Petit Fors And Againsts

I'm grateful for historian Jeremy Young's comments on my recent Rick Perlstein post. Young wrote here and here (at "Daily Kos," no less!). Perlstein's shown at left, Young at right. Young writes:

The strawman here is Perlstein's imagined claim that Nixon was responsible for the political polarization of the late 1960s and after, down to our own time. If this were actually Perlstein's argument, his book would be pure partisan hackery, not to mention boring and unoriginal. Plenty of people have blamed plenty of things on Nixon; nothing new in that.

Where Perlstein scores, and scores big, is in accepting that many of Nixon's basic assumptions about politics (at least those not rooted in paranoia) were accurate. There really was a silent majority; there really was a widespread belief among middle-class whites and white ethnics that elite liberalism and civil rights were succeeding on the backs of their own suffering. This sentiment led to class and racial warfare and left white middle-class Americans ready to drop liberal causes in exchange for security and the maintenance of the status quo. It also made them racist, in the way that petit-bourgeois people often become racist in times of economic strain: in a desperate desire to maintain their status above the people and races in the class below them.

I replied:

Thanks for your post and for linking to mine. It’s been a couple of years since I read Nixonland. I read it on Kindle, and I believe the author actually got the news from me that it had been Kindled. I mention this only because all my underlining is somewhere on Amazon’s server and therefore a little too difficult to get at. So my comments are impressionistic rather than specific, and I apologize in advance if I’ve forgotten something from Rick’s massive and entertaining narrative.

All that being said, I readily concede your basic point. I get that it wasn’t a Nixon biography and that Rick was saying that Nixon was superbly prepared by his upbringing and temperament to understand and exploit the fears and resentments of those you refer to as petit-bourgeois people. I’ll even go so far as to say that a better title would’ve been “Americaland,” seeing as — according to your own analysis — Rick was arguing that Nixon was the incarnation of our country at its worst.

Making Nixon seem like the target was the smarter move, since otherwise it would’ve been obvious that Rick was actually excoriating the tens of millions of fear-motivated, sometimes racist petit-bourgeois people who voted for him. Of course one person’s petit-bourgeois is another person’s indispensable GOP primary voter. That being said, as I recall, Rick showed that Nixon was exceedingly careful about what he said about so-called wedge issues during 1966-68. He eschewed the cheerful demagoguery of Gov. Reagan, for instance.

And then there’s the matter of what he did in office. The southern strategy is one thing, but telling George Shultz to get schools in the deep south desegregated is another. The law and order issue is one thing, but setting up methadone clinics in the big cities is another. I don’t recall that Rick seemed very interested in Nixon’s policy agenda. But his breathtaking foreign policy, and what Nixon library director Tim Naftali recently called his progressive domestic initiatives (from the EPA to national health insurance), would seem to have deserved at least equal mention alongside his political tactics.

If Nixon the politician was a reflection of America at its worst, what might we say about Nixon’s substance? Given that the petit-bourgeois masses gave the author of that relatively progressive agenda an historic landslide re-election victory, don’t both Nixon and all those angry, fearful Americans, thanks to his leadership, look like something far greater than the sum of their resentments?

I don’t say this to minimize Watergate. But as I assume Rick would be among the first to concede, Watergate’s biggest winner was the Goldwater-Reagan right. Did Nixon’s failure make RINOs an endangered species? It appears so, and I think that’s a devastating loss. You write that we need drastic action to solve our problems, whereas I, a committed incrementalist, get the willies just typing the words. I’m with Stephen Ambrose: When we lost Nixon, we lost more than we gained.

My principal beef with Rick’s book, having to do with the Ellsberg break-in, is here.

Thanks again. I tried to leave this at Daily Kos, but it wouldn’t let me sign up!

Perlsteinland

In Nixonland, historian Rick Perlstein (left) argued that Richard Nixon's class resentments inspired him to bait the privileged elites he hated (plus win a whole bunch of elections) using wedge issues such as anti-communism, race, and law and order, igniting the hyper-partisanship that roil our politics today.

