Editorial / Richard Milhous Nixon: The Serenade in B-Flat
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Editorial / Richard Milhous Nixon: The Serenade in B-Flat" R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Richard Milhous Nixon, 5' 10", 165 pounds, Caucasian, male, no distinguishing features. Though a man as common as...
...I take it as a mark of the enormous strength of that great and good man, Alger Hiss, that he survived the entire Nixon reign, though his gaunt mug and watery eyes tell us much about how he has suffered through the "New American Revolution," the "New Federalism," the "China Opening," Julie's "wedding," and all the other dubious public-relations stunts...
...It is an odd twist—and a mark of the inferior men we have elected to the White House—that Nixon was one of our best-equipped presidents for international diplomacy...
...With surprising constancy they are sick, dead, convicted of low deeds, under threat of conviction, banished, or absurd...
...All we were left were dubious platitudes, and they evanesce further with every inescapable revolution of the planet...
...Not infrequently they end their lives shouting helplessly from the Freudian couch...
...For instance, Nixon was campaigning strenuously just before the death of Paul Goodman, and during his 1970 European junket we lost Janis Joplin...
...Have I overegged the pudding...
...hate him...
...40 The American Spectator June/July 1978...
...Others have their hands at their throats...
...It must be remembered that we all witnessed our nation suffer the first strategic defeat in its history...
...Tory men and liberal policies are what have changed the world," he buoyantly proclaimed, and his guaranteed annual income plan was promptly slaughtered in Congress...
...And forget not that ancient gasbag, Sam Ervin, illustrious constitutional expert...
...Heretofore Nixon had dizzied only individuals...
...And as westerners go, Nixon was probably Chou and Mao's only drinking buddy...
...Is it possible that the qualities that made him successful abroad made him a disaster at home...
...The book itself is the usual bouillabaisse of a presidential memoir, considerably better than LIEU 's but still not up to the readable two volumes written by the irrepressible Harry...
...This war affected him profoundly, as it did the entire Army, myself included...
...This picture of Saigon by day and night is fine and, by my memory, very accurate...
...In fact I suspect that over the years the untimely deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of America's most upright citizens can be laid to a Nixon press conference, a UPI photograph of the man with his dog, or any of a myriad of other Nixonian apparitions...
...His instantaneous apotheosis proved only to be a diabolical prank, making his eventual fall all the more ignominious...
...Tussaud's Waxwork Museum found him to be among the five most hated and feared men in history...
...chief investigator for the House Judiciary Committee during its impeachment hearings, now wriggles under the eye of a U.S...
...Well then, suggest to me his equal...
...Where are they now...
...I, of course, purchased a copy immediately, and if I had the funds I would purchase thousands more, gladly sending them to high elected Nixon maniacs with ..he forged inscription, "Compliments of Stansfield Turner...
...Richard T. Hanna, the Rt...
...Nixon should not have been president for reasons of public health and safety...
...Hence he devoted himself to foreign policy...
...The closer one's contact with him, the greater one's peril...
...His enemies suffer similar calamities...
...they had never seen liberals act so strangely...
...Watergate led to the election of the most ill-prepared president of this century and to the hitherto unimaginable—that is, an actual increase in barbarism in Southeast Asia...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) Howe, and the Rt...
...Most spectacularly there was the late President Kennedy...
...They report hearing wild dogs barking and maidens sobbing...
...Nixon dreamed immense dreams, and the setting was usually the whole wide world...
...Nowhere is Nixon's fascination with international relations discussed more vividly than in With Nixon, t the product of Raymond Price, a gifted Nixon aide who seems to have escaped the Commoner from Whittier unscathed...
...Who were his enemies and why did they * Grosset & Dunlap, $19.95...
...the bedwetters fear a political comeback...
...With Nixon is the best discussion of Nixon's character, of the odd standards by which others weighed him, and of the even odder predicaments into which he so often fell...
...now he stultified and laid low an entire nation...
...Today the scholars are at work...
...Was there something momentous at issue in the Hiss case...
...Poor Nixon, everything he touched grew fangs and let out a howl: welfare reform, a generation of peace, an unbalanced budget...
...Or was he ever a success anywhere...
...Hows come...
...The column of petty malefactors and suspects straggles forward...
...Think well on the cyclones that struck the gorgeous careers of the Rt...
...the sonorities, the scowls, the whines of presidential greatness—when one studies his opponents—their increasing alarm, their jeremiads, their snifflings, and the eerie regularity with which their reasonable objections metamorphosed into ridiculosities —it grows ever more apparent that this is not a typical political struggle...
...Each of us played a part in that defeat and holds a portion of the responsibility for it in his own hands...
...No sooner had it appeared in serial form than the maniacs were howling about the enormous profits and moaning that RN contained no lascivious revelations...
...Cornelius Gallagher, the Rt...
