Not Too Tricky To Be Ike's Veep

Irwin F. Gellman: The President and the Apprentice - Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961

Standpoint, March 1, 2016

The thing about “archive rats”, to borrow Stalin’s useful insult, is that they unearth facts that unsettle the authorised version of history. It’s a label that Nixon scholar Irwin Gellman can wear with pride. He has been burrowing in the archives for decades in obvious places (the National Archive, the Nixon Library), overlooked places (the Cabot Lodge papers), and in places (he none too subtly implies) that other historians could not be bothered to inspect — every one of the approximately 845 boxes of the “largest part of the Nixon manuscripts, called the 320 series”. 

The result is The President and the Apprentice, a somewhat obsessive, intriguingly contrarian retelling of the story of Nixon and the Eisenhower presidency. Traditionally, Eisenhower’s time in office has been regarded as a wasted opportunity, only partly redeemed by the supposed disdain he felt for his vice-president, Richard Nixon. More recently, academics have been re-rating Ike (it probably helped that doing so made his Republican successors look bad) but that re-rating has yet to percolate through to a popular consensus still shaped by dim memories of high-school history lessons and, more vividly, media depictions of Eisenhower’s America as a land that progress forgot.

Nixon has also benefited, to a degree, both from the attention of revisionist historians and the passing of the decades since his disgrace. His funeral was attended by President Clinton and all his surviving predecessors (Clinton was representing, he declared, “a grateful nation”). For all that, to most Americans Tricky Dick remains a President Evil, snarling while he plots dark deeds and incriminating tapes whir. He has never been forgiven by liberal opinion-formers for his role in exposing the traitor Alger Hiss (“vindicated” again, I note, in a book published last autumn).  Nor have they forgiven him for his style — or styles, all those “new Nixons” — for his abrasiveness, his awkwardness, his embarrassingly obvious striving and, worst of all, for a series of election victories that announced that America was more like him than them.

Even those historians willing to look beyond the standard caricatures of this complicated man’s complicated career have struggled to put Nixon’s relationship with Eisenhower in a positive light, something that Mr Gellman, previously the author of The Contender, an account of Nixon’s Congressional career, sets out to correct. This is no hagiography; it is a scholarly work, but a combative one too. Reinforced by what he has mined from all those archives, Gellman debunks myths, he challenges the comfortably liberal narrative, and when people have lied he says so. Nixon was brought down by his lies, but to no small extent his reputation has been trashed by the lies of others. To take just one: No, Mr Truman, he didn’t call you a traitor.

While The President and the Apprentice leaves a generally favourable impression of the Eisenhower administration, it is not a broad rethink of this already rethought presidency. It is too narrowly focused on the Nixon vice-presidency for that. But Gellman does attempt to address what has become a central criticism of those years: that Eisenhower did too little too slowly to come to the help of African-Americans, at the wrong end of institutionalised racism across the country and, in the South, victims of something very much worse. Nixon, whatever his private thoughts on racial matters (the much later White House tapes do not make pretty listening in this respect), had no time for Jim Crow, segregation, or the petty (and not so petty) viciousness of the racial discrimination of the era. And nor, despite some attitudes that might dismay in 2016 (as a father, he would not have been too happy to discover who was coming to dinner) did Eisenhower, a man, it must be remembered, brought up in turn of the 20th century Kansas. That said, even allowing for a difficult political environment, the duo’s reluctance to make more use of the bully pulpit in support of civil rights must count against them. And their hopes that changing attitudes and improved African-American access to the voting booth would be enough to do the trick were at best wishful thinking.

True to form, Gellman does not let the Democrats off the hook, highlighting what was once in plain sight, but is now often consigned to the memory hole. Democrats did much to obstruct and (in LBJ’s case, for a characteristically calculated blend of reasons) dilute the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first legislation of its kind since 1875. This was a reflection of the priorities of their southern redoubt, as was the unwillingness of many Democrats (including, Gellman points out, both JFK and LBJ) to offer public support for Eisenhower’s decision to send in the army to enforce the integration of Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas.

To be sure, President Truman ordered the desegregation of the military (although it was the Eisenhower administration that essentially implemented it), but, after reading this book it’s hard to deny that Truman, later an opponent of the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters (organised by “Communists”, apparently), and no stranger to the N-word, has been credited too much, and Eisenhower too little, for what they each did to push the US further down the long march to racial equality, an imbalance that, of course, fits all too neatly into the historical perspective of the American Left.

