Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 7

Richard Nixon has been accused of sabotaging the Paris Peace Talks during his 1968 run for U.S. President.  Did Richard Nixon, using Anna Chennault as a go-between, try to convince South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu to back out of the Paris Peace Talks, thereby depriving the Democrats of an opportunity to take credit for a peaceful resolution of the Vietnam War?  Did Chennault, speaking for Nixon, claim to Thieu that he could get a better deal from Nixon were Nixon to become President?

Overall, Jonathan Aitken in Nixon: A Life, appears to be skeptical about this.  Aitken acknowledges that prominent Nixon campaign adviser John Mitchell spoke once with Chennault about the peace talks, but he doubts that Nixon was personally involved in Chennault's activities.  Aitken says that Nixon regarded Chennault as a "self-promoting chatterbox" (Aitken's words), and he seems to be saying that Chennault acted on her own initiative, since she opposed Lyndon Johnson's proposed deal with North Vietnam.  Aitken on page 366 states that "The telephone intercepts had...specifically recorded Mrs Chennault telling the South Vietnamese embassy that Nixon did not know what she was up to", yet Aitken goes on to say that "She may well have taken Nixon's name in vain during her conversations with her friends in Saigon..."

On the preceding page, Aitken says that "even if Nixon, through Mitchell, was something more than an innocent bystander in the contact with Mrs Chennault, he was certainly not a guilty party to the breakdown of the peace talks."  According to Aitken, Thieu had his own reasons not to participate in the Paris Peace Talks, and he did not need prompting from Chennault or the Nixon campaign to act as he did.  Regarding Lyndon Johnson's belief that Nixon was sabotaging the peace talks, Aitken says that LBJ was paranoid, and he contends that neither the wiretaps on the phones of Spiro Agnew and John Mitchell, nor the bugging of Nixon's plane, uncovered "any evidence of collusion" (page 465).  (NOTE: I have read in a couple of places that the allegation that Nixon's campaign plane was bugged was false.)  Moreover, according to Aitken, the reason that Democratic Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey did not go public with the accusation that Nixon sought to sabotage the Paris Peace Talks was that he did not believe that Nixon would do such a thing.

Aitken's narration of this appears to be rather contradictory, but he still offers perhaps the best defense of Nixon that I have read so far.  Was there solid evidence that Nixon was working through Chennault to sabotage the peace talks?  Or were Mitchell and Chennault acting on their own initiative?  Aitken does well to cast doubt on Chennault's claim that she was speaking for Nixon to the South Vietnamese, as she herself claimed on a few occasions that such was not the case.  But, as I say here, using Stephen Ambrose's biography of Nixon as my source, "Lyndon Johnson apparently had evidence that Nixon adviser John Mitchell, claiming to speak for Nixon, had asked Chennault to try to persuade Thieu to back out of the Paris Peace Talks."  Would Mitchell claim to speak for Nixon, without that being the case?

The answer to the question of whether Nixon knew about the activities of Mitchell and Chennault may revolve around how involved Nixon was in the details of his campaign.  There were times when Nixon was supposedly obsessed with the details of his campaign and intimately involved in what his campaign did.  But there were also arguably times when he had a more hands-off approach when it came to what his underlings did.  Watergate, in my opinion, is a good example of that.

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 8

What I noticed in my latest reading of Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character was that Fawn Brodie did not criticize John F. Kennedy.  At least she hasn't in what I have read of her book thus far.

I've become somewhat accustomed to seeing snark about Kennedy in some of the books about Nixon that I have read.  After talking about Kennedy's advice to Nixon on the importance of writing a book, Stephen Ambrose said that Kennedy did not really write Profiles in Courage, and that his father pressured the Pulitzer Committee to give JFK the Pulitzer.  I read in one book about Nixon (though I forget which one) that JFK's father, Joseph Kennedy, may not have been just lucky when he managed to thrive during the Great Depression.  Don Fulsom is rather positive about JFK, noting that the mob hated him, and yet he acknowledges that JFK had mob connections at some point.  Anthony Summers goes more deeply into JFK's mob connections, even talking about how some bruisers were at polling stations pressuring people to vote for Kennedy.  Summers also tells a humorous story about when a Kennedy associate in 1960 was doing investigative work on the wild weekend parties that Nixon attended at Bebe Rebozo's home, but he decided not to pursue that line when he learned that Kennedy, too, was at the parties!  And Nixon, and also biographers about Nixon, have claimed that there were ghost votes for Kennedy in the 1960 Presidential election.

I'm reading Brodie's book, and I don't see much of that.  She acknowledges that JFK was a womanizer, but I suppose that this was such common knowledge by the time that she wrote the book that she decided not to omit it.  But she appears to take for granted that Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage.  She says that Joseph Kennedy luckily dodged the negative consequences of the Great Depression.  While Nixon charged that candidate Kennedy was briefed about the U.S. Government's plots against Fidel Castro, and that Kennedy was really low when Kennedy was publicly accusing the Eisenhower Administration of doing nothing against Castro, Brodie seems to think that Kennedy had not been told about the U.S. Government's plots.  Overall, she portrays Kennedy as a witty person who came across as more authentic than Nixon did.  As far as negatives go, she says that Nixon was healthier than Kennedy because of Kennedy's bad back, and that Nixon was a better orator, even though Kennedy improved by the time he got to the first debate.  But I don't see the snark about Kennedy that I saw in many of the other books about Nixon that I read.

