One of Us

...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...

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

...Not bad...

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

...The typical writer begins in high school, when he scribbles effusions that would disgrace a lavatory wall, and only after years of grueling apprenticeship attains (if he is lucky) brilliance...

...a great dramatic critic, a brilliant wit, "full of subtile flame," a teller of unmatched short stories, and the most expert of feuilletonists, he was the omnipresent pivot of literary and theatrical life in the seething, sky-scraping metropolis that is New York City...

...His fine and illuminated intellect grasped, held, and assessed...

...Furthermore, he repeatedly visited Franco's Spain, simply in order to relish its bullfights, on which he wrote with a bloodlust unsurpassed since Old-Bull-in-the-Afternoon Hemingway...

...And indeed the dramatic diplomatic initiative was duly announced, but too late...

...makes for compelling spectacle, but ends in messianic absurdity, like the post-assassination editorials and sermons that explained how Kennedy had "expiated" our national sins in Dallas...

...Endowed with tons of charm charm, a hypnotic stammer, and a prose style that at its best practically glowed in the dark, Tynan soon emerged as Britain's best drama critic since Max Beerbohm...

...It is a mystery that London playhouses managed to attract any audiences whatever during Tynan's reviewing reign, because the performances given in the theater at an opening night were liable to furnish much less entertainment than the performances Tynan gave on the printed page the following morning...

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

...present-day pressure-groups can draw no comfort from him...

...What in Marlowe is more memorable than Tynan's summary of Marlowe's Tamburlaine as "an orgy of sadism by the light of meteors...

...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...

...combined with the equally boundless blessings of Lenny Bruce, Bertolt Brecht, proletarians, and erotic liberation...

...Read on a bit to Wicker's account of the 1968 presidential election, and there's old "Av" the highminded statesman pleading with President Johnson to contrive a "major breakthrough" in the Vietnam negotiations—any breakthrough—to push Humphrey ahead before Election Day...

...it is more surprising that Tynan, far from being a case of early burnout, became one of the few Oxford graduates ever to experience fame after his graduation...

...Tynan, a leftist, never permitted his T politics to serve as an excuse for incompetent or otherwise unreadable writing...

...He satisfied me...

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

...As Lavinia, Vivien Leigh received the news that she is about to be ravished on her husband's corpse with little more than the mild annoyance of one who would have preferred foam rubber...

...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...

...the other being Landslide Lyndon...

...Politics isn't supposed to bring us Grails or expiation or "peace at the center...

...and memorable, too, even if only for Alec himself, crooning in some ghastly baby language: "EVWY day my pwayers I say, I learn my lessons EVWY day"—until his opponent happened to throw double sixes, whereupon he would scream a shrill and profane imprecation in tones of apparently ungovernable fury...

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

...Wicker writes: "There's no doubt that he almost won...

...Compare what tripe the rest of us furtively confided to notebooks at sixteen—the tenth-rate Dylan Thomas, the bargain-basement Rimbaud, the all-tooplausible attempts at out-self-pitying Sylvia Plath—with what Tynan was producing at the same age (this from an obituary of Alexander Woollcott): [He] was an all-embracing, non-respecting, joy-loving genius...

...As maitre de salon, too, he was supreme...

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

...Clad in insecure egg-stained pyjamas, he would preside over an animated crowd of backgammon-playing, talking and eating guests...

...The proudest boast in his Who's Who entry was not of his palpable journalistic achievements but of his having been the first person to use the F-word on British TV...

...Then there's a reminder of just how Nixon became, as Wicker describes him, so darned "paranoiac...

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

...If anything, the politically preoccupied—not only the seekers of "the Grail" but those who chase after them with recorders and notepads—seem to be rushing in just the opposite direction...

...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...

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

...The first publisher who has the brains to reissue Tynan's quotidian critiques in book form will earn a zillion dollars: with any luck, the present profiles—largely magazine rather than newspaper journalism—could sell well enough to make such a reissue possible) Why would anyone read or attend Titus Andronicus, notoriously Shakespeare's most awful play (if indeed Shakespeare wrote it), in preference to perusing Tynan's description of Vivien Leigh exacerbating its awfulness...

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

...The central fact of the saga, writes Wicker admiringly, is that Richard Nixon succeeded in his "long, lonely search for the Grail...

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

...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...

...W hether, in the end, all this adds up to the "sublime" life promised by Longfellow and Grandmother Milhous, to "peace at the center," one cannot say...

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

...Citing Kennedy's dismissive remark-Nixon doesn't know who he is and went out as he came in: no class"—Wicker writes: This was a good if not particularly original insight into Nixon from a man who clearly knew who he himself was—though not always: the Kennedy who supported Nixon against Helen Douglas, who was reluctant to condemn Joe McCarthy and who exaggerated his claims to have written Why England Slept and Profiles in Courage, may not have known himself so well as the Kennedy who ran for president in 1960 seemed to...

