THE POWER AND THE PRESIDENCY
Cronin, Thomas E.
BOOKS II I I I II II THE POW AND TMLE PRESIDENCY The Palace Guard DAN RATHER GARY PAUL GATES Harper & Row, $8.95 The President Is Calling MILTON S. EISENHOWER...
...His managerial suggestions merit widespread attention...
...yet it is exceedingly weak relative to the expectations we hold for it...
...Both books are somewhat unusual in that the protagonist of every story in each is a female...
...In short, Rather and Gates' book suffers from many of the same shortcomings of television news--too much attention is paid to personality, gossip and style over substance, people over processes, and simplistic over complex explanations...
...Doubtless Haldeman was exceedingly important in the Nixon scheme of leadership...
...Confusing matters further is the paradox in our values whereby we simultaneously condemn great concentration of power in any one location yet we yearn for strong, effective leadership performanees from our presidents...
...Never before had so much authority with so little accountability been delegated to so few," write Rather and Gates...
...Unlike Rather and Gates, Eisenhower has plenty of ideas for making the presidency more effective, chief of which is that a President must make much better and extensive use of advisory commissions...
...Nixon's chief helpers turned out to be his major liabilities...
...However, his call for separation of the presidency from party leadership and his urging of the six-year single term seem to misunderstand the role of a President as politcal coalition-builder, necessarily engaged in political bargaining and negotiation...
...It must be said that this latest gallery of Williams women are all projections of an unsympathetic if not highly misogynistic imagination...
...Haldeman is criticized as the person who kept the cabinet members from talking with the President, who thwarted the advance of any progressive program ideas, and who in moments of stress and crisis had an uncanny knack for inducing Nixon to revert to his early, hatchetman "Old Nixon" style...
...One from another in their stories they create scenes to which we can attach abstract names, almost titles for Victorian paintings--The Loss of Innocence, Man's Inhumanity to Man, etc...
...Moreover, Williams and Oates, in these two highly interesting collections, invite comparison for another reason...
...When they succeed, the brilliance of both writers lies in their capacity to imagine these symbolic acts for their characters, acts which will trip a universal chord in the reader...
...The only problem is that they visit far too much explanatory power on one person...
...He views a strong presidency as one that relies on a strong cabinet and that would have the additional help of two appointed vice presidents...
...Or how the values and priorities of the President's party affect a President...
...A more complex and satisfying book is Milton Eisenhower's rambling but perceptive The President Is Calling...
...Milton Eisenhewer is perhaps closer to reality when he observes: "How foolish and naive it is to expect the man in the White House, whoever he may be, to solve problems we do not fully understand and cannot agree on...
...That is, it is too strong for the safety of the nation as well as for the realization of the ideal of government by the people...
...On the other hand, there are fiction writers who are in essence poets, identifying each character with a passion or an idea...
...Some hold that the office corrupts the man, others hold that the recent incumbents have corrupted the office...
...BOOKS II I I I II II THE POW AND TMLE PRESIDENCY The Palace Guard DAN RATHER GARY PAUL GATES Harper & Row, $8.95 The President Is Calling MILTON S. EISENHOWER Doubleday, $12.95 Pick up another new book on the American presidency and you will doubtless read yet another explanation of what is wrong with the institution once prized as America's most notable political invention...
...Eisenhower concludes that the presidency is a near-impossible job, certainly too big and exhausting for one person...
...Thus, the most undistinguished performance in domestic policy since the days of Coolidge is blamed on the President's top few administrative aides rather than such factors as ignorance about what would really work, competing and often contradictory national objectives, the inherited problems from Johnson's guns and butter policies, and so on...
...Reading Tennessee Williams' and Joyce Carol Oates' latest collections of stories reminds this reader how totally Commonweal: 55 the work of each agrees with Meredith's serf-proclaimed creed for his own fiction: "My method has been to prepare my readers for a crucial exhibition of the personae, and then to give the scene in the fullest of their blood and brain under stress of a fierce situation...
...Engaging characters in significant acts or crises, these writers symbolize and make abstract large issues...
...Haldeman's zeal for efficiency and insistence upon complete loyalty to Nixon, it is argued, persistently narrowed rather than widened the circle of advocates and advisers from whom Nixon could learn...
...Yet we fully comprehend what committing it did to Maria...
...Both retain a keen sense not necessarily of the complexity of character, but of the splendor of the symbolic scene...
...They contend that the chief problem of the Nixon presidency was its tendency toward palace guard government...
...Too, there is not enough discussion of how societal values shape and constrain presidential performance...
...Nixon, they tell us, became the victim of too closed and too protective a staff system...
...Still others point to our imperialistic values and suggest that America's quest to be number one corrupted societal values and that the presidency merely mirrored these overreaching national tendencies...
