Presidential library

Latest stack of Nixon books re-examines a dark legacy

REVIEWS BY EDWARD MORRIS

Americans may soon know more about Richard Nixon's personality and escapades than they do about Paris Hilton's. At least, Americans who read will. Books on the disgraced but unsinkable 37th president just keep on coming. Recently, Margaret MacMillan examined Nixon's most fruitful political achievement in Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World. Nixon also figures prominently, albeit without star billing, in Jim Newton's Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made. The four new books here continue the presidential probing, buttressed by a wealth of White House tapes, insider diaries and eyewitness accounts.

Elizabeth Drew's Richard M. Nixon, part of Times Books' American Presidents series, offers the widest view of his administration. Drew covered Nixon for the New Yorker while he was still in office and thus brings a reporter's summarizing directness to her account. Although she acknowledges Nixon's intelligence, doggedness and occasional successes, she ultimately concludes that his personality made him unfit to lead the country.


Two of the president's men

Like Nixon, Henry Kissinger—who began as the president's national security adviser and then moved on to become his secretary of state—achieved political power by a combination of raw intelligence, towering ambition and unremitting guile. And, just as with Nixon, it was never quite clear when Kissinger was animated by political conviction and when by quirks of personality. It is no wonder, then, that these two titanic egos would be drawn to each other, even as each railed against the other's perceived deficiencies. This condition of mutual dependence—and its effect on national policy—is what Robert Dallek examines in Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power.

Dallek sets the stage by noting that Kissinger acted as a double agent in the months leading up to the 1968 election that brought Nixon to power. Then identified politically with his patron, Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger tapped into his Democratic sources to feed information to the Nixon camp. At the same time, he kept his distance from Nixon in case Hubert Humphrey won the election and had a proper place for him. While Kissinger was never particularly skilled or careful in concealing his duplicity, Nixon nonetheless chose him as his diplomatic right hand and de facto confessor. Dallek traces the dynamics of this odd duo through such sticky issues as the failing war in Vietnam (in spite of vows to end the war, Nixon committed more than 20,000 additional troops to the doomed cause and spread the conflict into Cambodia and Laos), the CIA overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, continuing troubles in the Middle East, the arms race with Russia, the opening of China and, finally, the debacle of Watergate.


Serious though his subject is, Jules Witcover's account in Very Strange Bedfellows of Nixon's relationship with Spiro Agnew, his first vice president, is riotously funny and revealing. As governor of Maryland, Agnew initially supported Rockefeller to be the Republican standard bearer in the 1968 election. When Rockefeller demurred, Agnew switched his enthusiasm to Nixon, who then, as a last resort, tapped Agnew for vice president. Since Nixon had felt neglected as Dwight Eisenhower's vice president, he was determined to assign Agnew serious political responsibilities and treat him with respect. However, since he had no affection for the man, he went out of his way to avoid personal contact with him, even after Agnew became a conservative "star" via his colorful denunciations of the media (always a Nixon whipping boy) and war protesters. To complicate matters, Nixon developed something like an adolescent "crush" on former Texas governor John Connally and decided he would make a better vice president if somehow Agnew could be shunted aside.

One ploy Nixon considered as a way of dislodging Agnew from office was to appoint him to the Supreme Court. This notion arose after the Senate had rejected two of the president's nominees. Whether Nixon ever broached the subject directly with Agnew is unclear, but he did discuss it at length with his closest advisors before finally moving on to other schemes. It is obvious from the transcripts Witcover cites of those discussions that Nixon cared little about Agnew's legal qualifications—which were minimal—or about his political philosophy and the impact it could have on the court. He just wanted him out. Thus, much of the talk centered on how the Senate and the press might react. Not well, they soon decided.

The conversations Nixon had with his chief of staff, H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, about what to do with Agnew are more comic to read than a script for "Saturday Night Live." Discussing an international junket on which Agnew mostly played golf—an activity that left little for his press entourage to report on—Haldeman said to Nixon, "Hell, on the way to the golf course, he could stop at an orphanage and pat a couple of kids on the head and the press gets a picture and a little quote about how he says it's too bad these kids are orphans, and he could go on and play golf... [I]t's so easy." Circumstances eventually solved Nixon's vice presidential problem. After being charged with taking kickbacks, Agnew reluctantly resigned. Ten months later, Nixon was out, too.


Ready for prime time

Three years after his resignation, Nixon negotiated a large fee to do a series of interviews with British TV personality David Frost. In preparing for the encounter, Frost hired a team of researchers to supply him questions and background facts. One of that team was James Reston Jr. He chronicles the event in The Conviction of Richard Nixon. The "conviction," of course, arose from Nixon's confessions about his complicity in Watergate. (These interviews are the source for the current Broadway play, Frost/Nixon, and also for a movie that's due out next year.) By 1977, though, the world was basically beating a dead horse. Not being in power, Nixon no longer posed a danger to the republic. But Reston asserts in his foreword that there are frightening parallels between what Nixon and his minions did to undermine the Constitution and international law and what's happening in the current administration. Nixon's dark legacy, he concludes, lives on.


Edward Morris feeds his fascination with all things Nixon from Nashville.

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