Mark Feeney, author of the lively and entertaining 'Nixon At The Movies', focused his remarks on the 'phrase-mongering' aspects of the four books [NOTE: Feeney praised the subtitle used by Richard Reeves, 'Alone In The White House', which Reeves used for his valuable record of the Nixon presidency. It is perhaps relevant to note that a closely related title ('One Man Alone') was used by Ralph de Toledano for his Nixon biography about 3 decades earlier (1969), in the year Nixon first assumed the presidency]. Feeney chose to provide little perspective about the contents or novelty of the four books, and I thought it might be useful if I did so, at least for the two I have read. Because I haven't yet read Witcover's 'Very Strange Bedfellows ...', I can only anticipate that, if it is of the same high quality as Witcover's earlier books about Nixon ('The Resurrection Of Richard Nixon') and Agnew ('A Heartbeat Away ...'), it will likely be an informative and highly entertaining 'read'. Likewise, I have not read Elizabeth Drew's 'Richard M. Nixon'; however, in this instance, it seems fitting that Ms. Drew's book appears in a series that was once edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. whose pathological views of Nixon are legendary and whose lifelong inability to comprehend the very meaning of 'historical writing' was recently memorialized in a searing (and accurate) obituary in the Manchester Guardian, where Arthur might have expected to be treated more kindly. In brief, I'll take a pass on any of Ms. Drew's 'work product'. Rightly, Feeney mocks Drew's ludicrous quasi-analogy between the 1974 House Judiciary Committee & The Founding Fathers [see Jerry Zeifman's 'Without Honour' for a close-up of the scabrous bunch that comprised the HJC].
However, I have read the other two books, and it is a pleasure to volunteer an opinion on each. The Dallek book is fatally flawed because the author fails to address the context in which the Nixon presidency began, with the Soviet Union having reached nuclear parity with the U.S., with U.S. power in general decline as a result of the Vietnam conflict, and with the nation in the thralls of what Patrick Moynihan memorably described as a "Second U.S. Civil War.". Of more than passing interest in the context of this assessment, Black, in his book, deals with the very same matter in an incisive way, remarking in passing, as few others have, that the preceding Democratic (Johnson) administration had allowed parity to be reached without public discussion or apparent well-ordered contingency planning of any recognizable kind -- of the sort that Nixon brought to the presidency in 1968. Further, because of his enslavement to the modern conceit that personal relations between/among the principals in historic events are more important than their doctrinal agreements, Dallek fails to recognize that the Nixon Doctrine and its unwritten corollary -- that many states don't, at a given time, have the traditions and institutions to make democracy work -- were to produce Nixon's 'generation of peace', a highlight of his 1972 State Of the Union address. Between the Vietnam Peace Treaty (1973) and the Bush adminstration's invasion of Iraq (2003), a full generation (30 years) of Americans grew to maturity as the U.S. enjoyed its longest respite from high-casualty warfare in the 20th century.
On the other hand, Black's book is a genuine novelty and a delight to read. Black combines an arch style of commentary -- of the sort used by onetime 'Nixon hater', Stephen Ambrose, in his admirable trilogy of Nixon biography -- with an objective and often admiring respect for the historic importance of Nixon's achievements. Notwithstanding Feeney's remark in his review, that "Eisenhower...elevated [Nixon]", it was, in another sense, 'Nixon who elevated Eisenhower' by skillfully finessing Earl Warren and Robert Taft at the 1952 GOP convention, a saga Black relates in gripping fashion, as being a masterpiece of the political arts and sciences. Appropriately, Feeney makes fun of some of Black's gratuitous expositional fluorishes, but Black's textual adornments give him a 'voice' [as Feeney notes, "a man who is on a first-name basis with the Deity"] that does nothing to disturb the 'feng shui' of his narrative. On the contrary, these fluorishes afford a distinct style and a solid measure of amusement. There have been other 'friendly' Nixonographers during Nixon's post-presidency (e.g. Jonathan Aitken, Lord Longford, Ray Price), but none of the others has been as comprehensive and specific as Black in dealing with Nixon's likely place in history. Notwithstanding the spinning sound that emanates from the tomb of Arthur M. Schlessinger, Jr., Black cogently ranks Nixon with the great U.S. presidents. Black concludes that Nixon "ranks in that category of unusually talented presidents who are just beneath the very greatest American leaders [Washington, Lincoln and FDR, with some argument to be made for Jefferson and Reagan] with Jackson, Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Truman and possibly Eisenhower."
