FROM LOATHED LIAR TO REVERED ELDER STATESMAN

A review of Kasey S. Pipes’s After the Fall: The Remarkable Comeback of Richard Nixon (2019)

(Rating 4 of 5)

                  In addition to writing my book reviews on this blog, I will afterwards publish copies on Amazon.com and Goodreads.com.  The difference of course is those copies of my reviews don’t come with pictures and video links.  This July I was contacted by Jennifer Duplessie of Regnery Publishing. She had seen my review of Conrad Black's A Life in Full: Richard M. Nixon and wanted to know if I would like to have a new book to review and offered this one to me for free on the condition that I review it.  I then googled Regnery Publishing to see what they are all about was and was very amused to learn that they were a right-wing publishing company that produces a lot of conservative- leaning  works from Republican Party officials and right-wing commentators.  I said I was amused because they clearly had no idea what my politics were.  Just because I like someone’s biographical work does not mean I would agree with them on all their political positions or even most of them.  But hey, free is free and I might enjoy reading something written by the other side and taking it apart.  So I said "yes" and received it in the mail a week later.  However I was still slogging through Winston Churchill’s World War II memoirs (reviews on that to follow) so was unable to get to it right away. 

                  I began reading this book two weeks ago, reading a chapter or two a day.  I have to say I was really glad I did.  It is actually a very good book.  It offers a view into a period of the life of President Richard M Nixon that is not often covered.  Richard Nixon’s political career and presidency is arguably one of the most studied in the 20^th century.  The only President of the United States who is forced to resign.  The resignation and helicopter trip that the Nixons took after being escorted by his successor President Gerald Ford and First Lady Betty Ford is usually the end of the story.  The pardon is spoken of but mostly in passing.  Traditionally the narrative ends with Nixon waving goodbye.  In this book that is where the story begins: a disgraced President beginning to look for his road to redemption. 

                   Pipes ‘s writes with a smooth narrative that is easy to follow and understand.  The book is broken down to chapters with the first third dedicated to Nixon crawling back into the public consciousness with a series of carefully placed moves that allows him to slowly convince the American public to give him another try. 

                  Before he would begin his public rehabilitation he would first have to survive.  Shortly after his resignation Nixon had a health scare that Pipes’s shows nearly killed him and did causing great financial damage as he had no health insurance at the time.  This would add to President Nixon’s financial desperation which would be part of the later motivational fuel to get himself reestablished.  Now this particular part of Nixon’s life I had read about before as it was covered in Bob Woodward’s Shadow.  

Nixon in his post presidential office

                  Then we arrive at the Frost/Nixon interview.  These were a mixed back for Nixon.  It did give him an opportunity to tell his side of the story and it was the first attempt to go public again trying to shape the historical narrative of his presidency. Pipes writes that Nixon was a tad bit ill-prepared for the questions on Watergate.   While the Frost/Nixon interviews were being done, Pipes explains Nixon had recently been working on his memoirs and he had just gotten to Watergate.  He was now re-exploring those memories going over the materials that led to his downfall.   Therefore he was not as well versed in everything that was encompassed by Watergate as Frost was.  This leading into his stumbled statement of “when the president does it that means not illegal.”

                  Despite its flaws in the interview that he gave David Frost the exposure would start Nixon on his trajectory toward recovery.  He would go on to write nine books, give more interviews, and become a foreign policy adviser for several administrations, not limited to his own party, up until his death. 

Nixon returns with two other former Presidents to see President Reagan

                 James Buchanan, who when he left office in 1861 did so with the country being torn in two, in an effort to redeem himself in the public eye wrote and published his memoirs establishing a precedent that most future former presidents would follow.  When Herbert Hoover left office in 1933 with the country in the middle of a severe economic depression, in an effort to redeem his image he would establish the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library.  He was the first president to do such a thing who would then be followed by all subsequent presidents.  Now Nixon forced to resign in 1974 was going to create a new type of post-presidency that would be mimicked by his successors.