Why didn't Brodie share much dirt on Kennedy?  Anthony Summers wrote an anti-Nixon book, and he didn't shy away from that!  Brodie talks about how Kennedy drove women wild.  Could she have had a crush on the late President Kennedy?  I don't know.

Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full 10

For my blog post today about Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, I'll use as my starting-point something that Black says on pages 344-345.  The context is Hungary's 1956 revolt against the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union's brutal suppression of that revolt.  There are right-wingers who have criticized President Dwight Eisenhower for not doing anything to save Hungary from Communist repression, even though Hungarians were desperately pleading for help.  What I have wondered is what exactly Eisenhower could have done.  Send in tanks?  Would that have provoked a war between the United States and the Soviet Union?  On pages 344-345, Black offers his ideas about what Eisenhower should have done:

"As for Hungary, the desire of the United States to avoid war with the U.S.S.R. is commendable, but there was an opportunity for a useful initiative.  At the least, Eisenhower could have proposed a neutral status for Hungary, like that of Austria, or what came to be called 'Finlandization,' and offered in exchange to the U.S.S.R. some corresponding NATO withdrawal, even if only some force reductions, or the removal of some secondary bases, such as from Greece or Spain.  More interesting would have been to supplement this offer with the air landing, by invitation from Nagy [who was leading Hungary after it declared its independence], of some airborn forces in western Hungary.  In exchange for extracting the Anglo-French from their self-authored debacle at Suez, the United States could have got some of their forces to join them in Hungary, not with a view to war or occupation, but to destabilize the Russian empire and turn up the pressure for compromise.  Nagy did eventually ask for the help of the 'international community.'  Sending forces might have been a bold move, but might have been justifiable, if only to redeem the Churchill-Stalin accord of October 1944, which promised the Western Allies a 25 percent sphere of influence in Hungary, to the U.S.S.R.'s 75 percent."

I have to respect Black for taking a retrospective stab at this problem.  This is one reason that I am enjoying Black's book: his analysis of politics and policy.  Black's book is lengthy, but it does not spend a whole lot of pages on certain events in Richard Nixon's life, such as the time that President Eisenhower had a heart attack and Nixon needed to handle the Presidency.  Black only spent a page on that event, if even that.  But I'm actually happy that Black doesn't spend lots of pages on certain events.  When I came to Black's discussion of Vice-President Nixon's visit to Caracas, I thought, "Oh man, this again.  I've already read about this who knows how many times."  But Black's narration of that was not long, and it was rather painless for me as a reader.  Black just says what happened, offers some analysis, and moves on.  Some of you may not be looking for that in a book.  And, to be honest, if I started my Year (or More) of Nixon with Black's book, I myself would probably be dissatisfied.  But, after reading Ambrose, Six Crises, Nixon's memoirs, and the list goes on, I'm not necessarily interested in reading another extensive regurgitation of certain events in Nixon's life.  I'm more interested in reading some analysis, or an author's take on certain characters in the drama.  I'm finding that in Conrad Black's book.

As far as the substance of what Black says about Hungary is concerned, I'm probably inadequate in terms of evaluating it, but I will say that I can see some logic in what Black is proposing.  The Soviets may have been holding on to Hungary, in part, because they felt that maintaining control of Eastern Europe was a way to protect the U.S.S.R. from the West: Eastern Europe is like a buffer.  If that is the case, then the U.S. offering to withdraw some NATO forces or bases in exchange for Hungarian independence makes a degree of sense, in that it could make the U.S.S.R. feel more secure.  The thing is, was the U.S.S.R. just interested in holding on to Eastern Europe for the sake of self-protection, or did it have imperial or aggressive aims as well?  If that is the case, then the U.S. arguably would not have been wise to reduce NATO forces.

Black may be saying that the U.S. would have had to pressure the U.S.S.R. to compromise, since the U.S.S.R. would be very reluctant to do so.  Giving up Hungary would arguably be a big deal!  If the U.S.S.R. gave up Hungary, would that encourage other Eastern European countries to revolt?  Even if Hungary were officially neutral, could the U.S.S.R. be assured that it was actually neutral?  That could be why Black says that the U.S. should have brought in the British and the French for extra leverage.

What Black says about the 1944 Churchill-Stalin accord is interesting to me, in light of what Black has said in his book about Yalta.  Against right-wingers who allege that the Yalta conference sold out Eastern Europe to the Soviets, Black argues that Yalta actually supported Eastern Europe's freedom, but that the U.S. and others failed to act on that.  Whether that helps me to understand the Churchill-Stalin accord, I do not know.  It seems that the Churchill-Stalin accord still gave the Soviets most of the influence in Hungary.  Maybe it would have been better had the Western allies had 25 percent of the influence in Hungary rather than none at all, as the Churchill-Stalin accord stipulated, but Black's statement that sending American, British, and French forces to redeem the accord between Churchill and Stalin makes me ask questions.  For example, Black says that the U.S. should have pushed for Hungary to be neutral.  But would it have been truly neutral, had the Soviets had 75 percent of the influence there, as the Churchill-Stalin accord stipulated?

Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full 7

For my post today about Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, I'll use as my starting-point something that Black says on page 246.  The context is the controversy about Richard Nixon's fund during the 1952 Presidential election.  Nixon was the Republican candidate for Vice-President at the time, and a fund that he had from the donations of businessmen was controversial, to the point that there were many who were urging Republican Presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower to drop Nixon from the ticket.  For some time in 1952, neither Dwight Eisenhower nor Thomas Dewey----an eastern Republican who helped advance Nixon's political career----would vigorously step forward to defend Richard Nixon, whereas more conservative Republicans such as Robert Taft and Joseph McCarthy did.  What follows is something that Black says about how Nixon would narrate an interaction that he had with Dewey about the fund controversy:

"In his mid-career memoir, Six Crises, Nixon wrote that he discerned that Dewey 'did not have his heart in what he told me.'  In his memoirs fifteen years later, written after Dewey had died, he omitted any reduction of implicit criticism of Dewey's role."

According to Black, in Six Crises, which Nixon wrote while Dewey was still alive, Nixon was toning down any criticism that he had of Dewey's advice about what Nixon should do in light of the fund controversy (namely, for Nixon to offer his resignation to Eisenhower in the Fund speech that he was about to give).  Nixon said that he could tell that Dewey's heart was not in what he was saying.  But Nixon in his memoirs, which he wrote after Dewey had died, and even after the Nixon Presidency itself had ended, omitted that little part about Dewey's heart not being in what Dewey had told him.  As I look at the passages----on page 110 of Six Crises and pages 125-129 of volume 1 of Richard Nixon's memoirs----I can see Black's point.  In Six Crises, Nixon talks about his anger at what Dewey was telling him, but Nixon mitigates any implied criticism of Dewey by saying that he could tell that Dewey's heart wasn't in what Dewey was telling him.  In Nixon's memoirs, however, Nixon simply narrates that he was angry at what Dewey was telling him.

I'd like to make two points:

1.  In my post here, I talked about Stephen Ambrose's discussion of what type of President Nixon might have been had he won in 1960, and how that would have compared with the type of President that he was in 1969-1974.  Ambrose is not particularly dogmatic in this discussion, for he considers different scenarios.  But one scenario that he considers is that, had Nixon won in 1960, Nixon would have surrounded himself with Establishment types such as Dwight Eisenhower and Thomas Dewey, rather than "us vs. them" types like Haldeman, Colson, Agnew, etc.  Black says that the Fund controversy in 1952 alienated Nixon from the Eastern Establishment Republican types, since Thomas Dewey did not go to bat for him, whereas right-wing Republicans did.  Would a President Nixon who had won in 1960 have drawn from the wisdom of Eisenhower and Dewey, if Nixon was arguably bitter about their failure to vigorously support him during the fund crisis?

I can see it going both ways, but what I think would have likely happened is that Nixon would have continued to draw from the insights of Dewey and Eisenhower.  Whatever his disappointments with them may have been, Nixon owed them for his political advancement, and he probably would have still needed them on account of their influence within the Republican Party.  After all, Nixon still felt compelled in Six Crises to mitigate any criticism of Dewey.  Moreover, Nixon himself speculated that, had he won in 1960, the "establishment types" would have remained in power and Nixon wouldn't have been able to do what was necessary for the country.  Nixon knew himself better than anybody, and he could envision himself keeping the establishment types in power.  At the same time, I can envision a President Nixon who had won in 1960 feeling free to stray from advice that Eisenhower would give him.  Nixon was for beefing up the U.S. military and cutting taxes, whereas Eisenhower was not for these things at the same level.  But my impression is that Nixon in 1960 ran on his own ideas rather than those of Eisenhower, and he probably would have been committed to his own ideas as President.

2.  Nixon probably felt that he could be more honest in his memoirs than in Six Crises.  When he wrote his memoirs, he was no longer pursuing political office, for he had just been President, and thus he didn't need to be as worried about appeasing the right people.  Plus, Nixon could be more honest about his thoughts regarding Dewey and Eisenhower, for both men had died.  That reminds me of how hard it is for one to be completely honest in writing, for people out there can take offense at what one wrote.  I am not completely honest in my own writing, to be candid with you.  Honest writing is better writing, but it's not always feasible----unless one wants to take risks and alienate people.

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.

