Nixon in Limbo
WHITFIELD, STEPHEN J.
Nixon in Limbo In Search of Nixon by Bruce Mazlish Basic Books. 182 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Assistant Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University The tradition of...
...Yielding to the cliche that Eisenhower was a father figure, Mazlish has Nixon feel "a forbidden, though perfectly natural, wish" to usurp his place...
...Mazlish is welcome to his belief that his subject has "a real sympathy for the poor and deprived," "a noteworthy streak of compassion," and a desire for peace that amounts to an "obsession...
...Veiny interesting...
...Not only does a writer have to perform the traditional biographical tasks of describing an individual's historical, cultural and social context, but he also has to select and grasp procedures from among myriad schools of psychoanalysis...
...Rarely has common sense been so shamelessly obfuscated, or conventional political savvy made so inadvertently desirable...
...Similarly, because his mother sent him to live with an aunt for two years, the President's presumed sense of betrayal "might have affected his later attitudes on 'traitors' in high places...
...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Assistant Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University The tradition of psychoanalytic biography is not quite an honorable one...
...Nixon also "projects unacceptable impulses onto others...
...Most revealing of all, though, is his anality...
...Few in his profession have effaced themselves as smoothly as has Richard Nixon...
...Why did Nixon so relentlessly pursue Alger Hiss...
...Relying upon thin secondary sources and fugitive reminiscences, Mazlish provides no clearer identification and garners no better insights than these...
...He exalts strength and fears passivity...
...In contrast, Mazlish lamely cites Nixon's "ambivalence," ignoring the larger tensions seething within the society, and the limits and polarities that constrain the operations of U.S...
...Freud started the genre with his studies of Leonardo and Wood-row Wilson, and Erik Erikson has provoked much critical admiration for his work, but good psychoanalytic biographies are the exception rather than the rule...
...In a society hungry for facts and for candor, information about Nixon's youth and early career remains as meager as the ostensive repertory of his emotions...
...His aversion to psychiatrists is open knowledge, and he has used the publicity that normally envelops a politician like a squid, emitting ink only in order to hide himself...
...Businessmen and political figures in particular seem to be less vulnerable than most to such inquiry, since they can so easily disguise their sources of feeling and action...
...The Georges' book dealt with Woodrow Wilson's excruciating recalcitrance at Versailles and after, when the fight over the Fourteenth Point ended in his political and physical collapse...
...Freud could infuse the trivial with ominous significance...
...Haven't other assistants referred to the Chief Executive's "iron butt...
...thus, he is extremely ambivalent about his aggressive impulses and tends to deal with them by projection onto others...
...He identifies his personal interest with the national interest...
...Nixon's complaint that reporters were "giving him the shaft" produces solemn acknowledgment of a "genital metaphor" but no apparent awareness that the phrase was as much a part of the World War II Navy as "anchors aweigh...
...even outbursts like his attack upon the Senate's rejection of Judge Carswell followed an evening's discussion with the Attorney General...
...Mazlish's problem is the absence of a problem-that is, of some erratic political behavior or psychological maladjustment to be explained...
...Instead, his extension of the psychoanalytic enterprise to Pennsylvania Avenue verges on parody, alas unintentional...
...In part because as boys both were afraid of spankings from fathers whose first name was Frank...
...Guilt, in this case, is a less important complex than the military-industrial...
...Mitzman's Iron Cage attributed to unresolved family conflicts, especially with an imposing father, the origins of Max Weber's prolonged writing block and mental breakdown...
...How can the affinity between the President and Billy Graham be understood...
...Nor can everyone be placed between psychoanalytic cross hairs...
...None of this has deterred Bruce Mazlish, a professor of history at MIT, who earlier collaborated on a splendid work of vulgarization entitled The Western Intellectual Tradition...
...Using a broader approach, Garry Wills successfully placed Nixon Agonistes within a context of ideals in eclipse, and integrated psychological perceptions into a general evaluation of American policies...
...The problems inherent in psycho-biography are as numerous as the neuroses authors usually discover in their subjects...
...Mazlish deflates the important into silly irrelevance...
...Even then he faces additional handicaps: Free association is impossible, and in the absence of diaries or retold dreams, the material available for piecing together the subject's emotional life is often extremely indirect...
...The name is perfect for its ambivalent [sic] conjoining of Horatio Alger, the Nixon hero, and 'hissing' the villainous Easterner...
...politicians...
...In Search of Nixon, therefore, veers helplessly between the banal and the bizarre...
...Whatever difficulties Nixon has in controlling aggressive impulses, whatever facility he has in projecting evil onto enemies, these surely ought to be regarded as political symptoms rather than the quirks of a personal syndrome...
...That many ignored, victimized Americans, and terrorized Laotians, Cambodians and Vietnamese might consider such a belief rather macabre merely testifies to the necessity of relating Richard Nixon to the political culture he both represents and champions...
...Didn't he once denounce some college students as "bums...
...Partly because of a favorite Presidential expression, "There is enough on the plate, don't add to it," the President's orality is deemed even more important than his geni-tality...
...Mazlish depicts Nixon as "a man torn between his mother's dislike of warfare and his father's sharp competitiveness...
...He is wracked by indecision and by the question of his own courage, especially in a crisis...
...Rarely does Nixon expose moments free of calculation...
...Oedipal impulses surface again with the nomination of Warren Earl Burger as Chief Justice: "The play on the name of Earl Warren, Eisenhower's Chief Justice, is striking...
...For example, Nixon's alleged death fears as a child are invoked to help explain his opposition to abortion...
...Wasn't it Nixon who once boasted to an aide of socking it to journalists "right in the behind...
...A ghost crafted most of his Six Crises, and apparently no "real" Nixon lurks behind his persona of bland rationality and self-absorption...
...Every learned interpretation like Arthur Mitzman's study of Max Weber competes with some display of misused analytic tools...
...Every scrupulously convincing book like Alexander and Juliette George's Wood-row Wilson and Colonel House must be weighed against disquieting exercises in shallow ingenuity...
...Neither does he show any discrimination in his search for psychoanalytic clues...
...What In Search of Nixon seems to demonstrate, however, is that a psychological portrait of the 37th President is a more hazardous undertaking than the presentation of a gallery ranging from Leonardo to Hegel...
...Compared to these torments, or to Martin Luther's struggle with the devil, Nixon's six crises, and his failure to sleep during the morning of an antiwar rally at the Lincoln Memorial in 1970, are quite tame...
...Nixon is simply too ordinary in his character and values, too indistinguishable from those redoubtable Middle Americans who nurtured and elected him, to be studied apart from the political system that sustains him...
...Treating him in isolation distorts history by transforming the underlying continuity and stability of American policy into manifestations of idiosyncrasy...
Vol. 55 • September 1972 • No. 17
