MELTING DOWN THE PLASTIC MAN
Howe, Irving
We should have known that when definitive word came to be spoken about Richard Nixon, it would be from the pen of Art Buchwald. In one of his recent skits Buchwald shows "a former White House...
...Even that no longer seems certain...
...What appalled the country, I think, was not merely the dirty work revealed by the tapes, since that had been visible earlier...
...Does anyone propose to tell us that Senator Hugh Scott didn't really know what Nixon was...
...It was a neat composition while it lasted, and its manufacturers can hardly be blamed that it didn't last...
...To the Byrds and the Strausses, as well as other Democratic leaders, this seems an attractive prospect...
...They figured if they were going to resort to a lot of dirty stuff in Nixon's second term, it would be better to do it in the name of the New Nixon rather than the Old Nixon...
...For all they'll have to do then is to keep repeating "Watergate," and put up noble blockheads for every office in the country without so much as worrying about social or economic programs...
...What "Deep Toes" reveals is that there was never a difference between the Old Nixon and the New Nixon...
...But insofar as one still takes seriously the American claim to democracy—and we do —then he must be dismissed, one way or another, as beyond the pale...
...There is even the implication that the Democrats are perhaps saving us from President Nixon's own possible impulse to resign...
...We had everybody fooled...
...But it will be a special responsibility of the liberalleft to make sure that the coming political struggles go deeper than the melting away of the plastic man who was elected to the presidency of the United States...
...The New Nixon whom we saw from 1969 to 1971 "was the Old Nixon with makeup on...
...That doesn't seem to the "pros" nearly so attractive a prospect as running against Watergate...
...In one of his recent skits Buchwald shows "a former White House aide" called "Deep Toes," offering a sensational news bit in "an abandoned garage in Chevy Chase...
...HE CANNOT LEAVE OFFICE a moment too soon...
...well, so small, so petty, so inconsequent, so very much like the local grifter trying to figure out a way to chisel around the law...
...But it would make unlikely a simple or simple-minded campaign against Nixon...
...What appalled the country was the recognition that the president of the most powerful nation on earth was...
...The resignation or impeachment of Nixon need not put an end to Watergate revelations, prosecutions, etc., nor remove the Watergate issue from the center of political debate...
...We dyed his hair, powdered his cheeks and put him in new suits...
...And for that matter, the distinguished intellectuals who just before the last election came out with a full-page ad in the New York Times supporting Nixon on the ground that he was "prudent"—they too were old enough to have witnessed the early rise of Richard Nixon...
...It only took a willingness to remember...
...You see people would have been very wary if they thought the Old Nixon was running for office...
...If, however, Gerald Ford becomes president and the Watergate clamor dies down, the Democrats might have to come up with an idea or two, something resembling a program...
...But keen as they are, they hardly tell us anything that, say, Helen Gahagan Douglas couldn't have told us all along, since Nixon defeated her for Congress in a dirty California election...
...As the New Yorker nicely put it: "The Democratic Party has, of all things, made a show of interposing itself between a besieged Republican President and the supposedly hysterical members of his own party...
...Chuck Colson and John Dean," continues Deep Toes, "cooked it up between them...
...it might even, heaven help us, force upon Democratic contenders some thought...
...But seeing the shriveled reality of Nixon was a blow to national pride...
...For this reductive view of things, Richard Nixon is the best argument...
...If ever a candidate was manufactured, it was Nixon...
...HE WAS MADE OF PLASTIC, and under the heat of revelation, it melted away...
...And with candidates who take stands, probably liberal ones against Ford's conservative bias...
...After Republican leaders started issuing their "moral revulsion" statements about the transcripts, such worthies as Senator Robert Byrd, the Democratic whip, and Robert Strauss, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, made cooing sounds to calm down "the hysteria...
...366 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS...
...pretty much the private Richard Nixon, Uriah Heep as ex-Quaker, scared, nasty petty-bourgeois, visibly pulling himself together for another public appearance, full of resentments and inferiorities masked by rhetoric about The Presidency, •a cheap little man who had surrounded himself with thugs and squealed that, really, he was not a crook...
...Behind this seeming timidity there is a cynical strategy that could easily backfire (one almost hopes it will...
...That is why there's more than a drop of hypocrisy in the sudden outpouring of "moral revdlsion" that followed the release of the transcripts...
...Whose idea was it to put out the story that there was a New Nixon...
...it would require that issues be touched upon, if not fully confronted...
...If, to be sure, that does not happen, then impeachment will be necessary...
...It hardly matters how he goes, resignation or impeachment, but go he must...
...From our point of view, however, it is very much to be desired...
...That being so, the conduct of the Democratic party leaders these days is pretty astonishing, indeed, disgusting...
...Insofar as he was, in part, aping the manners and morals of corporation executives, Nixon had a certain representativeness to him: that's what a politician can usually be expected to do in capitalist society...
...Keen words, "Deep Toes...
...Once the composition melted 365 away, what remained of the public Richard Nixon was...
...The deep unreality reflective people have felt about him, the sense that there was no one there but a puffy concoction, may indeed be the basis for his success...
...There is a point of view—far from adequate to the complexities of our politics, but not to be dismissed either —which sees the whole political process as little more than a public-relations stunt, an elaborate concoction of a pseudo-personality by skilled operators who try to gauge which sociopsychic needs are strongest at a given moment and then proceed to manufacture a candidate to satisfy them...
...That is why the tendency of the Democratic leaders to form a kind of tacit united front with Nixon against the idea of resignation and for the alternative of impeachment ought to be resisted by whatever liberal forces remain in Washington...
...The calculation of the Democratic leaders seems to be that if only they can maintain Nixon in office, drag out impeachment proceedings, and keep the headlines bubbling with new revelations, they will have an easy victory in 1976...
...Nixon had been put together to appeal to everything inauthentic in American life, every wish to evade social realities and responsibilities, every impulse to find ways of scuttling and sabotaging the welfare state without being explicit about it, and every stubborn residue of a mindless anti-Communism that could be tapped with a few phrases...
...Nor did it take library research to know what Richard Nixon had always been, to remember his complicity with McCarthyism and his natural affinity for the most benighted and vulgar politics...
...By comparison, Warren G. Harding had a certain magnitude, like a toy duck blown up with air—and in any case, had a passion for women, at least a recognizable human trait...
Vol. 21 • July 1974 • No. 3
