Richard Nixon's In the Arena and Herbert S. Parmet's Richard Nixon and His America
Hitchens, Christopher
IN THE ARENA: A MEMOIR OF VICTORY, DEFEAT AND RENEWAL, by Richard Nixon. Simon and Schuster, 1990. $21.95. RICHARD NIXON AND HIS AMERICA, by Herbert S. Parmet. Little, Brown, 1990....
...I had often heard that real friends are there when you need them the most," writes Nixon...
...Once that auction had been started, there could only be one long-term winner...
...e live, apparently, in a time of the composure of grievance, the forgiveness of transgressions, the putting-behind us of the past...
...We might begin, as I may have said, by bewaring of pity...
...Bush is an unpersuasive patrician version of Nixon's authentic plebeian cult of resentment—drawing upon the same reserves of irrationality, selfishness, and bigotry but far too much at home among the fat cats...
...When will we prove Professor Parmet wrong and raise politics above the level of these types...
...Just brood on this paragraph for a second: When I was first informed about the break-in, I did not give it sufficient attention, partly because I was preoccupied with my China and Soviet initiatives and with my efforts to end the war in Vietnam and partly because I feared that some of my close political colleagues might be somehow involved...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...Herbert Parmet's well-written and well-organized study of this mediocre, wretched, warped, dishonest individual also makes the case that he is an American Everyman—the quintessential postwar politician enjoying the closest rapport with the ordinary voter...
...When he gets into trouble, he will bleat and moan rather than whine and snarl—the chivvied sheep rather than the cornered rat...
...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Will he never acknowledge that there is a decent limit...
...I don't need to tell the readers of Dissent what, or how, to think about Vietnam...
...My third-grade teacher ate the ice-cream but left the cherries on her plate...
...On page 101, for instance, I hit upon the following: I particularly remember the time my mother served homemade ice cream topped with maraschino cherries for dessert...
...Rinfret attacked Cuomo for having been "too chicken" to serve in Korea...
...On the night of his 1972 victory party, he angrily fired half his staff...
...But, as I read this, the latest of his awful "books," I felt an uneasy slackening even in that usually taut string...
...Like Nixon also, he has spent too much time grinning agreeably as number two while the main man took the bows—a consumingly bad experience for a person of modest talent who combines the obsequious with the ambitious...
...Politics, likewise, becomes an automatic exercise in boilerplate and retrospective self-justification...
...Only on the second glance did I notice that these lists were in alphabetical order—a gruesome touch typical of a man who has no friends, only cronies and associates...
...As a personal memoir, then, this is a cringemaking failure...
...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...In the latter case, indeed, by dealing direct with the kidnappers in return for money and guns, he actually surpassed Nixon's POW cynicism...
...Thus empowered, Mr...
...History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration...
...Any program of educational reform should put the primary emphasis on the quality of teaching...
...So, the apple did not fall very far from the tree...
...Still gnawed by hatred and jealousy, the small man must puff like a bullfrog to seem grand, but durstn't forget to slake the appetites that he aroused on the way to power...
...The paragraphs precedent and subsequent to this one are likewise larded with self-pity, untruth, and vengeful revisionism...
...FALL • 1990 • 533...
...But as a Yale SkullandBones drone, he did not disdain to run against "Harvard intellectuals...
...10017 (212) 595-3084...
...to a summit which, once attained, did not bring him happiness or release...
...Here, we need Wilhelm Reich as much as Bertolt Brecht...
...A brilliant and profitable piece of post–"Missile Gap" centrism that turned out to be...
...IN THE ARENA: A MEMOIR OF VICTORY, DEFEAT AND RENEWAL, by Richard Nixon...
...Again, he is slightly worse than Nixon on the point...
...I remembered that when a superb group of black musicians had performed in the White House after one of our state dinners, the leader expressed his appreciation for the invitation and concluded his remarks by saying: "You know, Mr...
