Nixon's enemies Book

Originally assigned by Esquire magazine to cover the late stages of the 1968 presidential election from the vantage point of the Nixon campaign, featuring that political warhorse and his energetic team of legal associates and young fireballers, Garry Wills—under the prodding of his editor—turned a ruminative essay upon Tricky Dick into six hundred pages of analysis, diagnosis, deduction, induction, and reflection upon the state of the American national soul at the closing-out point of that tumultuous decade. It's an absolutely remarkable performance—character portraits of the primary players involved in the party nominating conventions and electoral races of the fifties and sixties, the period in which Nixon pursued the political career that seemingly brought him so much in the way of humiliation, anguish, devastation, and setback as compared to the fleeting joys and ephemeral exposures to power and influence, are offered up for dual exposure: that of the personalities involved and how they participated in what ofttimes appeared to be an unseemly charade, and that of their connexion to an American ethos that was deemed to be splintering at the seams and in danger of falling apart. Through it all Wills offers up his assessment of that ethos as part of the market structure that permeated the entirety of the classical liberal edifice that upheld and enclosed the country during its comparatively brief but burgeoning lifespan—markets in the moral, economic, intellectual, and political spheres that had long been working their contradiction-laden memes upon the process such that the election of Nixon could be viewed as the apotheosis of a system that, having thus achieved its ebb tide endpoint, was in desperate need of an injection of reform and restructuring. Astoundingly good by every measure: content, form, wit, depth, style, persuasiveness, coherence—and one of those tomes which, in my estimation, deserves to be read by as broad a segment of the American public as possible, in order that they might ingest the counter-intuitive, thought-provoking, and enduringly relevant themes worked out, at length, by the author, and (re)assess how the country has come to take on its disturbingly, nigh despairingly pretzel-like form in the early stages of the twenty-first century.

I had originally intended to make this book the followup to Rick Perlstein's Nixonland , based upon GRer AC's accurate positioning of the former as a superior tome to the latter, and hence better serving as a depth-provisioner to Perlstein's more broadly-based cultural-historical effort; and it is indeed the case the Wills paints a much more effective and detailed portrait of Nixon, an introvert in an extrovert's occupation enduring the loneliness of the long distance runner. It is also the case that Wills' logically drawn determination of the causation of and correlation between the strains of resentment bubbling below the surface of late-sixties America—from all corners and comers—is endowed with an inductive rigor and tiered process of intellectualization that withstands probing scrutiny better than Perlstein's more casually constructed polemics; and notwithstanding the (acknowledged) debt that Perlstein has to Wills in how he crafted the historic chain of American political evolution, the latter—in his linkage from the Founding Fathers through to the pivotal political philosophy of Woodrow Wilson and the bifurcation of the classical liberal spirit in the wake of the Great Depression via the instantiation of the New Deal—proffers an original take that is simply the better thought-out, constructed, and elucidated of the two. It's a closer match as regards the entertainment value contained in each, but even here Wills compares favorably with Perlstein—indeed, the dry and ironical tone with which Wills picks apart the latent absurdities within events, actions, words spoken or written, opining advanced or relegated, that transpired during the course of the political campaigns and backgrounds that are given coverage within, is deftly and wittily done—the pages flew by, which wasn't always the case with Nixonland. Another interesting connexion was presented in the similarities that I found in analytic avenues and market-moire discernment between Nixon Agonistes and the latest publication from Walter Russell Mead, the lamentably underrated and under-read God and Gold . In especial, both of these tomes viewed the twentieth century growths of liberal capitalist democracies via the prisms of the morality inherent within the foundational philosophies that underlay the entirety, moralities that stressed not only the equality of the citizen contenders within the nationality, but, perhaps even more so, the cherished individuality of each and the spirit of striving on one's own—a striving fully underwritten by the protestant theology that served as religious spinal cord—which was the integral component of that personal freedom within a constituted community. While both acknowledged the contradictions that also inhered within, ofttimes unnoticed, it was that moral element which stood as the centerpiece from which the other market constituents—the political, the intellectual, the economic—were ultimately derived.

It is with this Moral Market that Wills opens the book, segueing from his Esquire essay into a determination, by means of Richard Nixon's political career, of the centrality of the self-made man as an archetype of the American citizen. This is an Emersonian self-reliance, in which past defeats, setbacks, suffering is all of a purpose in forging one's current individuated self. One neither can nor should rely upon assistance or aide from anything or anyone beyond the self—we must earn our place at the table-setting of success. The homily that Anyone can succeed is matched in fervor and integrality with that which states you cannot get something for nothing; in this way, one betters oneself through hard work, sacrifice, and copious amounts of sweat; the end result being the reward of being able to provide more and better opportunities for one's children, while contributing to the pool of self-made individuals that comprise the grand success that is the American experiment.