With due allowance for the influence Nixon had on the elevation of two of the other worthies in this array (Eisenhower, Reagan) to the presidency, it occurs to a reader, after reading Black's book, that there is a good case to be made for including Nixon among the very greatest American leaders. For example, if there is any criticism to be made of Black's absorbing narrative, it is likely that, after making a very strong case for Nixon's role in engineering and contributing to a successful and relatively serene Eisenhower presidency, Black falls shy in making what might be a forceful case for Nixon's role in contributing to the successful Reagan presidency. To begin, it was during Nixon's senatorial run in 1950 that Reagan chose to abandon his support for the candidacy of Democrat Helen Gehagen Douglas and to campaign for Nixon while Reagan was still a registered Democrat. Later, in 1980, Nixon's best-selling book, 'The Real War', published well in advance of the presidential election, focused public attention on Carter's failings in foreign policy, 'storyboarded' Reagan's first-term arms buildup and provided much of the fodder used by Reagan's speechwriters in his first term (e.g., in 'The Real War' Nixon described the difference between the US and the USSR as the difference between good and evil). The "well-thumbed" (Richard Reeves) 'position paper' Nixon gave Reagan, and Nixon's timely intervention with Gorbachev, were arguably formative events in 'storyboarding' Reagan's second term, as 'the Gipper' retreated from the truculence of his first term rhetoric to the pathway of detente, by greatly extending (with INF etc.) Nixon's own seminal arms-limitation agreements of 1972 (SALT I).
Black brings a wealth of historic knowledge about military campaigning to the table and deploys it to unravel, insofar as possible, the intricacies and deceits of political campaigning, as in the case of the Mme. Chennault component of the 1968 presidential campaign, in which LBJ ordered the FBI to 'wiretap' Agnew, in an action that exceeds the subterfuge of 'Watergate' in the sense that Nixon had no foreknowledge of the 'Watergate' bugging whereas LBJ personally ordered the FBI to bug the vice-presidential candidate of the opposing party in mid-campaign. One thing seems beyond dispute: with the passing from the scene of the ageing 'engineers' of what the NY Observer's own Nicholas Von Hoffman once appropriately called a period of "hysterical contagion" in U.S. society, 'Watergate' has become nothing but a footnote to the Nixon presidency. To his everlasting credit, by 1976, Von Hoffman -- who was once fired by CBS-TV (from Sixty Minutes) in 1973 for having called Nixon "The dead rat/mouse on America's kitchen floor" -- realized and categorically stated in the Washington Post, the hallowed home of Woodward & Bernstein, that "Future historians will make short work of the idea of a diabolic Nixon and will, instead, interest themselves in how and why virtually a whole society lost the remnants of balanced judgement and fell on the man like a compacted mob .... These past three years Nixon has had a worse press than Stalin at the height of the Cold War. The only name for it is hysterical contagion .... To the very end, Nixon contended that he conducted the office in much the same fashion as his predecessors, and he was right."
Black is one of the "future historians" Von Hoffman was writing about in 1976.
Each time I see 'All The President's Men' listed in the TV summaries, I'm reminded of the apoplectic look on Ben Bradlee's face as 'Deep Throat' (W. Mark Felt) told Larry King's national and international viewers on April 26th, 2006, that he, Deep Throat, thought Nixon had done a good job as president.
