DANIEL JOHNSON: A Fundamentally Decent Man

...In doing so, he as usual defied the conventional wisdom: the desire for “closure...

...A Fundamentally Decent Man NO ORDINARY PERSON, deprived of a global newspaper empire that had taken a lifetime to create, would embark on an entirely new career as a biographer of presidents...

...She sent him long lists itemizing all the gifts she had ever presented to Robert and his wife, Mary Harlan Lincoln—jewelry, furniture, books, even clothing given years earlier and worn out long ago— and demanded that everything be returned to her...

...Indeed, it was Nixon who pioneered almost every aspect of modern media-driven politics, both at home and abroad...

...B O O K S I N R E V I E W DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 8 7 loving care and wise guidance [of Dr...

...She excoriated her son as one “of the greatest scoundrels of the age,” warning him that in the afterlife when she was reunited with Abraham Lincoln and her three dead sons, Robert would not be permitted to come near them...

...Think of Lenin and Gandhi...

...He builds up a picture of a gifted, visionary politician who grasped before anyone else that America’s unique role in the postwar world required a new kind of global statesmanship...

...But by fatally confusing national security with his own political advantage, he compromised the national consensus that had hitherto allowed the president considerable latitude in the name of raison d’état...

...By appealing over the heads of the Kremlin leaders to the Russian people on Soviet television, Nixon blazed a trail that Reagan would later follow to win the Cold War...

...Painful as it is to read such letters, they do give us, at last, a clearer picture of the state of Mary Lincoln’s mind, as well as the true character of Robert Lincoln...

...Patterson],” as Mary’s closest friend, Sally Orne put it...

...Yet he is undaunted, unrepentant, unabashed...

...While Gerson is part of a trend toward celebrity White House wordsmiths (sometimes to his former colleagues’ consternation), Heroic Conservatism has a more ambitious goal than relating what he saw at the revolution...

...The best chapter in the book is the last, devoted to Nixon’s “transfiguration...

...For the sake of such delicious lines, the reader will forgive Black his occasional baroque extravagances...

...Fairly or unfairly—and Black believes it is very unfair indeed—most people form their judgment of Nixon according to the view they take of Watergate and its longterm consequences for American politics in general and the presidency in particular...

...He would not, of course, be alone in this pursuit...

...It enables the Catholic Black to share the Quaker Nixon’s fascination with the amorality of megalomaniacs such as Mao...

...Even Stephen Ambrose, the most respected writer to have chronicled Nixon’s life, becomes partisan towards the end of his three volumes, portraying Watergate as a “Shakespearean tragedy” and its protagonist as a stage villain: Richard III in a suit...

...Hero Worship IT HAS BECOME ONE of the commentariat’s favorite clichés to designate Karl Rove “Bush’s brain...

...At the nadir of a lifetime of vicissitudes, Richard Nixon remarked to his chief of staff, Alexander Haig: “Some of the best writing in history has been done from prison...

...That life’s great enigma is, of course, Watergate...

...It is Nixon, more than Kissinger, who deserves the main credit for using the power of the presidency to move beyond bipolar confrontation to the more fluid world of the 1970s and ’80s, in which summitry and symbolism proved more potent than military hardware...

...He was right to tell David Frost that, where national security was concerned, covert operations required a special dispensation: “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal...

...It is improbable, if not inconceivable, that Bill Clinton would ever make such an admission, because he lacks any such sense of propriety...

...Nixon did not want closure, and this trenchant, readable, and well-informed biography is proof that even posthumously he remains the most complex, contentious, and (Black’s word) “interesting” figure ever to occupy the White House...

...In one droll footnote, for example, Black quotes Bobby Kennedy’s waspish remark about Clark Clifford’s appointment as Secretary of Defense, that President Johnson “might as well have named Attila the Hun...

...All the best on the occasion of your 40th Anniversary...

...Mary Lincoln was not so forgiving...

...Thirteen years before President Nixon famously went to China in 1972, Vice President Nixon had gone to Moscow in 1959 to meet Khrushchev, the first personal encounter between American and Soviet leaders of the Cold War...

...And Black knows what it is like to be surrounded by sycophants who vanish in adversity...

...Kennedy misjudged Clifford,” Black comments, “who had already concluded the Vietnam War could not be won on any acceptable basis...

...and it’s a pleasure to read...

...But Black’s contention is that Nixon let himself B O O K S I N R E V I E W 88 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 “Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP is proud to support The American Spectator...

...Black’s Nixon is very different...

...A man lacking in awareness of the proprieties due to his high office would never have admitted, as Nixon did, “Yep, I let the American people down...

...More than any previous biographer of Nixon, Black does indeed describe “A Life in Full...

...Jonathan Aitken, a familiar presence in these pages, published his Nixon: A Life in 1993, while the ex-president was still alive but before Aitken had resigned as a British cabinet minister to fight a libel action, served time in prison for perjury, and emerged as a born-again Christian...

...Indeed, it requires no great prescience to predict that, if the worst came to the worst, Conrad Black would pursue his new literary vocation even within the confines of a federal penitentiary...

...But Nixon was never part of this or any other establishment—not even the Republican patricians for whose electoral fortunes, as Black says, he had done more than any man since Lincoln...

...And she started carrying a pistol...

...We do not know what is best to be done...

...The problems that he inherited—Soviet aggression and subversion, the Middle East, China, and above all Vietnam—were still unresolved when he left office...

...Face to face with catastrophe, including the loss of his fortune, his reputation, and his liberty, Black has refused to contemplate defeat...

...him pathologically suspicious of rivals, subordinates, even friends...

