The Riddle of Power

...The key to Truman's character was his understanding of his own shortcomings and his ability to be honest with himself," adds Shogan...

...When the Queen saw the plan to have up to a dozen security men riding on either side of them she remarked testily, "I'm going out for a ride with a friend, we're not trying to rustle up a posse...

...Well, maybe a short shadow...

...That's putting it mildly...

...The poem had been etched by his Grandmother Milhous under a framed portrait of Lincoln that hung over his bed from age 13 until his departure for Duke Law School in 1934...

...The Reagan case is instructive...

...Shogan gives Reagan credit for a "half revolution...

...The blurb-writer at Bodley Head, the book's British publisher, promised us new information from Smith as to what the Queen thought of Ronald Reagan...

...One of Us brings out this nobility as well as any study to date...

...But] after my own struggles, disappointments and survival in the same decades, I consider him one of the two most interesting public men I have known...

...Nixon, says Shogan, attempted to polarize the nation, and succeeded...

...maybe a cloud passed over Durham...

...Shogan notes his "ability to maintain hard-line ideological positions without causing outrage except among his most dedicated enemies...

...He was a pragmatist in ideology, a rationalist in values, and self-determined in character...

...Shogan suggests Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic that if a President is badly deficient in one of the three elements of the presidency, he's likely to run into serious trouble...

...N ixon's peculiar humility (peculiar, at least, in a chronically insecure publicity hound) is reflected in a 1968 interview he gave to Life, in which he matter-of-factly noted that, in World War II, "I didn't get hit, or hit anyone...

...So also is a story Nixon himself has recounted—that upon Richard's return home from a year-long absence as a 13year-old, his dying brother Arthur had to ask their mother for permission to greet Richard with a kiss...

...Shogan, though, says the election of 1948 was the telling challenge, and Truman met it with courage and resourcefulness...

...As for JFK, Wicker marvels that Nixon never challenged the 1960 returns, a "decision both personally unselfish and ONE OF US: RICHARD NIXON AND THE AMERICAN DREAM Tom Wicker/Random House/731 pp...

...T here is a serene goodwill in this 1 writing that does Wicker credit...

...That's a stretch...

...all I got was a case of fungus...

...True, having no ideology at all doesn't work either...

...T he essay on Nixon is the best in the I book...

...I don't buy that...

...But in hindsight, Nixon gave up little and got the country over the hump at a time when it (or at least its opinion elite) had lost its nerve...

...Yuman certainly had an ideology: a bare-knuckles Cold War liberalism...

...I certainly didn't...

...Unfortunately this is not forthcoming, so shall I supply one example from the time of the Reagans' first visit to Windsor Castle in June 1982...

...It "contravened the qualities of moralism and idealism that he purported to represent...

...The rest of us should be happy and proud that they were so...

...Yes, it is suggesting too much, but applied in measure the information is useful...

...One need only think of young Lyndon Johnson engaging in the early deceits so absorbingly chronicled by Robert Caro in Path to Power, or young Jack Kennedy sauntering through the courts and resorts of Europe while the old man's staff prepared his term papers, to appreciate the grim perseverance by which Nixon emerged from a toilsome and unromantic childhood...

...Let's deal with the successes first...

...Leaving aside the bland subtitle and about 200 pages of detail on the SALT treaties, intricacies of the 1971 wage/price freeze, and whatnot, that could easily have been cut, it is a work of remarkable calm, grace, and, above all, charity...

...Still, the scheme works well enough as a tool for revealing the roots of success or failure in the White House...

...How could anyone have guessed that Bush would perform so marvelously...

...No, Shogan hasn't entirely solved the riddle of why some Presidents do well and others fail...

...And that, despite excellent grades, Nixon had to settle for Whittier College because his family was too poor to accept a partial scholarship to Yale...

...Senator Hartpence rewriting his name and himself...

...He'll be free to revise his preliminary assessment later, when Bush's term is finished—or not revise it...

...Shogan rates each according to his three-part scheme, and then shows how they held up in a moment of crisis...

...the other being Landslide Lyndon...

...He satisfied practically no one, and failed as a leader...

...And that, as we'd expect, young Dick Nixon did not cut a dashing figure on the dance floor, and perhaps harbored into adulthood "an inner anger" because of his "low standing with the girls...

...There's a name for this ability—leadership...

...But Nixon paid a high price...

...Wicker notes that Fawn Brodie, a querulous and malevolent nag even by the standards of her fellow Nixon biographers, took this as an expression of Nixon's regret that he hadn't done any killing...

...There, the French, Italian, and Belgian trade ministers blithely promise one thing, do the opposite, and leave their British counterpart nonplussed, bewildered, and blamed for holding up progress...

...He became quite skilled at drumming up support for conservative positions from folks who don't think of themselves as conservatives...

...His tax and budget cuts of 1981 were a triumph, but "he was unable to exploit the historic opportunity created by the early impetus of the Reagan Revolution...

...The successes are Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan...

