.  Brodie states that many in Whittier felt threatened by "the fantasy world of Hollywood" and the "surrounding Chicano society, with its taverns and dancehalls, its well-attended Catholic churches, with its more spontaneous gaiety" (page 501), and she seems to present Nixon rebelling against this protective Whittier mentality.  Nixon was drawn to acting and celebrities, he thought of practicing law in Havana, Cuba, and he enjoyed vacationing in the Caribbean.

Is there anything to Brodie's analysis?  I don't rule it out.  Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose did not seem to find that kind of argumentation overly convincing, for, as he notes, many people feel insufficiently loved by their parents, and not all of them turn out as Richard Nixon did.  The thing is, though, people are different, and thus they respond to situations in different ways.

Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character 3

On page 129 of Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, Fawn Brodie says that two published articles that Richard Nixon wrote as a Duke Law School student related to traumas or unfortunate incidents in his own life, or in the life of someone from his family.

One article that Nixon wrote was entitled "Changing Rules of Liability in Automobile Accident Litigation," and it discussed "old horse and buggy accident laws" (Brodie's words).  Nixon fell out of a buggy when he was a small boy, and his father as a motorman on a train got fired after the "train hit an automobile at a crossing" (page 129).  Brodie states that Nixon "cited laws holding that the driver of the automobile must stop, not just look and listen, thus indirectly exonerating his father of the old accident."

Another article that Nixon wrote was entitled "Application of the Inherent Danger Doctrine to Servants of Negligent Independent Contractors."  This related to incidents in which the negligence of a contractor led to injury or death of an employee.  Brodie states that "the choice of subject suggests that he was still seeking an answer to the question 'Who was really responsible for the death of my eldest brother?'  He seems also to have been researching the question 'Could we have sued to collect damages for his dying?'"

Here are two items:

1.  Frodie's discussion here is an example of her overall methodology: to explain things that Nixon did and said in light of what occurred to him earlier in his life.  The book, after all, is about "the shaping of his character".  This is one reason that Brodie's book has been criticized, and it is also one of the characteristics of her book that makes it so interesting.  Although Brodie makes some of the same points that Bruce Mazlish made in In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry, she does so more artfully than Mazlish did, in my opinion.  When Mazlish made some of the points that he made, he seemed to me to be stretching and reaching, whereas Brodie narrated the same points more effectively----perhaps because she could get the reader to feel for Nixon in terms of his predicaments, or her line from cause to effect was simpler.

At the same time, even when reading Brodie, I feel that some of the connections that she makes are not iron-clad.  Why?  I guess it's because her work and other books about Nixon have shown me how hard it is to define a person and to get a handle on what truly happened in the past.  Brodie herself goes into contradictory or different eyewitness accounts: about what Nixon's mother was like, about events in Richard Nixon's life, etc.  That being the case, can we really pick a couple of things from a person's life, and assert that one event influenced a tendency or a much later event?  The data field is much messier and complex than that, in my opinion.

2.  That said, it is plausible that events in Nixon's early life and in the life of his family shaped his interests, and the sorts of topics that he wrote about as a Duke Law School student.  That encourages me to ask: How does my background influence my scholarly interests?  Well, I grew up in Armstrongism, which professed to observe the Old Testament law.  I suppose that it's not a stretch that I would study Judaism at Jewish schools.  My worldview was rocked when I learned that Jews and historical-critics had different ways of interpreting the passages in the Hebrew Bible that many Christians applied to Jesus, and that set me on a path of wanting to learn more about the Hebrew Bible.  I've also wrestled with the question of how a person can be at peace with God, since I look at myself and realize that my own flaws make me insecure in terms of my standing with God.

The thing is, this was stuff in my past.  I'm not sure if I care about these issues to the same extent, anymore.  Religion and the Bible seem to me more and more to be the product of human beings, and I am feeling that attempts by theologians and evangelical scholars to claim otherwise are wishful thinking on their part, or stretches.  I am getting back into reading about religious studies, however, and there are different reasons for this.  One is that this is my field of study, and I need to learn more so that I can teach and write.  Another reason, I have to admit, is spiritual: I wonder if there is something that I can learn that can make my life make sense to me, or that can encourage me to fall in love with God, as opposed to going through the religious motions.

Ambrose's Nixon: Ruin and Recovery 16

For my blog post today on Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990, I'll discuss something that Stephen Ambrose says on page 488:

"On the subject of [Richard] Nixon, [Henry] Kissinger said, 'He was very good in foreign policy [but] he was a very odd man....He is a very unpleasant man.  He was so nervous...He was an artificial man in the sense that when he met someone he thought it out carefully so that nothing was spontaneous, and that meant he didn't enjoy people.  People sensed that.  What I never understood is why he became a politician.  He hated to meet new people.  Most politicians like crowds.  He didn't.'...[William] Safire reported that at the recent Vladivostok summit, Kissinger had sought to tout [President Gerald] Ford at Nixon's expense, saying that Nixon 'would never look [Soviet leader] Brezhnev in the eye.'"

