CIVILITY, TOLERANCE, NIXON, AND AMERICA: Michael Goldfarb's FRDH podcast

My friend Michael Goldfarb has posted an excellent essay on his FRDH (First Rough Draft of History) podcast. It's called Civility and the 'Paradox of Tolerance' and it's worth a 12-minute listen before you proceed here because I will be talking about some of its points (not spoilers, exactly). Anyway you won't find many people weaving together Newt Gingrich, Sarah Sanders' dinners, Karl Popper and the Sidney Lumet movie The Hill in such an entertaining, and chilling, fashion. You can link to the website here.

Back already? Michael's jumping off point was an essay in Politico, the Sporting News of False Equivalence, by Rutgers professor David Greenberg. As Michael says, Greenberg warns about the 'last time' the left got 'uncivil', pointing to a 1970's bomb explosion which killed members of the Weather Underground in New York. You can read the piece here if you must. How this equates to a mother berating former cabinet member and arch-grafter Scott Pruitt at his latest expensed dinner, or the owner asking Sarah Sanders to leave a restaurant, or diners forcing Mitch McConnell, in his mom jeans, to skedaddle from his night out, is only the peak of the piece's fatuousness. In terms of incivility we could point to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968, Nixon's October Surprise, the Chicago Eight trial, Nixon's plumbers, Watergate, the intelligence scandals of the 70s, Reagan's October Surprise, Iran-Contra, militia bombing federal facilities or shooting it out with federal marshals, assassinations of abortion-providing doctors, and other acts of political incivility, all of which pre-date Newt Gingrich's arrival in Congress to fight the second civil war.

Michael and I have had this discussion many times: I like to trace the modern Republicans back to the Goldwater fiasco in 1964, but more importantly to the Civil and Voting Rights legislation which brought about a re-balancing of American politics. Formerly, each party had its moderate wing; the Dems also had the racist southern Dixiecrats, loyal to hating the party of Lincoln. The Republicans had the John Birch, Ayn Rand, cowboy money faction who got Goldwater the nomination. When civil rights brought black people the vote, the Dixiecrats moved swiftly to the Republican party: all the right-wingnuts were now in the same canoe. And yes, it took them until Gingrich, and the 1994 shut down of government, for them to begin to understand what they had.

You wouldn't get any of this from David Greenberg, and I knew why. 15 years ago or so I reviewed a book of his, Nixon's Shadow, for the TLS. The book was about the way Nixon was portrayed in media, and I criticised it for the mess of selective assumption, historical blindness, false equivalence, and twisted values that it was. The editor who commissioned the review loved it, but it was spiked by the then-editor of the TLS, who as it turned out was also an unreconstructed Nixon-supporter. They do survive. The review appeared in the estimable political magazine Lobster, but when I started this blog I reprinted it, and you can find it here. It will give a decent idea of why Michael found the Politico essay so irritatingly off-base.

We are living in an age of determinedly minority government. I am used to it in the UK, but in America
gerry-mandering, voting repression, and the onslaught of propaganda disguised as news had led Fintan O'Toole in the Irish Times to make a compelling case about seeing the growth of a fascist state.  You can find that here; it's worth a read.

Michael, through Karl Popper, asks how far we should extend tolerance to the intolerant. In 2016 I screamed in frustration as Obama sat still and allowed Mitch McConnell to sideline his nominee for the Supreme Court. I wanted him to force a Constitutional crisis, bring events to a head, stand up to the intolerant. As I read O'Toole, I was reminded I am reading a book called The Trial Of Adolf Hitler right now; it's about the Beer Hall Putch and the trial that followed, and it is all about the tolerance of those who didn't feel the threat about which O'Toole is writing.

Anyone listening to Michael quote Popper: "for it may turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument. They may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive" and not thinking of Trump, Fake and Fox News, has been living in a cave. The kinds of things like Greenberg's Politico piece are the other side of the coin, seeming rational, but encouraging a 'tolerant' acceptance of the intolerant. This must not be allowed to happen. 

OUR NIXON: THE TRICKY DICK WE KNEW AND LOVED

There is a moment, watching the home movies of Tricia Nixon's wedding, when I wondered what similar Super 8 footage of Sonny Corleone's marriage might reveal. Our Nixon, which shows tomorrow at London's Open City Docs Fest, is built around home movie footage shot by H.R. 'Bob' Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin, three of President Richard Nixon's closest aides, three of his most loyal and devoted followers, all of whom would wind up in jail, cut loose by their hero on his way to becoming the only American president to quit in office.

