Silent Coup, by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin

I was reading about Silent Coup in other books that I was reading for My Year (or More) of Nixon, and its thesis intrigued me.  I already owned the book, since I had picked it up at a local Goodwill store some time ago.  So I figured that I might as well read it!

I probably should read John Dean’s books in addition to Silent Coup, since Dean sued the authors of Silent Coup for libel.    But I probably won’t read Dean’s books for My Year (or More) of Nixon.  Maybe I’ll read them some other time in the future.  January will be over before you know it.  February is coming up, and I have a couple of books to read and blog about for Black History Month (which is in February).  My Year (or More) of Nixon has to come to an end sometime, and January 31, 2014 is an appropriate date to draw it to a close.  Plus, as much as I have grown accustomed to reading books by and about Nixon—-after all, I’ve been doing so for over a year—-I would like to move on to something else.  Some books I will have to save for another time—-such as John Dean’s works.

So what did I think about Silent Coup?  It was all right, I guess.  I don’t know enough to critique its theses.  Moreover, because the book was rather heavy and detailed, it would take me a long time to evaluate each and every paragraph for accuracy, and I don’t want to devote years of my life to unpacking Silent Coup.  I was looking through some other books about Nixon that I have read, and more than one of them criticizes Silent Coup for making leaps in logic.  Maybe it does, but, to me, as a reader, it did come across as fairly well-documented.  It relied on interviews and documents.  It noted contradictions in people’s testimonies, and between what people said and what the record showed (i.e., someone saying there was such-and-such a meeting, when actually there was not such-and-such a meeting on record).  Maybe there were times when the authors of Silent Coup went a bit beyond the evidence to make certain people look more sinister than they actually were.  Still, they ask good questions.

The main villains of the book are Alexander Haig and John Dean.  Haig, according to Colodny and Gettlin, was sabotaging Nixon’s Administration as White House Chief of Staff.  In the story that Silent Coup lays out, Haig was behind leaks, and he himself was the mysterious Deep Throat who was leaking information to reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.  Colodny and Gettlin even argue that Haig and Woodward had a prior relationship, that Woodward as a Navy man briefed Haig.  Colodny and Gettlin do not buy into Woodward’s portrayal of himself as a political outsider, for they maintain that he was long a part of the establishment.  Why were there forces seeking to sabotage Nixon’s Administration, according to Colodny and Gettlin?  Because there were elements of the military who did not like Nixon’s policies of rapprochement with the Soviet Union and Red China, as well as arms control.

Colodny and Gettlin assert that The Final Days, by Woodward and Bernstein, is essentially Haig’s side of the story—-the propaganda that Haig is behind.  I don’t know.  Granted, Haig wasn’t portrayed too badly in The Final Days: he was loyal to Nixon, yet not blindly loyal.  But The Final Days did include some bad things that Haig did, such as talking badly about Kissinger to Nixon, and about Nixon to Kissinger.  The Final Days also quotes someone who was warning Gerald Ford about Haig, essentially saying that Haig was out for himself.  I don’t think that The Final Days is a complete whitewash of Haig.  But perhaps detractors would argue that The Final Days would have to include some bad details about Haig to look like a credible piece of journalism rather than a whitewash.

On Dean, I have read in other books that Silent Coup‘s thesis is that Dean ordered the Watergate break-in to conceal information there that his girlfriend was associated with a call-girl ring.  That’s certainly a major part of the break-in, according to Silent Coup.  The thing is, though, Dean in Silent Coup does not come across as particularly chivalrous, but rather as ambitious and selfish.  According to Colodny and Gettlin, Dean wanted to work on intelligence to advance himself within the White House ranks; he would look at people’s desks and take credit for their ideas; he broke up with his girlfriend, then decided to marry her because then she couldn’t testify against him.  Silent Coup‘s notorious and controversial thesis was actually the most puzzling and nebulous to me, in light of its portrayal of Dean.

I was looking at David Greenberg’s Nixon’s Shadow, and he says that Nixon in Silent Coup appears “hapless” and “guileless” (page 225).  That’s why he’s so puzzled that Roger Morris supported the book (Morris actually wrote the Foreword to Silent Coup): How could Morris portray Nixon as so manipulative and shady in Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, only to endorse a book that presented Nixon as a victim of Watergate?  But I didn’t think that Nixon came across as “hapless” and “guileless” in Silent Coup.  Granted, Silent Coup does portray him as a victim of Haig and Dean, but it does not depict Nixon as thoroughly innocent, but rather as one who was involved in a cover-up.

This book would probably be a good read for people who are interested in Watergate.  But I also found it to be rather interesting when it came to the human element—-how the characters were depicted: how one could be an insider yet portray himself as an outsider; how people try to rise in the ranks and impress others; and how one may be on the social margins of the elite and yet be able to seduce women by appealing to his contacts (there was one character like that in the book).

The Final Days 15

I finished The Final Days, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.  On page 455, we read Bruce Herschensohn’s reaction to Richard Nixon’s final speech to his White House staff: “That’s probably the real Nixon.  It’s a shame he couldn’t have been like that more often.”

