Revising a Tricky Politician's Image
GRAFF, HENRY F.
Revising a Tricky Politician's Image The Contender—Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946-1952 By Irwin F. Gellmnam Free Press. 590 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Henry E Graff Editor, "The...
...But as reactions to the recent 25th anniversary of Nixon's resignation from office on August 9, 1974, demonstrated, any sympathetic biographer is fighting an uphill battle...
...Now approval of his commonsensical aggressiveness is tempered by the notion that he may have had a larger hand in bringing on the Cold War than was recognized at the time...
...Ulysses S. Grant, for instance, gets better grades today than heretofore because Southern blacks could vote in his time and would not do so again for a century...
...Nixon left the Navy as a lieutenant commander...
...Gellman ultimately concludes: "The myth of Nixon as a liar is underscored by selective attention to his activities in the House and Senate...
...We read that Nixon—and his bride, Pat— joined the Office of Price Administration...
...Ultimately, any 'smears' paled beside the strength of anti-Communism's popularity...
...No knowledgeable person would question that most good politicians are manipulators, and most hard-up campaigners aim to make a big splash about something or other—usually an allegation of poor performance or malfeasance by the other side...
...on the eve of Pearl Harbor and moved to Washington...
...He had steered a middle road that avoided association with the supporters of both General Douglas MacArthur and Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio...
...Yet knowing their entire contents (something that will shortly become much easier to do when the National Archives begins selling cassettes of them), will not help us explain this complex figure...
...He became a defender of GOP moderation in domestic issues and a champion of internationalism in foreign affairs...
...It all began, says Gellman, with an article by Ernest Brashear in the September 1, 1952, issue of the New Republic entitled "Who is Richard Nixon...
...That is why there were so many "new" Nixons as he felt forced to remake his persona at various junctures in his political life...
...Califomians, in an anti-Administration mood, responded as expected, overwhelmingly making Nixon their new Senator...
...Finally, confronting the Quaker pacifism of his upbringing, Nixon resigned from the...
...The elder Kennedy years afterward told Speaker of the House Tip ?'Neill that he supported Nixon for the Senate because he believed that Douglas was a "Communist...
...Interestingly, the written record the author so assiduously explores, including the former President's own memoirs, does not register nuances of what happened during those months in the capital...
...To take only one example, if those tapes had not existed to reveal a marked anti-Semitic cast of mind, he would today be remembered in the memorial rolls— the Kaddish lists—of every synagogue in the world for what he did to aid Israel after the Yom Kippur War in 1973...
...The unit Nixon belonged to was charged with the policing of tire rationing, in anticipation of beginning to work on the larger project of gasoline rationing, not yet launched...
...Gellman faults Stephen E. Ambrose as well for showing in his splendid biography how Nixon manipulated his way into the Vice Presidential nomination...
...What makes this portion of the book so successful is that Nixon was correct about Hiss' role as a Soviet agent, while the sections of the liberal community that could not believe so handsome and wellconnected a young man had betrayed his country were wrong...
...The portion of the book dealing with Nixon's Vice Presidential nomination contains no surprises...
...Those tapes, which for unfathomable reasons Nixon did not burn in a big bonfire on the White House lawn before anybody could hear them, are his monument...
...After brief service in the Pacific, he returned to the United States a lieutenant senior grade—again, not as Gellman says, as a first lieutenant, which is of course an Army rank...
...This is today a small matter that Gellman does not go into, but it accounts for the hiring of Nixon and others in the group...
...His is the first work to be published that draws significantly on previously unopened government archives...
...There are no satisfactory answers in The Contender...
...But a renowned political scientist at Columbia University, Wallace Sayre, whose integrity as a scholar was beyond reproach, was also in the...
...and joined the Navy as a commissioned officer—a lieutenant, says Gellman in error, for he had actually become only a lieutenant junior grade...
...Pat and Dick Nixon were thus a matched pair from the beginning, although Gellman's account underplays her political role and depicts her mainly as a dutiful wife...