Is Kissinger accurate about all of this?  Ambrose in volume 2 of his Nixon trilogy says a couple of times that Kissinger probably was projecting onto Nixon some of his own insecurities.  Moreover, on the question of whether or not Nixon liked crowds, I recall reading in Bruce Mazlish's In Search of Nixon about an incident in which, when Nixon was in a group with a few people, he was rather quiet, but he lit up like a light-bulb when a crowd came to see him!  Mazlish attributed that to Nixon's narcissism.  But who among us wouldn't appreciate the adulation of a crowd?

I can't say that Kissinger was totally wrong in his description of Nixon, however.  From what I have read for My Year (or More) of Nixon, Nixon was shy around new people.  He was introverted.  He liked to plan.  He didn't particularly care for surprises, in which he would be upstaged or caught off guard.

Ambrose himself talks about the introverted, aloof side of Nixon's personality, particularly when he depicts Nixon as alone during the Watergate scandal.  Technically, Nixon was not alone, for Nixon had his friends such as Bebe Rebozo and his family, as Ambrose narrates.  But Nixon was keeping certain things to himself, according to Ambrose.  Moreover, Ambrose talks a couple of times about Nixon's bad jokes, which may indicate a social awkwardness on Nixon's part.

Did Richard Nixon have Asperger's Syndrome?  Many people with Asperger's, or who know something about Asperger's, can look at some of Nixon's characteristics and see some overlap with Asperger's.  Nixon loved order.  He was socially-awkward.  He tended to ramble on and on about subjects that interested him.  Kissinger said that Nixon did not look Brezhnev in the eye, and there are many with Asperger's who have difficulty with eye-contact.  (I should note, though, that Joan Hoff in Nixon Reconsidered narrated that, when she met Nixon, Nixon looked her straight in the eye.)

But I have my doubts that Nixon had Asperger's.  When I watch YouTube videos of him, or listen to the Nixon tapes that are on YouTube, or read about Nixon's interactions in books, he strikes me as socially competent----not dazzling, mind you, but competent.  He is able to joke and to come up with quick come-backs.  He can even banter a bit.

Very Strange Bedfellows 8

In my post today on Jules Witcover's Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, I'll focus on Richard Nixon's interactions with Spiro Agnew.

Witcover essentially portrays Nixon as someone who was nice and supportive towards Agnew to Agnew's face, but was seeking Agnew's removal from the Vice-Presidency behind his back.  Moreover, Agnew did not feel that Nixon really came to bat for him during his (meaning Agnew's) legal problems.  Agnew had a hard time forgiving this.  Nixon did reach out to Agnew after Agnew left office, sending Agnew notes, trying to call him on the telephone, and even giving Agnew the chair where Agnew sat at the Cabinet table.  But Agnew did not take Nixon's calls.

A characteristic of Nixon throughout Witcover's book is that Nixon did not like to confront people directly, sending intermediaries to do that for him.  Plus, according to Witcover's narrative, Nixon, when he was interacting with people who wanted from him something that he was not willing to provide them, tended to give them the run-around rather than a straight answer.  Witcover does not say this, but my hunch, based on other books that I have read by and about Richard Nixon, is that Nixon's relationship with his father had something to do with this.  Nixon's father, Frank Nixon, was an opinionated and confrontational man.  Frank would get into arguments with Nixon's brothers, and Nixon says in his memoirs that this influenced him (Richard) to desire peace.  Nixon probably learned that he didn't like confrontation, and so Nixon came to avoid it by sending intermediaries to confront for him, and by giving people the run-around when they confronted him.

I think also of Bruce Mazlish's claim in In Search of Nixon that Nixon sees himself as a fair-minded man.  In my opinion, Nixon regarded himself as a compassionate person, and that could have been why he was reaching out to Agnew even after Agnew left the Vice-Presidency.  And yet, Nixon also seems to have seen himself as a political realist.  That's how he could undermine Agnew behind the scenes (if it's true that he did that), while reaching out to Agnew when Agnew was down.

I'd like to close this post with a moving story from wikipedia's article about Agnew: "As a gesture of reconciliation, Nixon's daughters invited Agnew to attend Nixon's funeral in 1994, and Agnew accepted. In 1996, when Agnew died, Nixon's daughters returned the favor by attending Agnew's funeral."  According to Witcover, Agnew did not want to attend Nixon's funeral because of his bitterness towards Nixon, but Agnew was persuaded to do so because he had been Nixon's Vice-President, so his absence from the funeral would be conspicuous.  I think that it was a class act for Nixon's daughters to then attend Agnew's funeral after Agnew died.  

RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, Volume 1

I'm actually writing this post on February 26, 2013.  I've just returned from Indiana, where I was attending my sister's wedding and visiting with family.  The Internet connection was not that good where I was staying (most of the time) in Indiana, and so I decided to postpone my blogging to when I would return to my home in upstate New York.  Plus, I needed a bit of a break from blogging!  During my time in Indiana, I still did my reading for My Year (or More) of Nixon.  I read volume 1 of Richard Nixon's memoirs, which goes from Nixon's birth through his Presidency in 1971.  The copyright for the memoirs is 1978, which was four years after Richard Nixon resigned from office.  I read 300 pages during the car ride to Indiana----and it was a good book for car ride reading, on account of Nixon's clarity, pleasant conversational style, and stories.  Then, during the eight days that I was in Indiana, I followed my usual practice of reading 30 pages a day.  I finished the book on the car ride back to New York.

The book is 669 pages, and I don't think that I've ever covered the entirety of a book that long in one post.  I have a list of topics to cover, but I may not go through them all.  Rather, I'll make some points. Some of them will get into the nitty-gritty, whereas others will focus more on the forest rather than the trees.

1.  As in Six Crises, Nixon in his memoirs comes across as a basically decent person.  Nixon admires goodness in others and is fair-minded.  He empathizes with people, even political opponents and those he did not particularly get along with.  He is compassionate towards the disadvantaged.  He has had a long-standing love for peace and an admiration for pacifists (even though he admits that he's not a pacifist), and he has seen the horrors of war.  He recognizes mistakes that he has made in the past.  And yet, it was noteworthy to me that Nixon in volume 1 of his memoirs sometimes appeared to be rather shady, or he sought to justify activities within his administration that many considered shady, as opposed to flat-out denying that accusations had merit, as was the case in Six Crises.

For example, Nixon talks about his 1968 campaign for President, when President Lyndon Johnson was about to suspend his bombing for the Vietnam War.  Nixon was receiving inside information about Johnson's policies from Henry Kissinger, who (in some capacity) was advising Johnson at the time.  Nixon was all for suspending bombing, as long as North Vietnam met certain conditions, such as ceasing its aggression.  But what astounded me was that Nixon in his memoirs was quite up-front in narrating his concern about how Johnson's move would impact Nixon's campaign.  That just looked devious to me.  I mean, shouldn't a statesman be rooting for the President to succeed in bringing forth peace, rather than thinking about how a certain policy would affect his (the statesman's) political future?  Nixon often portrays himself as one who was concerned about the good of others rather than himself.  That's why his narration of how he handled LBJ's Vietnam policy in 1968 stood out to me like a sore thumb.

In some cases, Nixon's justifications for certain shady practices struck me as poor, even if they were understandable.  For example, Nixon says that he supported dirty tricks in campaigns because the Democrats themselves engaged in dirty tricks, and he wanted the Republicans to fight back.  That's understandable, but "they did it first" or "they do it too" (not that Nixon uses those exact words) sounds rather childish to me.  One justification that Nixon offered seemed to me to contradict another position that he holds.  Nixon, for example, expresses support for intelligence people stretching the law in order to fight domestic terrorists, such as the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, and he cautions that following the exact letter of the law is not always wise because the authors of the law could not have foreseen every circumstance that might come up.  That's a valid point.  And yet, Nixon emphasizes the value of appointing strict constructionists to the judiciary.  Perhaps Nixon's justifications that made most sense to me concerned his attempts to keep a lid on leaks.  Nixon talked about how leaks to the press about his foreign policy plans had the effect of disrupting those plans, since it's not prudent to let the people with whom one will be dealing to know everything one has in mind; moreover, according to Nixon, the Pentagon Papers contained some sensitive information, such as the names of sources of information to the U.S.  Good points.  It's ironic, though, that Nixon criticizes leaks, when elsewhere in his book he acknowledges that Kissinger was his source within the LBJ administration.  But it's still a fairly decent point.

2.  In reading the first volume of Nixon's memoirs, I thought about previous books that I had read about Nixon.  First, regarding Nixon's run for the U.S. House against Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis, Stephen Ambrose essentially argued that Nixon was unfair to say that Voorhis had the support of NC-PAC (a group that was believed to have been infiltrated by Communists) in 1946, for Voorhis had NC-PAC's support in 1944 but not in 1946, when Voorhis had a reputation for having anti-Communist beliefs on foreign policy (see here).  Nixon in his memoirs, however, says that the Los Angeles branch of NC-PAC indicated in 1946 its support for Voorhis, and Nixon said that this branch had a lot of Communists.  Nixon's issue was that Voorhis (in Nixon's eyes) was not sensitive to the problem of Communist infiltration.  Ambrose said that Nixon tended to misremember places, as when Nixon said that a fried-chicken lunch with Senator Joseph McCarthy and other officials occurred in Nixon's own office, when it actually took place in Senator Everett Dirksen's office (see here); on page 174 of the first volume of his memoirs, however, Nixon says that the fried chicken lunch occurred in Dirksen's office.