To FDR’s first Veep, “Cactus Jack” Garner, the vice-presidency was “not worth a bucket of warm piss”, but Gellman makes a strong case that Nixon made far more of this unloved position than might have been expected. He was not any sort of co-executive; the Dick Cheney vice-presidency lay far in the future. But he was valued for his contribution to, and coolly objective analysis of, the frequently rough political scene at home (a melée that the grand old general preferred to be seen to soar above, but understood enough about to know — usually — what he didn’t know) and, as the years passed, also for his thoughts on abroad. Nixon was, so to speak, a youthful understudy whom Ike (conscious of how ill-prepared Truman had been when he took over from FDR) felt a patriotic obligation to train, but he was also a real force within the White House, given real jobs to do.

Not unreasonably, Gellman sees this as proof of the faith that, particularly in the second term, Ike put in Nixon: “The president gave assignments to those he trusted, and he trusted Nixon.” That’s true, but, in the case of Eisenhower, cold behind that five-star beam, that word “trust” should be read as conveying a faith in Nixon’s competence rather than anything with more emotional resonance. Gellman backs up his more upbeat take on the relationship between president and vice-president with a series of letters and obiter dicta from Eisenhower signalling the respect and affection the president had for Nixon. Maybe, but they can also be interpreted as pats on the head for a promising young subordinate by a man who knew how to motivate those under him. And Gellman cannot avoid the reality that Eisenhower let Nixon twist in the wind, not once, but twice. 

The first time was when, during the 1952 election, a scandal blew up over a fund that had been raised by some Californian businessmen to help the far-from-wealthy Nixon with his senatorial expenses, an arrangement that did not deserve to be labelled as corrupt. A larger, possibly more questionable fund that benefited Adlai Stevenson, the liberal icon running against Eisenhower for the presidency, received rather less coverage: how odd! Eisenhower made clear Nixon was on his own, but even when Nixon had vindicated himself with the brilliantly manipulative “Checkers” speech, still hesitated to stand by his man. The second occasion, four years later, was when Eisenhower effectively made Nixon beg for his slot on the re-election ticket, a position that he had clearly earned, a cruel spectacle that the normally indefatigable Gellman finds “baffling”.
And then, four years after that, there was the moment during a press conference when Eisenhower was asked to cite a major contribution that then presidential candidate Nixon had made to his administration. Ike replied that, given a week, he “might think of one”.

Gellman fillets these incidents with his customary diligence, handily demolishing some of the mythology that surrounds them and adding some detail  often omitted from the historical record (for example, Eisenhower promptly apologised for that remark). But, despite Gellman’s best efforts, the sense that something was awry between the two men lingers.

If I had to make a guess (and when it comes to the enigmatic Ike, one can only guess) the key to Eisenhower’s behaviour was partly the sense, not unusual among the great, that no one could be good enough to succeed him. But there was something else at play, and Gellman points to it with his argument that Ike’s leadership style was in peace as it was in war: “he led a team of subordinates, who were expected to go where Ike sent them, be his eyes and ears, provide intelligent and informed advice, deliver his messages, and occasionally become casualties.” They were, therefore, in the end, disposable.

But Nixon hung on. 

Fixin' Nixon

Conrad Black: Richard M. Nixon - A Life in Full

The New Criterion, March 1, 2008

Judging by the tone and the content, if not the length, of his epic, sprawling, and (on several levels) fascinating new biography of Richard Nixon, Conrad Black is not inclined to attempt much analysis of what, ultimately, made Tricky Dick tick.. There have, he snorts, “been many amateur psychoanalyses of Nixon, [but] none of any apparent validity or value.” None? When Black refers to the “psycho-media speculation” contained within press coverage of the various medical disasters that befell the former president in the immediate aftermath of his resignation, he doesn’t mean it as a term of approbation.

Now it is true that Nixon did have to put up with more than his fair share of long-distance psychoanalysis (so much so, in fact, that when David Greenberg wrote Nixon’s Shadow [2003], a valuable study of shifting perceptions of the thirty-seventh president, he devoted an entire chapter to “the psychobiographers”), and more than a fair share of that was nonsense, make-a-buck flimflam, or propaganda masquerading as science. At the same time, there can have been few presidents whose behavior did more to attract this sort of attention. Nobody should expect the occupants of the Oval Office to be regular folks, and few of them have been. Nevertheless, even when compared with other members of this often eccentric fraternity, there’s something about Nixon’s psyche that makes it stand out in its strangeness, its melancholy, its noir, and its mystery.

