In Search of Nixon
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
Writers & Writing I? SEARCH OF NIXON BY WILLIAM L. O'NEILL No man alive has had as long, as important or as controversial a political career as Richard M. Nixon. Numerous books have been...
...As a rule, Ambrose gives Nixon the benefit of the doubt without glossing over his transgressions...
...Anyone with an appetite for recent history and politics will want to read both of these engrossing chronicles...
...Parmet makes no effort to explain the paradox, devoting a bare two dozen pages to Nixon's life before he ran for Congress...
...Most who know the family background probably would accept Parmet's observation that, "From the Nixon side, Richard got his drive, intensity, tempestuousness, and determination to beat the odds...
...But by focusing sharply on the rational and statesmanlike aspects of Nixon's career, and by skipping over Watergate in four pages, Parmet makes him seem more balanced, and much less complicated than he was...
...Ambrose and Parmet regard the actual charges as trivial, or perhaps false...
...Surely Parmet is correct when he writes: "Long after Watergate and the evidence of abuse of power, long after the passions over Vietnam subsided, middle-aged liberals invariably explained their hatred toward Nixon by citing 'what he did to Helen Gahagan Douglas.'" Where all of Nixon's biographers fail is in explaining the transformation of an exemplary Quaker boy into a politician utterly devoid of morals...
...Only the most rabid Nixon-hater would deny that his Presidency included several notable achievements...
...He has made some questionable decisions, however, in addressing a career that is very hard to reinterpret...
...One of them is Herbert S. Parmet, a highly regarded historian whose Eisenhower and the American Crusades (1912) was the pioneering revisionist study of an underrated Ike...
...Morris is to the left of Ambrose, less fair, more hostile to Nixon, but most of all they have opposite conceptions of how biography should be written...
...Parmet gets right to the point: It was not simply that Nixon Red-baited Douglas shamelessly...
...Morris sees the fund in question as the merest tip of an iceberg of dirty money...
...By far the most partisan author, Morris is also the most theatrical...
...Ambrose's pithy narrative comes to fewer than 20, while Morris carries on for almost 100 pages...
...Morris is fashioning a huge, minutely detailed, sometimes gossipy account...
...William L. O'Neill, our guest columnist, is professor of history at Rutgers University and the author, most recently, of American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960...
...He maintains that the important thing about Nixon is not his personality or character...
...Nixon has always believed that the Hiss affair did him enormous harm by turning liberals and the press against him, so that ever afterward he was the target of slander, abuse and falsifîcations...
...His early years have been intensively researched...
...Morris also demonstrates in great detail Nixon's huge capacity for work and his outstanding mental abilities...
...These qualities came together in the Hiss affair, and Morris manages to outdo all previous writers on the controversy in showing how skillfully Nixon handled it—and how he sometimes stumbled...
...Morris covers the ground at greatest length, but doesn't provide us with an answer either...
...His path to the Vice Presidency entailed convincing each important power center that he secretly revolved around it, and then going on to double and triple his options...
...Roberts, came after the War to resemble Mr...
...Parmet omits most of the sleaze altogether...
...Quite so, and Parmet is doubtlessly right when he suggests that in time history will give greater weight to Nixon's positive contributions...
...Yet had Nixon been defeated by Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968, as nearly happened, his career would now be of interest chiefly to graduate students...
...In addition, Parmet contends that from his pious mother, Hannah, "Richard learned the gentleness, consideration, and courtesies that so often astonished those who only knew him as the son of Frank Nixon...
...rather, it is the degree to which he has embodied major strains in recent political history...
...During a single day at the 1952 GOP convention afterhis nomination, he received callers with Eisenhower, paid his respects toRobertA.Taft, showed up when Arthur Summerfield was installed as party chairman, and had a drink with Harold Stassen, atthetimeamanofinfluence...
...Roger Morris goes further than Ambrose, for his Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician (Holt, 1,005 pp., $29.95)stresses personal traits to the point of obsessiveness...
...She was, all agree, the strongest influence on her son during his formative years, and yet, as the White House tapes revealed, he grew up to be a man literally incapable of telling the difference between right and wrong...
...The author argues strenuously that the prosecution's case was tainted by various kinds of misbehavior, and he may very well be right...
...But certainly even the more objective historians of the future will recognize that Nixon exploited fear and prejudice, and finally destroyed himself because he could not control the dark side of his own nature...