Was that the real Nixon?  I remember reading in David Greenberg’s Nixon’s Shadow that there were people who did not think so.  They thought that Nixon was positioning himself for a comeback, feeding people sentimentalism, as he had in the past.  Some have pointed out the apparent errors in Nixon’s stories in that speech: Nixon’s father did not sell the lemon ranch before oil was found on it, for example, but rather the Nixons failed to purchase land on which oil was later found.  Maybe Nixon was giving that speech to look better in the eyes of history, for he did insist that it be televised, and there were instructions about where his wife, his daughters, and his sons-in-law would stand.  On the other hand, he put on his glasses at this event, something he rarely if ever did in public before.  And there seemed to be tears in his eyes, and the fact that he let them be seen in public differed from a tendency he often had to want people to see him as tough.  And yet, did not Nixon cry after giving the Checkers Speech, prompting one of his former acting teachers to remark that he was acting?  Did Nixon recognize that a certain form of sentimentalism could look good to people?

Do people like us when we are vulnerable, when they see the real us?  According to the Final Days, Nixon did not want it to be known that he cried when he was with Henry Kissinger on one occasion, under the pressures of the Watergate scandal.  Many of us may want for people to see us as tough and as strong.  We can identify with vulnerability, and even feel sorry for people who are vulnerable.  But do we respect and admire vulnerability?  Maybe we do when vulnerability appears to us in a particular package—-when it does not convey weakness or self-pity, for instance.

Of course, I cannot say “we,” as if I have some right to speak for everyone.  I’m just stating my general observations and speculations, and what I am saying may not apply to a number of people.

I'd like to add my final impressions of The Final Days.  At first, I liked the book on account of its descriptions of the legal reasoning of pro-Nixon and anti-Nixon people.  But I came to enjoy it even more because of its narration of the relationships in its stories: the loving ones, the complex ones, etc.

Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character 2

On pages 20-21 of Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, Fawn Brodie states:

"Billy Graham, Nixon's 'spiritual adviser,' who had led the prayer breakfasts at the White House and had given the funeral service when Nixon's mother died, described to his own biographer, Marshall Frady, how he vomited after reading the Nixon tape transcripts.  He said, 'I thought like John Wesley when he said, 'When I look into my heart it looks like hell.''  He did not say 'when I look into Nixon's heart,' but 'when I look into my own.'"

Brodie then goes on to say that Graham "soon saw his own escape from responsibility", and she goes on to quote Graham's statement in which he blamed Nixon's downfall on sleeping pills and demons.

Brodie argues that many people seek to differentiate themselves from Nixon, in an attempt to make themselves feel better about themselves, amidst their own shortcomings.  They ask what made Nixon so bad because they want for him to be worse than them, for their problem is that they see a bit of themselves in Nixon.  On page 20, Brodie gives examples: "We need reassurance that his lying is pathological whereas ours is simply 'white' lying, lying out of kindliness or unwillingness to give offense.  We want to be told that our small evasions, if any, in reporting our income tax do not compare with his fraudulently backdating a deed to win a tax break of half a million dollars."

This sort of theme has come up previously in my reading for My Year (or More) of Nixon.  Both Joan Hoff and Monica Crowley contend that Nixon was a scapegoat for flaws within the United States.  And David Greenberg in Nixon's Shadow stated (or perhaps he quoted someone who stated----I don't remember offhand) that a number of Americans could identify with Nixon.  Nixon was one who played roles and wore masks in his life, for instance, and many Americans realize that they do the same thing.

I've been thinking of doing a post on the hit TV series, Breaking Bad, but I'll comment on it here, even though I realize that more people would probably read what I have to say were I to write a separate Breaking Bad post.  More than one Christian blogger has stated that the show teaches them about Christian truths, such as original sin, and the slippery slope on which evil can place a person.  I have to admit that I myself do not think about spirituality when I am watching Breaking Bad.  I'm intrigued by the plot, the characters, and all the money that Walter White is making, but I don't contemplate how the show relates to my life.  I tend to identify with something that Matthew Paul Turner said on Facebook: "The '"Breaking Bad can teach us about God' blog posts are beginning to get old. I've seen at least 5 or 6 today. Why can't a good show just be a good show? Must every good show, song, or movie become a tool for Christians trying to make a mediocre Christian point?"

One reason that I was hesitant to learn any moral lessons from Breaking Bad was that I had a hard time judging Walter White.  Walter had cancer and a kid with special needs, and his jobs weren't making him much money, so he went into the meth business to provide for himself and his family.  It's a "situational ethics" sort of scenario, in which none of the options is great.

As I thought some more, however, there did come to be a time when it was no longer a matter of situational ethics.  Walter's cancer eventually went into remission, so he didn't have to worry about that anymore.  But he continued to be in the meth business.  Why?  Well, he was good at it, and he was making a lot of money.  Moreover, he had lingering resentment because, years before, he was part of a scientific discovery, and he was excluded from the huge profits that were made on it.  He thought that he had been cheated out of what he deserved, and he was making up for that by making tons of money in the meth business.

There, I believe, Breaking Bad teaches me something about morality and spirituality: Can greed and resentment lead me to do something that's wrong, something that ends up hurting people I don't see, and people I do see?  In this case, by looking into Walter White's heart, I see the flaws in my own.

Nixon Reconsidered 7

I have two items for my blog post today about Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered.

