A Companion to Richard M. Nixon

Melvin Small, Melvin Small

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781444340938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This companion offers an overview of Richard M. Nixon's life, presidency, and legacy, as well as a detailed look at the evolution and current state, of Nixon scholarship.

• Examines the central arguments and scholarly debates that surround his term in office
• Explores Nixon's legacy and the historical significance of his years as president
• Covers the full range of topics, from his campaigns for Congress, to his career as Vice-President, to his presidency and Watergate
• Makes extensive use of the recent paper and electronic releases from the Nixon Presidential Materials Project
  

Part I

PRE-PRESIDENTIAL YEARS

Chapter One

NIXON BIOGRAPHIES

Iwan W. Morgan

One of the most written about of all America’s leaders, Richard Nixon still remains one of the most elusive for biographers. None of the many studies produced to date on the life and character of the thirty-seventh president has fully captured this complex man. The absence of anything approaching a definitive biography of Nixon stands in marked contrast to those gracing the lives of most of his significant predecessors.

Why Richard Nixon is such a difficult subject for biography is not hard to explain. First, gaining access to his presidential records, held until recently at the Nixon Presidential Materials Project in the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, was initially fraught with difficulty. The former president conducted a dogged campaign first to block and then to slow their release, one that his estate continued after his death in 1994. Meanwhile, the Nixon pre-presidential and post-presidential papers were held some three thousand miles to the west at the private Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California and also, until recently, at the National Archives facility in Laguna Niguel. The ­integration in 2007 of these hitherto separate collections in the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, now made part of the presidential library system administered by the National Archives, has largely resolved these legalistic and logistic problems, a development that should ease but not erase the challenge of Nixon biography (Hoff 1996; Worsham 2007).

Even with fuller access to the historical documents, the task of writing Nixon’s story will continue to pose problems that do not pertain to biographical examination of other modern presidents. As traditionally understood, the art of historical biography is the telling of history through the telling of lives (Ambrosius 2004). This is particularly difficult in Nixon’s case because symbolism has been as significant as substance in biographical interpretation of him. In consequence, no other major figure of twentieth-century American politics has been subject to such divergent characterization. Such diffuse terms as populist, liberal, conservative, free-world crusader, red-baiter, mad bomber, and peacemaker have all been used to describe him at one stage or another – and these by no means exhaust the lexicon of Nixonography. In view of Nixon’s lack of fixed ­identity in his biographical canon, some analysts contend that his image and the disputed meanings it engendered have become as important to understand as what he actually did. In the words of Daniel Frick, “[W]hen we fight about Nixon, we are fighting about the meaning of America. And that is a struggle that never ends” (Frick 2008: 17; see also Greenberg 2003). If that is the case, disagreement over what his life signified about his nation is less a ­matter of establishing what is true than it is a struggle to shape ­understanding of the recent past, which in turn influences ­perspectives on the present and future.

The problems of document-based research and of separating symbol from substance largely explain why Nixon biographies by professional ­historians to date number only three. Reaction against his final campaign for rehabilitation from the disgrace of Watergate and presidential resignation is another factor. Nixon has occupied a lowly status in the scholarly ranking of presidential greatness – usually with the likes of James Buchanan, Ulysses S. Grant, and Warren Harding for company in the “failed presidents” category (Bose and Nelson 2003; Felzenberg 2008). Frustrated with the consistently negative assessment of historians in particular, the former president declared in a 1988 television interview: “History will treat me fairly. Historians probably won’t, because most historians are on the left” (Nixon 1990: 75).

To Nixon, the hostility of historians was another example of the enmity of liberals that he had suffered throughout his political career. In reality, their animus had less to do with ideological prejudice than a concern about the meaning and making of history. In the eyes of many scholars, Nixon’s efforts to be his own historian in the memoirs and books he wrote in retirement made history vulnerable to personal interest and manipulation. This served to limit their enthusiasm for Nixon revisionism lest they inadvertently became allies in his post-resignation pursuit of respectability and, after his death, the efforts of his admirers to rewrite the past in his favor. As Stanley Kutler, arguably the foremost historian of Watergate, remarked, “Richard Nixon has struggled mightily for the soul of history and ­historians. Historians ought to worry about theirs” (Kutler 1992: 111).