...His reputation will thud into that dark hole which for more than half a century has been the domicile of Warren Gamaliel Harding alone...
...Daniel J . Flood, and is there any hope at all for the Rt...
...The miraculous destructiveness of the Nixon touch is for them a legend...
...Even during the grimmest moments of Watergate, times when I had been lead to believe he was plotting the overthrow of the Constitution, the poor fish was grandly discoursing to his aides on the Middle East, China's geopolitical interests, Brezhnev's yearnings for a fat and shiny Lincoln...
...Remember Senator Joseph M. Montoya of the Watergate Spectacular...
...It is an observation abounding with truth and stimulative of hitherto unimagined hopes for the presidency...
...Nixon is gone—hurrah!--but so is any semblance of a serviceable foreign policy...
...Ho Chi Minh and General Giap had very little fun at his expense...
...Joshua Eilberg, who as a member of the House Judiciary Committee observed: `.`Our citizens are afraid that if they take a position on a political issue their telephones will be tapped, their mail opened, and their tax returns audited as a means of punishment...
...The friends and associates of Richard Nixon have already, and in unusually large numbers, had the prison door clank behind them...
...other passages are agony...
...Will he join the Rt...
...What will become of the blubbering Speaker O'Neill...
...Some, admittedly, have their hands over their hearts...
...I can count three who have been assassinated and several who have been maimed...
...What has become of the renowned Woodward and Bernstein...
...Pearl of the Orient, long open avenues lined and bowered over by trees running into spacious parks precisioned scale, all under the , soft shell from a million breakfast fires, camphor smoke rising and diffusing, covering Saigon and the shining veins of the river with a warmth like the return of better times...
...Wayne Hays and the voluptuous Wilbur Mills...
...Everything about the man suggests palpable weirdness...
...Had JFK run against any other Republican doubtless he would be with us today, and his administration would have been enormously more creditable...
...He is elliptical...
...Remember the Rt...
...An astonishing number of the leading celebs of the Watergate Spectacular have seen their careers evaporate...
...Mention his name and millions of Americans leap to their feet yelling...
...Even John Doar, Esq...
...Discreditable acts they are indeed, but there must be more to the Nixon legend than this...
...Popular journalists resort to the name Nixon to galvanize feelings not even the name Stalin raises...
...Whether friend or foe, one steps from his presence and as likely as not the sky falls in...
...Even a Will Durant, even a Toynbee, would be hard pressed to find an analogue...
...Did Pat Brown fare much better...
...It was idolatry contrived from a presidency of singular mediocrity and a life of stunning sham...
...Neither of them could write...
...EDITORIAL Richard Milhous Nixon: The Serenade in B-Flat R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Even in American politics such doings are unusual...
...Their only talent as journalists was their ability to answer crank calls in the night, from whom no one knows, and the boys are not telling, at least not until the price is right...
...Charles C. Diggs...
...t Viking, $12.95...
...The final irony of Nixon is that the very qualities that earned him the wary respect of tyrants drove many American liberals right out of their minds...
...Meditate on the chances of the Rt...
...Now begin the tribulations of his enemies...
...the sobs and growls of his vice-presidential years...
...Though a man as common as anything on display in a Sears catalogue, he rose steadily to become the most widely reviled man in American history...
...He was also the easiest laugh in our history...
...What really brought on Watergate remains a mystery...
...The astonishing misfortune that befalls those who come into contact with Nixon is a riveting reminder of the power the occult plays in his life...
...Count Dracula tied him, and Jack the Ripper finished a poor fifth...
...In desperation a boycott has been slapped on the book, and in the book trade many a staunch defender of the First Amendment is promising not to stock it...
...This result makes it imperative that Richard Nixon be impeached" ? Nearly fifty congressmen from the Watergate era have been indicted or are lying low...
...Surely they do not compose the corpus delicti...
...Rather it is an incomparable succession of bizarreries so traumatizing as to be explicable only in terms numenous and diabolical...
...Dignity, well-being, and soundness of mind so often depart after a close brush with the man that I have no doubt his career is more comprehensible to amedieval mystic ensconced in a cave than to a modern rationalist with all his books and analytical gear...
...It is my considered judgment that in the very White House where such giants as Lyndon John-son and the sainted Kennedy brought their immense dignity, wisdom, and integrity, the Commoner from Whittier suffered diabolical infestation, and no one tried to help...
...His certitudes only go so far...
...The Paris of the East...
...Floozies began stepping forward from every trailer camp in Amefica, coyly testifying to their personal involvement with what the suave president had cockily called "class...
...What was the reason for the Cold War...
...And as Nixon leads us through thirty years of prodigious political dramaturgy, the reader becomes steadily more aware of the odd obliviousness about this famous narrator...
...What of Nixon's later opponents...
...Except for Michael Herr's personal cynicism, his inaccuracies, and his failure to discuss the American infantry in the favorable light they truly deserve, his story is probably worth reading...