The footage provides behind the scenes looks at some of Nixon's biggest moments, including the China visit, and his most important speeches. Context is set by clips from network newscasts, and by post-prison interviews with the three home movie makers. When I reviewed Nixon's Shadow, a book about his image (you can link to that review here), I asked whether, in Doonesbury's words, a new generation would recoil as they ought to, and now the same question holds true. But here the answer is more ambiguous.

The answer is that the footage is so infused with the adulation of the cameramen that it's almost hard to realise what is going on. Worryingly, I even found myself admiring Tricia, something I never did when I was young. My feeling was that viewers who were not there would not feel the almost visceral impact of Nixon on the times, and it is impossible for the documentary makers to summon that up from the past. Still there are surprises, the biggest one for me being a small protest by two of the Ray Conniff Singers when they performed at the White House. This was the 'square' music Nixon preferred, and the tiny banner of protest, and the heartfelt Christian plea they make for peace does more to set Nixon and Co. into context than any news reports.

Two things help make Penny Lane's carefully structured film work for an audience to whom Nixon is a blank slate, or worse, pace his posthumous re-evaluation, a statesman. One is the personality of the three aides, who are so obviously out of step with their own and our time as to exude mistrust even as they try to appear ingratiating. These are frat boys, squares themselves, Greg Marmalard and Doug Neidemeyer from Animal House gone from frat house to White House. It was Dwight Chapin's frat buddy Donald Segretti whose 'dirty tricks' on the 1972 election campaign got Chapin dumped, but also allowed the press a chance to ignore the bigger issues of government spying and malfeasance.

That took place under Ehrlichman, who was in charge of putting together the 'plumbers' unit, designed to counter White House leaks. Ehrlichman post-prison is easily the most engaging of the three: one of the real highlights of the film is a commercial he made, and which was quickly withdrawn, for ice cream. He says it's 'unbelieveably good' and then smirks 'and believe me, I'm an expert on that subject'. Stay through the credits to see it.

Haldeman was truest of true believers, cast as Martin Borman by his critics, all brush cut and Rumsfeldian arrogance. He gives an interview about his children calling his hair out of fashion, and, like his boss, admits he is. In his most telling quote, he speaks of their arriving in Washington with 'no great ideological thrust or noble ambition'. Once out of prison, he's rocking a carefully styled 70s do, but it doesn't change him at all. He still denies the truths the Watergate tapes reveal, that he as chief of staff was engineering a major cover-up, and unlike Ehrlichman, who doesn't seem surprised he never spoke with Nixon again, Haldeman seems hurt by his abandonment by the Tricky One.. You almost feel sorry for him. You feel even more sorry for his wife, who shows up in a few shots, always looking like a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The second thing that helps us understand is a series of taped conversations which sometimes reflect on the footage already shown. The last of these, when an obviously drunken Nixon calls Haldeman after the speech announcing his and Ehrlichman's 'resignations', is telling. Nixon curses what he's done, but also asks Haldeman, whom he's just cut loose, to call round to get reactions to how his speech went for him. We've previously heard both his need for approval and Haldeman's unwavering willingness to provide that. And we still can't shake the feeling, as we do when we hear Alexander Butterfield explain to Nixon how the recording devices work, and Nixon saying 'there may be a day we have to have this' that Nixon, even drunkenly, was speaking for a record, double-accounting for posterity.

There's a fascinating discussion as Nixon and Ehrlichman deconstruct a TV show they can't identify, but is All In The Family, the American version of Til Death Do Us Part, and how it glorifies homosexuality. Nixon takes the lead: 'You don't glorify homosexuality on public television. You know what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. Aristotle was a homo, we all know that. So was Socrates.' 'But he never had the influence television has,' adds Ehrlichman. 'The last six Roman emperors were fags,' Nixon begins, and Ehrlichman cuts him off with an explanation of 'fatal liberality' that Haldeman finally cuts short. Speaking of that, the discussions of Henry Kissinger, his duplicity, and his penchant for pillow talk, are fascinating. Haldeman later explains that Nixon feels it's OK for Kissinger to 'be a swinger in New York, Florida, or California, but he should not be in Washington.' He advises 'not to put him next to the most glamorous gal anymore, but to seat him next to some intelligent and interesting woman instead.' This was the White House in 1971.

Along the way there are other amusing cameos and side views. Ehrlichman's camera reveals in great detail the bidet in an ornate Paris hotel bathroom. Daniel Moynihan pops up in the foreground as Nixon's helicopter takes off. John Kerry speaks on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against The War during the March on Washington; this is the footage that the 21^st century equivalent of Nixon's frat boys, Shrub Bush and Karl Rove, would use against him relentlessly 40 years later. When Nixon complains no one's called to congratulate him on a speech, and Haldeman says Nelson Rockefeller has, Nixon says 'well, the hell with him!'. And there's celebrity TV interviewer Barbara Walters, interviewing Haldeman, and carefully grimacing when he says history will judge Nixon as one of the great presidents; the grimace, of course, filmed later as a reverse.