James Buchanan

Herbert Hoover

“In fact, in the first ten years following Watergate, Nixon had done more than just survive as a former president—he had unknowingly established a template for future ex-presidents to follow.   Before Nixon, former presidents in the modern era mostly stayed behind the scenes, Truman had returned to Missouri and Ike split his time between his farm in Gettysburg and Gettysburg and summers in Palm Springs.  Neither of them made many public appearances or waded into public issues.
             “But Nixon, largely because he wanted to rehabilitate his name—and in any case was never one for retirement—chose a different path.  He made money from delivering speeches and writing books.  He gave interviews with the media in which he tried to shape public opinion on important national issues.  He became something of an elder statesman.  The Nixon template is the template used by former presidents to this day.” (p.170)

                 Pipes describes a former president, who is always thinking of history’s judgment, and is working to make sure that the narrative that its very minimum would give him a fair shake.  It was a virtual guarantee that his presidency was to be studied he wanted to make sure that it was going to be studied in all its aspects and he would try to influence this by befriending and is sometimes recruiting historians to take up his cause.

“The former president went out of his way to encourage any historian he didn’t think was a liberal.  One of his favorites, a former Dole Senate staffer named Richard Norton Smith, burst onto the scene in the 1980s with a biography on Thomas E. Dewey that became a finalist for the Pulitzer.  Nixon would write to Smith and compliment him as an ‘honest historian.’ It’s a telling remark that demonstrates how Nixon viewed the rest of Smith’s colleagues.” (p.179)

Nixon would even go so far not only to recruit a historian by the name of Jonathan Aitken , personally edit his work for him, and then go off and try to pitch the manuscript to various publishers.  This was a hard sell because of its clear bias.  There was one publisher willing to help him out.  Any criticism I do have of this work by Pipes is right here.  For this is a little bit of shameless promotion because the publisher of this book, Regnery, is the publisher that would ultimately pick Nixon’s biography written by his chosen biographer.  Talk about being part of your own story!

“Nixon had feared that a book favorable to him could not win a contract in New York.  So he planned accordingly.  Having the book published was more important to Nixon than who published it.  He urged Aitken to pitch his book to Regnery, the conservative publishing house in Washington.  Aitken did so and found success.” (p. 245)

My favorite part about the book is how Pipes shows Nixon’s relationships with the five presidents who followed him into the White House.  Nixon was still underground when Ford was in office; he actively worked to replace Carter; was a semi-formal advisor to Reagan until they broke over arms reduction; was cool to Bush; and surprisingly he was very warm with Clinton.  The Clinton one is the most surprising, but in some ways understandable both presidents were students of history and could see past political differences.  

Bill Clinton with an unlikely mentor 

The only other thing that I felt was missing from this book was there was no mention of President Nixon acting as the arbitrator to settle a strike of professional umpires union against Major League Baseball.  The fact that those in power baseball, which is America's past time, felt that he was the person to turn to help resolve one of their most important issues of the day I think is a major statement about how President Nixon was now viewed by the public.

Scene from Nixon funeral

             In the end I do strongly recommend this book is a fascinating study and a new look at one of the 20^th century’s most important political figures facing a unique challenge and rising to that challenge with great success.  President Nixon’s career is one of peaks and valleys and thanks to his tireless efforts he assured for himself that when he died he did so on top of a peak.  Now that I read the book I enjoyed it to the point where I regret that I did not get to it right away as it was given to me by the publisher.  However with holidays only weeks away and you are struggling gift idea for that history buff in your life this might be a good one. 

{YouTube videos from CBS Network and 2achselhaare}

THE AGE OF NIXON

A review of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008)

(Rating 4 of 5)

There is the Great Man Theory of history and there is Social (bottom up) Theory history.  Rick Perlstein gives us both with Nixonland .  He tells the story of how America seemed in the middle of a ‘liberal consensus’ with the Johnson landslide in 1964, and how the tide changed into a reverse landslide in 1972.   Nixon's reelection and even set the stage for greater conservative triumphs in the 1980s.  In Nixonland the reader views a transformation of the United States from the top to the bottom. 

In 1964, Johnson had crushed Goldwater in the election.  Since the rise of the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt, the liberals had reigned.  Even the one Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been a moderate and, in some ways, an open liberal. But that liberal empire was about to fall, first the Vietnam War would tear the liberal alliance apart, then the extremism of various factions combined with a social white backlash against the progress of minorities at perceived expensive of themselves.

There is a lot enjoyed about this book, Perlstein doesn’t write in a ‘professional’ manner; he writes more like he is just talking to you.  (Which, I find refreshing.) With that said it is not always an easy read, for he often speaks using cultural allusions that if you don’t catch you might be a little lost. I really like how Perlstein refers to the movies of the time period and how each influenced a particular side in the culture war.  Good examples were Bonnie and Clyde influencing the young radicals and Patton influencing conservatives like Nixon.  (Although, I thought Perlstein’s statement about Planet of the Apes was a bit off.)  