That was and remains hard for Nixonites to swallow, since today's mainstream conservatives are far to Nixon's right. Sam Tanenhaus (below), another leading authority on Cold War-era politics, has argued that the culture wars' Fort Sumter moment was actually the far right's outrage over Nixon's moderate to liberal foreign and domestic policy agenda. If that's true, and if you're a liberal or moderate, then you have to end up admiring Nixon, at least grudgingly, for battling his way to the top of a party that had nominated an extremist such as Barry Goldwater (another Perlstein subject) four years before and then proceed to go to China and create the EPA. Maybe Nixon was just acting smart instead of acting out.

Perlstein's now researching the last volume of his political triduum, on Ronald Reagan. I had assumed (well, hoped) that as a political progressive, Perlstein would at least be tempted by the idea that the U.S. had lost more than it gained when Nixon was ousted, as another Nixon biographer, the late Stephen Ambrose, wrote in his own third volume. The Reagans, Goldwaters, and Buckleys always knew Nixon wasn't one of them. If the right had fought harder for Nixon in 1973-74, might he even have been able to hold on? Did any key conservatives come to the conclusion in the depths of Watergate that you could discredit liberal Republicanism by letting Nixon go down the tubes?

If there's anything to Tanenhaus's theory, it will take Perlstein a considerable amount of intellectual engineering to get from Nixonland to Reaganland without leaving the impression that he scapegoated Nixon for the sins of the Reagan-Goldwater wing of the party by blaming him and not it for today's political rancorousness.

Aptly rendering Reagan, and especially his latter day, right-of-Reagan acolytes, without redeeming Nixon -- that would need to be Perlstein's secret plan.

One approach is just to say that Nixon's failures de-legitimized his substance, leaving a vacuum for GOP extremists to fill. Perlstein would be onto something there. Deep down, Nixon himself thought Watergate was worse than most of his critics did. They thought he was guilty of hurting the presidency. He believed he helped contribute to the deaths of millions in Cambodia and Vietnam as U.S. resolve to continue to support anti-communist regimes crumbled amid the distractions of Watergate. If Perlstein plays his cards right, he can blame Nixon for Reagan and Pol Pot both.

There's a hint of Perlstein's approach to his Reagan book in his new "Mother Jones" article about lying and politics. He doesn't say lying started with Nixon. How could he after devoting so much attention to the Pentagon Papers, which embodied the vast, fateful mendacity of two Democratic administrations? And yet he writes:

[A] virulent strain of political utilitarianism was already well apparent by the time the Plumbers were breaking into the Democratic National Committee: "Although I was aware they were illegal," White House staffer Jeb Stuart Magruder told the Watergate investigating committee, "we had become somewhat inured to using some activities that would help us in accomplishing what we thought was a legitimate cause."

Even conservatives who were not allied with the White House had learned to think like Watergate conspirators. To them, the takeaway from the scandal was that Nixon had been willing to bend the rules for the cause. The New Right pioneer M. Stanton Evans once told me, "I didn't like Nixon until Watergate."

Though many in the New Right proclaimed their contempt for Richard Nixon, a number of its key operatives and spokesmen in fact came directly from the Watergate milieu. Two minor Watergate figures, bagman Kenneth Rietz (who ran Fred Thompson's 2008 presidential campaign) and saboteur Roger Stone (last seen promoting a gubernatorial bid by the woman who claimed to have been Eliot Spitzer's madam) were rehabilitated into politics through staff positions in Ronald Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign. G. Gordon Liddy became a right-wing radio superstar.

So Nixonland ethics and personnel were mainlined into the Reagan GOP -- and that's not to mention the worst Rogering of America, as Perlstein sees it. That began with Nixon, too, specifically his corrupt first vice president, Spiro Agnew, who excoriated the networks for their criticism of the administration:

There evolved a new media definition of civility that privileged "balance" over truth-telling—even when one side was lying. It's a real and profound change—one stunningly obvious when you review a 1973 PBS news panel hosted by Bill Moyers and featuring National Review editor George Will, both excoriating the administration's "Watergate morality." Such a panel today on, say, global warming would not be complete without a complement of conservatives, one of them probably George Will, lambasting the "liberal" contention that scientific facts are facts—and anyone daring to call them out for lying would be instantly censured. It's happened to me more than once—on public radio, no less.