1.  My first item will concern whether the United States should intervene in other countries.  Hoff has a section in her book, "THIRD WORLD MISTAKES", in which she is quite critical of how President Richard Nixon approached the Third World.  Overall, she seems to be arguing, he saw it through the prism of the Cold War.  Hoff discusses the Nixon Administration's treatment of Chile, which was headed by the Marxist President Salvador Allende, who would be overthrown in a coup.  While Hoff does not believe that there is evidence that the CIA or Nixon Administration "played any direct role in the assassination of President Salvador Allende," she does acknowledge that they "did everything possible to destabilize his government" (page 249), by funding Allende's political opponents, for example.  One who was opposed to such features of President Nixon's foreign policy was Secretary of State William Rogers, who would later say that the U.S. giving contributions to foreign elections is a bad idea.  One reason, according to Rogers, was that the U.S. doesn't get its "money's worth" in doing so.  Second, Rogers said, it is embarrassing to the countries and undermines their trust in the U.S.  And third, it contradicts the U.S.'s rhetoric about non-intervention and allowing "countries to determine their own future" (Rogers' words on page 251).  Some have characterized Rogers as not particularly bright, but I do believe that his critique of the Nixon Administration's policy in Chile is quite insightful.  I can still see Nixon's perspective----that the Soviets were backing the leftists in Chile, that the U.S. did not want a major Communist power in South America, and that thus the U.S. had to support Allende's opponents.  Still, in my opinion, Rogers does well to highlight downfalls to U.S. intervention in other countries' political systems. 

Hoff herself appears to pursue a rather isolationist route at the end of her chapter on the Vietnam War (even though I seriously doubt that she and Rogers were complete isolationists).  She essentially says that the U.S. government and military officials should apologize for the Vietnam War.  She blames the South Vietnamese, "not the dove-inspired constraints on the U.S. military", for losing the war (page 242).  While Hoff defends Nixon against a number of charges that she considers to be unfounded and unfair, she still apparently retains the opposition to the Vietnam War that she had when she was a New Leftist.

Hoff sometimes seems to praise Richard Nixon's foreign policy, as when she says that detente may deserve some credit for the end of the Cold War.  But, overall, she does not have too many kind words for Nixon's foreign policy.  As I said in my post yesterday, she is critical of the "linkage" element of detente, in which Nixon and Henry Kissinger would link together different issues in dealing with the Soviets, offering concessions in some areas if the Soviets would do what the U.S. wanted in other areas.  Her chapter about the Vietnam War is entitled "VIETNAM: WITHOUT PEACE OR HONOR".  She's against how Nixon approached the Third World.  What exactly does she favor in President Richard Nixon's foreign policy?  She says that his rapprochement with Red China was an accomplishment, but here, her applause strikes me as rather tepid.  One goal behind the rapprochement was to give the U.S. leverage in its relationship with the Soviet Union, and my impression is that Hoff does not believe that it did that.  Hoff's praises of Nixon's domestic policies are quite pronounced, by contrast.  She does note flaws in some of them, such as Nixon allowing the dollar to float, and Nixon believing that the Equal Pay Act could actually bring about equal pay for men and women in the workplace.  But she also believes that Nixon accomplished a significant amount of good in such areas as civil rights, the environment, and the U.S. Government's treatment of Native Americans, and that his proposal to reform welfare was quite groundbreaking.  I don't find that same level of respect in Hoff's book for Nixon's foreign policies.

2.  In my post here, I refer to Stephen Ambrose's claim that Nixon's desire for information about Democratic National Committee chairman Larry O'Brien could have contributed to the atmosphere that led to the break-in at the DNC's headquarters at the Watergate hotel.  Ambrose is not the only one who posits this, for many believe that the burglars were looking for information about O'Brien.  But Hoff does not buy this explanation for the break-in, and her reason is that "the Watergate burglars did not initially bug, nor were they subsequently caught in, O'Brien's office" (page 305).  Hoff goes into other motivations for the break-in that have been proposed, but she appears to be open to the controversial argument in the book, Silent Coup, by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, that the break-in was an attempt to find information about a prostitution ring that was servicing Democratic and Republican politicians.  I'm not sure if, or to what extent, she buys into the aspect of Silent Coup's argument for which John Dean sued its authors for libel: the argument that John Dean was somehow involved in ordering the break-in and trying to cover things up, since (according to the authors) Dean's wife was connected with someone who was prominent in the prostitution ring.  Hoff does, however, say on page 311 that Silent Coup "has surpassed other books about the origins of Watergate" and also "attempts to resolve factual contradictions in the testimony of all the participants about the break-ins and cover-up" (page 311).

David Greenberg in Nixon's Shadow said that Hoff essentially provided scholarly cover for Silent Coup.  There are many who may feel that Silent Coup was a book with a crackpot theory that several Nixon apologists desperately tried to grab onto, perhaps to make Dean a scapegoat for Watergate.  I don't know enough about Watergate to comment.  But I do have to respect Hoff's humble tone in praising Silent Coup, as when she notes that the book attempts to resolve contradictions in testimonies.  There's not a whole lot of pretense in her liking the book for that reason.

Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon 12

I am in the part of Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician that is about the Alger Hiss case, in which Congressman Richard Nixon played a significant role.  (For background on that case, see my post here.)  As I said in my first post about Morris' book, one reason that I wanted to read it was to get an alternative perspective about the Hiss case, since much of what I have read thus far for my Year (or More) of Nixon seems to presume that Hiss actually did engage in espionage for the Soviet Union.  I read in an Amazon review of Morris' book, however, that Morris is rather skeptical of ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers' claim that such was the case.  In terms of blogging, I will probably save my post (or posts) about Morris' discussion of the Hiss case for the future, after I have gotten a better idea of where Morris is going in his narration and arguments.