Nixon Reconsidered 4

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

1. On page 109, Hoff says the following about Nixon's stance on equal rights for women:

"Nixon told me in 1983 that his family (his wife and two daughters) favored the ERA, but he had come to believe after 1963 that the Equal Pay Act would achieve equality for women----apparently not realizing that this legislation could never end the pay differential between women and men or the sex-segregated nature of the U.S. labor force.  This view may have had validity in 1969 when Nixon came into office, but he argued the point with me as though twenty years had not passed and proved him (and many others, including Democratic women who had supported the Equal Pay Act) wrong.  Nonetheless, he correctly asserted that effective application of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act could serve the same purpose for women as passage of the ERA.  Nixon admitted to me, however, that as president he had not done as much for women as he would have liked."

This paragraph exemplifies that Hoff's intention in Nixon Reconsidered is not to whitewash Nixon's record on domestic policies, although she does believe that Nixon as President had a number of significant progressive domestic policy accomplishments.  Hoff is open about what she considers to be strengths and weaknesses in Nixon's record.  For example, Hoff acknowledges that there were weaknesses in Nixon's policies regarding women.  Hoff also discusses the sexist attitudes of Nixon and some of his staff, as well as Nixon's tepid support for the Equal Rights Amendment as President.  At the same time, Hoff notes accomplishments that Nixon made in terms of fighting gender discrimination, and she also appears to give Nixon the benefit of a doubt, in some cases.  On page 104, Hoff says that Nixon questioned the value of recruiting women for government positions, as Nixon expressed doubt that this would get him more female votes.  Hoff states: "Rather than being a totally negative comment simply rationalizing the president's reluctance to appoint women, it could have been, suggested the columnist Tom Wicker, a 'hard political calculation; or it conceivably was a view somewhat ahead of its time that women generally wanted effective measures against sex discrimination rather than the highly visible 'token' jobs in government for a select few.'"

What I liked about the paragraph on page 109 is that it highlighted two aspects of Nixon.  On the one hand, Nixon was making the same arguments in 1983 about the Equal Pay Act that he had made back when he was President, even though (according to Hoff) subsequent events had proven him wrong.  On the other hand, Nixon acknowledged to Hoff that his record as President on equality for women was inadequate, that he himself was not completely satisfied with his record on this issue.  Many of us would like to think that we accomplished something good, and we try to justify our decisions; yet, since none of us is perfect, we can also look back and reflect that we could have done more.  Self-justification and regret seem to co-exist in a lot of people!  Personally, I find it refreshing when an ex-President looks back at his time in office and shares his regrets: what he wished he accomplished but didn't, what he did wrong, what he could have done better, etc.  It makes the ex-President look more human, which contrasts with how politicians continually try to spin to make themselves look flawless.

2.  On pages 149-150, Hoff talks about how Henry Kissinger did not expect for his working relationship with Richard Nixon to last, and yet the two managed to bond over shared characteristics:

"On the surface Nixon and Kissinger----an American Quaker and a German-American Jew----appear to have been the odd couple of U.S. foreign policy.  Given his long personal and professional association with the Rockefeller family and his blunt criticisms of Nixon, Kissinger apparently did not think he would last even six months in the new Nixon administration.  Yet when these two men came together in 1968, they actually shared many viewpoints and had developed similar operational styles.  Both relished covert activity and liked making unilateral decisions; both distrusted bureaucracies; both resented any attempt by Congress to interfere with initiatives; and both agreed that the United States could impose order and stability on the world only if the White House controlled policy by appearing conciliatory but acting tough.  While neither had headed any complex organization, both thought 'personalized executive control' and formal application of procedures would lead to success.  Even more coincidental, perhaps, each had a history of failure and rejection, which made them susceptible to devising ways of protecting themselves and their positions of power.  Often their concern for protection appeared as obsession with eavesdropping, whether wiretaps or reconnaissance flights.  They even eavesdropped on themselves: Nixon by installing an automatic taping system in the White House, Kissinger by having some of his meetings and all of his phone conversations taped or transcribed from notes.  In a word, instead of compensating for each other's weaknesses and enhancing strengths, Nixon and Kissinger shared their worst characteristics."

Hoff goes into more detail about the relationship between Nixon and Kissinger.  It was quite stormy, in areas!  Nixon thought at one time that Kissinger needed psychiatric help, and Nixon often tried to hinder Kissinger from taking credit for foreign policy moves.  And Kissinger actually was trying to upstage Nixon (according to Hoff), and also badmouthed Nixon to others after the Nixon Presidency.  Meanwhile, as Hoff notes, Nixon in his memoirs was quite mellow in talking about Kissinger.  Overall, from what I have read in books about (and even by) Nixon, there were intense personality conflicts among Nixon's staff.  I doubt it's an Administration in which I would have wanted to work, at least in the inner-circle!

Moreover, Hoff notes that prominent Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman thought that Nixon and Kissinger actually did compensate for each other's weaknesses: that Nixon did well in crisis but poorly when things were going well, whereas Kissinger tended to stress out in crises, while handling the good times rather adeptly rather than botching things up.

Whatever their conflicts, Nixon and Kissinger did have a long-standing relationship in the area of foreign policy, particularly during Nixon's Presidency.  I recall Stephen Ambrose telling the story in his biography of Nixon of when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited Nixon and Kissinger during a conflict between India and Pakistan, and she noted that Nixon was continually saying, "Isn't that right, Henry?"

