The Ultimate Assault on Liberalism

...Nixon fell heir to this strategy in 1968, but with a far greater self-confidence than Goldwater had possessed, a sharper mind and a better working knowledge of the trade...

...In fact, Wills continues, youngsters are attacking liberalism and its professorial apologists, the shopkeepers of an intellectual market "which is as rickety with pretense as the economic one...

...The book--part history, part contemporary report, part philosophical treatise--is revisionist yet reliable, provocative and sometimes provoking...

...Johnson is but a shadowy figure here...

...But measuring his performance in the political market, Wills deems the President not a clever pragmatist but an ideologue...

...His career began with Alger Hiss but was predicated on Horatio Alger: Strive and succeed...

...While the indignation of the middle class fermented, Nixon was pursuing a lucrative law career, acting out its equation of success and money--not incidentally for the edification of the gop (something Nelson Rockefeller, handicapped by fortune, could not do...

...Wills Agonistes...

...and political (the international scene, where the liberal ideals of free elections and self-determination are imposed...

...Consequently--and significantly--Republican politicians and Democratic professors must be depicted as the standard-bearers of what Wills terms liberalism...

...They strive, adopt false values, but fail to achieve happiness because their aspirations must always exceed their satisfactions...

...Thus the self-indulgent refusal to practice restraint--by the young, the poor, the blacks, whomever--is naturally viewed with horror by the self-controlled Americans who subscribe to the liberal creed...

...The President is not treated unsympathetically...

...He may fail, as his favorite predecessor failed--as Wilson failed...

...Indeed, during the Eisenhower years he was disliked "because he epitomized all those traits liberals wanted to ignore when they celebrated the American 'mainstream...

...Such eccentricity is itself the product of a certain ideology...

...The self-made man, a variant of Emersonian individualism, is crucial to the operation of the marketplace...

...I do no mean to imply that Nix-on Agonistes is a dogmatic political tract featuring a straw man as anti-hero...

...Wills writes that the President's plan "was not clever and opportunistic...

...he was them...

...The contrast between Nixon and the young is striking...

...To picture George Wallace as Nixon's advance man, to view the team of Spiro Ag-new and John Mitchell as the first line of defense for liberals is surely to argue for a virtually monolithic America, held together by the cement of a unanimous liberalism...

...Wallace voters thought their children, corrupted by teachers, were attacking the bogeys imagined by pseudo-intellectuals...

...Contributing to the impression of emptiness is Nixon's lack of regional identification, of roots...

...Yet there is, if not an emptiness, an apparent lack of authenticity to the man...

...If the test of the genre is its intent of catharsis, then Nixon Agonistes qualifies as tragedy, for its purpose (unannounced until the closing chapter) is to purge the United States of a crippling ideology...

...It is the total effectiveness of this restraint (excepting the famous 1962 press conference) that has made Richard Nixon at once inhuman and prototypically liberal...

...The hidden resentment of the '60s--concealed beneath the more obvious frustrations of the blacks, the poor, the young--was the bitterness of a rising middle class that played by the rules of the economic market, emulating the businessman, only to find the sympathies of the Liberal Establishment extended to the rebellious nonproducers...

...it was naive and self-defeating...

...Still, he has a personality...

...His passion, which will surprise many of his critics, is to resurrect liberalism: ". . . this is his agon, his struggle...

...Wills admits no distinction between 19th-century laissez-faire thinking, now the creed of conservatives, and contemporary corporate values, conventionally associated with 20th-century liberalism...

...Defining liberalism as "the philosophy of the marketplace," Wills discusses the several markets: moral (the conscience, location of "the internal race man must run with himself in America" and, more specifically, Nixon's own sprint...

...As protagonist of this drama, Richard Nixon emerges less a full-blooded person than an embodiment of national values...

...It is difficult, though, to see wherein this honor lies, since Garry Wills disparages liberalism throughout his book...

...Mark Harris seized upon this theme in his analysis of Nixon's failure in the 1962 California gubernatorial campaign, accusing the former Vice President of "low intellect" and a consequent deficiency of "the self-awareness which intellect produces" and, finally, a belief that "success was enough" in itself...

...He is the least 'authentic' man alive . . . . His aim has always been the detached mind, calculating, freed for observing the free play of political ideas, ready to go with the surviving one...

...In each case, the process is automatic, concatenated by an invisible hand...

...In addition to this theoretical conflict, the practical implementation of Vietnamization may be impossible...

...Fastening on the liberal concept of self-determination, Nixon proposed to "Vietnamize" the conflict in Southeast Asia--a scheme favoring, of course, the regime in power rather than the people's desire, for the idea of self-determination is based on the assumption that there is a unitary popular will...