      

“The lies went back to Harry Truman, the article explained.  Military aid to France had ‘directly involved’ the United States in preserving a European colony; the Eisenhower administration played ‘a direct role in the ultimate breakdown in the Geneva settlement’ and the cancellation of free elections scheduled for 1956. (President Nixon always said honoring Geneva was the reason we had to continue the war.) Kennedy—this in the Pentagon’s study’s words—transformed the ‘limited-risk gamble’ he had inherited into a ‘broad commitment.’  Lyndon Johnson laid plans for full-fledged war as early as the spring of 1964—campaigning against Barry Goldwater with the line ‘We seek no wider war.’

            What became known as the Pentagon Papers—three thousand pages of historical narrative and four thousand pages of government documents—was shocking to all but the most hardened antiwar cynics.  The expansion into genuine warfare began, the Times summarized, ‘despite the judgment of the government’s intelligence community that the measures would not cause Hanoi to cease its support of the Viet Cong insurgency in the South…The bombing was deemed militarily ineffective within a few months.’ To catalog the number of times Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon looked the American people squarely in the eye and said the exact opposite would require another book.” (p.574)

This book was published in 2008 as President Obama was going to have his triumph victory—a confirmation of the legacy of both the 1960s and 1860s.  In the last forty years right had reorganized, unified, and then complexly collapsed by the end of the first fifteen years of the 21^st century.  In some ways the new right of this current decade reminds me of the left of 70s.  Not similar in ideology of course, but in their approach to politics. 

“The New Politics reformers had fantasized a pure politics, a politics of unyielding principle—andantipolitics.  But in the real world politics without equivocation or compromise is impossible.  Thus an unintended consequence for the would-be antipolitician.  Announcing one’s inflexibility sabotages him in advance.  Every time he makes a political decision, he looks like a sellout.  The reformers fantasized an open politics, in which all points of view had time to be heard.  That meant that Tuesday session adjourned eleven hours after it began, at 6:15 a.m.—a fortunate thing, coolheaded Democratic strategists decided, terrified over what this all looked like on TV.” (p.695-6)

In the end I would highly recommend this book, it describes precisely how the country was knocked off track.  It doesn’t offer any solutions but it doesn’t have to, for it is descriptive not prescriptive.  Nixonland represents an embrace of extremes and a failure to listen.  

(Video was posted by on YouTube by Simon and Schuster)

MR. CIVIL RIGHTS

A review of Juan Williams’ Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (1998) 

(Rating 5 of 5)

Thurgood Marshall is one of the primary movers of the United States in the twentieth century.  He was a trailblazer who challenged racial segregation head-on in the courts and won.  Marshall reversed the over a half century precedent of ‘separate but equal’ by making the Supreme Court to finally see correctly what the Fourteenth Amendment is supposed to mean. 

Williams traces a young Thurgood Marshall who grew up in Maryland and was mostly uninfected by the segregation system that he would come to challenge.  It was not until he grew up and wanted to go law school when he found out that he could not get into the prestigious state law school and had to make other arrangements.  His mother, Norma, dominated the house that he grew up in.  She strongly pushed both her sons, and despite living in a world where everything was stacked against them, Norma ended up with a doctor and a lawyer. 

Young Thurgood Marshall

  

After graduating from Lincoln University, where he attended with Langston Hughes, he was denied entrance to the University of Maryland because of his race. Marshall was forced to go to Howard Law School, which was anything but prestigious.  Fortunately for Marshall—and ultimately the United States—Marshall’s arrival coincided with the arrival of Charles Houston as the dean.  Houston’s rigorous curriculum help prepare Marshall to become the lawyer that would change the nation.  

Langston Hughes, famous writer and classmate of Marshall's

Charles Houston, early Civil Rights lawyer an mentor to Marshall

Marshall goes to work for the NAACP where he helps establish the Legal Defense Fund.  Williams’ shows Marshall taking on case after case.  He defends poor black people down on their luck, and he attacks segregation at every opportunity for everyone but himself.  While becoming the bane of Jim Crow, he felt as a lawyer he needed to obey the law no matter how immoral it was.  His work to improve the lives of the African-American community led to him earning the nickname ‘Mr. Civil Rights.’ 

