Nixon Visited and Revisited

Ronald Reagan may be our most popular postwar President, but Richard Nixon is undoubtedly our most interesting. Though deploring his anti-Communist activities in Congress and his choice of White House companions, left-leaning biographer Stephen Ambrose repeatedly comes back to Nixon’s intelligence and complex character. His personality has also preoccupied two psychobiographers, Garry Wills and Bruce Mazlish. Wills’s book Nixon Agonistes particularly aroused my curiosity because of its obsessively spiteful tone. Why should Wills feel so strongly about someone he seeks to portray as a conventionally devious pol? And can one reconcile Wills’s picture of a shabby opportunist with Whittaker Chambers’s celebration of the same figure as a heroic anti-Communist?

Unlike Wills and other intellectuals, I for one find nothing particularly crooked about Nixon’s ascent to power. Though he charged some Democrats with being soft on Communism, the accusation was arguably just for Helen Gahagan Douglas, his opponent for a senatorial seat from California in 1950, and certainly no worse than what Democrats have said about Republicans. In 1948, for example, Harry Truman depicted Thomas Dewey and the Republican Party as being soft on fascism. This baseless and by 1948 anachronistic charge and Lyndon Johnson’s even more outrageous assault on Barry Goldwater as a nuclear maniac are rarely mentioned by those who present Nixon as a sui generis defamer of political opponents. Indeed, in his controversial senatorial race, Nixon merely repeated charges against Mrs. Douglas already made by her fellow Democrats.

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Paul Gottfried

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Ronald Reagan may be our most popular postwar President, but Richard Nixon is undoubtedly our most interesting. Though deploring his anti-Communist activities in Congress and his choice of White House companions, left-leaning biographer Stephen Ambrose repeatedly comes back to Nixon’s intelligence and complex character. His personality has also preoccupied two psychobiographers, Garry Wills and Bruce Mazlish. Wills’s book Nixon Agonistes particularly aroused my curiosity because of its obsessively spiteful tone. Why should Wills feel so strongly about someone he seeks to portray as a conventionally devious pol? And can one reconcile Wills’s picture of a shabby opportunist with Whittaker Chambers’s celebration of the same figure as a heroic anti-Communist?

Unlike Wills and other intellectuals, I for one find nothing particularly crooked about Nixon’s ascent to power. Though he charged some Democrats with being soft on Communism, the accusation was arguably just for Helen Gahagan Douglas, his opponent for a senatorial seat from California in 1950, and certainly no worse than what Democrats have said about Republicans. In 1948, for example, Harry Truman depicted Thomas Dewey and the Republican Party as being soft on fascism. This baseless and by 1948 anachronistic charge and Lyndon Johnson’s even more outrageous assault on Barry Goldwater as a nuclear maniac are rarely mentioned by those who present Nixon as a sui generis defamer of political opponents. Indeed, in his controversial senatorial race, Nixon merely repeated charges against Mrs. Douglas already made by her fellow Democrats.