W. JAMES ANTLE III: Hero Worship
Gerson, Michael J.
down far more than the American people. 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...
...Earlier generations of Christian conservatives focused disproportionately on sexual mores and censoriousness, sometimes allowing their moral certitude to creep into arrogance...
...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...
...This formulation is not entirely new...
...IT WAS HENRY KISSINGER, to whom Nixon subcontracted much of his diplomacy, whose neoBismarckian Realpolitik captivated the foreign policy establishment...
...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...
...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...
...Kinder and gentler than Barry Goldwater, whose “Western, rugged, libertarian individualism” presupposed “the belief that government was the enemy of freedom, and should not poach beyond the fences of personal privacy...
...CATALOGUING PRESIDENT BUSH’S “domestic ambitions,” Gerson dwells less upon tax cuts, judicial appointments, or the partial-birth abortion ban than the “massive” (his word) Medicare prescription drug benefit, No Child Left Behind, and federal support for faith-based charities...
...The best chapter in the book is the last, devoted to Nixon’s “transfiguration...
...But Nixon’s global statesmanship bore fruit long after his departure, and his methods are still in use today...
...The idea was to “use active government as an instrument—not to create towering bureaucracies, but to break up an unjust status quo...
...Indeed, it was Nixon who pioneered almost every aspect of modern media-driven politics, both at home and abroad...
...It is reminiscent both of the “national greatness conservatism” espoused by David Brooks in the 1990s and First Things editor Joseph Bottum’s call for “a new fusionism” after the 2004 elections...
...In Bush’s first term, Fred Barnes explained in the Wall Street Journal, “To gain freemarket reforms and expand individual choice, [the president is] willing to broaden programs and increase spending...
...Gerson insists that federal spending has risen only because of defense and homeland-security expenditures, although the data show otherwise...
...In place of the more circumscribed pre-Bush conservatism, Gerson proposes “a conservatism committed to the defense of human dignity at home, and the promotion of human rights abroad...
...Bottum was trying to come up with a fusionist framework for the existing relationship between foreign-policy hawks and social conservatives...
...He says little about why heroic conservatives will succeed where Great Society liberals failed, and even less about Republican missteps since 2001...
...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...
...But conservatives can be forgiven for asking, like Nancy Reagan, “Kinder and gentler than whom...
...Pre-countercultural liberalism was frequently idealistic, ambitious, and even religiously motivated— as Gerson is aware, since he discusses both William Jennings Bryan and the Social Gospel...
...The author isn’t very compassionate toward his fellow conservatives who believe in a smaller federal government...
...The problem is that Heroic Conservatism doesn’t seem to acknowledge limits—limits on the efficacy of government, limits on personal obligations, or limits imposed by human nature...
...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...
...Kinder also than Ronald Reagan, who “attack[ed] welfare queens” and believed government was more likely to be the problem than the solution...
...The subtitle tells the story: Republicans must “embrace America’s ideals,” as defined by Gerson, or “they deserve to fail...
...Its adherents—just “one narrow element of the Reagan coalition”—are “anti-government the way Sherman was anti-Georgia...
...Black is scathing about the mythology of “investigative journalism,” but he rightly castigates Nixon—the master of presentation—for not scenting danger soon enough...
...Good intentions notwithstanding, their wars against poverty and to end all wars usually deepened human misery, which free markets and the “little platoons” of civil society have done much to alleviate...
...It’s not because the bureaucrats weren’t faithful enough...
...Brooks worried that “Democracy has a tendency to slide into nihilistic mediocrity if its citizens are not inspired by some larger national goal...
...Not just the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the general concept of democracy promotion, more foreign aid “than any time since the Marshall Plan,” and global health initiatives, all cast “in a frank moral language of right and wrong, good and evil...
...Gerson describes the administration’s post-9/11 foreign policy in similarly moralistic terms...
...Gerson appreciates Imago Dei more than original sin, which Chesterton famously described as “the only part of Christian theology that can really be proved...
...Hero Worship IT HAS BECOME ONE of the commentariat’s favorite clichés to designate Karl Rove “Bush’s brain...
