THE INVINCIBLE QUEST
The Life of Richard Milhous Nixon
By Conrad Black
McClelland & Stewart,
1,152 pages, $45
Everyone loved and pampered little Arthur, the baby of the family - especially his older brother Richard, who was also a distant and solitary child. Then, in the summer of 1925, Arthur fell ill and the doctors could do nothing. When he died that August, the adoring brother at first sat staring into space, silent and dry-eyed, holding his agony from the world, though for weeks afterward, alone in his bed at night, he cried himself to sleep.
Thus the 12-year-old Richard Nixon sinking into himself - as he would again a few years later at the death of another brother - into some impenetrable inner place of despair yet dauntlessness. In a sense, the Unites States' 37th and arguably most controversial president would always be there.
He was, and remains, a fascinating, endlessly elusive paradox of modern politics. Quintessential middle-class American, yet an enduring puzzle, constant national presence for a half-century, yet ever a stranger, typical yet exotic, his gifts and greatness never free of abuse and vulgarity, no president so embodied and represented his moment, and none has been more gladly disowned. Even now, when even his mixed record might evoke nostalgia in a Washington where administrations can always be worse, he occupies a kind of historical purgatory - posterity not quite sure what it could or should make of this brooding ghost.
It all makes this laudable book exceptionally important and timely. Like the story, of course, the volume is massive, but an essential journey. As he did with Franklin Roosevelt, Conrad Black tells it with an old-fashioned sweep, confidence and unabashed simplicity that postmodern biographers rarely attempt or manage. Empathetic while clinical, alert to telling detail and unafraid of generality, he leaves us a Nixon we may still largely judge for ourselves, now on the basis of the richer, fuller perspective this work gives us.
The very length and scope of the chronicle charted Black's limits. He had scant time for the extraordinary colour of the early-20th-century Los Angeles basin or the larger California that defined so much of Nixon's persona and politics, and throughout the book there is a relative, sometimes nagging absence of direct testimony from the cloud of eyewitnesses who watched the saga unfold. But even what seems at times presumptuous narrative summary sacrifices little of the essence, and Black captures with a kind of terse brilliance a genuine feeling for the boy, man and place.
Pedants and special pleaders - and the Nixon bibliography has already had more than its share of both - may gasp at this express ride, but it makes all the stops, however brief the layovers or cursory the station scenes. Black's own Tory biases, like his command and self-assurance, are hardly hidden. Still, he is admirably even-handed in a record infamous for partisanship in the act and then the history.
For Nixon's seminal 1946 congressional campaign, for instance, there is an unsparing portrait of Nixon's sleazy manager Murray Chotiner ("whom Pat [Nixon]despised as an evil little hack"), and of Nixon's own excesses, as well as of the earnest but "complacent" and "bumbling" Democratic opponent, Jerry Voorhis. Black goes on to handle with some mastery the ceaseless complexities of the Alger Hiss case, and then Nixon's machinations to gain the 1952 Republican vice-presidential nomination - what the author calls aptly "one of the cameo masterpieces of manoeuvre of American political history."
The book is at its best, as it should be, in Nixon's recurrent crises, beginning with the now long-forgotten but still resonant 1952 scandal of a secret campaign fund. Like so much else with this remarkable politician, it was a foreshadow of a darker future when the power of wealth and special interest would rule U.S. politics far more completely. In the flood of Nixon literature, Black's may well be the best highlight account thus far of Nixon's eight years as Dwight Eisenhower's vice-president, his dramatic lost-but-won 1960 presidential run against a vote-stealing John F. Kennedy, and then his historic comeback over the 1960s to gain the Oval Office at last in 1968 - all of it shaping the history yet to come.
Yet, it is the second half of the volume that is the real payoff: a fast-paced, wide-ranging account of the Nixon presidency that compares favourably to any earlier renditions. No doubt drawing on his own experiences and boardroom politics, Black is adept at portraying the cast of characters (some of whom he knows well), as in the richly symbolic, grand and seedy relationship between Nixon and Henry Kissinger - for all their unrecognized differences of personality, Nixon the brooding intellectual, Kissinger the tireless self-promoting politician, "both men [were]devious outsiders, overwhelmingly ambitious, excessively suspicious, and always inclined to fear the worst, mistrust everyone, and impute low motives to virtually everybody."
Again, the tale often wants more eyewitness description rather than Black's condensed version, but the fault is more than compensated for in the breadth of the diplomatic history and the telling reminders of Nixon's domestic as well as foreign-policy achievements: from a healthy devolution and decentralizing of government to significant progress in desegregation, and the first premonitory stirrings of campaign finance reform, universal health care and energy self-sufficiency that will make Nixon a spiritual godfather of the steps the United States must now take decades after he left office.
Not least, Black threads as well the endless maze of Watergate, where historians still wander, and with one otherwise neglected quote from the infamous Nixon tapes, reminds us eloquently what misrule was, and is, all about. It is July 1, 1971, and Nixon is haranguing his chief of staff Bob Haldeman: "I want you to find me a man by noon ... who will work with me on this whole situation. ... I mean, I can't have a high-minded lawyer like John Ehrlichman or [John]Dean. ... I want a son of a bitch who's just as tough as I am, for a change. ... Shake 'em up and get them off their God-damn asses. ... we're up against an enemy, a conspiracy using any means. We are going to use any means. Is that clear? Did they get [break into and fire bomb]the Brookings Institution last night. ... Get it done. I want it done ... I want the Brookings safe cleaned out, and have it cleaned out in such a way that it makes it look like somebody else did it."
The Invincible Quest climaxes with just that in Nixon's inexhaustible effort at rehabilitation over the past 20 years of his life following his historic 1974 resignation, beginning with his candid, confessional, but triumphantly political, interviews with David Frost in 1977. In a sense, it is these last few pages of a long book that make most of it worth the candle.
Black understands, of course, that for better and worse, Richard Nixon is a maker of our world. In policies, politics and people, we live with Nixon's United States, and will for perhaps decades to come. And though this largely celebratory book does not convey it, there is in the end an ineffable sadness about what was lost over the long twisting trail of the story it tells. For the struggling republic of Richard Nixon's youth has been transformed into a tawdry 21st-century oligarchy the world now justifiably fears as much as it once envied. It may not be an America that Nixon planned or hoped for, but it is certainly in part his legacy - and there is much evidence to suggest that its lethal folly at home and abroad, like Nixon's own decline and fall, may also prove invincible.
Roger Morris, who served on the senior staff of the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, is the author of the National Book Award Silver-medal winning Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician. His new book, Shadows of the Eagle, will be published soon.
Related Reading
NIXON AND KISSINGER
Partners in Power
By Robert Dallek, HarperCollins
740 pages, $41
Following his distinguished biography of JFK, Dallek turns his attention to the ever-fascinating partnership of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.