After Checkers, to the cosmopolitan liberals, hating Richard Nixon, congratulating yourself for seeing through Richard Nixon and the elaborate political poker bluffs with which he hooked the sentimental rubes, was becoming part and parcel of a political identity…
Four o’clock EST, this Sunday, we discuss the first two chapters of Nixonland.: the Rise of A President and the Fracturing of America.
The book is info-dense, but Perlstein’s range is giving me all sorts of details I hadn’t heard before, even though I consider myself fairly well read about Nixon’s pre-Watergate history.
jeffreyw
Makes me hungry for some manly man food.
jeffreyw
No? Mebbe a salad?
freelancer
Agreed. The anecdote about Nixon boarding the train last on the way to the Convention in California and thus being able to spread agitprop against Dewey and Earl Warren in favor of Ike was particularly striking. Also, the full context leading up to the “Checkers” speech made me feel as though I had known nothing about the Checkers speech previously. Should be an interesting discussion.
Davis X. Machina
@freelancer: I loved it for the cameos — the young David Brooks ooh-ing and aah-ing over Nixon’s 1966 campaign plane, as RMH stumped the country for Congressional campaigns, putting down markers for ’68.
As the twig is bent, so grows the BoBo.
BGinCHI
It might also help to watch “Zombieland” Saturday night.
It’s got zombies and Bill Murray.
Rick Perlstein
In all modesty, both those scenes are ripped off from previous Nixon books!
Dee Loralei
@BGinCHI: That movie cracks me up. I liked Shaun of The Dead even more.
Elizabelle
Looking forward to Sunday, and particularly the no quiz part!
frosty
Bought a used hardback copy and read our first assignment last Sunday. I’ll have to skim it again this weekend to see if I can find anything intellectually stimulating to add to the discussion. This being Balloon Juice and all.
Davis X. Machina
My daughter borrowed my copy of Nixonland this spring and supper, and read it over dinner for a couple of months — bad manners, but we’re a house of readers — which betokens a strong constitution.
Youth is wasted on the young — stomachs like ostriches.
freelancer
@frosty:
Thank FSM for Kindle’s ability to sync annotations and highlights so you can share key excerpts without much effort.
Anne Laurie
@Rick Perlstein: We’re bloggers here; dissemination is our forte!
MikeJ
@Rick Perlstein: Dammit, I was expecting a book with all new Nixon stuff. Like how he invented the sport of Ultimate Frisbee and how his testicles had never actually dropped out of his body.
(edited for typos. mj+2)
Murc
You should see if you can get a sub-license for ‘Effete Liberal Book Club’ from Coates.
trixie larue
Is there a movie I could watch instead – Nixonland. I don’t have the time to read the book and it’s just too hard to do anyway.
freelancer
@Rick Perlstein:
I’m sure most of what you report can be found elsewhere. What I’ve noticed so far is that this book is exhaustive, informative, and not dull. Your compendium of modern history is providing valuable context to things we’ve all heard, or in some cases remember (I was born in 82, practically none of this is memory for me.) As far as the quality of the prose, I’ll gush more on that in Sunday’s thread.
@Murc:
Eh, BJ is edgier. I think we’d call it something akin to “Faggy Arugala Reading Clan” or “Uppity Non-regnery (we actually read the stuff we buy) librul egghead Book reader club”.
frosty
@freelancer: Post-it Notes instead? Seeing as I don’t like to write in books.
JWL
MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK DATE: MAY 1, 1994 FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER…. HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA…. BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.
“And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”
—Revelation 18:2
Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing — a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that “I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.”
Return to Atlantic Unbound’s interview with Hunter S. Thompson.
Discuss this article in The Body Politic.
I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
Nixon laughed when I told him this. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.”
It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he’s gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive — and he was, all the way to the end — we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.
That was Nixon’s style — and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don’t fight fair, bubba. That’s why God made dachshunds.
Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.
These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon’s immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president’s body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.
The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable — some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.
It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern — but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man — evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him — except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.
It is fitting that Richard Nixon’s final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. “It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard,” said one. “And it fucks up my children’s sense of values.”
Many were incensed about the howitzers — but they knew there was nothing they could do about it — not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon’s last war, and he won.
The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.
Dole’s stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for ’96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won’t even be re-elected as governor of California in November.
The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments — most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.
Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. “He will dwarf FDR and Truman,” according to one scholar from Duke University.
It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.
Nixon’s meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy “my dog Checkers” speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.
When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise — a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he’d run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.
Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him). It was Hoover’s shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon’s downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director’s ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.
Hoover was Nixon’s right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee’s flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.
For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director — who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean’s relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.
That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that’s what Bill Clinton says — and he is, after all, the President of the United States.
Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that “if the president does it, it can’t be illegal.”
Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon’s vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.
Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn’t argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn’t bother him.
Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.
It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that — but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.
Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.
Nixon’s spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives — whether you’re me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin’s daughter or your fiancee’s 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don’t even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.
He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
MikeJ
@freelancer: The nook version is also awesome. I’ve been highlighting like mad, but I turn off all the “social” stuff since I’m anti-social.
And now I have:
Gee, Officer Krupke,
We’re down on our knees,
Cause no one wants a fella with a social disease
stuck in my head.
dziliak
This book was an eyeopener to this former ‘Reagan Democrat’.
That said, I still take issue to some of the cartoon caricatures of conservatives portrayed in the book.
It’s easy to beat up on a caricature, but it’s not so easy to persuade one who believes the BS by beating up on the caricature.
Davis X. Machina
@trixie larue: I remember circa 1990 standing behind the mother of one of my students as she berated the clerk behind the counter of the in-supermarket video-rental shop. (We will have to explain these things to our grandchildren, who will not believe they ever existed.)
“What do you mean you rented out both copies of The Great Gatsby?! It’s due the day after tomorrow, and you have left my son with no alternative but to read the f*cking book!”
There are days I wish I had become a machinist, or a trapeze artist, or a trombone player, or a…..
freelancer
@frosty:
However you like, I just annotate the shit out of dead tree versions of my books. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because the act of reading a book is such a singular experience. Like a conversation with the author. They write for everyone, but really, each reading of a text is between the author and the reader, one on one. I like to throw my ideas or impressions back at the author page to paragraph to chapter. I’m quixotic that way.
freelancer
@Davis X. Machina:
Didn’t Andy Kaufman read Gatsby in its entirety to a college audience expecting Latka Gravas routines and jokes?
It’s a short read.
Southern Beale
OH CRAP I need to get busy and read!!!
Chet
Orson Scott Card, on Nixon Derangement Syndrome:
“There’s a perverse part of me that, when it’s in vogue to hate somebody, makes me want to say, ‘Isn’t there another way to look at this?’ The national hatred of Richard Nixon during the 1970s particularly bothered me, mostly because it was so completely out of scale to anything he actually did. At no point did he distort or endanger the constitution of the United States as much as it was distorted and endangered by his two immediate predecessors; indeed, they were clearly his political school in just how vile a politician can be and still become president. I concluded at the time, and still believe, that Richard Nixon was hated for his beliefs; and even though I share almost none of them, I find I have at least as much contempt for the hypocrites who attacked him in the name of ‘truth’ as for the man himself. In particular I think of Benjamin Bradlee, one of the ‘heroes’ of Watergate, who brought a president down in the name of the public’s right to know the truth–the same Benjamin Bradlee who, as a reporter, was fully aware of and, according to some reports, complicitous in John Kennedy’s constant adulteries in an era when, if the public had known this trait about the man, he would never have been elected. Indeed, the political life of Gary Hart should inform us that times may not have changed all that much! Somehow, though, the people didn’t have the right to know the truth about a man when he was a presidential candidate with views Bradlee approved of. The people only had a right to know when Baradlee hated the candidate and his views.”
MikeJ
@Chet: Orson Scott Card is a fucking liar or a moron.
freelancer
@Chet:
That’s the OSC I’ve heard exists today, also here, not the one whose novels I grew up loving. Seriously, for an adolescent, nerdy and thoughtful, the first series of Ender Wiggin books were a revelation to me. How sad that they rot in my bookshelves, (Xenocide being an autographed copy!) almost surely never to be re-read again because of the author’s bigotry and real world small-mindedness.
Gin & Tonic
@JWL: Thank you for that. As someone who came of age politically on hatred of Nixon, this from the good doctor was refreshing.
newhavenguy
I’m in. That Dave Neiwert guy just reminded me of Brisenia Flores and the racist scumbags who murdered her and her father.