In Wills' determination, the mythological model of this self-reliance opening the doors to success via perduring struggle and determined effort is Horatio Alger; the existent one, none other than Richard Nixon, who exemplified the rags to riches theme that powered Alger's fictive works—and modest riches at that, at least as compared to today's standard of political remuneration for favors provided—in a way that resonated with the so-called Silent Majority, Americans who had committed to the Alger method whole-heartedly and were stunned to discover, in their children and the black minority, scorn and contempt for their work ethic wedded to a continuous demand for a larger share of the pie—a share that, in their estimation, could only come from an equally scornful and, worse, condescending Eastern elite taking that majority's hard earned money and doling it out, and in the process turning the truism of not getting something for nothing on its head. But Wills, in working through this Moral Market, concludes that it is, particularly in the twentieth century, a charade: nobody makes it on their own; indeed, that very Silent Majority had risen through inherent advantages and privileges, from governmental legislation and intervention, business favoring and protection, communal aide and support, exploitation of the disadvantaged and the underclass, and increasingly used it to hedge themselves off from any risk or challenge. The rage and resentment came as much from an understanding of this reality, one which, if admitted inside, would shatter the moral foundations that the myth of the earner required in order to perdure. Deeming themselves the heroes of the American dream, Wills portrays them as of a kin with Nixon: diminished, curdled, nursing grudges and resentments and perceived injuries, an oppressed majority held down by the very stringency of their striving ethos.

The Economic Market is delineated by means of a truly entertaining sequence of chapters focussing upon the Republican National Convention of 1968. As with its moral sibling, the economic market is one that encompasses a nation of earners ever in motion—running the race of competition, working, striving, seeking every advantage and taking advantage of every opportunity. As opposed to the Old World conflict between a landed aristocracy and wage-bound working class, the United States provided a dynamic, proclaimedly level playing field where every agent—an agent of the self, naturally—was in motion, sometimes being herded into a renewed and rejigged starting line so that a greater measure of equality might be injected into the race itself, but still powering forward under the propulsion achieved through one's efforts and willpower. But Wills shows a race with no end, merely a continuously unfolding track ever beckoning one on, unto exhaustion. In his calculation, the primary differences between the Left and Right in the United States, as versus that which had arisen in Europe, was that there was no vision of economic reform that deviated from this need for dynamic motion upon a competitive track. Attempts to craft some measure of stability to the platform, to achieve communal support and interdependence, was scorned as the gambits of the lazy or timid or unwilling; and this also meant that any work geared towards fostering such stabilities or alterations to the pattern of competitive striving was held in disregard as well. As the author saw it, there was little honor and even less coherence in such a frenzied pace of perpetual motion—no way to ever pause and take stock of where the country was at, what cracks were showing in the edifice, and what parts of this hollow, hying boast echoing forth from a mythological past might best be discarded or emended in order to address the current realities.

It is within the Intellectual Market of the academic world that Wills really gripped my attention and pulled me into the current of his reasoned thought. In the United States, academia displays the same adherence to Liberal ideals that permeates the markets moral and economic: the upholding of a free exchange of ideas, expressed via free speech and determined within a value-neutral environment in which the emergent champion will be that ideation which overcomes it challengers by means of its expressive rigor and logical strengths—a case of an invisible hand of the mind at work, self-regulating and advocating for the best of the mind's product. Yet Wills sees an intellectual system as riddled with contradictions and incoherencies as its siblings outlined above—for the American intellectual market abhors and refuses to countenance any beliefs or ideas that tend to the absolute, to a universality of truth, to systemic completeness, and hence pre-judges them as untenable ideologies. In this, the academic world acts as a judge upon the exchange of ideas, neutralizing any that will not admit to being value-free. What's more, the academic market is a propagator of an aristocratic mindset and a receiver of government funding that it uses in order to advance political agendas and furnish a continuous supply of minds designed for employment within the government and government-contracted industries, such as the massive military-industrial complex. But there is also conflict between the academic and political worlds, expressed through the former's adherence to freedom as a positive value, which leads to the exclusion of such as exclusionary religions or philosophies, and a tendency to bypass the production of an enlightened citizenry in order to directly gain the politician's ear. As Wills sees it, this lack of responsibility for its own failings and flaws was the primary impetus for the campus uprisings of the late sixties, which the universities attempted to counter with an even broader application of its contradictory Liberal mores. The academic market is blind to the fact that it has crafted an orthodoxy through its own preferential advocacy and lack of intellectual honesty—and hence that the ideals that it believes to have been determined to be the best by the invisible hand were done so through the firm guidance provided to that incorporeal extremity.