Recently, I've been reading psychological profiles of Nixon (one by Bruce Mazlish and another by Eli Chesen), which assert that Nixon was not open to pursuing in-depth self-examination.  In reading his memoirs, did I find Nixon to be one who speculated about how early events in his life shaped the sort of person that he became?  Occasionally.  Nixon said that his father was argumentative and that his father's fights with Nixon's brothers made Nixon want peace.  Nixon also stated that his mother's low-profile religiosity----which focused on doing good rather than wearing religion on one's sleeve----made him adverse to wearing his religion on his sleeve.  But I didn't see anything about Nixon's earlier experiences in life making him an insecure perfectionist who sought control, which was the picture I got from the psychological profiles that I read.  Nixon even mentioned the incident of him falling out of a buggy at a very young age, but he did not comment about how that shaped the way that he turned out.

3.  There were a lot of interesting discussions about public policy in volume 1 of Nixon's memoirs, ranging from such topics as the Vietnam War, to welfare, to civil rights.  (And I'm still scratching my head about Nixon's discussion of civil rights, for Nixon brags about how more schools became racially desegregated under his administration, while also making the bizarre argument that Brown vs. the Board of Education had no problem with segregated schools, just so long as they were equal, which was one reason that he opposed busing while supporting more federal support for education.)  For this item, however, I'd like to highlight something that stood out to me on page 640:

"The budget I submitted in January of 1971 was set to be balanced at full employment and run a deficit to help take up the slack when unemployment was high."

Nixon appeared to be walking a fine line.  Inflation was a problem during his administration, and he attributes that (at least in part) to the heavy government spending under the LBJ Presidency, as LBJ increased government spending for both the Vietnam War and also the Great Society, running a deficit in the process.  At the same time, Nixon acknowledges that unemployment was rather high under his Presidency, and Nixon seems to be aware that austerity (clamping down on spending) is not that good on the economy when unemployment is a problem.  Nixon does not mention Keynes in the first volume of his memoirs, but he may very well have had a Keynesian notion that the government needs to spend money to stimulate the economy.

Overall, on the issue of the Great Society, it seems to me from Nixon's memoirs that he was for the government spending money to alleviate poverty, but he did not care for how welfare split up families, and he wanted for there to be work requirements or job training for poor families who (under his proposal) would receive a stipend.  He also thought that George McGovern's proposal that every family of four receive $6,500 a year went way too far!

President Nixon's Psychiatric Profile 2

I finished Dr. Eli Chesen's President Nixon's Psychiatric Profile: A Psychodynamic-Genetic Interpretation.  I have three items.

1.  Chesen speculates that Nixon was especially susceptible to pneumonia in the summer of 1973 because he was about to meet with Senator Sam Ervin, who was investigating Watergate and who (according to Chesen) reminded Nixon of his opinionated, authoritarian father, Frank Nixon.

The relationship between Nixon's later life and his earlier life has been of interest to me, especially as I've read Stephen Ambrose's Nixon: The Education of a Politician and Bruce Mazlish's In Search of Nixon.  Or let me phrase the issue a bit differently by asking a question: Could Nixon ever outgrow the problems that he experienced in his earlier years?  According to the picture that Chesen presents, Nixon, even years after his father had died, when Nixon had a family of his own and was in a position of authority in his own right, could still be troubled by his issues with his father.  Bruce Mazlish talks about how Nixon in the 1950's did not care for the prospect of Dwight Eisenhower treating him like a little kid, but, when Nixon was President, he himself could be the father-figure.  Nixon was like a father-figure to his son-in-law, David Eisenhower.  And, whereas Nixon as Vice-President was the political attack-dog while President Dwight Eisenhower maintained an aura of dignity above the fray, Nixon as President tried to be the fair-minded one above the fray, while his Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, acted as the attack-dog.  But did Nixon truly arrive at a state of maturity in his years as President?  Somewhere in Nixon: The Education of a Politician, Stephen Ambrose argues in the negative.   When Nixon was Vice-President, Eisenhower thought that Nixon was immature and lacked administrative experience, and he contemplated replacing Nixon as Vice-President while giving Nixon a cabinet position so that he could attain administrative experience.  This did not happen, for Nixon remained Eisenhower's Vice-President.  But, even as President, Nixon was not that good of an administrator, as far as Ambrose is concerned!  One can move into maturer roles while still being dogged by one's past!

2.  Chesen has a chapter about the people with whom Nixon surrounds himself.  I was particularly intrigued by Chesen's discussion of H.R. Haldeman and Billy Graham.  H.R. Haldeman was Nixon's Chief-of-Staff.  Haldeman had a flat-top, years after the 1950's; he (like John Ehrlichman) was a disciplined Christian Scientist who did not drink or smoke, yet he crossed ethical boundaries; and he had a gruff demeanor, which enabled him to do the hard jobs that Nixon didn't want to do himself.  According to Chesen, Haldeman met Nixon's need for order.  But Nixon apparently didn't go for Haldeman's proposal to replace Nixon's long-time secretary, Rose Mary Woods, whom Chesen says was practically part of Nixon's family!