...There have been no chastening lessons, no lasting heroes, and no useful myths...
...Herein lies the saddest part of the Nixon legend...
...When it was over, our allies and our enemies were left rubbing their eyes in amazement...
...They gurgle...
...Nevertheless, soon the facts made their debut: petty political fixing, ineptitude as grandiose as his oratory, a whole family of pinheads and rascals...
...Not only was he the first modern president shot from ambuscade, but he died under circumstances that still excite morbid speculation...
...Today Watergate looks increasingly like a historic black hole in the national chronicle, and if that is all it turns out to have been we shall be fortunate...
...Carl Albert...
...Nixon was indeed the most reviled man ever to sit in the White House...
...Not even Franklin Roosevelt, not even Anita Bryant, is so hotly scorned...
...from all history bring one forward...
...What surer flight from Whittier than to expatiate in the language of power and to ponder the use of power on a global stage...
...Some of the writing is surprisingly crisp and insightful...
...How is it that the father of Tricia and Julie has earned such disesteem...
...In Nixon's hands all such noble aspirations went sinister...
...Neither of these hinds has done anything remarkable since Nixon's last helicopter flight, and I contest the notion that they ever did do anything remarkable except hog the show right up to the last limits of the plausible...
...His presence causes too much distress...
...Nothing can stop them, and within a decade his policies will be the most discredited of any president's since Hoover...
...Watergate, of course, is the most catastrophic instance of the Nixon touch...
...But it is unlikely that Papa Brezhnev ever laughed at him...
...The revelations dragged his repute from nadir to undreamt of nadir, and soon there was a movement to remove his pictures from the Catholic schools of Iowa...
...In 1975 only Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada and the late Adolf Hitler surpassed him...
...Domestic advisors like Daniel Patrick Moynihan were appalled...
...Herr writes, "I went to cover the war, and the war covered me...
...The phobia he stimulates in millions of America's most virtuous and enlightened citizens is impossible to exaggerate, and this seems to be true of people all over the world...
...By 7:30 AM it was beyond berserk with bikes, the air was like LA on shortplumbing, the subtle city was inside the war, had renewed itself for another day, relatively light on actualviolence, but intense with bad feeling: despair, impacted rage, impotent gnawing resentment, thousands of Vietnamese in the service of a pyramid that wouldn't stand for five years, Plugging the feed tube into their own hearts , grasping and gorging...
...Frederick W. Richmond, poor ex-congressman Allan T. (continued on page 40) 4 The American Spectator June/ July 1978 In that space, at that hour, you could see what people had seen forty years liefore...
...Upon beating Nixon for the California governorship in 1962, he rapidly became a laughingstock, and it is now apparent that fate dealt him an idiot for a son...
...Its only benefit is that it brought the retirement of Nixon and with that a quieting of the frantic alarums of the Nixon maniacs...
...He slipped so deeply into obscurity so rapidly that the American Express company exploited his instant anonymity in a television ad featuring him and Barry Goldwater's running-mate as two typical nonentities urgently in need of American Express cards—a fitting testimonial to the lasting achievements of Watergate...
...Is it for his wicked deeds: prosaic lies endlessly repeated, eavesdropping, the bombing of Cambodian progressives, the harassment of North Vietnam's liberal democrats, those brummagem uniforms he ordered for the White House guards...
...Why did they abscond from the limelight so hastily...
...Nixon, contrary to the fears of his more obsessive opponents, was a rather ordinary man, distinguished only by his gigantic will to escape ordinariness...
...It is uncanny...
...If my work would put the book on the best-seller list, so much the better...
...Yet I have always contained my objections to more immediate concerns...
...Yet seasoned Nixon observers remained calm...
...Now the publication of RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon* threatens to undo even that emaciated benefit...
...Hugh Kenner has said that Nixon should not have been president on aesthetic grounds...
...After 1968 he seems to have forgotten...
...When one studies Nixon's public career —his first yelps in Congress...
...Its fundamental issues grow increasingly hazy with the passage of time...
...His friends suffer bankruptcy, the loss of dozens of IQ points, broken spirits, and, with astounding frequency, the calaboose...
...My guess is that they are both afflicted with obscure and horrible diseases, never to be heard from again...
...In every scene, grand or minute, Nixon remains always in the dark about the unearthly powers pulling his strings...
...Attorney...
...From 1970 to 1975, a poll conducted by Mme...
...Despite all the orotund promises of the episode, it has led to no grand reform...
...What became of John Dean or Senator Daniel K. Inouye...
...An indication of the preternatural circumstances surrounding the man is that merely by asking the question one sets off sirens and shouting matches...
...Yet he blew up, and with his passing, millions of citizens in foreign lands slipped into the claws of Communism and barbarity...
Vol. 11 • June 1978 • No. 8