In part, of course, this reflects Nixon’s misfortune (for a man who achieved so much, Nixon was, as Black demonstrates, remarkably unlucky) to be living at a time when increasing (and frequently hostile) media scrutiny combined with the mid-century infatuation with psychiatry to ensure that almost no aspect of his career or character was not picked apart. If his predecessors had received similar treatment, Nixon would not have seemed quite so peculiar.

Nixon himself understood that he was something of a puzzle, and rather relished it. In President Nixon—Alone in the White House (2001), his intriguing account of the Nixon presidency, Richard Reeves recounts how Bob Dole once told Nixon “that he was destined to be misunderstood because he was too complicated a man to be totally understood.” Nixon had responded to that with enthusiasm, saying, “Aha! Now you’re getting somewhere.” Reeves then goes on to argue that Nixon “did not want to be understood. If other men thought he was unreadable, then they must think there was a great deal more inside him than just a powerful mind voyaging alone in anger and self-doubt.”

You can debate the second part of that diagnosis, but not the first: Nixon clearly did not want to be understood. That doesn’t mean, however, that a biographer should avoid trying to do so. Black doesn’t, but his efforts too often come across as more a matter of (deftly chosen) adjectives than anything more substantial. Even if one makes allowance for Black’s distaste for such analysis, his failure to deliver more of it diminishes the roundedness of his book, and is, in such a perceptive author, a disappointment. What his readers are offered instead is a biography where, with the notable exception of the canny, and feline, depiction of Kissinger, politics tend to be handled more convincingly than personality, a chronicle where the emphasis is on the event rather than the individual. Black, the author of a notable biography of FDR, is evidently a writer who prefers to focus his attention on the external, on great men, on momentous events and the grandest of themes. The rest, I’d guess, he sees as trivia, little more than gossip. Nixon would approve.

To read Black’s book is to be treated like the guest at a lavish dinner party presided over by an opinionated, brilliant, mordantly amusing, powerful, and loquacious host. As the port is passed round and the cigars light up, the host holds forth—for hours and hours (this work is easily over a thousand pages long) and hours. Glasses are drained and doubts drowned. Stories tumble out, anecdotes cascade. Portentous verdicts are cast: the opening to Communist China“was an imaginative diplomatic initiative of great geopolitical consequences … but to the extent it was sold, then and subsequently, as a combination of Columbian exploration, Bismarckian diplomacy, and Jesuitical missionary work, it was a confidence trick to reelect the president, pad the CVs of the two ex- plorer/diplomat/pilgrims, and garnish the post-governmental wallet of Kissinger.” Lapidary pronouncements are made: “Nixon’s trousers were slightly too short (often the case with Americans).” Widespread rumors are discounted: Nixon tells the author that “Edgar [Hoover] had a lot of files, but I had a lot of files too, and there was nothing in them about Edgar in a red dress.” Erudite digressions are explored: “Disraeli was rivaled only by Churchill as the greatest wit of all British prime ministers.” And insidery recollections are shared:

His office was another Nixonian classic. It was reached by walking through a large travel agency on the ground floor of a building on a suburban boulevard, then taking an elevator up two floors, opening a box with a bronze eagle on it, and announcing oneself on the telephone receiver within.

All this is filtered through, and often illuminated by, our host’s distinctive, distinctly orotund, use of language. He deploys a startling, imposing, and baroque phraseology. Black’s language is never dull, but it does teeter between the enlightening (the Democratic-led “assault on Nixon” had become “the rape of the executive”), the arch (“the influx of newcomers to California … tended to be conventional southerners well to the right politically of the egalitarian EPIC group, which had believed in collective economics and the absence of complexional distinctions”), the absurd (“malignant Nibelungen within the IRS”), the Agnew (“It was another herniating levitation of pandemic hypocrisy”), the sly (“Kissinger tried a fully gymnastic range of explanations”), and occasionally the bizarre (Jesse Jackson as “rutting panther”).