And the goods just keep on coming, as Wills saves his best for last. The analysis of the Political Market is just brilliantly executed, impossible to do any measure of justice without its entirety being ingested—but the key element is that from the Liberal devotion to the self-made man springs the same compulsion to champion the self-determination of nations, as a freely-elected government, preferably operating within the free enterprise system, serves as an enduringly effective check upon despotism whilst harnessing that same self-made striving through applied effort and will found in devolved form within the average citizen: witness the United States as Exhibit A. Unfortunately, such self-determination, a theme stridently promoted by Woodrow Wilson as part of the Fourteen Points he brought to the Peace Conference held in the aftermath of the Great War, presents a series of problematic barriers against its implementation. In a masterful deconstruction, Wills wends through the various elements that would comprise how a particular people might determine themselves as deserving of their own state of nationhood, highlighting the perennial problems inherent to the process: what is to be the conclusive factor? Language? Ethnicity? Religion? Numbers? Current mood? Former territorial status or partition? Historic state constitution? Furthermore, Wills works through the United States' history in dealing with self-determined nations effecting an (enforced) democratic system—Mexico under Wilson; Latin America under Eisenhower; Vietnam under Kennedy and Johnson—to show how the preference, from the point-of-view of the United States, or indeed any First World state, is for dealing with an authoritative personality through whom their wishes might readily be channeled and implemented; and, hence, that despots best serve the United States' interests. This preference for strongmen works in tandem with the puritanical elements operating within the perceived benevolence endemic to American promotions of freedom abroad, and which accounts for the comparative ease and rationalized acceptance of the use of force in implementing democratic ideals and determined sovereignty. As Wills pithily puts it: It is when America is in her most altruistic mood that other nations better get behind their bunkers. That authoritarian strain is something Wills detects as existing within the United States' citizenry from the very beginning, an obedience to authority—whether scriptural, political, communal, cultural, or familial—that abrades against the freedom championed as the engine of the various markets that make-up the national character. And this very freedom—being what Americans deemed to set them above realms not so constituted, the source of the fuel that empowered the self-made man, the earner, the runner, the idea advocate, the self-determined realm—was severely called into question by the time of Vietnam: for not only were the elections that Americans were championing, and dying for, in Southeast Asia failing in the face of conflict, but those that took place at home produced no better an executive entity than Richard Nixon, a man who inspired little enthusiasm and had risen from the ashes of successive political failures at the opening of the decade.

And so we arrive back at Nixon. He is, properly, the central locus of the book, the figure, so ill at ease with his chosen profession, whose unwavering devotion to all of the tenets that constitute the various Liberal markets brought under the authorial microscope marked him as the ideal representative of the resentment-bound self-made man that formed the Silent Majority and made the rise of a slick and crafty rabble-rouser like Wallace possible; made him the perfect representative with which to diminish the occupancy of the White House and starkly limn the problems endemic to the American conception of Liberalism heading into the latter stages of the twentieth century. I felt that Wills nailed down far more of the inner makeup of Nixon, what made this tormented but undeniably brilliant man tick, than Perlstein managed in far more pages; in particular, the chapter on the infamous Checkers Speech is just perfectly done—highlighting Nixon's courage, political instincts, hard work, and aggressiveness in pursuit of his ambition in perfect balance with his continuous humiliation, belittling slights from the elite classes, shiftiness and abject kowtowing to those same forces in the name of that same ambition. It is impossible to read Nixon Agonistes—an exquisitely apt title, that—without a sense of sympathy and understanding for that man, indeed for all introverts and grinders who must endure much suffering, many slings and arrows on the course of the racetrack the country demands that they run. He was never a particularly bad man, but rather one whose hard and lengthy road to the top must perforce have seared the very soul that such gains were not achieved as something for nothing—and, in the process, curdled that spirit with the gnomic deformations of resentment, rage, bitterness, and paranoia at what was demanded of one both by the silver spoon Franklins looking down upon you from above and the minorities and underclass scrabbling up desperately and insolently from below.

Other characters are also given superb depictions, particularly Eisenhower's qualities as a politician and cautious president; Spiro Agnew as Nixon's point-man and kindred spirit on the domestic law and order platform in the face of riot and demonstration run rampant among young and black America; and Woodrow Wilson as the prototypical puritanical Liberal monger-of-modalities, Nixon's inspiration and model for what a president might and should achieve in the global marketplace of (arms-implemented) ideas. As Wills saw it, the classical liberal spirit of the US had been rent in twain in the aftermath of the Great Depression, with the free marketeers, combined with the authoritarians and religious fundamentalists, striving for an absolute individualism amongst the running earners as set against the progressive, socialist, and democratic strains that opted for tight social cohesion and rejigging of the race's starting line—but even this split evinced traits of their opposing side as part of the living contradiction that was the American Liberal system. As GRer AC also noted, Wills' discerned trending for a renewal and reworking of Liberalism's failures proved to be ridiculously optimistic; but, as has often been the case in books such as these, if his remedy is rather inordinately Panglossian and casually implied, his diagnosis of the problem is first rate, in every aspect. It amazes me how much a perceptive mind could induce about America from the unattractive character traits of one of its least-heralded twentieth century presidents—that this very contender would prove such a symbolic exemplar of the class writhing under the whiplash of demanded and unfolding changes. Tricky Dick, then, was America: and that's as alarming as it is astounding.