But most important are the glimpses of the real Nixon, whose gloating at the press reaction to his announcement of peace with North Vietnam, a peace that never arrived, is a masterpiece of hypocrisy. This is what I grew up knowing, instinctively about Nixon, and what Our Nixon allows a new generation to acquire at its own pace, and learn, as mine did, to recoil.

WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS... NIXON'S SHADOW

Note: Recently I read a review in The Spectator by George Osborne (Tory shadow chancellor, recent convert to government regulation of financial markets, and Russian yachting partner of 'Lord' Mandleson) of Rick Perlstein's book Nixonland. Osborne was speculating whether the Beijing Olympics, and the entire modern China, would exist had not Nixon visited China? Of course coincidence is not causation; one might equally ask if the Cultural Revolution was down to Nixon, or JFK? Osborne concluded 'we don't have Nixon to kick around any more because a new generation hardly knows who he is, unless they Google him of course'. Osborne may be right; and I thought of Nixon's funeral, and how politicans, like hookers, become respectable if they hang around long enough--and then about how Reagan's funeral celebrated Don Ron's reinvention from corrupt at home and dangerously out-of-control corrupt abroad into an Uncle Joe Stalin figure for an America moved far to the right. It reminded me I'd reviewed a book about Nixon a few years ago, for the TLS, but because I hadn't given it the sort of glowing notice the editor (who was not the section-editor who commissioned it) thought it deserved, the review never appeared. That actually happened to me more than once at that stealth Murdoch paper. The review eventually appeared in issue 48 of the estimable magazine Lobster. But since IT is concerned in part with crime, and since true crime is an important part of the crime genre, and since an election is just around the corner in America, now seems a good time to circulate it.

A few years ago, during one of America’s periodic re-evaluations of Richard Nixon, cartoonist Gary Trudeau showed Mike Doonesbury’s young son watching the ex-president on television. After a panel’s worth of contemplation, the boy asks ‘he’s lying now, isn’t he?‘ His parents beam with pride. ‘A new generation recoils!‘ says Doonesbury.

Perhaps David Greenberg needed to recoil just a little too. Pinning down Tricky Dick is as easy as nailing mercury to a wall; it is even more difficult to bring his image into focus if one approaches the past with assumptions borrowed from the present. In fact, it is the very distance between image and reality which proves the stumbling block for this book. Since his death, Nixon has been shifted to the political middle-ground; by shifting along with this and adopting the template of today’s neo-conservative America, Greenberg mitigates, if not accepts wholeheartedly, the decades of pervasive lies from which Nixon benefits. Concluding convincingly that Nixon did change our approach to politicians, Greenberg analyses the man with the assumption that such change must have been, by definition, positive, given that he accepts as healthy the state of America's current American malaise. The result is an unchallenged litany of the received wisdom of blandness that reflects the American media’s avoidance of substantive issues, particularly during election campaigns.

The cartoonists were always way ahead of the political pundits on Nixon anyway. Paul Conrad drew the President's gravestone, sporting the ambiguous epitaph, ’here lies Richard Nixon’. In fact, it's easy to see Nixon as America’s Dracula, rising repeatedly from his grave to suck blood from the collective polis. This would make Greenberg his Renfrew, wanting to raise him from the coffin one last time, while simultaneously criticising Bram Stoker for lack of balance as a biographer.

Is neutrality a sufficient approach to Nixon’s early political years? Can one discuss Nixon’s image while dismissing the influence of Murray Chotiner, the godfather of negative campaigning? Greenberg chooses to portray Nixon as an honest battling candidate during his red-smearing races against Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas. Presumably, since both were ‘liberals,’ they deserved whatever they got. Even the Checkers speech, for most of us the litmus paper of Nixon’s insincerity, becomes to Greenberg a public success, since he sees the 1952 Presidential election as Nixon’s triumph over ‘egghead’ Adlai Stevenson. This is a position tenable only if you somehow manage to disregard the immense popularity of Dwight Eisenhower. If ’most’ Americans really 'embraced' Nixon the man, as Greenberg claims, why would his 1972 re-election committee consciously reject using his name, instead calling themselves the Committee to Re-Elect ‘the President’? They would have avoided the subconsciously inevitable acronym CREEP.