...Of blood and brain and stress and ferocity both Tennessee Williams and Joyce Carol Oates are particularly possessed...
...The Principessa, for instance, attempts to satisfy her insatiability by forcing the (Continued on page 57...
...The best of Presidents have been those who understood the importance of political parties and who listened to the rank and file of their parties, and did not condescendingly view the American common person as childlike and dependent on omniscient leaders...
...A writer, say, of the George Meredith conviction, whose novels often appear "worked-up" from abstract material...
...Eisenhower served in government as I1 April 1975:54 a civil servant for some 19 years and was on call as a part-time adviser for the next 30 years, most notably as a prime confidant of his older brother...
...Despite the similarity of fictional method and the apparent similarity of subject, however, the protagonists are actually vastly different...
...First, there are those psychological writers, artists who feel their way, patiently and surreptitiously, in and out of the mind, rendering each character different in minute yet complete ways one from another...
...the ancient Principessa Lisabetta dances to imngin...
...Indeed, this THOMAS E. CRONIN is their only theme, their only focus...
...And John Ehrllchman turns out to be largely the creature of and wholly subordinate to Haldeman...
...Some say the presidency is too powerful, others that it is too weak, with shrewder observers pointing out that it is both too strong and too weak...
...He makes his reader well aware of the fragility of that institution, of what it can do well and of what it cannot do...
...ary Waltzes with imaginary lovers...
...And the books' titles tell the tale: Williams' females are "ladies," if not by temperament, at least by socio-economic signification...
...He argues too, albeit unpersuasively, for the creation of a single term six-year presidency...
...Still, Rather and Gates spend too much time blaming the doorkeeper, to the neglect of appraising other more significant variables...
...Thus, there is too little discussion of Nixon's own character and penchant for the cocoon...
...The other contenders --Arthur Burns, Daniel Moynihan, John Mitchell and Robert Finch--were never able to penetrate the Haldeman "Berlin Wall...
...Eight Mortal Ladles Possessed TENNESSEE WILLIAMS New Directions, $6 The Goddess and Other Women JOYCE CAROL GATES Vanguard, $8.95 ROBERT PHILLIPS It was Virginia Woolf who first said that, among the many distinctions which can be made, there are two types of fiction writer...
...His book offers personal descriptions of Presidents from Coolidge to Nixon with special attention to his own advisory work with each President since Hoover...
...The "few" turn out to be none other than Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Henry Kissinger...
...Along the way, Milton Eisenhower served as an assistant to a cabinet officer, chairman of several presidential commissions, special representative to Latin American countries, and in a handful of additional diplomatic and management consultant roles...
...The portraits of some of the palace guard figures are often fascinating and the authors provide an unusually good treatment of the rise and fall of Daniel P. Moynihan as a member of Nixon's inner circle...
...Having served on several himself, he skillfully documents which ones work well and why, which ones fail and why...
...For Henry Kissinger is for ~the most part absolved--doubtless forgiven because of the appearances of policy success...
...On balance, the easily read (yet glib) Rather and Gates book offers less understanding of the modern presidency than do the long and sometimes tedious reminiscences of Milton Eisenhower...
...Doubtless too Nixon's introverted personality was reinforced rather than compensated for by Haldeman and company...
...And the method is not restricted to the novel...
...Henry James comes immediately to mind, as does any writer of the Jane Austen persuasion: take away the "big scenes" and you still have a portrait of Emma complete...
...Their goal is to make us reach conclusions...
...Upon closer inspection of The Palace Guard, the villain turns out to be Haldeman alone...
...In light of these complexities of presidential government the best-selling book by Rather and Gates is neither very subtle nor satisfying...
...Most of the men who have been effective Presidents have also been highly political--in an open, rather than covert, sense of that term...
...Presumably, then, Nixon lost contact with reality because Haldeman filtered out the people or the messages which might have let reality in...
...Indeed it is part of the presidential condition that the presidency is always too strong, always too weak...
...In the end, they all became the victim of Haldeman's penchant for a sterile, paper presidency (Don't bother the President, put it in a memo and I'll see that he reads it when he has some time...
...the big scene of revengeful murder in Katherine Anne Porter's fine story, "Maria Concepcion," is never shown...
...Their goal is to make us realize individuals...
...But perhaps the greatest charm as well as strength of the Eisenhower study is his appreciation of the limits of the presidency...
...The out-dated poet, Sabbatha Duff-Collck, dreams and imagines herself to be America's greatest writer...
...That is, each is a woman of "refinement" belonging to a Victorian culture which long since has gone with the winds of change, each a frustrated Southern gentlewoman, out of touch with the real world about her, living in a private (and often, quite mad) world of her own making...
Vol. 102 • April 1975 • No. 2