I like stories in which people whom one would not expect to get along actually do end up forming a fairly successful relationship----whether that be a working or a personal relationship.

3.  On pages 163-164, Hoff talks about Nixon's Secretary of Defense, Mel Laird, who had a reputation as a hawk during his time in the 1960's as a Congressman, but who as Secretary of Defense was much more moderate.  As Secretary of Defense, Hoff says, Laird pushed for the end of the draft, the replacement of American troops in Vietnam with South Vietnamese troops (Vietnamization), and the withdrawal of American troops "faster than the Pentagon thought the South Vietnamese forced could be trained to replace them..."  Laird also questioned extending the war into Laos and Cambodia.  Hoff says that, "unlike Nixon and Kissinger, Laird was more interested in ending the war in Vietnam than in winning it."  All this, "Despite cartoons depicting Laird's bald head in the shape of a missile, bomb, or bullet..."

In addition to liking opposites-attract stories, I also enjoy stories in which a person acts differently than people perceive him.  I think of the movie, Separate But Equal, which was about a companion case to the Brown vs. the Board of Education Supreme Court decision banning racial segregation in public schools.  In that movie, the side that is challenging segregation is afraid when Earl Warren becomes the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, for it learns that Warren as California Attorney General was a major force behind putting Japanese-Americans into internment camps during World War II.  But Warren surprised the anti-segregation side.  Not only did Warren come to support desegregation, but he also attempted to persuade the other justices to support it so that the court could make a firm statement.

The way that the movie depicts the situation, Warren's eyes were opened to the realities of racial discrimination after he had become Chief Justice, and he saw that his African-American driver was sleeping in his car one night because no hotel or motel would accept him.  Maybe this is true, and maybe it is not.  Still, Warren probably did surprise people when he fought for desegregation.

Why Laird changed his mind, I have no idea.  Perhaps he learned more.  Maybe he just got to the point where he wanted the war to end, and he didn't believe that hawkish measures were working.  I've read Republicans who make fun of how the liberal establishment says that Republican politicians who end up supporting liberal measures have demonstrated "growth" since their time in office.  Personally, I think it's great when people change with new information and exposure to real life----whether that change be from left to right, or from right to left, or from one of these extremes towards the middle.  All sorts of people can move from shallow positions to positions of depth.

Coming back to the issue of regrets, I'd like to quote what Earl Warren said in his 1977 memoirs about his support for Japanese internment camps during World War II (see here): I "since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating it, because it was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom and the rights of citizens...Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends, and congenial surroundings, I was conscience-stricken...[i]t was wrong to react so impulsively, without positive evidence of disloyalty..."

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."

Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon 4

In my latest reading of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, Roger Morris talks about an oratorical contest that the teenage Richard Nixon won in 1929.

The aim of these oratorical contests was to extol the U.S. Constitution.  One of the contestants looking back at these contests, Merton Wray, said that they "were seeking to promulgate this philosophy of the American Constitution demonstrating that it came down from Mt. Sinai along with the Decalogue...whereby all the Founding Fathers were saints and especially ordained by God and had connections with Him".  Wray's speech was a little too liberal for two out of three of the judges' taste, however, for Wray proposed making the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights worldwide.  Because two of the judges didn't care for Wray's promotion of a one-world government, Wray came in last place.  "I never realized that I was stepping on a sore point," Wray would reflect years later.

Nixon in his speech, however, criticized those who were using the Constitution's rights to undermine the Constitution.  Personally, I much preferred how Morris discussed this to how Stephen Ambrose handled it in volume 1 of his Nixon trilogy.  Ambrose simply said on page 47: "One struggles to imagine who 'some' and 'those' were.  The year was 1929, conservative Republicanism was at its zenith, and there certainly were no labor agitators in Whittier, much less people going around denouncing the Constitution."  Morris, however, interprets Nixon's speech in light of the Red Scare, the union agitation, and the fear of unions that were gripping parts of California in the early 1920's.  According to Morris, Nixon's speech "spoke unmistakably to the inbred fear of leftist or alien forces among the small businessmen and merchants of Southern California enclaves like Whittier" (page 105), people who thought that leftists were using the Constitution to undermine the Constitution.  Labor agitation had even impacted Nixon's own family, on some level: "Over the musty school auditoriums where he spoke there was still the specter of the Wobblies who had left their initials so ominously scrawled that night on the Yorba Linda packinghouse where he and his mother worked" (page 106).

Wray's characterization of the view of the Constitution held by the sponsors of the contests stood out to me because it resembled how a political science professor of mine characterized Ronald Reagan's conception of the Constitution: that a dove descended upon the Founding Fathers, and they wrote our most holy document, the U.S. Constitution!  A teacher who would say such a thing in an elementary school, a junior high school, a middle school, or a high school would probably be criticized by the religious right, at least if he lived in the sort of area that I did!  But a college professor can have a bit more leeway (depending on where he teaches).  I'm not sure if Ronald Reagan actually believed all that about the U.S. Constitution.  But I did find my professor's mockery of that concept to be quite refreshing, for, while I appreciate the rights that I have under the Constitution, I don't think that the Constitution is perfect, nor that the men who framed it were perfect.

