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A Brit Looks At Nixonland

July 19, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Book Review, History, Nixonland Nitpicks, Richard Nixon, U.S. History 

Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland hit British bookstores earlier this month, and at the London Telegraph Dominic Sandbrook, of Oxford’s history faculty and the author of well-received books on Eugene McCarthy and England in the Swinging Sixties, reviews it. His assessment more or less matches mine:

“One of the book’s biggest flaws, oddly, is its handling of Nixon himself. Moody, introverted, driven by resentment and envy, the man from California should be a gift to the narrative historian. But here we never get close to him, largely because he is no more than a caricature. Perlstein’s Nixon does not say anything; he ’snarls’ or ’slurs’ it. Behind the scenes, he ‘rants’ and ‘rages’; on camera, he is a manufactured liar. His positive achievements – diplomatic breakthroughs in Moscow and Beijing, his surprisingly liberal record on health, education, civil rights and the environment – are dismissed as window-dressing. We are never invited to feel sympathy for him, to understand what made him tick, to see his point of view. Even Bond villains usually get a better press.

“But the real problem with the book is found in the subtitle: ‘the fracturing of America’. Nixonland wallows in the exaggeration of extremism, the pornography of violence; Perlstein even dedicates it to the ‘dozens of Americans who lost their lives at the hands of other Americans’ for political reasons between 1965 and 1972. While his vast array of anecdotes make for a rich and compelling read, they add up to a very distorted view of the period.”

The rest of the review is very much worth reading as well. And, in related news, at the end of the month Princeton University Press will publish the anthology Richard Nixon: Speeches, Writings, Documents, which Perlstein edited.  The book’s introduction, which is somewhat like a condensed Nixonland minus the drama and anecdotes, and which also looks at some aspects of the President’s career given little attention in that book, can be read here.



Comments

3 Responses to “A Brit Looks At Nixonland”

  1. Maarja Krusten on July 20th, 2008 7:41 am

    I read the Introduction by Rick Perlstein to which you linked as well as the review of Nixonland in the British newspaper. Thank you for linking to them.

    Although this is not the place to go into it in depth, Perlstein misunderstands what happened with Nixon’s efforts – largely successful during his lifetime — to delay or limit disclosures from his tapes. As Clement Vose pointed out in “The Nixon Project” (PS, Summer 1983), you have to place the Nixon Project within the context of the pre-Watergate Presidential Libraries to which Nixon’s predecessors donated under deed of gift (with restrictions) their White House records as personal property.

    An archival studies professor, Richard J. Cox noted in his article, “America’s Pyramids: Presidents and their Libraries” a quote from an employee in the Office of Presidential Libraries who reportedly once said to White House officials, “Our job is to make you look good.” However, without context (when did the unnamed official say that? Did this relate to the somewhat innocuous area of museum exhibits? Or the more dangerous one of archival disclosures?), it’s hard to assess such a comment fully.

    On the other hand, Lyndon Johnson reportedly told archivists he wanted National Archives’ employees at the LBJ Presidential Library to deal with history “with the bark off.” This is a better public stance than the one Cox attributed to a National Archives official. However, LBJ’s comment also requires context. His was a donor-restricted Library. And he died a mere four years after leaving office. It is impossible to tell how much history with the bark off would have been released, had he been younger and had he lived on for decades after leaving office. Johnson’s once secret tapes and Lady Bird’s diary humanize him by revealing his tortured discussions about the Vietnam War. Could he have faced that humanization while he still was alive? Unknown. LBJ sealed his tapes for 50 years after his death, a seal that broke slightly after the statutory formation in 1992 of the Kennedy assassination records review board. Archivists then persuaded Lady Bird Johnson to allow them to process additional tapes.

    Professor Vose noted in his article that the practice at donor-restricted Presidential Libraries was to screen innocuous files first. Before Congress passed the Nixon records act in 1974, archivists usually set aside files covering contentious matters so as to allow “the passage of time to dim controversy” related to the highest officials, “including the President himself.” By contrast, the Nixon records statute required the Archives to give priority to processing information related to “abuses of governmental power” (Watergate). And to open material of “general historical significance.”

    This required placing a new, untried, and very difficult, albeit statutorily required, template on a system that had operated very, very differently for decades. The outcome of Nixon’s efforts to litigate matters related to his tapes often is presented simplistically by historians as Nixon fought disclosure, Stanley Kutler sued for access, and the good guy won. However, it is much more complicated than that framing suggests.