...Johnson advised a writer who wanted to cultivate an “elegant but not ostentatious” style to “give his days and nights to the volumes of [Joseph] Addison...

...Advocating idealism and charity over realism and frugality, the book could easily have been titled The Conscience of a Compassionate Conservative...

...shrewd analysis of the people, the period, and the sources...

...Gerson sets out both to defend the Bush administration’s compassion-induced deviations from conB O O K S I N R E V I E W DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 89 Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America’s Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don’t) By Michael J. Gerson (HARPERONE, 320 PAGES, $26.95) Reviewed by W. James Antle III W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator...

...Nixon could not escape his nemesis and neither can his biographers...

...Just as Franklin Roosevelt—the subject of Black’s previous biography—had transformed the role of federal government, for better or worse, in the United States, so Nixon transformed the role of the United States in the world...

...But there is nothing ordinary about Conrad Black...

...Gerson, now a Washington Post columnist and Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow, wants the right to have bigger dreams than smaller government...

...Michael Gerson, the president’s former chief speechwriter, might have been remembered as “Bush’s mouth,” but in this volume he is more interested in the Republican Party’s heart...

...the thrilling discovery of long-lost documents...

...But for Watergate, Black contends, Nixon would today be ranked among the great presidents...

...Looking back, he confessed to mistakes—unworthy, even “horrendous” ones—but not to crimes, not to deliberate “wrongdoing...

...By placing the worst possible construction on the president’s conduct—that he cold-bloodedly ordered the break-in, the cover-up, and various attempts to subvert the legal process—and then allowing this diabolical figment of their imagination to color their view of his entire career, they caricature Nixon as a monster and those who brought him down as heroes...

...After her release from Bellevue (she stayed there four months) her rage against her son escalated...

...There is plenty of it in this book, for a black, sardonic humor is as characteristic of the author as it is of his subject...

...However, the Machiavellian aspects of Nixon’s personality that made him so formidable on the world stage also tempted him to adopt the hubristic belief that he was above the law...

...Like Aitken, Black was able to interview Nixon, but he builds on his predecessor’s redemptive portrait by exploring the wide range of achievements that belie the notoriety of this presidency...

...Black shows that already as Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon understood far better than anybody else how to use the power of the media to promote foreign policy goals...

...America is still paying a terrible price for its morbid fixation on Watergate...

...He was the president who turned the press conference into an art form, who worked round the clock to meet the demands of a news-hungry public that expected the bloated federal government he had inherited to have an answer to every local, national, or international problem...

...It has everything—a compelling story...

...She would not let him touch her, denounced him as “wicked...

...Black observes that this “dark, ironic, recondite cynicism” was “often one of his most attractive qualities...

...If Black goes to prison, I trust he will take Addison with him...

...Some of them, though, have abdicated the role of the jury in favor of the prosecution...

...Black’s empathy with Nixon is a great asset...

...Black knows all about the ruthless self-reliance that enabled Nixon to return again and again from the political dead, but which also rendered Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full By Conrad Black (PUBLICAFFAIRS, 1,148 PAGES, $40) Reviewed by Daniel Johnson Daniel Johnson is a writer living in London...

...Black is scathing about the mythology of “investigative journalism,” but he rightly castigates Nixon—the master of presentation—for not scenting danger soon enough...

...Mary Lincoln even took pleasure in the thought that her son would end up in hell...

...The Nixon who emerges is a fundamentally decent man, whose ruthlessness in his own cause is tempered by a moral sense and who “always put the national interest over all other considerations...

...In letters to friends Mary could not bring herself to write her son’s name, referring to him as “the young man” or using his initials...

...The subtitle tells the story: Republicans must “embrace America’s ideals,” as defined by Gerson, or “they deserve to fail...

...But in taking on the liberal establishment, he overestimated his ability to manage the news agenda...

...T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 40th ANNIVERSARY down far more than the American people...

...IT WAS HENRY KISSINGER, to whom Nixon subcontracted much of his diplomacy, whose neoBismarckian Realpolitik captivated the foreign policy establishment...

...Here is a model of the historian’s art...

...That is not to say that Attila, if available, might not have been a competent nominee...

...Whatever force of nature propelled him to the pinnacle of power and influence he wielded for nearly two decades has by no means deserted him in extremis...

...BLACK IS NOT THE FIRST BIOGRAPHER of Nixon to have first-hand experience of public disgrace...

...Aitken’s interest was above all in a man whose flawed humanity deserved to be redeemed...

...It enables him to identify with the president’s bizarre insecurity about social status: the eternal underdog in the White House, who loved the proximity of the rich and famous while despising their culture and politics...

...But Nixon’s global statesmanship bore fruit long after his departure, and his methods are still in use today...

...As I write, he is awaiting sentence after one of the most sensational fraud trials of recent years, with the prospect of years of litigation ahead...

...Finally, I’d like to make a prediction: Jason Emerson’s The Madness of Mary Lincoln will become a classic of American history...

...Yet Nixon’s career did not end with his resignation, nor even with his pardon, which reinforced the impression of criminality...

...Why Mary Lincoln suddenly went about armed is unknown, but her sister and brotherinlaw, Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards, feared Mary planned to use it on Robert the next time he visited his mother...

...God is just,” she wrote to a friend, “retributionmust follow those who act wickedly in this life...

...She says she will never again allow you to come into her presence,” Uncle Ninian wrote Robert...

...a fascinating cast of characters...

...Once the Bernstein and Woodward claims of a cover-up had become an idée fixe in the public imagination, nothing could dislodge it...

...Until his crew mutinied, Nixon kept the ship of state on an even keel...

...As Black shows, the aim of his last and largely successful campaign was to reopen the question of whether he had been the victim of an injustice—and keep it open...