Seems off topic, but…no. Sadly, this is the Nixonland we live in. (Spoiler alert!) Nixon pioneered the mass-marketing of resentment, fear and hate in American politics. Palin is pretty much Nixon with half the IQ (?Insulting to the Trickster?)
frosty
@Southern Beale: Sunday’s assignment is Preface and chapters 1 and 2. Took me about an hour. It’ll take me twice that long again to find the passage that gave me Brilliant Insights into the Politics of Today.
Gee, I hope there aren’t any brainiacs reading ahead for extra credit …
newhavenguy
Flawed dude, was HST, but he understood Nixon.
“The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes… understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.”
-Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (If it were 1986, I’d suggest that as the next book group project.)
Tears came to my eyes reading that, and I never knew the guy. And was one year old when the Trickster smashed McGovern. Hunter was right; I can only hope we have a chance to claw enough of it back from these bastards before they loot and burn it all.
Linnaeus
Got my copy from the library just in time.
Linnaeus
And I don’t care how good Ender’s Game is. Won’t read any Orson Scott Card.
Chad N Freude
@frosty: Do you mean
?
TOP123
@freelancer: FARC, indeed!
To all: I apologize if this question has already been addressed, but I wanted to track down an answer ASAP before buying the book to cram for Sunday afternoon; is there an account or link we should buy through on Amazon, etc., which will help BJ or associated charities in any way?
Chad N Freude
@Rick Perlstein: I think your book is excellent, and I feel wow-I’m sitting-at-the-cool-kids-table to be talking about it on the same blog that you are.
Chad N Freude
@TOP123: Scroll down the left-hand column of ad stuff. The Amazon for BJ link is there.
frosty
@Chad N Freude: Yes, that’s part of it, but more, it’s how the typical Democratic/liberal response to that failed, and has been failing for 40 years now.
I’m thinking of that Einstein quote now on repeating activities that failed and expecting a different outcome.
Now I gotta back away from the computer and find that paragraph.
Chad N Freude
@MikeJ: He may not be a moron, but he’s a Mormon.
ETA: He’s the smiling mustachioed guy peering to the right.
TOP123
@Chad N Freude: Thank you for the prompt response… and now to catch up on the assignment!
Zelma
I have Nixonland sitting on my bookshelf unread. My son gave it to me and said I just had to read it, so I started. And I couldn’t get beyond the first chapter or so. Not because the book is uninteresting or inaccurate but because I lived in that land for most of my adult life and because, to some extent, I and all Americans still live in that land.
As I read the Preface and the first chapter, I could see foreshadowed all the pain, all the suffering, all the hatred, all the divisions, all the mean-spiritedness, all the death that followed. I couldn’t bear the thought of traveling that road again, however well Perlstein mapped it out.
I do not usually shy away from the harsh facts of life. After all, I spent my life teaching history and one can’t do that without facing the reality of human perfidy, cruelty and selfishness. But one can usually find contrasting examples of human generosity and heroism that leave one with at least a glimmer of hope.
But the career and impact of Richard Nixon offers no such glimmers. He appealed consciously and continuously to the worst in human nature, always for his own power and gain. Hunter Thompson’s obituary is too kind.
I shall be interested in reading all of your comments as you read the book. I believe it will be a revelation to those of you who did not live through those times, who do not fully understand how we lost the promise of the early 1960s that we could and should become that vaunted “more perfect union.”
But I won’t be reading along with you. I don’t need to. I lived in “Nixonland.”
freelancer
This is the link to the sidebar link. aka WhatChad N Freude said.
Chad N Freude
@Zelma: I lived through it too, and I find Perlstein’s narrative enlightening. You really should read the second chapter about Nixon’s college days.
TOP123
@Zelma: Actually, your comment makes me even more interested in reading the book, and excited (if that’s the word) for this discussion. I was born 37 days before Nixon’s resignation took effect, so I don’t have those memories. To me, Nixon was a symbol–a crooked lying bastard who wormed his way to the Oval Office and filled it with a lot of blood.
I am very curious to get a closer look, with people who do remember, at Nixon, and to try to see him better in relation to some of his successors. Particularly, I remember a conversation I had several years back with my father (b. 1947, most definitely not a Republican) in which I suggested that GWB was turning out to be as bad as Nixon, and he responded, oh, much worse–Nixon actually did some good things (China, EPA, etc.). All the same, though, Nixon seems to have a special place of loathing amongst those who lived through his time. I look forward, I guess, to learning why.