In this post, however, I'd like to use as my starting-point something that Morris says on page 376.  The topic is Richard Nixon's alienation from academia, which, according to Morris, occurred after the House Committee on Un-American Activities' treatment of scientist Edward Condon.  (For background on this, see my post here.)  Nixon tried to distance himself from that through a letter to Douglas Maggs, a critic and one of Nixon's old law professors, and the Maggs letter went to others within academia as well.  But Nixon was unsuccessful in creating a bridge between himself and academia.  Morris states:

"In particular, the affair left a first legacy of distrust and suspicion in academic and scientific circles that would thicken into near-professional anathema, despite his solicitous gestures like the long letter to Maggs.  It would be a political liability for Richard Nixon for years to come and soon a touchstone for his own wounded resentment and alienation vis-[a]-vis an intellectual world that might have been a much greater ally and resource for him."

Nixon's alienation from academia has come up more than once in My Year (or More) of Nixon.  Nixon, on some level, was drawn to academia.  In my post here, I talk about Nixon's fantasy about being an academic at Oxford----of reading, teaching, and writing.  But I read somewhere (it may have been in David Greenberg's Nixon's Shadow) that there were academics who were rather amused by Nixon's fantasy.  They must not have thought that Nixon's thoughts were good enough for him to be within their ranks!  I read in another place that, while Nixon liked to read, his shelves were stocked mostly with older books and classics, rather than the newer, up-to-date books that academics were discussing.  And Stephen Ambrose, in his discussion of the books about foreign policy that Nixon wrote, makes the point that Nixon's books were not particularly accepted within academia.  Ambrose himself is rather critical of Nixon's books, saying that they were more like speeches and were inconsistent.

I myself have a love-hate relationship with academia.  There are times when I believe that certain academics are snobbish, that they talk an issue to death without going anywhere, and that they engage in sophistry that really doesn't mean anything.  I've often wondered if they find my thoughts, my writing, or the books that I read to be good enough.  On the other hand, there are times when I am sensitized to the necessity for academia.  I was one time watching snippets of a debate between Christians and atheists, in which Kirk Cameron and Roy Comfort were representing the Christian side.  Kirk Cameron was trying to ridicule evolution, and he held up a picture of a "crockaduck," a fictional intermediary between a crocodile and a duck.  One of the atheists looked embarrassed to be on the same stage with Kirk Cameron, but the atheist side didn't impress me either, for one of the atheists was arguing for Christ-mythicism and was apparently unaware of when Josephus wrote his books.  That's when it occurred to me: You either value the people who have seriously studied issues and who know what they're talking about, or you have the "crockaduck."

In the Arena 2

I have two items for my blog post today about Richard Nixon's In the Arena.

1.  On page 44, Richard Nixon says: "What separates the men from the boys in politics is that the boys seek office to be somebody and the men seek office to do something."

A couple of posts ago, I was talking about Richard Nixon's statement in his book Leaders that a winning candidate is one who truly wants the job, not someone who is reluctant.  The reason is that the person who wants the office is the one who will endure the hard road that comes with it----the criticisms, the invasion of privacy that candidates experience, etc.  I wondered if that contrasted with how the Hebrew Bible depicts a number of good leaders: as initially reluctant.  Moses and Gideon, for example, were very reluctant to assume a leadership position, but they were chosen by God, and God used them significantly.  By contrast, there were people who desperately sought to be leaders, such as Abimelech in the Book of Judges, and they were not exactly the right people to lead Israel, for they were bad people.

I think that what Nixon says on page 44 is an important ingredient to this whole discussion: Why does the leader want to lead?  Does he want to lead to help people, or mainly to help himself?  The former characterizes good leaders, whereas the latter characterizes, well, not-so-good leaders.  I can't treat this as an absolute.  There are well-intentioned people who sincerely want to help people, but they are not effective at getting people to follow them and at doing the political work that is necessary to pass their agenda.  Moreover, there are many leaders who accomplish good, and yet they have some self-serving motive: they like the glory that comes with politics.  But, in my opinion, a person who is a good leader cares for the people he leads, or at least he tries to make things better.

I think of the movie, Oliver Stone's Nixon.  Stone depicts Nixon as one who was hungry for power, and yet as one who accomplished good.  Nixon in the movie tells anti-war protesters that he can ride the beast (meaning the power-system) and hopefully accomplish some good.  But Oliver Stone appeared in the movie to have had a New Left perspective.  According to David Greenberg in Nixon's Shadow, the New Left tended to lack faith in the American political system and the likelihood of genuine reform occurring through it.  Greenberg cites Oliver Stone's Nixon as an expression of much of the New Left's feelings about Richard Nixon.  Personally, I thought that Oliver Stone's depiction of Nixon was much more positive than Greenberg apparently believed, and yet I do see a New Left pessimism in more than one of Stone's movies.  In JFK, President John F. Kennedy tries to end the Vietnam War and the Cold War, and he is then assassinated by a conspiracy of dedicated Cold Warriors, inside and outside of the U.S. government.  In Nixon, Nixon accomplishes reforms in terms of the environment, civil rights, and foreign affairs (with detente), and he angers a powerful right-wing cabal.  When one of the cabal (played by Larry Hagman, of Dallas fame) tells Nixon to remember who put him into office, Nixon replies that the American people did.  The cabal-person responds, "Well, that can be changed," and another cabal-person then adds, "In a heartbeat."  In these movies, those who try to do good will likely be attacked by the beast, the powerful interests that do not want reform.