I'd like to turn now to the essay and oratorical contests that I participated in when I was in junior high and high school.  In junior high school, I won the local level of an oratorical contest, then I went on to come in third at the next level (third out of four boys----I feel sorry for the guy who didn't even place!).  The next year, I won at the local level, then I won at the next level, and then I lost at the level after that.  On the essay contests, I never got too far.  I won an essay contest two years in a row at the local level because I was the only one participating, but then I apparently lost at the subsequent level (since I never heard back about my essays).  I also lost other essay contests.

There may have been a variety of reasons that I lost the contests that I did: my ideas not being fresh enough, or others being able to communicate their ideas in more effective, profound ways.  Some of you may be thinking that, if I wrote my essays like I write my blog, then it's no wonder that I lost!  Okay, ha ha, you had your laugh!  But what I'd like to focus on is the role of ideology in these contests.  Morris talks about how the local judges of the essay contests in which Nixon participated were largely conservative: Wray lost due to his promotion of world federalism, whereas Nixon won after giving a speech that spoke to conservative fears about those who would supposedly use the Constitution to undermine the Constitution.  What was the ideology of those judging the contests in which I participated, and how could that have worked for or against me?

Well, I think that ideology may have helped me at the local level of the oratorical contests, the ones that I won.  People there were more conservative and religious, and I was talking about the importance of religious values and patriotism.  I don't think that giving a conservative speech was enough to win these contests, for a fellow contestant who gave a dry speech about the dangers of the national debt did not do too well.  But I managed to give a fairly decent delivery, while also saying things that resonated with my rather conservative audience.

At the next level, though, my hunch is that the judges were a bit more liberal, since that was an urban area and a college city.  In the first year that I participated in the oratorical contest, the guy who won at the second level gave a speech extolling the United Nations.  That poor guy who did not even place, however, gave a speech denouncing the bias of the media.  How I won at this level the next year, with my faith and country speech, I have no idea!  Maybe the judges were less ideological in that year, or there were pastors who were judging the event.  (I was later invited to give my speech at the church of a pastor who was at the contest.)

On the essay contests, I lost whether the judges were liberal or conservative.  I participated in one essay contest about the family, and I wrote about the importance of Christian devotion in maintaining a healthy family life.  I watched some of the essays that won on TV, and one of them was praising gay and lesbian families----and this was during the early 1990's, when homosexuality was not as widely accepted as it is now.  The judges of that contest may have been more to the left.  But I also lost essay contests that were sponsored by groups that probably leaned to the right.  There were essay contests about how freedom is America's most precious heritage, or about how we have a responsibility to preserve freedom.  I participated in these contests, but I had a difficult time writing these essays.  The reason probably was that I didn't know how to reconcile "freedom" with my own right-wing beliefs.  Freedom is our most precious heritage?  I didn't think that our right to do what we wanted was our most precious heritage!  For one, I didn't believe that we should always have the right to do what we wanted, for I supported the government banning certain things that I considered immoral, plus I looked with favor on the times that the government restricted freedom in an alleged attempt to preserve the country (i.e., the Palmer raids).  Second, I believed that devotion to God was a more precious aspect of our national heritage than freedom!  But I also managed to lose by going the other extreme.  In one essay contest, which was sponsored by conservatives, I criticized the American Legion for wanting to force Jehovah's Witnesses to say the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools in the 1940's.  I viewed that as an attack on religious freedom.  In all of these cases, I may have lost because I wasn't profound or eloquent enough, or because there were others who were more profound or eloquent than I was.  But I do believe that there was an additional factor to my losing: I was an oddball!

Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon 2

For my blog post today about Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, I'll use as my starting-point something that Morris says on page 56.  Essentially, Morris expresses skepticism of Richard Nixon's claim that he grew up poor:

"...the well-dressed Nixon children, the tractor and car, the hired help, the china closet----all belied the later, well-publicized images of poverty, and bespoke, for those who knew, both Milhous subsidies and pride.  Richard Nixon had not been born or left to the grim impoverishment depicted in his political mythology.  The reality seemed very different to others nearby who lived much the same existence, and even in the same larger family.  'We had our own good small happy life,' Jessamyn West once said of her comparable childhood in Yorba Linda, separated from the Nixons by the irrigation ditch.  Measured against the poor-boy origins Richard seemed to claim later, against genuine poverty in the basin and elsewhere, she concluded, 'We were the landed gentry.'"

Jessamyn West was one of Richard Nixon's cousins, and she became an author.  Nixon in one of his books that I read (I forget which one) referred to a conversation that he had with her.