In the same vein, when the Obama administration accused Fox News of not being a legitimate news source, the DC journalism elite rushed to admonish the White House. Granted, they were partly defending Major Garrett, the network's since-departed White House correspondent and a solid journalist—but in the process, few acknowledged that under Roger Ailes, another Nixon veteran, management has enforced an ideological line top to bottom.

Lying (more than ever before, "every day," worse than the Maine, worse than the Pentagon Papers!), continuing Watergate-style opportunism, media balance instead of "truth telling," partisan politicking disguised as cable news -- all laid at the feet of Nixon and his men, all because he didn't get into that snobby club back at Whittier College.

Not So Clear After All

UC Irvine professor Jon Wiener, writing on April 5 about the Nixon library's new Watergate exhibit:

The exhibit makes clear how, with the country in turmoil over an unpopular war, the president became obsessed with "enemies" and formed a secret unit, "the plumbers," to carry out illegal assignments.

Wiener overreached by saying that Nixon personally authorized the plumbers to break the law. While I look forward to reviewing the exhibit in detail, nothing in the on-line resources the library published last year shows that Nixon knew in advance about the plumbers' fateful burglaries in September 1971 (at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office) and June 1972 (at the Watergate).

Did Nixon contribute to an atmosphere in his wartime White House that resulted in wrongdoing? Yes, and he admitted as much. But that's just not the same as authorizing or knowing in advance about specific criminal acts. This distinction is more important to some than others. In July 2008, I wrote that historian Rick Perlstein, in his book Nixonland, had misconstrued a secondary source in a way that gave the impression that Nixon had known in advance about the 1971 burglary. Perlstein replied that I was technically right but that the "preponderance of the evidence suggests that Nixon probably knew what was going on." And yet criminal culpability hinges on technicalities, not assumptions or atmospherics.

Other writers have overreached in attempting to pin advance knowledge of the burglaries on Nixon. There's plenty in the Watergate story that reflects poorly on Nixon and his men without imputing to him crimes that he didn't commit.

Electric Lady Nixonland

Is this how the Egyptian revolution started? Noticing a spike in sales at Amazon of his book Nixonland, historian Rick Perlstein tracked it to this philly.com item about last night's surprise Grammy phenom:

Lady Antebellum are the Nixonland not-so-silent majority candidate, this year's stealth Taylor Swift, the voice of Middle America with a pretty, de-twanged sound that's all about harkening back to a "simpler" time.

Why that would cause anyone to buy a $14 tome about 1960s-70s politics is beyond me, but I don't have time to worry about it, because I just remembered I need to download some Lady Antebellum.

Richard Nixon, Matchmaker

On Facebook tonight, I jokingly told historian and Nixonland author Rick Perlstein that I wished he'd used a weather-lengthened Newark layover to visit Richard Nixon's old northern New Jersey neighborhood. He replied that he'd done so many times, including when attending mass with his in-laws at Christmas.

Ain't no flies on me. To Google! Perlstein and his wife, Kathy Geier, made news in May 2001, in the New York Times "Vows" column, where we learn that, in his ineffable way, 37 helped make two, one (as with my Kathy and me as well):

Their first date was at the Living Room Cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where, it turned out, they were neighbors. Ms. Geier discovered that she had read and admired his pieces in Lingua Franca magazine, while Mr. Perlstein learned that she shared his passion for "the lunacy of Richard Nixon."

Ms. Geier, who handed out Nixon fliers as a child during the 1972 election, said she got her devotion to politics from her staunch Republican parents, Patricia and Henry Geier. Her father, an investment banker, was once mayor of Westwood, N.J.

"The New Nixon" Improves "Nixonland"

In an interview (actually, an exchange of e-mails) with the editor of the History News Network, Nixonland author Rick Perlstein tips his hat to "The New Nixon," the blog I launched in February 2008 at the Nixon Foundation:

I actually quite appreciated most of what was said at the New Nixon blog. New Nixon blogger Jack Pitney made several useful corrections in particular I was able to incorporate into six subsequent printings.