2.  In documentaries that I have seen about Ronald Reagan's Presidency during the Cold War, the message that I get is that the Soviets were really baffled by Star Wars (or SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative), President Reagan's plan to set up a defense system in space that would destroy Soviet missiles.  According to this narrative, the Soviets thought that Star Wars was more of a reality than it actually was, that the U.S. was actually making real progress in constructing such a system, for the Americans come up with a lot of interesting things!  But, according to Nixon on pages 67-68 of In the Arena, Mikhail Gorbachev told him (meaning Nixon) that the Soviet Union was not against Star Wars "because it feared the huge cost to the economy or because it could not keep up technologically" (Nixon's narration).  After all, Gorbachev told Nixon, the Soviets were making progress on their own SDI program, plus Gorbachev expressed optimism that the Soviets could "evade and overcome any SDI system that the United States might eventually deploy" (Nixon's words).  Rather, Gorbachev said that he was against SDI because he thought that it would exasperate the arms race.

This reminds me of a variety of things.  First of all, I think of Lord John Marbury's argument against Leo McGarry in the West Wing against a missile-defense system: that, if one side constructs a missile-defense system, the other side will only construct a more powerful missile.  Second, I recall reading in a right-wing magazine as a child that the Soviets had their own SDI program, called the Red Shield.


Gorbachev may have been bluffing.  Nixon himself thought that Gobrachev, whatever he said, still feared the cost to the Soviet economy of keeping up with the United States.  Perhaps the Soviets were attempting to construct their own version of Star Wars, but they didn't make any more progress than we did, and they thought that we were making more progress than we were.  Still, I can understand Gorbachev's arguments against Star Wars.  And yet, I wonder: Would a missile-defense system have to lead to an escalation of the arms race?  Reagan offered to share the SDI technology with the Soviets.  Would that have resulted in mutual peace?  Perhaps.  Or perhaps Lord Marbury is right: both sides would then try to create more powerful missiles.

Nixon's Shadow 8

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.

Nixon's Shadow 7

I covered a lot of ground in my latest reading of David Greenberg's Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image.  I finished the chapter on the Washington Press Corps' image of Richard Nixon, the one about the image of Nixon that was held by Nixon loyalists, and the one on the image of Nixon promulgated in psycho-historical works.

I did find my latest reading to be engrossing, and there were at least two reasons for that.  First of all, Greenberg is a compelling storyteller.  In my latest reading, Greenberg told the tale of journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who investigated the Watergate scandal when many within the upper-level media were unwilling to do so.  Greenberg talked about Rabbi Baruch Korff, who had become a Nixon fan in 1972 due to Nixon's support for Soviet Jews, and who achieved minor celebrity status by launching an organization to defend President Nixon during the Watergate scandal.  Greenberg discussed the popularity and significance of works about Nixon.  Silent Coup's controversial thesis about Watergate was rejected by a number of observers, including certain historians, yet it was accepted by Nixon apologists and was given some scholarly cover by Joan Hoff.  Victor Lasky's It Didn't Start with Watergate, which was about how Nixon's misdeeds were no worse than those of previous Administrations, sold many copies, even though even Lasky acknowledged that the reason for its popularity was probably that it made Nixon supporters feel a little better after Watergate.  Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days, as well as David Frost's interviews of Nixon, made many Americans feel sorry for the former President.  And Greenberg goes into the entertainment media's depiction of Nixon.  Alex Keaton on the 1980's sitcom Family Ties was an ardent Nixon supporter, yet Alex was a likeable character.  (I appreciated this discussion because Family Ties was what got me interested in politics.)  And the 1999 comedy Dick not only depicted Nixon as a buffoon, but also Woodward and Bernstein.  In my mind, evaluating and discussing the significance of relevant players and works is an element of good storytelling.

Second, my impression is that Greenberg strives to be fair to Nixon, as he accepts and rejects the arguments of pro- and anti- Nixon people, as well as acknowledges some legitimate point in the various images of Nixon, without necessarily accepting those images completely.  Greenberg acknowledges that some of what the media accused Nixon of doing was false, and he also  says that the allegation that Nixon beat his wife Pat lacks convincing evidence.  Yet, Greenberg does not buy Nixon's arguments in every case: Nixon often alleged that the Democrats had his plane bugged in 1968, for example, but Greenberg does not believe that there is evidence for that.  In the chapter on the psycho-historical depictions of Nixon, Greenberg essentially says that they may have a point, but that they went too far at times: they could get overly political, or they would try to find a deep sinister meaning in insignificant things that Nixon did (such as mashing his mashed potatoes).  Greenberg makes an attempt to be fair and balanced, to both Nixon and also those who have written about Nixon.

That doesn't mean that I agreed with Greenberg on everything.  For example, on page 213, Greenberg says regarding Frost's interviews of Nixon that "The Watergate segments also provided the shows' most lasting moments, including Nixon's rationalization, soon to enter Bartlett's, that 'When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.'"  The movie Frost/Nixon depicts that statement as dramatic and as occurring within the context of Nixon's discussion of Watergate (see here).  The thing is, Nixon was not talking about Watergate when he made that statement, but rather he was discussing the Huston plan for gathering intelligence on domestic radicals.  Nixon's point, as Stephen Ambrose says, was that certain things that ordinarily would be illegal, such as burglary, become legal when the President provides cover for them.  One can argue that what Nixon said was still bad, even within that context, as David Frost does here, or even that Nixon's statement was relevant to Watergate because it provides us with insight into his view on Presidential power.  But Nixon was not explicitly talking about Watergate when he made that statement, nor did he say it in a particularly dramatic fashion (see here).