Plenty of others have rushed in where historians seemingly fear to tread, of course. In its consideration of the myriad Nixon biographies, this ­chapter organizes these works into the following categories for analysis: “Nixon ascendant” pre-Watergate biographies; psychobiographies; Nixon’s ­memoirs and post-resignation writings; redemption and damnation ­post-Watergate biographies by non-professional historians; and scholarly studies.

Nixon Ascendant Biographies

As Nixon rose in politics, he became the subject of admiring studies written by sympathetic journalists. Produced as a vice-presidential campaign book, Philip Andrews’s 1952 volume is historically interesting as the first Nixon biography – and the one with the longest title – but for little else. Consideration of Nixon biographical historiography better starts with Ralph de Toledano’s 1956 study, which was updated for the 1960 campaign and provided the foundations of a third volume when his hero finally got to the White House. These works manifest three traits common in the pre-­downfall biographies. They present Nixon as: a man of the people rising through his work ethic; a lone battler against the institutional power of the establishment; and a leader dedicated to his nation’s interests in seeking practical solutions rather than doctrinaire responses to its problems.

De Toledano had come to know Nixon when covering the Alger Hiss case as a Newsweek journalist. A supporter of the post-War conservative movement, he also wrote for anti-Communist journals like American Mercury and became in 1955 a founder of National Review, but broke with his fellow editors in backing Nixon over Barry Goldwater for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination. For him, Nixon “represents an American phenomenon … as indigenous as an Indian fighter, as characteristic as a covered wagon, as unpretentious as apple pie” (de Toledano 1956: 16). Whereas psychobiographers tended to emphasize the negative effects of Nixon’s family background in allegedly warping his personality, de Toledano typifies the tendency in early biographies to celebrate it for making him an American everyman dedicated to hard work in pursuit of the American Dream. He also sees a sense of destiny in Nixon’s choice of a political career to lead a nation that generations of his forbears had shaped in their ordinary lives: “Heredity is the operative word, for there have been Nixons and Milhouses in America almost as long as there has been a white man’s America. And though Nixon has never made a fetish of it, the consciousness – and subconsciousness – of his antecedents as a fact of his life and character is with him at all times, as it should be” (de Toledano 1969: 15).

De Toledano’s books present Nixon as the solitary battler for truth and justice in the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ (HUAC) investigation of Alger Hiss. His lone warrior is a man of conscience determined to lay bare not only the communist conspiracy in government but also liberal efforts to cover it up. Echoing his hero’s own perspective, de Toledano sees this episode both as the making of Nixon and the issue that would dog him for the remainder of his time in politics because of liberals’ desire to be revenged for his exposure of their folly in supporting Hiss. The case “earned him the enduring enmity of powerful men in high places, and lesser men – in government, journalism, among the liberal intelligentsia – whose aggregate influence is immense. … They turned on him not only because of Hiss, but because he had proved the dangerous error of their belief that communists were merely ‘liberals in a hurry’ ” (de Toledano 1969: 99).

Lastly, de Toledano’s own conservatism did not prevent him from admiring what he described as Nixon’s “divorcement from any doctrinaire espousal” (de Toledano 1956: 183). The politician who emerges from his pages is prepared to appropriate what best suits the nation’s needs from the agendas of both liberalism and conservatism without identifying himself with either value system. In relation to this, de Toledano anticipates later analysts in asserting that both sides of the political divide tried to remake Nixon’s identity into their own image of him (de Toledano 1956: 182; 1969: 9–10, 374). However, post-Watergate scholarship would not recognize his depiction of President Nixon as anxious for quiet discourse, patience and caution in the task of governing America at a difficult moment in time (de Toledano 1969: 1–13, 360–74).

Other than de Toledano, Nixon’s favorite chronicler was New York Herald Tribune reporter Earl Mazo, whose biography spent fifteen weeks (highest position number six) on the New York Times Book Review ­best-seller list in 1959. A friend of Nixon’s, Mazo got him to open up in interviews more than any other writer probably would ever do. In part, this was because his subject trusted him to write the story he wanted. The staples of the Nixon life are all there: the rise from humble origins through hard work and talent; the tenacity against the odds in the Hiss case; and the willingness to do what is right for the nation regardless of ideological inconsistency. The author gave his subject the chance to review the manuscript and propose any changes, but it was so friendly that none of substance was required. In writing it, Mazo had already taken up a number of Nixon’s suggestions, notably that he address head-on the criticism that his issue positions were based on electoral calculation rather than principle. An updated version, written with the assistance of political scientist Stephen Hess, took the story to 1968. This uncritically reported a Nixon statement in an interview with Mazo that his determination not to plunge the nation into a constitutional crisis was his main reason for not contesting the 1960 presidential election count. It also contains an interview transcript in which Nixon defines his politics in somewhat mangled fashion but to best ­advantage for 1968: “You can’t classify me. … I’m just not doctrinaire. If there is one thing that classifies me it is that I’m a non-extremist” (Mazo and Hess 1968: 316).