...Ah yes, say a startling number of liberals, but Nixon made the apertura to China and put an end to the Vietnam War...
...Other similarities are certain to strike one...
...Now More Than Ever" was the slogan of the Nixon delegates at Miami, and it was only, I think, Renata Adler who noticed what was staring us in the face—that this boring chant was the unknowingly amputated first half of a lovely line from John Keats...
...Bush, of course, did not have to come from Whittier to the White House...
...Recall Walter Mondale deciding to attack Ronald Reagan from the right for his offer to "share" SDI technology with the communist enemy...
...In this rejection of flattery lies our hope—there is a limit to the success of conservative populism and the exploitation of "little guy" or "silent majority" rhetoric, and it is very often reached because of the emaciated, corrupted personalities of the demagogues them selves...
...Well, there's always Nixon-hating...
...But it may be worth recording what Nixon says about East-West relations in a book published in May 1990: Unfortunately, the INF Treaty has compounded the pressures on West European leaders, particularly in West Germany, to give in to Soviet demands...
...Parmet tells again a story that many left-liberal idealists are reluctant to believe (I first read it in Stephen Ambrose's Nixon: The Education of a Politician...
...A small man, like Nixon, can appeal to the little guy, but only for so long and so much...
...The Democratic National Committee was a pathetic target...
...Nothing but disaster and disgrace comes of trying to accommodate to, or borrow from, the demagogic style...
...President, it's a long way from Watts to the White House...
...It's as if nobody ever heard the tapes...
...He appears to be saying that until the abrupt end of his second term he had only heard this maxim but never seen it exemplified, and one fears that this might well be true...
...In his memoir, Nixon relates how he told Mao Zedong: "I think the most important thing to note is that in America, at least at this time, those on the right can do what those on the left can only talk about...
...Reagan's printed recollections of "friends" and family possess the same forced, insincere brightness and falsity...
...As a student of history, I should have known that leaders who do big things well must be on guard against stumbling on the little things...
...Loathing may seem a strong word, but it came wholesomely back to mind before sickly compassion could gain any lasting hold...
...A ghastly lowering overtakes the spirit when one reads of the lonely, mistrustful FALL • 1990 • 531 Books half-lives that are led by our politicians these days...
...Bush, like Nixon, fears and hates what he laughably calls the liberal press (Nixon is so impressed by Bush's lying and blustering with Dan Rather in 1988 that he practically fouls himself with glee, telling the same story twice as an example of how to stick it to the media...
...24.95...
...And, no doubt, sending him rejoicing on his way...
...The line positively cried out for its completion, which is, from the "Ode to a Nightingale": "seems it rich to die...
...I believe that in any organization loyalty must run down, as well as up...
...I responded by thanking him and saying, "It's a long way from Whittier to the White House...
...Some have said that my major mistake was to protect my subordinates...
...He was always more sound on détente and foreign affairs...
...Even as I write, the papers tell me of a certain Pierre M. Rinfret, Republican candidate for the governorship of New York, leaving the White House with an injunction from Bush to "hit Mario Cuomo...
...Ancient wrongs are righted, traditional conflicts resolved or dissolved...
...This amazing stupidity comes gift wrapped, as if for reinforcement, with the inscription of NATO's only remaining dictatorship —a pungent reminder of Nixon's fondness, while in office, for regimes of this sort in Greece, Spain, and Portugal as well as further afield...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...Both Nixon and Parmet fail at some essential level to appreciate the distinction between the little guy and the small man...
...Simon and Schuster, 1990...
...YOU pick the Congressman the Kremlin loves," she told the voters, adding with deliberate artifice and deceit that Nixon and "Communist party-liner Representative Marcantonio" were in "complete accord" on the selling out of our boys in Korea...
...Nor did he disdain the organizing energies of racists and creeps when they served his turn—like Nixon, prepared if the need arose to be adequately uninformed of the doings of his subordinates...
...Bush, like Nixon, is abject and adamant when it comes to the People's Republic of China, of whose decrepit hierarchy he will hear no ill...