Chesen essentially portrays Billy Graham as insecure, as authoritarian, and as "grandiose and intoxicated by as well as addicted to power" (page 209).  I don't think that Chesen is saying that Graham runs things in an authoritarian fashion, but rather that Graham likes to get on his high horse and preach to people about how they should live their lives.  Chesen seems to base his impressions, at least in part, on Graham's sermons.  What need of Nixon does Graham meet, according to Chesen?  Essentially, Graham rubber-stamps Nixon's political agenda (particularly anti-Communism) with God's alleged stamp of approval, as well as promotes that agenda.

Chesen may be spot-on when it comes to the Billy Graham of the 1950's, who dogmatically shouted his political and religious convictions from the pulpit.  But, in my opinion, the later Billy Graham came across as humbler, as less right-wing (notwithstanding his support for a ballot measure against marriage equality), as gentler, as more reflective, and as more tolerant.  Still, I may read another book that Chesen has written: Religion May Be Hazardous to Your Health.

3.  Chesen asks (and this was in 1973) if we have anything to fear from President Nixon, with his psychiatric status as one who is obsessed with order yet has deeply seated aggression?  Chesen thinks that Nixon would thrive in solving an international crisis, for that would feed into his grandiosity, but Chesen doubts that Nixon would do as well in personal scandals, such as Watergate.  The danger, for Chesen, could come if the crisis were international in scope while also impacting Nixon on a more personal level.

Chesen makes clear that he is not being partisan politically.  The back flap of the book says that Chesen voted for Nixon in 1968 and for George McGovern in 1972, presenting Chesen as an independent.  Moreover, Chesen, like Mazlish, criticizes the American Psychiatric Association for circulating a questionnaire in which the majority of respondents questioned Republican Barry Goldwater's mental health.  Chesen thinks that the APA was irresponsible and inaccurate, in that case.  Chesen's point, however, is that mental health is relevant to the Presidency.  Mazlish makes a similar point.  That does not mean that those who seek psychological help are unfit to be President----as Mazlish notes, going into therapy is actually admirable because it shows courage and a desire to grow.  But, for Mazlish and Chesen, knowing how a President ticks is important because that could impact so many people.

President Nixon's Psychiatric Profile 1

I started Eli Chesen's 1973 book, President Nixon's Psychiatric Profile.  According to this wikipedia article, Dr. Chesen worked with David Frost in developing a strategy for Frost's interviews of Richard Nixon.

Chesen admits that his psychiatric analysis of Nixon is not based on any personal meetings that he has had with Nixon.  Rather, like Bruce Mazlish in In Search of Nixon, Chesen relies on such sources as biographies, Richard Nixon's Six Crises, and Nixon's public appearances.  Interestingly, one way that Chesen justifies his methodology is by appealing to something that Nixon himself said in Six Crises: that, if the Alger Hiss hearings had been televised, there wouldn't have been all of the controversy about Hiss' guilt, for people would have looked at Hiss' mannerisms and would have concluded that Hiss was guilty!

Chesen essentially presents Nixon as someone who is insecure and thus tries to maintain control.  That, according to Chesen, accounts for various features of Nixon's personality and activities: Nixon's obsession with detail, his self-discipline and his admiration of those who are self-disciplined, his behavior during Watergate, the way that he says that he wants to make something clear or to be candid (rather than just assuming that people will accept what he's saying as candid), etc.  What are the roots of Nixon's insecurity, according to Chesen?  Well, Chesen provides a fictional case-study of a man named Steve Cleansman, who grew up with a father who ran him down, and Cleansman went on to become an insecure perfectionist.  Chesen makes clear that Steve Cleansman is not entirely like Richard Nixon, but rather that the fictional case-study is a way for Chesen to illustrate categories and defense mechanisms that are relevant to Nixon's life.  And, to be honest, I don't get the impression from Chesen's book that Nixon was an insecure perfectionist because his father didn't think that he was good enough.

Nixon's parents were relevant, however, as far as Chesen is concerned.  Nixon's father was an authoritarian and was argumentative, and he would never let his sons develop self-esteem by beating him in an argument.  (According to Mazlish, Nixon responded to this by becoming talented with words.)  Nixon's mother was religious, and she was also the strong one of the family.  According to Chesen, the strength of Nixon's mother confused Nixon because men were the ones who were supposed to be strong, and Nixon's religious upbringing----coupled with his father's authoritarianism----instilled in Nixon a certain authoritarianism.  Nixon, according to Chesen, found a degree of comfort in the authority structure that was around him, and yet Nixon resented it, contributing to the aggressive impulses within him.  According to Chesen, the adult Nixon on some level admires Communism on account of its orderliness as a system, yet he is anti-Communist because he is projecting things onto Communism.