Mark Feeney, author of the lively and entertaining 'Nixon At The Movies', focused his remarks on the 'phrase-mongering' aspects of the four books [NOTE: Feeney praised the subtitle used by Richard Reeves, 'Alone In The White House', which Reeves used for his valuable record of the Nixon presidency. It is perhaps relevant to note that a closely related title ('One Man Alone') was used by Ralph de Toledano for his Nixon biography about 3 decades earlier (1969), in the year Nixon first assumed the presidency]. Feeney chose to provide little perspective about the contents or novelty of the four books, and I thought it might be useful if I did so, at least for the two I have read. Because I haven't yet read Witcover's 'Very Strange Bedfellows ...', I can only anticipate that, if it is of the same high quality as Witcover's earlier books about Nixon ('The Resurrection Of Richard Nixon') and Agnew ('A Heartbeat Away ...'), it will likely be an informative and highly entertaining 'read'. Likewise, I have not read Elizabeth Drew's 'Richard M. Nixon'; however, in this instance, it seems fitting that Ms. Drew's book appears in a series that was once edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. whose pathological views of Nixon are legendary and whose lifelong inability to comprehend the very meaning of 'historical writing' was recently memorialized in a searing (and accurate) obituary in the Manchester Guardian, where Arthur might have expected to be treated more kindly. In brief, I'll take a pass on any of Ms. Drew's 'work product'. Rightly, Feeney mocks Drew's ludicrous quasi-analogy between the 1974 House Judiciary Committee & The Founding Fathers [see Jerry Zeifman's 'Without Honour' for a close-up of the scabrous bunch that comprised the HJC].
However, I have read the other two books, and it is a pleasure to volunteer an opinion on each. The Dallek book is fatally flawed because the author fails to address the context in which the Nixon presidency began, with the Soviet Union having reached nuclear parity with the U.S., with U.S. power in general decline as a result of the Vietnam conflict, and with the nation in the thralls of what Patrick Moynihan memorably described as a "Second U.S. Civil War.". Of more than passing interest in the context of this assessment, Black, in his book, deals with the very same matter in an incisive way, remarking in passing, as few others have, that the preceding Democratic (Johnson) administration had allowed parity to be reached without public discussion or apparent well-ordered contingency planning of any recognizable kind -- of the sort that Nixon brought to the presidency in 1968. Further, because of his enslavement to the modern conceit that personal relations between/among the principals in historic events are more important than their doctrinal agreements, Dallek fails to recognize that the Nixon Doctrine and its unwritten corollary -- that many states don't, at a given time, have the traditions and institutions to make democracy work -- were to produce Nixon's 'generation of peace', a highlight of his 1972 State Of the Union address. Between the Vietnam Peace Treaty (1973) and the Bush adminstration's invasion of Iraq (2003), a full generation (30 years) of Americans grew to maturity as the U.S. enjoyed its longest respite from high-casualty warfare in the 20th century.
On the other hand, Black's book is a genuine novelty and a delight to read. Black combines an arch style of commentary -- of the sort used by onetime 'Nixon hater', Stephen Ambrose, in his admirable trilogy of Nixon biography -- with an objective and often admiring respect for the historic importance of Nixon's achievements. Notwithstanding Feeney's remark in his review, that "Eisenhower...elevated [Nixon]", it was, in another sense, 'Nixon who elevated Eisenhower' by skillfully finessing Earl Warren and Robert Taft at the 1952 GOP convention, a saga Black relates in gripping fashion, as being a masterpiece of the political arts and sciences. Appropriately, Feeney makes fun of some of Black's gratuitous expositional fluorishes, but Black's textual adornments give him a 'voice' [as Feeney notes, "a man who is on a first-name basis with the Deity"] that does nothing to disturb the 'feng shui' of his narrative. On the contrary, these fluorishes afford a distinct style and a solid measure of amusement. There have been other 'friendly' Nixonographers during Nixon's post-presidency (e.g. Jonathan Aitken, Lord Longford, Ray Price), but none of the others has been as comprehensive and specific as Black in dealing with Nixon's likely place in history. Notwithstanding the spinning sound that emanates from the tomb of Arthur M. Schlessinger, Jr., Black cogently ranks Nixon with the great U.S. presidents. Black concludes that Nixon "ranks in that category of unusually talented presidents who are just beneath the very greatest American leaders [Washington, Lincoln and FDR, with some argument to be made for Jefferson and Reagan] with Jackson, Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Truman and possibly Eisenhower."