Nixon's Shadow 6

For my blog post today about Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image, I'll use as my starting-point something that David Greenberg says on page 151.  The topic is how Richard Nixon as President hid himself from the press while showing the public a slick image, and how that was conveyed in the 1976 movie about Watergate entitled All the President's Men.

"The film of All the President's Men (1976), directed by Alan J. Pakula of The Parallax View and Klute, memorably rendered Nixon as inaccessible to reporters except via their TV screens.  'One of our big problems,' said Robert Redford, the film's producer and star, was 'dramatizing an opposition that had become almost invisible.'  Pakula explained that the solution they devised was to make sure 'you don't see the president except on television.'  At the opening, Nixon is seen addressing the Congress after his triumphant Moscow summit.  In the closing sequence, he is sworn in for a second term, pledging to 'preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution,' as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, playing Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, doggedly clack away at their typewriters.  Nixon's absence except as a TV image served as a rebuttal to his claims that he liked to speak 'directly' to the public via television; as the film demonstrates, the televised address could be an indirect form of self-presentation, compared to press reports based on direct personal contact.  Nixon is perceived as a flickering shadow, not a flesh-and-blood person----which was how most reporters experienced him in real life."

I only read part of Greenberg's long chapter about the Washington Press Corps' image of "Nixon as  News Manager," so what I say about this topic will be incomplete.  A point that Greenberg makes in this chapter is that there were many within the press who bought into the "new Nixon" that Nixon was trying to project in 1968----the more tolerant Nixon, the more relaxed Nixon, the nicer Nixon, etc.  But they felt like real suckers when Joe McGinnis' The Selling of the President 1968 came out.  On page 141, Greenberg says that McGinnis was arguing in this book that "since Nixon's natural personality was so unappealing, his campaign aides concocted a new persona they projected through TV ads and tightly guarded performances."  How did McGinnis know this?  Apparently, he had access to Nixon's campaign while it was going on.  Greenberg states on page 141 that "McGinnis sneaked in under the radar screen, presenting himself to Nixon's men as such an insignificant fly on the wall that they never thought to swat him away."

Greenberg on page 142 says that what McGinnis was arguing in that book would strike many today as obvious: of course politicians try to project an image in an attempt to sell themselves.  To be honest, I'm rather skeptical that reporters back then did not know that.  As Greenberg notes in his chapter about the 1950's liberals, critics of Nixon regarded Nixon as phony, as someone who hid behind his slick public persona as a champion of the common man.  While reporters may not have spent a whole lot of time with Nixon as a candidate (though Greenberg acknowledges that there were some who did), they got to spend time with other candidates.  Certainly, they would have noticed that the person they interacted with was not totally equal to the public image that the candidate was trying to project.  Am I right?

That said, I'd like to turn to Greenberg's claim that, because the press largely did not know Nixon up close, they were less inclined to give him the benefit of a doubt during his scandals as President.  This is a challenge to me: letting people get to know me.  For me, part of this is introversion, and part of it may be a fear that people will not like me or find me cool or interesting enough.  Greenberg acknowledges that reporters found Kennedy to be more fun to be around than Nixon; plus, there was the factor of Nixon's hostility towards the press, which did not particularly help his relationship with it.  But maybe reporters would have enjoyed hanging around Nixon, on some level.  Stephen Ambrose talks about how some who worked for Nixon found him to be a kind and considerate man.  Ambrose also says that, after Nixon was President, people liked going to his parties, notwithstanding his bad jokes.  Perhaps Nixon should have let reporters get to know him a little better.  He should have done this with prudence, mind you: you don't want to bare your soul to just anyone, since they could easily get a bad impression or use what you say against you.  I think that all of us maintain a public image while hiding aspects of ourselves from the public: it's a prudent thing to do.  But there's also a place for getting to know people, on some level, and letting them get to know you.

Nixon's Shadow 5

My latest reading of David Greenberg's Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image was about the New Left's portrayal of Richard Nixon.  Essentially, the New Left regarded Nixon as a conspirator.

In reading Greenberg, I could see some of the New Left's points, even though I thought that New Leftists went too far at times.  They were a bit too paranoid for my tastes, as when they expected Nixon to suspend the 1972 Presidential election, or when the Secret Service locked the doors to the White House press room so Nixon could take a private walk, and the New Left concluded that Nixon was launching a coup.  But they had valid points about the futility of democracy in a country where corporate interests can influence the system to do its bidding, or about the insignificance of Watergate in comparison with the number of Indochinese civilians killed in the Vietnam War.

I'd like to highlight something from page 113.  There, Greenberg summarizes the views of Carl Oglesby on the elites who (according to Oglesby) run this country.  Oglesby served as President of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and he had an influence on Oliver Stone when Stone was making JFK and Nixon.

"The larger protagonists were two cabals of business elites, once allied in promoting the Cold War consensus, who had gone to war with each other over whether to pursue a 'd[e]tentist' or 'militarist' foreign policy.  One group, which Oglesby called the 'Yankees,' consisted of old-money Northeastern businessmen----the corporate liberals of New Left thought.  Internationalists on foreign policy, the Yankees had come by the late 1960s to oppose American involvement in Vietnam and soften their hostility towards Castro's Cuba.  Oglesby's other group, the 'Cowboys,' comprised the new-money real estate and oil moguls of the Southwest who wished to keep expanding America's frontiers in Asia.  Extreme anti-Communists, they despised Castro and supported the Vietnam War, from which they profited.  Secretly running the country, both groups employed clandestine means and violence to work their will.  The Cowboys killed Kennedy because of his timidity over Cuba and Vietnam, installed their front man Nixon in power, and funded his dirty tricks against the Yankee-friendly Democrats.  Eventually, however, the Yankees, including top CIA operatives, came to consider Nixon too dangerous, so they deliberately botched the Watergate break-in to bring him down."