The time that Nixon's mother was away in Arizona caring for Richard's brother Harold (who had tuberculosis) also had an impact on Nixon, according to Chesen: at age 12 (and I should note that Mazlish on page 21 of In Search of Nixon seems to say that Nixon was older than 12 when this happened), Nixon was thrust into adulthood, and he had to perform tasks that women did (i.e., washing the dishes).  That, according to Chesen, could have made Nixon ashamed and influenced him to withdraw.  There are other factors that young Nixon experienced that could have contributed to his insecurity: the death of his brother Arthur, an accident in which Nixon fell out of a buggy when he was very young, and illnesses.

Like Mazlish, Chesen discusses Nixon's grandiosity.  Early in the book, on pages 12-13, Chesen says that the difference between Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon was that Eisenhower regarded himself as part of America, as was evident in Eisenhower's division of his loyalties between the White House and the golf course; Nixon, by contrast, regards the country as an extension of himself and takes himself way too seriously----even though Nixon says in Six Crises that he learned from Eisenhower not to take himself too seriously!

I should make a clarification: I doubt that Chesen is saying that events in Nixon's earlier life caused Nixon to turn out a certain way.  Chesen acknowledges in his story about Steve Cleansman that people who grow up in the same environment can turn out differently.  Perhaps Chesen believes that how people turn out is a combination of both nature and nurture----of temperament coupled with the experiences that people have.  Just to speculate (and this is my speculation, not Chesen's), Nixon may have already been a quiet boy who wanted order, but certain events amplified those characteristics.

I'd like to close this post by commenting on Nixon's religion.  Both Mazlish and Chesen discuss the role of religion in Nixon's childhood and his adult life, and they appear to regard Nixon as rather conservative religiously.  But, as I talk about here, as I draw from Stephen Ambrose's Nixon: The Education of a Politician and William Martin's With God on Our Side, Nixon during and after his young adulthood had quite liberal ideas about religion, indicating that Nixon was not afraid to question his rather fundamentalist upbringing.  That should somehow be factored into any discussion about the role of religion in Nixon's authoritarianism.  Still, notwithstanding Nixon's religious liberalism, elements of his religious upbringing may have contributed to his obsession with order: the sociology of his religious upbringing, his mother's insistence that God had a plan, etc.

In Search of Nixon 3

I finished Bruce Mazlish's In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry.

On pages 144-145, Mazlish quotes Richard Nixon expressing his fantasy of being an academic: "If I had my druthers, I'd like to write two or three books a year, go to one of the fine schools----Oxford, for instance----just teach, read, and write...In order to make a decision, an individual should sit on his rear end and dig into the books.  Very few executives do it.  They listen to this side and that, but they don't go to the sources.  In this respect, I'm like Stevenson...He was an intellectual and he needed time to contemplate."

I liked this passage for a couple of reasons.  First, I myself think that it would be an ideal life to teach, read, and write, and to get paid for doing so.  Second, I appreciated Nixon's admiration for Adlai Stevenson----the Democrat who ran against Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, and who attacked Nixon with his witty barbs.  In Six Crises, on page 96, Nixon criticizes Stevenson as one who was indecisive.  But, in Mazlish's quotation of Nixon, Nixon recognizes a possible reason for Stevenson's indecisiveness: Stevenson needed time to think.  For me at least, it's heart-warming when people can see good even in their foes.

Would Nixon be as sensitive to nuance, as an academic should be?  My impression from reading details in Mazlish's book is that Nixon became more sensitive to nuance, especially when it came to the issue of Communism.  When Nixon visited Latin America and encountered mobs, Nixon tended to reduce Communism in Latin America to those mobs.  According to Mazlish, Nixon most likely did not talk with Marxist intellectuals to hear what they had to say, and Nixon was wrong to assume that the mobs represented the sum total of Communism, as it would be erroneous to think that lynchings in the South represent the sum total of the Southern political system.  Yet, Nixon came to recognize different shades of Communism, and he concluded as President that China was not as intent on aggression against other countries as it used to be.  I doubt that Nixon would say that he grew.  When Nixon was asked if his visit to China as President demonstrated that there were two Nixons----the old Nixon who opposed Communist China, and the new Nixon who visited it----Nixon retorted that there were actually two Chinas!  (I base this, not on Mazlish, but rather my seeing Nixon on television.) Nixon apparently thought that his position in the past was correct, within that historical context, but his view changed as the context changed.