With due allowance for the influence Nixon had on the elevation of two of the other worthies in this array (Eisenhower, Reagan) to the presidency, it occurs to a reader, after reading Black's book, that there is a good case to be made for including Nixon among the very greatest American leaders. For example, if there is any criticism to be made of Black's absorbing narrative, it is likely that, after making a very strong case for Nixon's role in engineering and contributing to a successful and relatively serene Eisenhower presidency, Black falls shy in making what might be a forceful case for Nixon's role in contributing to the successful Reagan presidency. To begin, it was during Nixon's senatorial run in 1950 that Reagan chose to abandon his support for the candidacy of Democrat Helen Gehagen Douglas and to campaign for Nixon while Reagan was still a registered Democrat. Later, in 1980, Nixon's best-selling book, 'The Real War', published well in advance of the presidential election, focused public attention on Carter's failings in foreign policy, 'storyboarded' Reagan's first-term arms buildup and provided much of the fodder used by Reagan's speechwriters in his first term (e.g., in 'The Real War' Nixon described the difference between the US and the USSR as the difference between good and evil). The "well-thumbed" (Richard Reeves) 'position paper' Nixon gave Reagan, and Nixon's timely intervention with Gorbachev, were arguably formative events in 'storyboarding' Reagan's second term, as 'the Gipper' retreated from the truculence of his first term rhetoric to the pathway of detente, by greatly extending (with INF etc.) Nixon's own seminal arms-limitation agreements of 1972 (SALT I).
Black brings a wealth of historic knowledge about military campaigning to the table and deploys it to unravel, insofar as possible, the intricacies and deceits of political campaigning, as in the case of the Mme. Chennault component of the 1968 presidential campaign, in which LBJ ordered the FBI to 'wiretap' Agnew, in an action that exceeds the subterfuge of 'Watergate' in the sense that Nixon had no foreknowledge of the 'Watergate' bugging whereas LBJ personally ordered the FBI to bug the vice-presidential candidate of the opposing party in mid-campaign. One thing seems beyond dispute: with the passing from the scene of the ageing 'engineers' of what the NY Observer's own Nicholas Von Hoffman once appropriately called a period of "hysterical contagion" in U.S. society, 'Watergate' has become nothing but a footnote to the Nixon presidency. To his everlasting credit, by 1976, Von Hoffman -- who was once fired by CBS-TV (from Sixty Minutes) in 1973 for having called Nixon "The dead rat/mouse on America's kitchen floor" -- realized and categorically stated in the Washington Post, the hallowed home of Woodward & Bernstein, that "Future historians will make short work of the idea of a diabolic Nixon and will, instead, interest themselves in how and why virtually a whole society lost the remnants of balanced judgement and fell on the man like a compacted mob .... These past three years Nixon has had a worse press than Stalin at the height of the Cold War. The only name for it is hysterical contagion .... To the very end, Nixon contended that he conducted the office in much the same fashion as his predecessors, and he was right."
Black is one of the "future historians" Von Hoffman was writing about in 1976.
Each time I see 'All The President's Men' listed in the TV summaries, I'm reminded of the apoplectic look on Ben Bradlee's face as 'Deep Throat' (W. Mark Felt) told Larry King's national and international viewers on April 26th, 2006, that he, Deep Throat, thought Nixon had done a good job as president.