Two other biographies produced for the 1960 campaign also merit ­consideration as part of the Nixon-rising genre. Hungarian émigré Bela Kornitzer wrote a human-interest study that received much more cooperation from Hannah Nixon than from her son, who consented to only one interview and was uncomfortable with the writer’s angle. Kornitzer had built his career in the United States by focusing on parent-child relations in shaping the characters of its leaders. This reflected his belief that the essence of US democracy was to be found in the tolerant democratic attitudes ­prevalent in the American family. One of the interesting snippets in his book is the reproduction of a letter written by Nixon when ten years old, in which he imagined himself as a dog begging his master to come home because he is being mistreated by his temporary carers. For Hannah, who let Kornitzer see the letter, it was just an example of her son’s precocious intelligence. For later psychobiographers, however, it was evidence that Nixon’s childhood was shaped by maternal control and a desperate yearning for his mother’s love (Kornitzer 1960: 57; Abrahamsen 1977: 59–63).

William Costello’s The Facts about Nixon, the sole exception to the generally friendly tenor of early biographies, has historical interest as the first critical study of his life. Growing out of a series of articles in The New Republic, it is generally well researched but faults Nixon’s McCarthyite past, particularly in the Hiss case, and what the author sees as his opportunism in shifting to the center ground of politics in the 1950s. Even so, Costello is at one with the Nixon-as-common-man orthodoxy in declaring his subject “an authentic product of the American pioneer tradition,” who succeeded because “no effort was impossible, no goal unattainable” (Costello 1960: 17).

Psychobiography

Political scientist David Barber’s 1972 study of presidential character claimed that it was possible to predict how presidents would behave in office on the basis of which one of four personality types they fitted into. In an interview with Time magazine, he pronounced Nixon a psychologically flawed active-negative president who was ambitious out of anxiety (Time 1972; see also Hirsh 1980). Notwithstanding the problems of reducing human complexity to four types and his questionable categorization of particular presidents, the turn of events appeared to validate Barber’s warnings and helped to give respectability to the new Nixon studies genre of psychobiography.

Predating Barber, the first entry in this field was journalist-academic Gary Wills’s Nixon Agonistes (1970), but in reality this was more cultural history with Nixon at its center than psychobiography. For Wills, Nixon was the embodiment of the self-made man, who had triumphed in the political market by becoming the “ ‘least’ authentic man alive, the late mover, tester of responses, submissive to the discipline of consent.” Brilliant though this study is as a cultural polemic, it works far less well as biography – even of the “psycho” kind – because Nixon is reduced to a one-dimensional figure. As a consequence, Wills leaves many questions about his protagonist unasked let alone unanswered. In particular, if Nixon was so inauthentic, why did he generate controversy throughout his career and why was he so prone to take political and policy risks?

More authentically psychobiographical but inherently less interesting than the Wills study are the oeuvres of historian Bruce Mazlish (1972) and Manhattan psychoanalyst (and criminal-behavior specialist) David Abrahamsen (1977). Both make sweeping claims about Nixon’s personality without having interviewed their subject and his close family or examined the documentary record (beyond his public statements). For Mazlish, three factors defined Nixon’s persona: absorption of self in his role (in essence being Nixon is his role); ambivalence; and denial as a defense against unacceptable feelings. Their supposed effect was that Nixon had as much difficulty as the rest of the country in deciding who he really was. In Mazlish’s pre-Watergate estimate, the president’s insecurity in not knowing himself could create serious problems for his administration and the nation. In Abrahamsen’s post-Watergate analysis, the possibility became proven in his portrayal of Nixon as engaged in constant struggle between two different sides of his personality. The effect was a string ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO AMERICAN HISTORY
• Title page
• Copyight page
• List of Plates
• Notes on Contributors
• INTRODUCTION
• Part I: Pre-Presidential Years
• Part II: Domestic Policies
• Part III: Foreign Policies
• Part IV: Post-Presidential Years
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Supplemental images
• INDEX