...Because Nixon is, like Wilson was, a prisoner of the traditional moral assumptions of American foreign policy...

...intellectual (the academy, whose members cannot bring themselves to admit that Nixon is their ally against the antiliberal students...

...For the kids, the less guided action is, the more does it 'open' one to good...

...Experience, tested by the free play of feelings, will sort itself out into patterns of wisdom--just as, for their teachers, the free play of ideas must lead to serviceable truths...

...Quite the contrary: it is learned, thoughtful, often witty, and almost always interesting...

...economic (the milieu of "businessmen . . . whom we envy but imitate," and who choose Nixon as their champion...

...Yet Wills, who took a PhD in classics before turning to journalism, is also skeptical of the student response...

...The teachers, in turn, believe student rebellion is aimed at society, at parents, at the government--at everyone but teachers...

...Contrary to the compelling story told by Joe McGinniss, Wills writes, "there was no need to do an image job on Nixon...

...Having condemned liberal intellectuals of the 1950s for rallying round a consensus theory of American history, it is ironic that Wills falls prey to the same viewpoint...

...After his election, the self-made President was still called Tricky Dick by liberal professors unable to tell their friends from their enemies...

...they learn too late, if at all, that the victory is not worth the battle...

...But the struggle, even if doomed, is an honorable one, and Nixon must be assessed in its terms, by his own standards, loftier than men give him credit for...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Associate Professor of History, San Francisco State College "Tragedy," wrote John Milton in the preface to Samson Agonistes, "hath been ever the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other poems: therefore said by Aristotle to be of power, by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such-like passions, that is, to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions, well imitated...

...These deluded educators believed they were inculcating liberalism in the classroom, an erroneous opinion they shared with the Right...

...But Wills produces convincing evidence that Nixon "has gone through most of his career knowing that he is better, brighter, more profound than he lets himself appear," that he has candidly acknowledged a distinction between his public words and private views, and that his striving is not empty of purpose--"Nixon is a Market ascetic, and politics is his business...

...Wills' true point of view is reflected in his conclusion that "Nixon, by embodying that creed, by trying to bring it back to life, has at last reduced it to absurdity...

...Students see clearly that the university is the servant of government, that its "conformist, career-conscious" caretakers preach an openness and egalitarianism that does not square with life in the "protective, semi-feudal system...

...plunging, ready to take risks...

...his escapes from work are trips rather than homecomings...

...Certainly George Wallace, in the interval between elections, had helped to prepare the nation for the politics of resentment...

...though as a statesman he comes off second-best to Eisenhower ("a political genius"), he is rated somewhat ahead of John Kennedy...

...Wills labels him a "brooding Irish puritan," the black moods of cantankerous Frank Nixon controlled by the austere standards of the saintly Hannah...

...if there is a villain, it is Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...In the current attacks on liberalism, pinning the label on Nixon is the ultimate assault...

...This makes him stand for all that the kids find contrived, what they call 'plastic' They are the opposite...

...Thus, Nixon Agonistes: the Tricky Dick of yesteryear, supposedly the manipulator of ideas, wrestled to the ground by the weight of an outworn ideology, supposedly the creed of his political enemies...

...It is a brilliant tactic, but even Wills' extraordinary reportorial skills cannot fully support his argument...

...without personal discipline there could not be a self-regulating economy (a la Adam Smith), an open airing and exchange of ideas (the intellectual laissez faire of John Stuart Mill) or self-government (Woodrow Wilson's equation of democracy and morality...

...His disclaimer that "the techniques developed under liberalism are not only admirable but can be put to better use" is unconvincing because the "better use" he speaks of could be accomplished only by rooting out the ethic--a profound belief in self-regulation--fundamental to the system itself...

...For this uptight community, Nixon surely was the one...

...Nixon, like Woodrow Wilson, sees his mission in the area of foreign affairs, where study is of more use than style...

...Wills attributes this to the deadening effect of the market on style: Nixon began his career by mobilizing antagonism to his opponents (in 1946, 1950, 1952), a technique he was not able to utilize again until 1968--which is to say that he reflects public values rather than projecting his own...

...But most important, the Forgotten Americans saw themselves in Nixon...

...Barry Goldwater, in 1964, raised the issue of the Forgotten Man, tried to exploit ethnic voting patterns, and made special efforts to woo the South...

...Substitute "tricky" for "plastic" and it will become apparent that Nixon has always been judged an opportunist...

...for without a borrowed life from that old set of values and aspirations, he cannot succeed, cannot be judged by norms congenial to him...

...Self-made men like Nixon are competitive, sanctimonious, sullen...