...A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...Must he chatter and gibber forever, dead but not recumbent, until at last our pity turns to loathing...
...And, lest we forget, Bush was an exceptionally docile chairman of the Republican National Committee during the Watergate years...
...It's appalling to reflect that a version of this trick has been pulled at least four times since 1970, in the greatest constitutional democracy in the world...
...One list runs from Buchanan to Ziegler, which gives you an idea...
...They may be partly right...
...In the celebrated 1950 campaign in California, it was Helen Gahagan Douglas who launched the red-baiting charge against Nixon, and not the other way around...
...The interesting bits of Nixon's private existence—the foul mouth, the Jew-hating, the paranoia—all lie under a ban of denial and are bled out of the narrative...
...Bush, like Nixon, has an exalted idea of the value of CIA and FBI heroes, and likes a chance to play the veterans' and hostages' card...
...The most agonizing chapter is undoubtedly the one entitled "Friends," which more than fulfills the arch and dreadful promise of its title...
...After 1974, I saw that first hand...
...Bush, like Nixon, likes to see that domestic front as a field in something called the "war on drugs...
...How marvelously we progress...
...Literally everything reminds Nixon of himself and of his own bitter struggle to the top...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...He has divided Europe from the United States, divided Europe against itself, and divided the German coalition...
...Bush, like Nixon, had a long and torrid romance with the Marcos family...
...As a result, solipsism lurks in wait for the loveless, suspicious, unspontaneous professional pol...
...The little guy will not, in the end, stand for being told that he doesn't deserve or understand the sacrifices the small man has to make to stay on top...
...As I read Nixon's turgid, tenth-rate apologia, I found that I could see the unctuous features of George Herbert Walker Bush rise to greet my eyes...
...I had never had them before...
...Pity breaks in again, to be dispelled again when the former president prints lists of "friends" who stuck by him...
...Only pity, surely, can be felt for such an arid, constipated figure, who writes of his own childhood like a lugubrious bureaucrat and who then makes it an occasion to inflict a moralistic cliche upon the reader...
...What's more, I have paid, and am still paying, the price for it...
...Today's moribund Nixon oppresses one with a similar emotion...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...And we know where the China policy has led, and why...
...This, in turn, has created sharp tensions within NATO...
...Nixon himself ushers him onto the stage, telling us of a call he paid on Eisenhower: "When I saw him in 1967, among those he told me was a `comer' was a young Congressman from Texas named George Bush...
...People did not count calories in those days, and I always assumed that she left the cherries for me since she could not have helped but notice how much I had enjoyed my first exposure to that delicacy...
...It might be argued that at least this degraded realpolitik concerned the long-overdue establishment of diplo matic norms, rather than a limp handclasp over the hecatomb of Tiananmen...
...Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...
...Nixon, of whom this was also true, faced in smaller ways the dilemma that other such movements confronted on a sickeningly grand scale: how to redirect the resentment when "those in power" are you and your "friends...
...Bush, like Nixon, uses superpower posturings to offset his want of ideas on the domestic front...
...In the lees of this soothing tonic of lenience and euphemism, what is left for the bitter integrity of the radical personality...
...It shows only that the unlived life is not worth examining...
...One needs the skills of a Brecht to resist this Arturo Ui presentation...
...As Turkey's foreign minister told me in commenting on the treaty, "Gorbachev has killed three birds with one stone...
...So—a bit of bombing here and a touch of destabilization there (never forgetting to treat Brezhnev and Mao with the utmost regard and 532 • DISSENT respect) and at home a hateful drizzle of innuendo and spite against the press, the universities, the arts, the intellectuals, the outsiders, the you-know-whos...
...I bequeath % of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...RICHARD NIXON AND HIS AMERICA, by Herbert S. Parmet...
...Not taking a higher road than my predecessors and my adversaries was my central mistake...
Vol. 37 • September 1990 • No. 4