Jager
@trixie larue:
Trixie, didn’t I meet you in a bar in San Francisco, bottle blonde, beret at a jaunty angle and a pump dangling from the toes of a fishnet clad leg? Baby, where you been?
Jager
Sorry Trixie, the babe I was thinking of was Trixie LaBush, damn could she french inhale!
Turgidson
@TOP123:
My thoughts, having read Nixonland and some other stuff, but not having lived through it, are something like this:
I think Nixon, the man, was probably a worse scoundrel than GWB. They’re both reprehensible scum, but I think GWB at least occasionally thought some of the horrible things he did were actually for the good of the nation.
Nixon didn’t give two shits about that. He just happened to be president during a very ideologically different time and did some decent things out of a thirst for affirmation, approval, and consolidation of more power. If he’d risen to power in 2000 instead of GWB, he might have been even worse – because he would have learned the trade in the Reagan era. And likewise, GWB as president in the late 60s-early 70s would have probably steered a more moderate course than he did as 00-08 prez and just been a massive tool.
But that’s just a guess.
Anne Laurie
@efgoldman: Spam filter no like the word poker. Which you didn’t use, but the Perlstein you quoted did, and it’s a very dumb stupid FYWP spam filter, as we all have cause to know to our sorrow.
Turgidson
@efgoldman:
That’s probably a more accurate way of saying it – I guess I’d refine my thoughts to say that Nixon cared about the country in some way, but somehow always reconciled that feeling with whatever was in his immediate interests. To an extent that made him a sociopath. But you’re right, it’s overly simplistic to say he “didn’t give a shit.” Nixon was far more complicated than that. On balance, wretched scum, though.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@Turgidson: I would say precisely the opposite– Nixon was a lying son-of-a-bitch; a scoundrel of the very first water– but when he was President, he actually did try to govern. He instituted policies that todays republicans would have him pilloried for (wage and price controls? SOCKULISM!!!); as someone else mentioned, he created the EPA and he also opened China (so to some extent the multi-million dollar deal I negotiated last year is thanks to him? OMG.)
GWB did not give a shit beyond winning the white house. One can never doubt Nixon’s “work-ethic,” that son-of-a-bitch worked his ass off constantly; GWB was on constant vacation and when he wasn’t he worked what, 6 hour days? 5?
Reading Nixonland has opened my eyes to one thing– Nixon himself was only a catalyst– the neo-Confederate sense of grievance was out there and just waiting to be tapped. Nixon was just the evil genius who figured out how.
WereBear
One thing I took away from Nixonland: I loathed Nixon even more.
Never got a chance to vote for or against him; except in sixth grade, where me and the other intellectual kid where the only ones who voted for McGovern; I didn’t know much about the issues at the time, but I took one look at that face and experienced a visceral fear and disgust.
I must say I didn’t know just how bad he was; and my opinion was never high to begin with.
dziliak
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko:
The ‘Nixon was a catalyst’ thing was my largest takeaway as well.
IMHO, tricky dick was a deeply flawed President who had the potential to be so much greater than he actually was.
JenJen
Really excited to start the discussion tomorrow! This is the first Book Club thingie I’ve ever joined, and I can’t think of a better book to discuss, analyze and share.
Judas Escargot
Bought it for Kindle over a week ago, then got distracted by my meatspace job. I’d better start reading.
(Posting this to both change my handle back… and to get some mobile-site cookies.)
Origuy
My mother was a life-long member of the Indiana Republican Party; for a long time she worked a patronage job at the highway department. She told me once that she voted for McGovern because she hated Nixon. I don’t know about my dad, who is still a Republican as far as I know, but I know they voted for LBJ because of Goldwater.
Turgidson
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko:
And I think Nixon’s achievements in that regard can be attributed not to any high-minded sense of duty to govern, but from a need to boost his approval ratings and burnish his reelection credentials/legacy. Which, to some extent of course, if true of all politicians. But with Nixon, I think that was almost his sole motivation.
He did take being president more seriously than Bush in that he did work his ass off and he was a very smart guy. But I don’t think he exerted his energy towards any benevolent purpose – he just happened to do some sensible things because the ideological times pushed him that way. If he’d been president post-Reagan, he would have been a hard-right terror as bad or worse than GWB, I suspect.