Morris may be right that the Nixons were not as poor as many of their neighbors.  Some may say that Nixon fabricated the whole story about his childhood poverty for political purposes----so he could portray himself as someone who understands people's problems, or so he could glory in his rise from humble roots.  But, while Nixon may very well have appealed to his alleged humble roots for political purposes, I don't think that's the whole story.  Perhaps Nixon looked back and thought that he was poor in his childhood, in comparison to his affluent lifestyle and all of the money that he made as an adult.  Moreover, while his immediate family of origin may not have been as poor as others, it also was not rich.  It struggled.

What's interesting is that Morris himself narrates that Richard Nixon's mother, Hannah, thought that she was poor.  Morris quotes a family friend who said that Hannah "seemed sometimes overwhelmed by the poverty."  Morris also quotes Hannah herself as saying: "While we were there, the lemon grove only kept us poor.  Many days I had nothing to serve but corn meal.  I'd bring it to the table and exclaim, 'See what we have tonight----wonderful corn meal!'  And they would gobble it up as if it were the most delectable of dishes."  Morris also narrates that one reason that the Milhous family did not care for Frank Nixon (Hannah's husband, and Richard's father) was "Frank Nixon's failure to do more than scratch a living from the tract" (page 56, the Milhous family provided the Nixons with financial assistance, though).  But Morris also quotes the Nixons' neighbors, who didn't think that the Nixons were particularly poor.  While Morris does appear to have his own opinions and conclusions about this issue, one reason that I am liking his book so far is that he includes different perspectives.  Not only on this issue, but also on the question of whether Nixon was introverted as a child, Morris includes different views from eyewitnesses: he quotes Jessamyn West, who says that Nixon was not the sort of child you'd want to hug, but he also quotes someone who related that the young Nixon jumped on her lap and told her he would grow up to hunt wild animals!

On the issue of Nixon's discussions of his alleged childhood poverty, I'd like to relate to you a story that Stephen Ambrose told in volume 3 of his Nixon trilogy----a story that I enjoyed but did not get an opportunity to write about.  Nixon liked to tell the story about how he wanted a pony when he was a child, but did not get one.  On page 586, Ambrose talks about what Hugh Sidey said happened when Nixon tried to tell his pony story to Yugoslavian Communist leader, Marshal Tito:

"Nixon overdid his boyhood experiences to elicit sympathy.  He told the story of the pony he wanted but never got so often that reporters turned it into a joke.  Hugh Sidey relished the time he watched Marshal Tito and President Nixon in the tiny bedroom of Tito's boyhood home.  Nixon got going on the pony story; Tito cut him off: 'We had eleven kids who were in this room.'"

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 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 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 in Winter 9

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Nixon in Winter 8

On page 289 of Nixon in Winter, Monica Crowley relates a discussion that she had with Richard Nixon about his course language on his presidential tapes:

Nixon: "I'll tell you, and this may seem like a minor thing compared to the other things on the tapes, but the criticism about my course language bothers me, and it bothers Mrs. Nixon.  If you could have spent five minutes with Johnson or Kennedy, your ears would've curled.  All presidents swear, and everyone acted like I was the first one."

Monica: "That's because we can hear you doing it, but we can't hear the others."

Nixon: "I know.  But it bothers Mrs. Nixon because I don't use that kind of language with her.  I don't use it with you...Well, maybe sometimes."

Stephen Ambrose in Nixon: Ruin and Recovery argues that Nixon's language on the tapes was not all that bad, and that those who made a big deal about Nixon's foul language were blowing it out of proportion.  Nixon's language on the tapes shocked his friend Billy Graham, but that's probably because Graham had high standards, due to his religiosity.  A high school history teacher of mine said that many Americans were shocked by Nixon's language because they believed that Nixon was religious.  That could be.  Or did they believe that such language was unbecoming on the part of the President?

I'm just writing from memory, which may be distorted, but I recall hearing Monica Crowley say about ten years ago on the radio that Nixon never said anything racist or anti-Semitic in her presence.  I think that she was trying to defend Nixon (even though, in her book, she offered a more nuanced portrait of the man; in my reading thus far, she doesn't address anti-Semitism, however, but other issues).  But Nixon did say things that were anti-Semitic and racist on the tapes.  And, to be fair, he also asserted that he was not anti-Semitic on the tapes.  But my point is that Monica can't judge Nixon's entire character by what he said in her presence.  Similarly, I don't think that Nixon's entire character should be judged by what he said on the tapes, for Nixon did good things.

Nixon in Winter 6

On page 206 of Nixon in Winter, Monica Crowley relates the following discussion that she had with Richard Nixon about China:

"'Some want the United States to build a universal culture,' I said.

"[Nixon] turned to me, horrified.  'You mean like Americanize everything?...That's not only wrong, that's a crime.'

"'I heard from somebody in Guangzhou that when the Chinese decided to build the hotel we stayed in, they brought in an American manager, who gave all the Chinese workers American names because it was easier for him,' I said.

"Nixon's jaw dropped.  'No!  Why, that's...insulting!  I can't believe it.  Who did he think he was?  Coming over here, to one of the strongest, richest, oldest, proudest cultures in the world and stripping them of their identity?...That's bad,' he said, shaking his head.  'Nobody should let that happen: not us, and not the Chinese."