Less popular with the distinguished author was the revelation by your (still on hiatus) Episconixonian correspondent last July that Perlstein had altered the meaning of a quotation from another book to make it appear as though President Nixon had known in advance about a plan to break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist in September 1971. Perlstein told HNN:

[Dr. Taylor's] right on the narrow point, but I think more broadly the preponderance of the evidence suggests that Nixon probably knew what was going on.

Which prompted me to reply to Perlstein:

I appreciate that you think the preponderance of evidence suggests RN [knew] about the Fielding job in advance, but there's actually no evidence that he did. My lack of historical training and a Ph.D notwithstanding (although your describing me as Dr. Taylor was a mighty buzz), I don't think your gut call on Nixon's complicity is a justification for making a secondary source sound like he's saying what he actually didn't say.

Appalling Enemies List

Michael Barone reviews Rick Perlstein's Nixonland:

[M]y reading of this book left me more appalled by Nixon's enemies than by Nixon.

Rick Perlstein And The New Nixon Tapes

Nixonland author Rick Perlstein is doubly wrong in a Newsweek column:

For 364 days a year archivists toil anonymously, transcribing hundreds of hours of often banal, taped conversations. Then they pick out a few titillating excerpts to nab a headline in the next day’s newspapers.

How much time has the recently so widely celebrated scholar of the Nixon Presidency actually spent with Nixon White House records? There’s nary a National Archives transcript to be found. As archivist Maarja Krusten recently wrote in comments at “The New Nixon” and as most Nixon scholars know well, NARA decided a generation ago not to make transcripts, since it took 100 person hours to transcribe an hour of tape (300 hours before PCs were available). Instead, archivists supply finding aids in the form of outlines.

And is Perlstein so unfamiliar with NARA practice that he thinks government archivists actually “pick out…titillating excerpts” and feed them to the papers? Perlstein meets Nixonstein: That’s what 37 and his cronies were supposed to think. Hundreds of dedicated professionals are cringing at the accusation. Perlstein and “Newsweek” owe them an apology.

Elsewhere in his column, writing about Vietnam, Perlstein misuses the tapes as he did a secondary source in Nixonland when he tried (but failed) to show that President Nixon had foreknowledge of plans for a break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. As the Miller Center’s careful transcripts have shown, while Henry Kissinger was consistently pessimistic about whether South Vietnam would survive the withdrawal of U.S. forces, President Nixon was all over the map, sometimes saying that South Vietnam couldn’t survive, other times saying it must for the sake of U.S. credibility.

In his article, Perlstein tries to have it both ways:

In moments of candor both men admitted that Saigon would inevitably fall to the communists within a couple of years. Yet they were determined to stave off the collapse for a “decent interval”—the real purpose, as Nixon well knew, of the Christmas bombings. The two men told another story to the American people, our allies in the Saigon government and perhaps even themselves. In the new tapes, Nixon justifies his decision to use the most fearsome bomber in the fleet by saying that one final, swift, savage blow might force communist negotiators to give up their claim to non-communist South Vietnam. The only person he’s trying to convince is himself.

So if on one tape, Nixon says he doesn’t think Saigon will survive, he means it. If on another, the President says he thinks the bombing will blunt Hanoi’s ambitions, he doesn’t mean it.

How does Perlstein know? He doesn’t. He’s just pushing the “decent interval” theory, which is an ideological construct, the rearguard action of the antiwar movement.

The real history of the Vietnam war, and therefore the Nixon Administration and Watergate, has yet to be written. That work will take open-minded writers who among other things will take into account evidence, undercovered by scholars such as Stephen J. Morris, that the December bombings had precisely the chilling effect on the communists that the President had hoped. It was the distraction of Watergate that may well have doomed Saigon, not the Nixon policy.

***

In a response on the New Nixon version of this post, Rick Perlstein tells me that for this tapes release, the Nixon Library indeed highlighted tape segments that it thought was most interesting, unlike National Archives practice during prior openings.