...as the fruit of his prodigious youth...

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

...TYnan's attitude was of the refreshing, old-fashioned sort visible in the 1950s New Statesman, which took it for granted, as did 1950s Britain in general, that leftists could not only construct grammatical sentences but also, on occasion, write poems that rhymed and scanned...

...Sure, a diligent editor might have blue-penciled a few of Tynan's wilder metaphors and shortened the occasional sentence...

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

...His erotic liberation, that is...

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

...The source of this disdain: Nixon had used "unseemly" tactics to beat Harriman's friend Helen Gahagan Douglas in their recent Senate race...

...From his desk at the New York Times on Election Day 1960, Wicker watched managing editor Turner Catledge pacing about and wishing aloud "that a certain midwestern mayor would steal enough votes to pull Kennedy through...

...The Reagan case is instructive...

...For example, Tynan died—in 1980—of emphysema caused by willful and unabashed chain-smoking...

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

...it may even be that he did win...

...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...

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

...Imagine a chain-smoker being allowed to hold court in chic restaurants these days...

...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...

...Nineteen sixty-nine witnessed the first session of his musical Oh...

...He had won the prize, "only to see it snatched away by the kind of privileged and advantaged man who represented in his person Nixon's worst nightmares about his own inadequacy...

...erhaps it was inevitable that an English boy who could write this well should shine as a student at Oxford...

...Matters carnal eventually dominated his thought to the virtual exclusion of other topics...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...Such fervor K enneth Peacock Tynan reversed the Two Literary Ages of Man...

...Calcutta!, complete with nude cast...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

...One's first reaction is to assume that chronological skullduggery is afoot, that an unscrupulous veteran of letters is trying to palm off a brand-new essay R. J. Stove writes for National Review, the Weekend Australian, and Quadrant...

...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...

...its title was a labored pun on the PROFILES Kenneth Tynan/HarperCollins/437 pp...

...Let one of Tynan's wives or mistresses so much as contemplate making whoopee with someone else, and Tynan would have to be physically restrained...

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

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

...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...

...But conservatives already knew that...

...And how many theatergoers, recollecting the last vile updated version of a classic they were forced to sit through—Macbeth transplanted to El Salvador, say, or Congreve's The Way of the World reset in a Paris nightclub—will be able to suppress three hearty cheers at Tynan's great epigram "They were dressed to kill, and what they were dressed to kill was the play...

...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...

...These bons mots were mild by Tynan's standards...

...Kennedy, moreover, had the advantage of a quite different upbringing and life experience, but still had his own calculations, maneuverings, dark spots and tasteless moments—particularly with women—to answer for...

...The wish was "not serious," we're assured, though as it happened a certain Midwestern mayor came through, and offhand one doesn't recall any stunning Times investigative pieces or Watergate-scale books on The Stolen Election of 1960...

...at its lowest, it isa story of needless compromise and surrender to the drama of the moment—as in those effusive and self-abasing toasts to Mao in Peking...

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

...What about the flops...

...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...

...Not so: the Woollcott elegy appeared (in Tynan's school magazine...

...True enough, but it is always a little depressing to read of a politician's quest for "the Grail," or for that matter to find religious imagery applied to any purely political pursuit...

...But cigarettes and bullfights could not distract Tynan from expounding his deepest rent-a-crowd convictions: the boundless wickedness of censorship, South Vietnam, World War I, and capitalism...

...29.95 R. J. Stove THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 39...

...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...

...yet, even as he did so, he would have been shaking his head in teeth-gritted wonder at an adolescent capable of authoritatively using words like "feuilletonists" and "imprecation...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...At its best, it has been a story of will, and a strange grandeur—as in that final defiant wave from the helicopter on August 9, 1974...

...Orson Welles's Othello goaded him into his most publicized and lethal one-liner: "Citizen Coon...

...Averell Harriman, the quintessential "Franklin" type, arrives at a Georgetown party in 1951 and, spotting Nixon sitting alone in a corner, loudly announces: "I won't sit with that man...

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

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

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

...Nor was this the sole aspect of Tynan's character that would incense today's Chattering Classes...

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

...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...

...little indeed was beyond his wit, the wise and jetting laughter of a corkscrew of a brain...

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

...24.95 Matthew Scully 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 profoundly in the interest of the country and the president-elect...

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

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

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

...They were noisy, joyful assemblies...

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

...Tynan started off brilliant, and only after years of grueling apprenticeship did he descend to the level of a lavatory wall...

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

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

...in July 1943, and Tynan was born April 2, 1927...