...He confronts conservative critics of administration policy in these areas: “Republicans who feel that the ideology of Barry Goldwater—the ideology of minimal government —has been assaulted are correct...
...That is closer to Bush’s pronouncement that when “somebody hurts, governB O O K S I N R E V I E W 90 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 ment has got to move” than Barnes’s description of big-government conservatism...
...I AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD New York Times Bestseller America: The Last Best Hope (vol...
...Politics,” Gerson acknowledges, “like sex, is both a human necessity and an occasion for sin...
...And he makes no apology for this fact, arguing that the “major departures from precedent” were “intended to inaugurate a new era of idealism...
...Their successors are increasingly emphasizing compassion, justice, and mercy...
...Nor does he even acknowledge the conservative case for limited government, having internalized the liberal critique that opposition to any expenditure or intervention is based on cruelty or indifference...
...The problems that he inherited—Soviet aggression and subversion, the Middle East, China, and above all Vietnam—were still unresolved when he left office...
...This has already been evident in the 2008 presidential candidacies of Sam Brownback, whose bid went nowhere, and Mike Huckabee, who may yet defy expectations...
...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...
...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...
...Gerson, now a Washington Post columnist and Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow, wants the right to have bigger dreams than smaller government...
...Conservatives who believe in a muscular national defense might nevertheless pause over what Gerson describes as “the most ambitious presidential statement on foreign policy since President Woodrow Wilson pledged to ‘make the world safe for democracy’—and it went beyond that pledge...
...But in taking on the liberal establishment, he overestimated his ability to manage the news agenda...
...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...
...This refusal to engage those who disagree is often puzzling...
...Yet Gerson’s Heroic Conservatism goes the farthest...
...Libertarianism, once considered part of the American right’s fusionist consensus, is dismissed as “the elevation of personal and economic freedom over other values like compassion and community...
...servative orthodoxy and place them in a broader intellectual context...
...THERE ISMUCH TO ADMIRE in this kind of idealism...
...Once the Bernstein and Woodward claims of a cover-up had become an idée fixe in the public imagination, nothing could dislodge it...
...Even the conservative defense of the prescription drug benefit and No Child Left Behind has been advanced before...
...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...
...His admiration for President Bush is evident, and his desire for a kinder, gentler Republican Party is more than rhetorical...
...B O O K S I N R E V I E W DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 1 New York Times bestselling author, continues his narrative through American history in the sequel to America: The Last Best Hope vol...
...1) also available www.thomasnelson.com America_AmSpctAd:Layout 1 10/10/07 11:26 AM Page 1...
...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...
...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...
...Such people “thought they were being assaulted” by the Bush-led GOP, “and they were right to think it...
...Until his crew mutinied, Nixon kept the ship of state on an even keel...
...His earnest and sometimes moving book would be a much stronger contribution to political thought if his heroic conservatism were balanced more often with that kind of humility...
...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...
...Gerson is, like the president, a committed evangelical but also someone profoundly influenced by Catholic social teaching...
...In doing so, he as usual defied the conventional wisdom: the desire for “closure...
...Advocating idealism and charity over realism and frugality, the book could easily have been titled The Conscience of a Compassionate Conservative...
...Yet Nixon’s career did not end with his resignation, nor even with his pardon, which reinforced the impression of criminality...
...According to Gerson, there was a method to the president’s compassion: “He is open to increased spending, if that spending was accompanied by reform...
...Maybe President Bush didn’t “roll back government, but he did restructure and modernize it...
...To his credit, Gerson doesn’t hesitate to answer...
...An author who purports to “believe in the accumulated wisdom of humanity” cannot be unaware of these experiences...
...Gerson wants heroic conservatives fighting for “economic and racial justice,” combating malaria in Africa, and providing a political home for voters who are “pro-life and pro-poor...
...Brooks was content to have “energetic government” confine itself to monument-building and trust-busting...
...Bottum argued that pro-life activists and “opponents of Islamofascism and rule by terror” are engaged in a similar enterprise of defending “truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised...
...While Reagan gets credit for being “both a cultural conservative and a cultural optimist,” Gerson winces at the 40th president’s “anti-government rhetoric...
...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...
Vol. 40 • January 2008 • No. 10