This passage reminded me of two things.  First of all, it called to my mind Nixon's aversion to colonialism.  I can't make a blanket statement about this, for Nixon in a speech in Great Britain (which he included in his book, Six Crises----see here) praised colonialism, and Nixon was quite critical of President Dwight Eisenhower's anti-colonialist policy of refusing to assist Britain, France, and Israel in going after Egypt after Egyptian President Nasser nationalized the oil in the Suez.  But, in reading Nixon's memoirs and other books, Nixon does strike me as someone who sincerely tried to understand the perspectives of other countries, including their aversion to colonialism.  Nixon was also critical of solely treating the Third World as a battleground for the Cold War.  People can argue about whether Nixon was sufficiently anti-colonial or empathetic towards other countries----or if he even was those things at all.  (He certainly had a record of supporting U.S. intervention in other countries.)  All I'm saying is that I'm not surprised that he would be horrified by the view that America should Americanize the world, or by an American manager who gave Chinese workers American names.

Second, I thought of Nixon's overall love for China.  Nixon's respect for the Chinese people shines through in his memoirs and also his 1980 book, The Real War.  Moreover, on page 539 of Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990, Stephen Ambrose says the following about Nixon during the 1980's: "He hosted dinners----stag, intimate, off-the-record affairs for the opinion makers...The dinner was invariably Chinese.  (Nixon's love affair with China was ongoing.  His home was decorated in a Chinese motif; his house servants were a Chinese couple; his bookcases carried works on Chinese history. Chinese art, Chinese politics.)"

Nixon in Winter 4

For my blog post today about Monica Crowley's Nixon in Winter, I'll highlight something on page 110.  Richard Nixon, Monica Crowley, and Joseph Crowley (Nixon's private security escort) are in Moscow in the 1990's, walking around the grounds of the guesthouse.  Nixon tells Monica that, if she wants to talk in Russia, she has to do so outside, due to bugging.  Monica asks, "Even in a newly democratic Russia?", and Nixon laughingly responds, "I know about bugging.  Democracies are the worst!"  Monica then narrates:

"Since [Nixon] had wanted to think about the next day's meeting with Yeltsin, we walked the rest of the way in silence.  Crowley and I tossed some snowballs at each other, narrowly missing the former president, who bent down, made a snowball of his own and lobbed it at us."  Nixon then said, "Enough fun and games", and proceeded to talk with Monica about her tasks in Russia.

I liked this part, for it shows Nixon playing!  Is this believable?  Well, on the one hand, Stephen Ambrose depicts Nixon as somewhat of a stuffed shirt.  Nixon often wore a tie, even when he was at home.  Nixon said that his friend Bebe Rebozo addressed him as "Mr. President."  Nixon was not that big on watching TV.  Some of the things that Monica says about Nixon are consistent with this picture (though she doesn't call Nixon a stuffed shirt, and neither, for that matter, does Ambrose, even though he portrays Nixon as the serious type).  On the other hand, Nixon did enjoy the company of his grandchildren.  And Nixon was also competitive and loved sports.  That being the case, I can easily picture Nixon lobbing a snowball after being nearly hit!  And maybe, just maybe, Nixon loosened up and played more in his older years, at least sometimes!

Nixon in Winter 2

On page 49 of Monica Crowley's Nixon in Winter, Richard Nixon tells Monica Crowley about a recent interaction that he had with George McGovern, who was his opponent in the 1972 Presidential election:

"'Well, I'm sure you know about the McGovern thing,' [Nixon] said...'On the shuttle home, I was reading before we took off and I heard somebody say to Jerry [Rosalia, his security escort for that day], 'I know that guy!'  Well, it turned out to be [George] McGovern.  So after we took off, I had Jerry see if he had an empty seat next to him, and we had a nice talk.  He was thinking about running in '92, damn fool!  But he was always a very decent guy.  He at least had the guts to stand up for what he believed in, not like the current bunch of clowns.'"

I loved this passage for a couple of reasons.  First of all, Nixon was not very positive about McGovern in his memoirs, even though Nixon could speak highly of some of his political opponents.  Nixon considered McGovern to be sanctimonious and lacking in leadership qualities, and he resented McGovern's attacks on him during the 1972 campaign.  I'm pleased to see that Nixon came to have a more positive view about McGovern.  And, according to this wikipedia article, which appeals to an article about McGovern by William Greider, McGovern came to have a positive view about Nixon: "George McGovern, Nixon's onetime opponent, commented in 1983, 'President Nixon probably had a more practical approach to the two superpowers, China and the Soviet Union, than any other president since World War II ... With the exception of his inexcusable continuation of the war in Vietnam, Nixon really will get high marks in history.'"

Second, this passage reminded me of a passage in volume 3 of Stephen Ambrose's trilogy on Nixon, a passage that I loved but did not write about.  Ambrose said that Nixon respected the anti-war protesters because at least they were in the arena, unlike a number of rich people.  Nixon spoke against the anti-war protesters when he was President, but he still respected that they were standing up for what they believed.