...the son who watches his eldest and youngest brothers die lingering deaths from tuberculosis, resolving to live a "Life of Great Purpose" and leave his mark in the world...

...Ford couldn't explain to Shogan's satisfaction why he pardoned Nixon...

...It's an excusable misjudgment, and it's one of the few things I'd argue with in this provocative yet fair-minded book...

...Far, in fact, from revealing any "inner anger," many of the stories reflect humility and an awkward gentleness, always apparent in Nixon's better moments...

...a young man who—as he recalled in RN and In the Arena—passed into adulthood without ever hearing the words "I love you...

...21.95 Fred Barnes THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 37 His goal was to create a middle-class constituency for his policies, and he figured that "the enmity of the war protesters would help solidify the support of the middle class...

...Johnson, an out-and-out fraud who in his campaign literature turned a congressional "fact-finding trip" in wartime into an Odyssean epic of courage and survival...

...And Wicker credits Nixon with having achieved more for the poor and disadvantaged than big-talking liberals, having himself grown up poor and "disadvantaged...

...Shogan, the top political reporter of the Los Angeles Times, is willing to ignore the liberal conventional wisdom...

...Okay, these are very broad categories, especially in Shogan's hands...

...Nixon's deepest wish, he supposedly told an unnamed confidante during his congressional days, was to emerge from the "un-Quakerish betrayals of his political life and say: 'Mother, I have made peace...

...Thatcher now calls Reagan's Reykjavik call for a non-nuclear world "the only real divergence we ever had...

...It is this readiness of the British to take people at their word which causes endless difficulties in the European Community...

...The incident showed Reagan being typically Reagan and Thatcher quintessentially Thatcher...

...Wicker tells us that his curiosity about Nixon first arose late one evening in 1957 when, as a young reporter, he spotted the vice president walking down a Capitol corridor in his familiar slumped bearing: I concluded then only that I had glimpsed a profoundly unhappy man, for once unsheltered behind practical defenses...

...Shogan doesn't offer a final verdict on Bush...

...Shogan raises the matter of Kennedy's sexual promiscuity, which clashed so obviously with the self-control he showed in other aspects of his life...

...THE RIDDLE OF POWER: PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP FROM TRUMAN TO BUSH Robert Shogan/Dutton/352 pp...

...It was when Reagan was left alone with his instincts, when he was denouncing the Evil Empire and threatening to bomb Russia in five minutes that he was at his best...

...Not only did Reaganomics work, but also, in foreign policy, "Reagan succeeded to a significant degree in meeting the challenge he took on...

...I was no fan of detente or of pandering to Mao...

...I submit his list of post-FDR Presidents who've achieved at least some success and those who haven't...

...What about the flops...

...His ideology wasn't...

...He thus preserved for some time to come FDR's Grand Coalition," Shogan writes...

...Whoops...

...Yeah, sure...

...Here and there, though, his fascination leads him a bit far, as when he speculates that Nixon has spent his life grappling with guilt for having forsaken his "saintly" mother's pacific ways in favor of his father's rancorous and partisan self-assertion...

...Kennedy got the Soviet missiles out of Cuba and averted military conflict, giving up only U.S...

...Whatever their gifts, they seem, like Nixon, to need public service a good deal more than the public needs their services—though, unlike him, they bring to their "service" little of that nobility earned by real struggle...

...Remember these words, the old Quaker woman told him, and one day you will find "peace at the center": Lives of great men oft remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time...

...Thatcher made the mistake of taking him seriously...

...As in so many things until the advent of the poll tax, her instincts were correct...

...Certainly one does not observe among such men a great reserve of "peace at the center...

...The duds are Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter...

...Now I am worthy of you.' " Is it too much to suggest, Wicker asks, that President Nixon's proclaimed plan for a "Structure of Peace" in Vietnam, his rapprochement with China, his travels to Moscow, were all part of his quest for maternal absolution...

...His values were shaped by his view of himself as an underdog, a guy who had had to labor long and hard to get respect...

...missiles in lbrkey that were supposedly going to come out anyway...

...If so, she has overlooked her denunciation of the United States's invasion of the Commonwealth island of Grenada in 1983...

...He sees three controlling elements of presidential power: ideology, values, character...

...From one angle it makes a touching picture: the solitary, awkward boy yearning for attainments beyond the drudgery of his father's faltering grocery store/ filling station...

...He cites Carter, a man whose personal values and character were adequate...

...In her very British way, Mrs...

...Too true...

...Barber had chatted with Carter and was dazzled...

...Shogan wrote before the air and land war against Iraq crowned Bush's foreign policy with a shimmering triumph...

...In foreign affairs, he says, George Bush's prospects are "dubious...

...He satisfied me...

...I'd agree with that...

...Reagan's unwillingness to confront the cost of entitlements contributed to the deficits that cast a long shadow over the nation he had governed," says Shogan...

...I'd have judged Truman by his leadership in saving Europe with the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, and NATO...