...Harry S. Truman, whose admirers are legion, once seemed to be a delightful bad boy, unabashedly tweaking the noses of his adversaries both foreign and domestic...
...Some may have noticed, incidentally, that in later years Nixon, dubious about bureaucracy, never listed his service with the OPA in his entry in Who's Who in America...
...Even now, after the publication of the Venona documents—the Soviet coded messages broken by the United States—there are still doubters that Hiss was shamelessly engaged in espionage...
...The infamous White House tapes, in the end, confirmed at last what millions had long only intuited: Nixon was a nasty man...
...About Nixon's alleged smearing of Helen Gahagan Douglas as a Communist in the 1950 California Senate race, costing her the victory, Gellman declares: "The fact is that throughout the primary Nixon had hardly mentioned any opponent...
...A full and fair version of his record shows a hardworking, promising young man...
...Gellman examines his subject's entry into politics and his thorough style of campaigning in often excruciating detail...
...We even learn that he "saved money by usually having a Milky Way for breakfast...
...The Contender is volume one of a projected three-volume reassessment of Richard M. Nixon by Irwin F. Gellman, a professor of history at Chapman University in Orange, California...
...Gellman reviews the story with a proper sense of how the young Congressman gradually warmed to his task as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
...And the corruption that stained the General's Administration now seems mild and forgivable compared to the present day use of money to "buy" the Presidency itself...
...The work of comprehending RichardNixon's character may not be a task for historians after all, but rather a burden and challenge to be turned over to poets and playwrights...
...As soon as General Dwight Eisenhower became the GOP nominee, Nixon became, in turn, the available man to be his running mate...
...The author's best chapter recaptures superbly, with all its drama and pathos, the confrontation between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers that brought Nixon to national attention...
...The future President got bad marks in too many circles at that time, and as the years rolled on he never quite managed to erase them...
...and often had dinner with the Nixons and other functionaries of the agency when they came in from the field in the evening...
...Night after night, Sayre once recalled to me, Pat Nixon, in the presence of her husband's colleagues, badgered him to the effect that he could not hope to get ahead in politics unless he put himself in uniform...
...His exemplary youth, including his propriety and penury, is amply reported...
...He also enjoyed a reputation as a strong campaigner...
...He had scarcely settled in when, in the author's strangely stilted language, he "pondered changing his position from civilian to military service...
...This study ends too early in his life to provide an answer...
...Can the disgraced President's historical standing be upgraded by a re-reading of the record...
...Since it deals with his political career only through his nomination for Vice President in 1952, none of what he was to be is covered...
...Nevertheless, he already was being demonized...
...He does tell us that one day Representative Jack Kennedy "dropped off $ 1,000 from his father for the campaign against Douglas...
...His character, we are told, never fully recovered...
...In the fall [Douglas] attacked first...
...It should be remarked at the outset that our 37th President is under sympathetic scrutiny here...
...Douglas was simply struggling futilely against the tide of political opinion that had decided the New Deal era was over...
...In short, Gellman persuades us that it was not dirty work by Nixon that did Douglas in...
...Possibly the "trickiness" that millions considered his most noteworthy characteristic has by now shown itself in so many forms among some of his successors that, oddly, Nixon may deserve fresh recognition as being the archetype of the postmodern President...
...Why, then, was Nixon so reviled for doing what is natural to the breed...
...As a good historian, though, Gellman should have mentioned that Ronald Reagan, then still a Democrat, had campaigned for Douglas...
...It is not only that society periodically changes its perspective, but also that new historians look afresh at the documentary record and sometimes unearth ignored sources...
...By voting time the fortunes of the UN operation in the Korean War were at their nadir because Chinese troops had entered the fray in force, and no one knew for sure what the outcome would be...
...Gellman's protestation to the contrary notwithstanding, clearly a disconnect developed early on between the public Nixon and the real Nixon...
...Reviewed by Henry E Graff Editor, "The Presidents: A Reference History As this generation knows better than any other, the reputations of Presidents are not set in stone...
...He was nationally known, attractive in appearance, and possessed of a fetching family...
Vol. 82 • August 1999 • No. 10