Oglesby's picture of the dynamics of power in the world may be too simplistic, but maybe there is something to it.  A problem that I have with John Bircher conspiracy theories is that they tend to portray the wealthy industrialists who are part of the alleged conspiracy as left-wing.  A problem that I have with Oliver Stone and people like him is that they tend to portray the wealthy industrialists who are part of the alleged conspiracy as right-wing.  Both can cite facts in support of their position.  Personally, I have my doubts that the wealthy industrialists who are criticized are rigidly ideological, one way or the other, for their goal is simply to further their own interests, regardless of which ideological camp that may place them in a given situation.  But Oglesby takes a different track: according to him, some of the elites are left-wing, and some are right-wing, and the two are at war with each other.

I'd like to read more of Oglesby's ideas sometime, but I may have to see if I can find his book about the Yankees and the Cowboys at any nearby libraries, since the book is too expensive for my budget on Amazon (see here).  I have some questions.  First of all, what would Oglesby say is wrong with the Yankees?  They're liberal, right?  Wouldn't they be the good guys?  Well, Greenberg in my latest reading did distinguish the New Left from the mainstream left, which was more optimistic about positive change occurring through the democratic processes.  But was that the New Left's only problem with the mainstream left: that the New Left deemed the mainstream left to be too naive?  Or did the New Left believe that there was something sinister about the liberal Yankees----that they were not helping the country or the rest of the world, but were actually pursuing harmful policies?  Second, why would the Yankees want to remove Nixon, when Nixon was pursuing detente, the very policy that they supported?  As you can tell in this scene from Oliver Stone's Nixon, it would probably be the right-wing Cowboys who would have problems with some of Nixon's policies!

Nixon's Shadow 4

For my blog post today on Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image, I'll highlight something that David Greenberg says on pages 71-72.  The topic is Richard Nixon's speech to the White House staff after he resigned from the Presidency, in which Nixon talked about his father, his mother, the importance of not hating people, and perseverance.  According to Greenberg, this speech reminded some of Nixon's critics of his famous Checkers speech in 1952, in which Nixon, under fire for having a fund from businessmen's donations, portrayed himself as a common man, and talked about receiving as a gift a cocker spaniel, whom his family named Checkers.  Many of Nixon's critics considered the Checkers speech to be maudlin, inauthentic, and manipulative of the public.

"Watergate, of course, represented cultural triumph for the image of Tricky Dick; if the image had been pronounced before Nixon's presidential crisis, it became indelible thereafter.  Yet even at their moment of vindication, liberals still filtered Nixon through their ideological and cultural lenses.  When Nixon delivered his farewell address in August 1974 from the White House East Room, in which he dwelled on his parents and his boyhood, many heard only mawkish echoes of Checkers.  When Nixon shook hands with the White House staff, they shook their heads that he was pursuing his cynical image making right until the end.  James Taylor's song 'Line 'Em Up,' written some years later, captured these feelings.  In rhyming couplets, Taylor recalled how the president, in a false show of sadness, wallowed in self-pity while privately relishing the political opportunity his resignation speech presented.  Even as he hit bottom, the cagey Nixon, in Taylor's telling, looked forward to pressing the flesh one last time with those who had served him in the White House, so that he might publicly display his affinity for ordinary Americans.  Meg Greenfield, who had moved from The Reporter to The Washington Post a few years earlier, recalled hearing such sentiments from her liberal friends at the time.  'Did you hear that performance?' they asked.  'Would you believe he's still trying that stuff?'  Greenfield herself----the self-professed 'last unreconstructed Nixon critic on earth'----had heard the speech on her car radio and sympathized with the president and his 'unendurable shame.'  But her fellow Nixon-haters, she wrote, couldn't grasp what she was talking about.  'Live by the image, die by the image,' she concluded.  'They saw Nixon's speech merely as evidence of further faking....I thought this reaction said something not about Nixon, but about us.'  Greenfield had a point.  Even as liberals saddled Nixon with a permanent image as Tricky Dick, they also revealed their distance from the Americans who shared his values."

I never thought that Nixon's speech to the White House staff was inauthentic.  Rather, I believed that Nixon in that speech was expressing what he truly felt about his father and his mother and their values, as well as the importance of perseverance and the possibility of experiencing joy on the mountain.  Did he really mean what he said about the importance of not hating those who hate you?  I think so.  I'd like to think that this is an example of him learning from his mistakes.  But my impression is that it was difficult for him to follow through on that, since resentment was a part of who he was.

Do I dismiss that there was at least some PR motivation to his speech?  There could have been, on some level.  I vaguely recall reading in the third volume of Stephen Ambrose's trilogy that Nixon's wife Pat did not want Nixon's speech to the White House staff to be shown to the public, whereas Nixon did want that.  Maybe he did have his legacy in mind.  But that doesn't necessarily detract from his speech being an authentic expression of his feelings.  Perhaps he just wanted to share with the American people that he wasn't a totally bad guy----that he was a human being, who learned from his mistakes and was persevering through life.  And why should we assume that he wasn't human?  I'm sure that Nixon was a cynical politician who, like a lot of politicians, tried to manipulate the public for his own ends.  But I think that he was also one who could value human goodness when he saw it, who could appreciate the things that his parents taught him, and who sought lessons in life.