...Johnson was so caught up in maintaining a consensus that he couldn't bring himself to choose between arms and butter, between fighting a war and pushing the Great Society...

...And that in college he helped found the Orthogonians ("straight-shooters"), a club for those excluded from the snooty Franklin society...

...Not bad...

...Carter was self-absorbed to the point of making himself the center of the hostage drama in 1980...

...As a journalist active through most of the Nixon saga, I was more often his critic—in retrospect, not always knowledgeably—than his admirer...

...This was as much a splendid photo-opportunity for the press as it was a nightmare for the security people...

...A s a judge of Presidents, Bob Shogan has the same problem as James David Barber: bad timing...

...Thatcher into paroxysms, all she ought to have done was just laugh it off as one giant sound-bite...

...But conservatives already knew that...

...But he has a useful method for measuring and explaining presidential performance...

...The left got its revenge in Watergate...

...For example, he describes LBJ's thirst for consensus as an ideology...

...Alas, Wicker's measure of presidential achievement is that Nixon "left intact the Great Society...

...24.95 Matthew Scully 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991...

...His genial smile, his soft voice, his apt analogy, all [took] the threatening edge" off his pronouncements and policies...

...The boy orator Joe Biden tearfully recalling the sacrifices of his father, the poor Welsh miner...

...In coping with the post-Cold War world, Bush "appeared driven by short-term, narrow considerations rather than any total overview...

...With Bush, Shogan errs on the negative side...

...He was right, and the antiwar movement never quite recovered...

...At Reykjavik, his call for a non-nuclear world was an example not of hopeless optimism, nor even of cynicism, but merely of the Great Communicator trying it on...

...There's a nice story about how, several times in the early fifties, Nixon stood up for Robert Oppenheimer when the physicist's security clearance and loyalty were challenged—despite Nixon's reputation as a reckless maligner of poor innocent dissenters like Alger Hiss...

...But, remember, Shogan gives Reagan credit for tackling the economic mess—inflation, slow growth—that Carter left behind...

...I can't explain that...

...It was decided that the Queen and President would go riding together in the Park...

...Although the Reykjavik pronouncement, which on any logical reading turned forty years of NATO policy on its head, sent Mrs...

...Although the point is not raised by Smith, there is reason to believe that she privately supported Reagan's attack, but such was the outrage of establishment figures, including the Queen herself, at the United States's attacking a country of the British Commonwealth that the Prime Minister thought discretion the better part of Atlanticist valor...

...In Tom Wicker's One of Us, as in each of Richard Nixon's three autobiographical works, we encounter the familiar lines from Longfellow's "Psalm of Life," a quotation Nixon cherishes almost as much as the "man in the arena" imagery he so often borrows from Theodore Roosevelt...

...Reagan exploited his own personality and the acting tricks he'd picked up...

...I was young and found it hard to fathom why a vice president, who could even become president, should appear so desolate, and so alone...

...Shogan concludes that Kennedy's "sexual athleticism" didn't interfere with his presidential duties or cloud his judgment during the missile crisis...

...Barber, a political science professor at Duke, came out with The Presidential Character just as Jimmy Carter was becoming President...

...Mario Cuomo posing as CoriolanMatthew Scully is assistant literary editor of National Review us, reluctantly heeding the call of the people and tormented by ethical subtleties that elude lesser statesmen—what underlies these pathetic melodramas but a yearning to stomp deep tracks into the "sands of time" for all to see...

...But its real relevance is as a contrast between Nixon and his two immediate predecessors—Kennedy, given to dispensing those ridiculous PT 109-shaped tie clips to remind Oval Office visitors of his heroism...

...N ow, here's what the lesson of this book ought to be for conservatives: in politics and public policy, ideology isn't enough...

...Anyway, according to Barber's scheme for analyzing Presidents, Carter was destined for greatness...

...But from another angle one detects an emotional thread common to all three of them—that longing for center-stage which in our day so often turns affairs of state into a personal psychodrama...

...He also insists that Reagan "compounded problems that middle-class Americans had to confront—drugs, the homeless, the accelerating collapse of the cities...

...Nixon is the archetype of that common figure for whom politics is less a civic undertaking than a redemptive struggle...

...Challenged in the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy understood it "as mainly a political rather than a military problem...

...There's no way Shogan could have known this would happen, right...

...Doing all this at once was a deft trick...

...Eisenhower was too inclined to lead by indirection, says Shogan, and failed to provide strong moral direction during the fight over school desegregation...

...Kennedy gets better marks from Shogan than I'd have given him...

...This facility," Shogan argues, "was a function of Reagan's character, which, like his values, greatly bolstered his ideology and leadership...

...She was obviously genuinely shocked when she caught the man she trusted negotiating with hostage-takers and behaving in a way one has come to expect only of the French...

...Shogan says Nixon's achievement was to thwart the antiwar movement and gradually (rather than precipitously) withdraw from Vietnam, while pursuing diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China...

...In fact, he had no ideology, which meant he was adrift...

...It is said that Mrs...