But through deft use of the locutions of mainstream punditry, like the unsubstantiated ‘most’, or the assumptive 'embrace', Greenberg attempts to redefine history, dismissing as conspiracy paranoia a wide spectrum of analysis which to him lies well outside the mainstream and thus doesn't fit his thesis. He makes scant mention of Nixon's shady pal Bebe Rebozo, and none at all of Howard Hughes, whose bribes to Nixon handled by Rebozo may have been the ultimate explanation of Watergate. There is no discussion of the original ‘October Surprise’, Nixon and Kissinger’s deliberate sabotaging of the 1968 Paris peace talks before the election. Respected reporters like Seymour Hersh get lumped in with student radicals, as people who abused the system every bit as badly as Nixon himself. Authors like Jim Hougan are marginalized completely. It’s as if Greenberg is desperate to avoid being labelled a ‘nattering nabob of negativism’ by Spiro Agnew.

Nixon’s defining moments, the Watergate scandal, his impeachment and resignation, exist sui generis for Greenberg in a similarly conspiracy-free light. No matter how much evidence he himself provides to the contrary, he continues to cite with approval those reporters who admit to having been fooled repeatedly by Tricky Dick. They remembered his ’you won’t have Nixon to kick around’ speech after losing the 1962 California gubernatorial election, and their sympathy, if not guilt, led them to accept Nixon at face value in 1968. Even after giving Nixon another free ride in 1972, against the ‘unelectable’ McGovern, Watergate remained a non-issue until the lies became too blatant to dismiss. Right-wing pundit James Kilpatrick is quoted, but not when he opined absurdly on 60 Minutes' Point-Counterpoint segment that the Watergate tapes showed only Nixon’s refreshing sense of humour. Greenberg, who worked on Bob Woodward’s Clinton book, THE AGENDA, never even wonders about the identity or motivation of Deep Throat.

After Nixon quit the White House, he was reborn as an elder statesman, hailed for his realpolitik with the Soviet Union and China. Greenberg is more comfortable here, and traces deftly Nixon’s academic re-evaluation as a ’liberal’, the last Republican President not committed to destroying the New Deal outright. The motivations behind Nixon’s ’liberalism’ can be guessed at; he did, after all, grow up poor during the Depression, but Greenberg is dismissive of most of the ‘psycho-biographers’ who were attracted to Nixon as an early case-study. His analysis of them is cogent, but although he quotes Gary Wills a number of times, he never actually discusses Wills’ NIXON AGONISTES, by far the best of the bunch. More a literary exegesis than psychobiography, it did far better thirty years ago what Greenberg attempts to do now.

Nixon’s campaign manager and attorney general, John Mitchell, said, on his way to jail, ‘this country is going so far to the right you won’t recognise it.’ The next group of California businessmen backing a political candidate chose someone you would buy a used car from, Ronald Reagan, the ‘Teflon’ president. Greenberg says Nixon’s legacy is that Americans now ‘routinely believe all Presidents manipulate images’. But the reality goes far deeper. Nixon’s true legacy is the way ‘character’ has become the bullfighter’s cape of political analysis, used by spin doctors and media to distract the audience while they, or the candidates, get gored.

In the 2000 Presidential election, the mainstream media cast Al Gore as the Nixonian ‘liar’, while George Bush, sporting the American flag lapel pin introduced by Nixon himself as self-conscious refuge in patriotism, proved himself presidential by not stumbling a la Gerry Ford. Not surprisingly, Bush’s Chotiner, Karl Rove, was a young Nixon supporter during the Watergate era. And it’s interesting to note that Bush’s ability to generate visceral protest is positively Nixonian. Shrub’s lip-licking smirk is the most revealing ‘tell’ identifying mendacity since Tricky Dick’s phony smile, and his chimp-like visage is the greatest boon to cartoonists since Nixon’s jowls, five o’clock shadow, and ski-jump nose.

Greenberg also gives short-shrift to the rich catalogue of Nixon portrayals in fiction and film. He is particularly dismissive of Oliver Stone’s NIXON, which, for all its horror-film iconography (America‘s Dracula?), is both more sympathetic to Nixon and closer to Greenberg’s own thesis than he would like to admit. Greenberg at one point quotes Nixon exhibiting a what he calls a Freudian bent, noting that those who lie or cover up tend to over-react. That is less Freudian than Jungian, namely Marie-Louise Von Franz's theory of the Shadow, whereby we hate in others what we fear in ourselves. In a key moment of Stone’s NIXON, Anthony Hopkins talks to a portrait of John Kennedy. ‘When they look at you, they see what they want to be; when they look at me they see what they are.‘ That is the essence of Nixon’s image; it is crystal clear, what you see is what you got. The shadow is not Nixon’s but America's. And behind it is somewhere Greenberg refuses to look.

Nixon's Shadow by David Greenberg, WW Norton, 2003
ISBN 978-0393048964