Mr. Civil Rights

Marshall had admirers in the white mainstream community as well as the African-American community.  Williams’ explains a great deal of strange alliances that Marshall made throughout his career, none more peculiar than his alliance with J. Edger Hoover. 

As Marshall built his career by challenging Jim Crow at the graduate school and college level, but he really made history with his victory in Brown v. the Board of Education that overturned the evil of Plessy v. Ferguson. 

            “No one had to tell him this was the biggest case of his career.  This case could change the face of American society.  Marshall began calling conferences of the brightest minds from around the nation to discuss every angle of the case.  Lawyers, law professors, sociologists, anthropologists, and even psychologists, notably Ken Clark, all came to Marshall’s office to discuss how to convince the Court that separate but equal was a devastating burden to black people, nothing more than racism.” (p.209)

Biographies are not worth much if you do not learn something about the people whom the subject shared the stage of history.  If you read a biography of Abraham Lincoln and you learn nothing of Stephen Douglas, then the biography fails.  In the case Marshal, I learned a great deal on his Brown adversary John W. Davis.  All I knew about Davis was his status as the Democratic nominee for President in 1924 and the segregation defender in the Brown decision.  The irony is Marshall, as a law student, use to watch Davis before the Supreme Court regularly and actually admired him.  Marshall would after Brown tell people that beat Davis but knew few who did.  

Marshall with Davis during the Brown Supreme Court case

Davis kind of reminds me of polite anti-marriage equality people.  Who maybe personally nice and polite and may not actually hate their opponents but are completely blind to the mass of hatred that is sitting to the right behind them.

       

As the fifties turned into the sixties the rank and file of the Civil Rights Movement—especially the younger members—got tired of the slow crawl of integration and embraced the non-violent direct action methods.  The leader of this new generation of civil rights leaders was Martin Luther King, Jr.  There was a huge generation gap between the young pastor and the older lawyer.  Marshall thought King was nice enough young man who could give good speeches but he also felt that King and his associates got way too much credit for the work that people like him really did.  Nevertheless, he kept a united front with King and never publicly criticized him.   

While Marshall had his reservations on Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference he had a respect for them; unlike Black Nationalist movement that Marshall absolutely despised.  He couldn’t stand Malcolm X and refused to meet with him even after the later dropped his separatist ideas.  To Marshall, Black Nationalism was undermining everything he had worked for in his entire life. 

 

While not only working for civil rights at home, Marshall went aboard under an invention from the new nation of Kenya to come and aid them in writing their constitution.  This great act of a statesmanship increased his international prestige. 

During the Kennedy Administration, Marshall filled his lifelong ambition and became a judge.  Now serving on the U.S. court of appeals, Marshall’s name disappeared from the newspapers and he was now working on business cases the completely disinterested him.  Marshall was relieved when he was asked by President Johnson to become the U.S. Solicitor General.  This was an interesting switch for him, because for years he challenged the system and now he was the government’s top lawyer.

 

The high point of Marshall’s life was his appointment to the Supreme Court.  He would be the first African-American to be appointed to this high position.  However in reading Williams’ account Marshall’s experience of the court was not what he thought it was going to be.

Justice Marshall

Marshall is unquestionably one of the greatest American lawyers in our history. Marshall easily ranks up there with the likes of Henry Clay and Clarence Darrow.  As a justice however, although he breaks major color barrier in American society, his career on the Supreme Court was not anywhere near as successful as his earlier career had been.  Part of this is not his fault.  He lacked opportunity due the changing climate on the court.  After his confirmation a conservative backlash would have the Republicans winning five out of the next six presidential elections.  This resulted in the Court growing evermore conservative.  Marshall would find himself in the minority and writing dissents more often than not.  In addition, throughout his stay on the Court he was suffering from numerous health problems.  This would also contribute to his declining effectiveness on the Court.  

I highly recommend this book.  I disagree with Juan Williams’ on many things politically but his historical work is awesome and he put together an incredible biography of one of our great statesmen Thurgood Marshall.

{Video was posted on YouTube by SECRETMOVIES; it is a long lost Mike Wallace interview.  If you can sit through the first couple of parts where the video cuts out you will see a fascinating video.  Also after the interview Mike Wallace has to do station advertising personally}.