Overall, one thing that I have respected about Nixon in my reading so far has been his openness to knowledge.  In reading Irwin Gellman's The Contender, I noticed that Nixon visited Europe when he was a Congressman and talked with a variety of people, even Communists.  Nixon was eager to learn why Europeans would be susceptible to Communism, and he learned that Communists provided services (i.e., a place to get a sandwich) in a time when Europe was impoverished in the aftermath of World War II.  Nixon still could be pretty dogmatic: sometimes he put words into people's mouths (as Stephen Ambrose says), or heard what he wanted to hear rather than what people were saying.  But, at times, he was a good listener when he sought to learn.

In Search of Nixon 2

For my write-up today on In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry, I'll use as my starting-point something that Bruce Mazlish says on page 115:

"In general, Nixon's basic vision of himself is as a high-principled, fair-minded man (of greatness), who is constantly being unfairly attacked and smeared by his opponents (mainly communists and crooks), and who is his own severest critic.  Much of this self-image, we must admit, corresponds to the image of self-righteousness projected by America as a whole; this correspondence is undoubtedly a part of Nixon's political success."

There are so many branches that can proceed out of Mazlish's discussion here of Richard Nixon's self-image.  Here are some of them (and I'll often be using the present tense, even though Nixon is now dead, because Mazlish when he wrote the book was commenting on what he thought Nixon was like at the time that Mazlish was writing):

1.  A point that Mazlish makes a couple of times in this book is that Nixon falls back on roles in seeking guidance on what to do, for Nixon doesn't really know who he is.  Mazlish also portrays Nixon's public outbursts of tears (which, interestingly, seems to go against Nixon's admiration for those who are tough and strong, and his contempt for sissies) as acting----though I'm not sure if Mazlish is implying that Nixon was insincere or not.  In any case, whether or not Nixon knew who he was, Mazlish does state that Nixon had a vision of himself.

2.  The thing is, was Nixon's vision of himself accurate?  Mazlish himself tries to be fair-minded in his analysis of Nixon, for Mazlish says that he thinks that Alger Hiss was guilty, whereas Nixon was not guilty of the charges of corruption that led him to deliver his Checkers speech in 1952.  But Mazlish doesn't appear to think that Nixon is entirely high-principled and fair-minded, for he says that Nixon tends to project his weaknesses onto others.  Nixon, for example, said that his political opponents smeared him, when he smeared others.  (Mazlish also refers to Nixon's statement in Six Crises that Nixon could tell that Alger Hiss was lying because Hiss appeared to be overacting.  According to Mazlish, Nixon made that judgment about Hiss because Nixon himself was the sort of person who acted and tended to exaggerate.)

3.  But is there an authentic core to Nixon, according to Mazlish?  Or was Nixon simply acting and fulfilling roles?  I think that Mazlish does believe that Nixon had an authentic core, rooted (at least in part) in his upbringing.  Mazlish accepts the notion that Nixon is someone who is committed to peace, for Nixon had a Quaker mother (and yet Nixon's psyche also received his father's combativeness).  Mazlish also believes that Nixon was genuinely affected by the deaths of the Kent State students, which was one reason that he visited anti-war students at the Lincoln Memorial.

4.  While Nixon sees himself as his own severest critic, I get from Mazlish, Nixon's self-criticism is rather superficial, and Nixon is adverse to undergoing a level of deep self-analysis.

5.  In the same way that Nixon tends to ignore his own faults and project them onto others, Nixon tends to ignore America's historical aggression.  Nixon says that the United States does not have a history of aggression, and he even tells foreign leaders that.  According to Mazlish, Nixon ignores historical examples of U.S. aggression: against Native Americans, Mexico, and others.  On pages 96-97, Mazlish refers to "American intervention in the Russian Civil War [and] the American willingness, in part, to have Germany invade Russia..."

6.  Mazlish talks about Nixon's generosity to people, which has been attested.  But Mazlish says that Nixon is generous, but Nixon tries to be generous from a position of strength.  Nixon wants to give, but he is uncomfortable with taking (though he has friends who have helped him over the years).

In Search of Nixon 1

I started Bruce Mazlish's 1972 book, In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry.  The edition of the book that I have is dated to 1973, which was when the Watergate scandal was occurring.  In my edition, Mazlish has a new introduction that touches on Watergate.

I may have heard of Mazlish's book when I was an undergraduate.  I was taking a class on American Government, and the professor referred to a book that came out back when Nixon was President.  This book attempted to make a psychological analysis of Nixon.  According to my professor, once the Watergate scandal broke out, people took a second look at this book, and they began to psychologically evaluate other Presidents, as well.  I'm not sure if my professor had Mazlish's book in mind.  I have another book that I will read after Mazlish, Eli Chesen's President Nixon's Psychiatric Profile, which is dated to 1973.  But Chesen refers to Mazlish's work, so Mazlish may very well have been one of the first to write a book that psychologically analyzed Nixon.