...Morris lays out a mouth-watering feast to be consumed at leisure...
...Numerous books have been written about him over the years, but recently there has been a flowering of Nixon scholarship...
...Ultimately it would be his undoing...
...A graver problem is that Parmet accepts Nixon on his own terms to a large extent...
...Stephen E. Ambrose has given us the second of his projected three volumes on our 37th president, and he has been joined by several other biographers...
...Morris is particularly effective in dissecting Nixon's 1950 race for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas, one of the seamiest in modern history, yet he does not appear to recognize how damaging this was to Nixon in the long run...
...There is no doubt that to some Nixon was the archfiend responsible for an innocent man being railroaded...
...EVBRYONE knows that Nixon's greatest performance was the infamous Checkers speech, a televised response to the charges made shortly after his nomination that he was being secretly subsidized by fat cats in exchange for special favors...
...Thus he assured the Stassenites that, as Morris puts it, "together they would be the forces of 'realism' in the campaign, tempering the conservatives on one side and Eisenhower on the other...
...The brilliant way Nixon buried the fund scandal and kept himself on the ticket is a fabulous story, and Morris turns it into a tour de force that gives his book a highly dramatic conclusion...
...Morris tracks down and autopsies every piece of dirt...
...Nevertheless, it remains something of a mystery how the upright high school, college and law student, the caring Navy supply officer described by one of his men as being like Mr...
...From his bid for a House seat in 1946 through his Vice Presidential campaign six years later, Nixon displayed a lack of respect for truth and ethics that would have made him a marked man in any event...
...He is about as reluctant as Caro to give his subject credit, though he recognizes that Nixon did occasionally act on principle, as when he persuaded his conservative Congressional district to support the Marshall Plan...
...Hyde...
...Parmet devotes under 15 pages to a matter of fact account...
...Nixon'smethod was to flatter the group he was talking to and implicitly criticize its rivals...
...Parmet may have had a similar objective in mind for his new work, Richard Nixon and His America (Littie Brovin, 755 pp., $24.95...
...Besides being a mudslinging, Red-baiting bully, Nixon was a political acrobat, walking tightropes and turning cartwheels as he maneuvered his way within and between the various Republican factions...
...Any examination of his role in history must have the White House years at its center, not relegated to the margins...
...Nixon enjoyed being vindictive and failed to recognize this as a character flaw endangering himself as well as others...
...This is typical...
...Ambrose drives his narrative forward at a relentless pace...
...it was that, unlike Hiss, she was a celebrity and a New Deal figure with many admirers...
...Since Parmet alone has completed his life of Nixon, we know only his conclusions...
...Indeed, this book—the initial installment of what is to be a three-part treatment, too—resembles The Path to Power (1982), the first volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson...
...This is a fact, not simply an opinion, and Parmet's book, though a solid and useful piece of work, would be better still had he considered its implications...
...At the same time, the majority of liberals were troubled by the weighty evidence against Hiss, which still seems incriminating...
...The comparable book by Ambmse, Nixon:The Education of a Politician l913-1962 (1987), covers more ground with fewer particulars and with superior force...
...The treatment of this incident shows how differently each author approaches his subject...
...These are what Nixon himself called "practical liberalism," and what Parmet describes as "conservative populism"—that is to say, an "idealized vision of capitalism," especially of entrepreneurship...
...Morris has many of Caro's virtues, particularly the inexhaustible curiosity, the desire to wring meaning out of every scrap of material...
...But that does not mean Hiss was guiltless, or detract from Nixon's achievement in saving the matter from oblivion...
...Ambrose and Morris work on a grand scale, but the differences between them outweigh the similarities...
...That he could exhibit such qualities Ambrose demonstrates as well, but even Nixon's friends recognized that he developed into the direct opposite of his mother...
...Although the book is in no sense a whitewash, a mere 114 of its 650 pages of text deal with Nixon's Presidency...
...In Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician 1962-1972 (Simon and Schuster, 736 pp., $24.95) Ambrose shows us a President whose hostility and malice were so extreme that he began each day by marking up typed news summaries with instructions on how his aides should seek revenge against his numerous enemies—leaving a record of venom that may have no equal in the papers of any Chief Executive...
...The reality is that Nixon became the politician liberals most detested—after Joe McCarthy—not on account of Hiss but because of his campaign tactics...
Vol. 73 • March 1990 • No. 4