And, no, as enjoyable as the occasion may be, the magnate’s guests at this splendid feast will never entirely be able to shake off the sense that they are receiving a message de haut en bas. Black, Conrad Black, Lord Black of Crossharbour, was a newspaper mogul in the old style, a mover, a shaker, a macher, and it shows. Nixon gives “the annual Atlantic Richfield Dinner address in London in the autumn of 1992, and dazzle[s] the most eminent dinner audience that city could produce,” a dinner audience that included Lord Black, but not me, or in all probability, dear reader, you.

None of this is to detract from Black’s ability to spin a “rocking, socking” (to borrow a term Nixon used to describe his more vigorous campaigns) yarn. A thousand pages, maybe, but they don’t pall, and they are dauntingly thoroughly researched. The narrative is comprehensive, detailed, generally judicious and, in its careful assessment of Watergate, is closer to a plea in mitigation than an outright case for the defense. Overall, it’s almost impossible and largely pointless to highlight any particular topic covered in those thousand pages, but if I have to choose one, it would be the subtle and sympathetic way in which Black handles Nixon’s tortured and complex dealings with a truly masterful trickster, the enigmatic, cunning, and ruthless Eisenhower.

Where the book fails is in “The Transfiguration,” the book’s ambitiously titled final chapter. The picture Black paints is of the painstaking, carefully crafted step-by-step creation of the last “new Nixon”—a largely rehabilitated figure, a much consulted, highly respected foreign policy sage, the grandfatherly “most successful ex-president in the country’s history,” a figure whose fate was apparently beginning to prick what Black refers to with characteristic melodrama as the “Great American Puritanical Conscience.” This overstates matters. With the passing of the years, we have indeed witnessed the emergence of a fairer, more balanced assessment of Nixon (and this biography will help in that process). Some of the wilder accusations of the Watergate era have now been shown up for the ludicrous overreaction they always were, and as they have faded, so some of the luster has, at last, been restored to Nixon’s reputation.

At the same time, it remains unclear just how seriously people really took Nixon’s advice in those final years. Not so much, I reckon. As for the circles in which he was allegedly regarded as either martyred or, well, transfigured, they are, in their very different way, unlikely to have been much more representative than those of Pauline Kael; the New Yorker critic was supposedly unable to work out how Nixon could have won his 1972 landslide when “no one she knew” had voted for him (as it happens, she didn’t actually say that, but the story’s too good not to repeat). What works for Atlantic Richfield will not work so well in Atlantic City or, for that matter, anywhere else in America outside, perhaps, the Beltway and, certainly, Yorba Linda. The restoration of Nixon’s image is far less complete than Black would have us believe.

It may not be the most scientific of tests, but the fact that, as David Greenberg records, masks of Nixon were the top-selling Halloween costumes in October 2000, over a quarter of a century after his resignation, must mean something. In the American popular imagination Nixon will always be seen primarily as a villain, albeit one who can sometimes be played for laughs, or pathos, or both. There were traces of that in Frank Langella’s enthralling performance as the fallen president in the play Frost/Nixon, but Nixon fans may not find it entirely reassuring that Langella was previously best known as a notably effective Dracula.

It’s difficult not to think that, in writing the final chapter in the way he did, Black may have allowed himself to be swayed by his hopes for his own future. In a still-disputed verdict, Black was found guilty last year of defrauding Hollinger International, the company he used to lead, as well as of obstruction of justice. He is currently appealing. Under the circumstances, the idea that Nixon (who was a friend of Black’s) was able to pull off a comeback may well be a source of comfort, inspiration, and, Black might hope, precedent. The author himself has preferred to downplay the extent to which he identifies, or should be identified, with his subject, but choosing, while under indictment, to write a supportive (if still critical) life of a public figure whose most well-known line was that he was “not a crook” may be revealing and is indisputably provocative.

What Black cannot surely deny is that his understanding of what happened to Nixon has been colored by his own problems, whether it’s on the reluctance of Henry Kissinger (once an appointee of Black’s to the Hollinger International board, but now, it seems, somewhat estranged) to stand by the beleaguered Nixon or on the way that the use by prosecutors of plea bargains and whistleblowers has“encouraged a system of suborned or intimidated perjury, or at least spontaneous clarity of recollection, to move upwards in the inculpation of officials in any organization where wrongdoing is alleged.” As so often, Black makes a good, if over-elaborately expressed, point.

It’s worth adding that whatever else this volume reveals about Black’s state of mind, its completion under what in the introduction are referred to as “very distracting circumstances” is also a phenomenal demonstration of discipline, willpower, and self-control. Yet again, Nixon would approve.