How did Mazlish undertake his task of psychologically analyzing Nixon?  Did he meet with Nixon himself?  As far as I know, Mazlish did not.  Essentially, Mazlish relied on Nixon's speeches, remarks that Nixon made in public, Nixon's Six Crises, and biographies of Nixon.  Mazlish defends his method.  Although there were many times when others wrote Nixon's speeches, and there were other hands that played a role in the composition of Six Crises, Nixon was still involved in the process, advising, supervising, approving, and even composing material himself.  Regarding the biographies that existed at the time, it's interesting how they contradict each other on certain factual details, such as whether Pat Nixon was older or younger than Richard.  But Mazlish looks at details in the biographies in his attempt to understand what Nixon is like, and why.  In my opinion, Mazlish's case is rather plausible, even though Mazlish wrote before the release of H.R. Haldeman's diaries and the great epic biographies of Nixon by such authors as Roger Morris, Stephen Ambrose, and others.

I used to read pieces of Mazlish's book when I was a student at Harvard Divinity School.  I would take a study break at the Hilles library, and during that time I would read parts of Mazlish's book, but not the entire thing.  Years later, in 2012, when I was looking for books to read for my Year (or More) of Nixon, I was trying to remember what book I read at Hilles, but I was drawing a blank.  I did a search online, but I could not find what I was seeking.  In the process, I stumbled upon Chesen's book, but I knew after I got it in the mail that it was not the book that I read at Hilles.  One evening, I looked at the bibliography of Stephen Ambrose's Nixon: The Education of a Politician.  I saw Mazlish's book listed, I looked it up on Amazon, and, bingo, that was the book I had read at Hilles!

The reason that I was drawn to Mazlish's book back when I was at Harvard was that I could identify with features of Nixon's personality, as Mazlish described them: Nixon's tendency to be a loner, yet Nixon's lighting up as a light-bulb whenever a crowd loved him; Nixon's quietness; the alienation that Nixon felt from certain sophisticated circles; Nixon's hard work; how Nixon's mannerisms when speaking looked rather contrived; Nixon's lack of physical coordination; Nixon's love for daydreaming; Nixon's tendency at times to act on ideas that he came up with in solitude, without telling his aides; and Nixon's lack of dates with women (though he did have more dates than I did).  I was intrigued by how Nixon would drive Pat on her dates with other men.  Nixon just wouldn't go away!  In reading Mazlish recently, I liked Mazlish's quote of Gary Wills, who said that Nixon tended to hang around when he was not wanted, with the result that he was a leftover, but one who still could find a job to do within that capacity!  I'd rather be loved, but if I could get a job as a leftover because I just keep showing up, that's all right with me!

To give you an example of how Mazlish traces elements of Nixon's personality to events in his life, I'll refer to a cluster of events that Mazlish talks about.  When Nixon was living at home with his parents during his younger years, two of his brothers died.  One was Arthur, who was expected to be a girl and was somewhat treated like a girl.  The other was Harold, who was the firstborn, and whom Nixon said was his parents' favorite.  When Harold got tuberculosis, Nixon's mother Hannah went with Harold to live in Arizona, where the air was drier.  Richard was now away from his mother, and he lived in California with his father.  Nixon heard his father's outrage over the Teapot Dome scandal within the Harding Administration, and it was at that point that Nixon abandoned his dream to be a railroad engineer who would go to faraway places and see the world; rather, Nixon would be an attorney, one who couldn't be bought!

How did these elements of Nixon's life influence the sort of person who Nixon became, according to Mazlish?  When Arthur was sissified, Richard was repulsed by the concept of sissies, according to Mazlish.  When his Mom was away, Nixon saw dependence on people as a weakness.  That's why Nixon was critical of "bums" (even though his Mom and grandmother fed the tramps who came to their door) and used the word as an epithet for anti-war protesters, whom he believed grew up with things handed to them on a silver platter.  That's why Nixon admired strength----which is evident in his marriage to a strong woman (Pat) who pressured him to stand up for himself and sometimes even chewed him out in public, Nixon's admiration for Communist leaders (as much as he loathed Communism), and his desire that America look strong in the Vietnam War.  According to Mazlish, the death of Nixon's two brothers may explain why Nixon sees life as a series of crises to be met head on and surmounted, and why Nixon tries to beat death.  And Nixon's gravitation to his father after his mother went to Arizona explains Nixon's entrance into public life (which Richard's Mom did not want for Richard), and also his love for hamburgers and spaghetti, which was a staple when Nixon's father Frank was raising his sons (other than Harold) on his own.  And yet, there was still within Richard Nixon some of the kid who wanted to be a railroad engineer who would see the world.  That's Nixon the daydreamer, but also the Nixon who has no home.  Mazlish refers to Theodore White's statement that, in a sense, Washington D.C. was Nixon's only home.  Nixon got to the point where he was rather alienated from California, and Nixon long saw the eastern United States as a strange, exotic place that excluded him (though he later worked there as a lawyer).  But Washington, D.C. was his home.