    Both Nixon and the voters who supported or opposed him seem more complicated to me, as well. Since this is running long already, I’ll limit my remaining comments to the voters. Perlstein presents them in his Introduction as the Silent Majority, the Non-Shouters, the Values Voters versus the Liberals, the Cosmopolitans, the Intellectuals. Where does that leave the Independents or the Centrists, people who sometimes voted Republican and sometimes Democratic? They existed in Nixon’s heyday just as they do now.

    Rick Perlstein has his take on things. But, as a member of the Silent Majority – I still have the “Silent Majority” and “Tell it to Hanoi” buttons I wore in my late teens and early twenties — I have another. As I’ve noted, after voting straight Republican for decades, I’ve been an Independent since about 1989. Maybe the six-layer (as opposed to two-layer) cake image once used for Richard Nixon applies to some voters, as well.

    Certainly, there are many ways to look at voters. Some characteristics are on display in web forums. There are those for whom party identification is a core part of who they are, a defining characteristic, perhaps a very needed way of feeling they are an empowered part of something very important. They may feel a strong sense of community with like-minded people. This isn’t unique to one party or one part of the ideological spectrum.

    And there are people on the right and on the left who personalize politics to a great degree. An intellectual argument against a policy supported by their party is taken almost as personal insult which, if left unchalleged, might undermine their very sense of self. And then there are those who vote for one or the other party, perhaps even consistently over decades, but from a position of greater detachment. I fell into the latter category, even during the Nixon years. I strongly supported his policies. But I generally tried to understand those who opposed them. Even at a young age, I wasn’t into stereotyping or demonizing people. I had friends who voted Democratic as well as Republican back then and never judged them for how they voted. They were just people I knew and with whom I had formed friendships. I voted Republican during the Age of Nixon but largely said “live and let live,” a stance Perlstein ascribes in the Introduction to Liberals.

    There are those among voters of both parties who discern what is going on during what David Brooks calls the soul-destroying process of campaigning. And there are those who are more inclined to take it all at face value, never stopping to think what it would feel like if they themselves had to achieve promotions by flinging mud at workplace colleagues who are their competitors. This too does not fall neatly right and left.

    Perlstein writes that “America’s Liberals saw themselves as the tribunes of the common people, Republicans as enemies of the common people.” On first read, I took that as “America’s Liberals saw…Republicans [saw themselves as].” Then I realized Perstein meant Liberals saw Republicans as enemies of the common people, not that Republicans saw themselves that way! Of course, in Nixon’s day, there was a Liberal wing of the Republican party. So juxtaposing Liberals with Republicans doesn’t work well for that time period. Moreover, in both parties and throughout the ideological spectrum, there always have been voters who have cast policy disputes as duking it out in the marketplace of ideas for what is best for the nation rather than seeing themselves and opponents as being good or bad guys, either for the common people or the elites.

  2. Maarja Krusten on July 20th, 2008 10:02 am

    A few additional points from someone who during the Nixon years was a member of the Silent Majority. Perlstein writes that of the two groups of Americans that Nixon left behind as his legacy, those in the Silent Majory felt condescended to by snobby opinion-making elites. Perhaps because I was an undergraduate at the time, I never felt that. I saw myself as an intellectual who happened to support Nixon and who voted Republican, that’s all.

    That I point to a more textured view of these matters is not to say that politicians, Nixon among them, haven’t recognized and capitalized politically on divisions. The tricky part was in governing once he retained office. Some areas he handled well, others not.

    Once your’re President, you have to convince people that you are acting in the nation’s collective best interest. It’s the same thing with managing an office or a staff or a federal agency. You have to convince your employees that the path your are taking is supportable and sustainable and properly premised. Sometimes that is self evident, at other times you have expend a lot of effort to sell it to subordinates. If you don’t understand the people who work for you, and do not take into account their complex and varied reactions, things can go awry. So too with Presidents.

    Nixon was able to do that through 1972 but things fell apart later. Bob Haldeman points to the PR focus of the White House as one reason for the containment approach that RN and some aides took to Watergate. I’m not convinced myself that a quick, direct and strong reaction to Watergate (instead of having Ziegler dismiss it as a third-rate burglary) would have harmed RN during the election. Who knows, some of what John Mitchell called “the White House” horrors might have remained unexposed.

  3. Maarja Krusten on July 20th, 2008 10:07 am

    Sorry, I meant “The tricky part was in governing once he gained office.” I’m not thinking only of the second term but of the period from 1969 onwards.

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