Nixon's Shadow 3

For my blog post today on Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image, I'd like to highlight something that David Greenberg says on page 44.  The context is the aftermath of Richard Nixon's 1946 run for U.S. Congress, in which Nixon unseated incumbent Democrat Jerry Voorhis.

"Voorhis alleged in 1947 that Nixon's minions had bullied shopkeepers, workers, and newspaper editors into suppressing their support for him.  'Merchants were warned that if they dared to sign newspaper statements in my support, as they had in previous campaigns, their line of credit would be cut off at the bank.  One large banking institution sent the word 'down the line' that its employees were not to vote for Jerry Voorhis.'  The sole editor in the district who had previously supported him, Voorhis added, 'was informed the next morning by his landlord that he had read the editorial and the editor would have to 'get out.'"

That reminded me of something that John Bircher Gary Allen wrote in his book, Richard Nixon: The Man Behind the Mask.  Allen referred to an article in the conservative publication Human Events that said that, during the 1952 Republican National Convention, wealthy bankers were trying to torpedo the candidacy of Republican Robert Taft by threatening to call in the loans of pro-Taft delegates; their aim, according to the article, was to preserve their cozy relationship with the government through the New Deal, which Taft would threaten, but which Dwight Eisenhower was open to keeping.  Voorhis would probably narrate his own situation differently: he would most likely say that the wealthy bankers were against the New Deal, and so they preferred Republican Richard Nixon over Jerry Voorhis, who was himself an ardent New Dealer.  Yet, assuming that what the Human Events article and Voorhis say is true, it's disturbing that private interests were using their control over the livelihoods of others to bully people into retreating from the political arena.  I think of something that a poli-sci professor said more than once: that government is not the only source of coercion.

Nixon's Shadow 2

On pages 36-37 of Nixon's Shadow: The History of An Image, David Greenberg describes the phenomenon of Nixon-hating in the 1950's:

"With liberal Democrats blazing the way, many Americans came to regard Nixon as a singularly dark and dangerous presence in national life.  And while the hatred had an ideological component, there was far more to it.  Nixon's detractors viewed him as categorically different from other partisan foes.  'All the time I've been in politics,' Harry Truman told his biographer, 'there's only two people I hate, and he's one.'  Adlai Stevenson said Nixon was the sole public figure he ever 'really loathed' and once, upon hearing Nixon's name at a party, exclaimed, 'Please!  Not while I'm eating!'  Eleanor Roosevelt, a biographer wrote, considered Nixon 'the politician she most detested.'  Dean Acheson thought just two or three others as odious.  Averell Harriman once stalked out of a swanky Georgetown dinner party----the kind where Democrats, Republicans, and reporters normally mixed with ease----because he spied Nixon sitting nearby.  'I will not break bread with that man!' the diplomat boomed before exiting.  And John F. Kennedy, speaking to The New Yorker's Washington correspondent Richard Rovere, called his 1960 presidential opponent a 'son of a bitch' and a 'bastard.'"

Why was Richard Nixon so despised?  Nixon asked Monica Crowley this question, according to Monica's second book about Nixon, Nixon in Winter.  Nixon believed it was because of his role as a Congressman in exposing Alger Hiss as a spy for the Soviets, for Hiss was a darling of the liberal establishment.  But David Greenberg does not buy that, for Greenberg says on page 44 that "many liberals and journalists had sided with" Nixon on the Hiss case.  Stephen Ambrose a couple of times in his Nixon trilogy (particularly volume 2) takes Nixon to task for his persecution complex, arguing that Nixon brought some of that persecution on himself.

Greenberg goes into the antagonistic view of Nixon held by many 1950's liberals.  According to a number of 1950's liberals, Greenberg narrates, Nixon was unprincipled and shady, and also dangerous because he could exploit the mass media (i.e., television, as in his Checkers Speech) to sucker the masses.  They regarded Nixon's common-man persona as phony.  They noted that Nixon was a ruthless campaigner----perhaps "demagogue" would be an appropriate word for how they characterized his campaign strategy.  They didn't think that Nixon was genteel or personable enough.  And yet, they still regarded him as a more sophisticated version of Joe McCarthy.

Nixon's Shadow 1

I started David Greenberg's 2003 book, Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image.  This book is about the images that people have had of Richard Nixon over the years.

In this post, I'd like to highlight something that Greenberg says on page xiii:

"Then, too, there's no denying that Nixon was a shadowy figure.  Even if you reject those dark, malign images whose creation and evolution are traced in the following chapters----Nixon as Machiavellian, Nixon as paranoid, Nixon as conspirator----there's no getting around the fact that Nixon fascinates people because of his dark side.  Just as the shining, heroic face of Franklin Roosevelt dominated an earlier, optimistic era of triumph through depression and war, Nixon's dour and shadowy profile beclouded the years that followed.  For the epoch of the Cold War, the Red Scare, Vietnam, Watergate, and malaise, Nixon----as opposed to the Kennedy of Camelot or the Reagan of 'Morning in America'----seems the most fitting avatar."

Essentially, Greenberg's point seems to be that Nixon was a depressing figure, for a depressing time.  That contrasts with what Nixon's image was when he first ran for Congress: fresh, young, handsome, wholesome.