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Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man
From one of America's most distinguished historians comes this classic analysis of Richard Nixon. By considering some of the president's opinions, Wills comes to the controversial conclusion that Nixon was actually a liberal. Both entertaining and essential, Nixon Agonistes captures a troubled leader and a struggling nation mired in a foolish Asian war, forfeiting the loyalty of its youth, puzzled by its own power, and looking to its cautious president for confidence. In the end, Nixon Agonistes reaches far beyond its assessment of the thirty-seventh president to become an incisive and provocative analysis of the American political machine.
640 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
About the author
Garry Wills
135 books219 followersGarry Wills is an American author, journalist, political philosopher, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, especially the history of the Catholic Church. He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1993.
Wills has written over fifty books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for The New York Review of Books. He became a faculty member of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is an Emeritus Professor of History.
Wills has written over fifty books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for The New York Review of Books. He became a faculty member of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is an Emeritus Professor of History.
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November 6, 2017
”The disjointedness of the talk seemed expressed in his face as he scowled (his only expression of thoughtfulness) or grinned (his only expression of pleasure). The features do not quite work together. The famous nose looks detachable…, but the aspect that awes one when he meets Nixon is its distressing width, accentuated by the depth of the ravine running down its center, and by its general fuzziness (Nixon’s ‘five-o’clock shadow’ extends all the way up to his heavy eyebrows, though--like many hairy men--he is balding above the brows’ ‘timberline’). The nose swings far out; then, underneath, it does not rejoin his face in a straight line, but curves far up again, leaving a large but partially screened space between nose and lip. The whole face’s lack of jointure is emphasized by the fact that he has no very defined upper lip…. The parts all seem to be worked by wires, a doomed attempt to contrive ‘illusions of grandeur.’”
I can’t imagine how it must have been to work for Richard Nixon. I would be mesmerized with watching the mechanics of his face. The shadow play of conflicting emotions that would be constantly being weighed, measured, discarded, and embraced. The tamping down of crippling paranoia and the constant battle to not inflict petty vengeance; and yet, knowing exactly what he needs to do politically to be successful. It is an intimidating face, a masterpiece of originality. There is no mistaking a picture of Richard Nixon for someone else. His face shows the craters of many emotional writhings revealing for all to see the damage his own internal conflicts have inflicted on himself. He is intelligent, certainly among the most intelligent to ever hold the presidency, but also possibly the president who like the people, his constituency, the least.
Nixon could grow a better beard than this by noon.
After losing a close election to a man who was one of the most charismatic politicians of the century most men would have considered their political ambitions at an end. They would have grown out a beard (Al Gore), which would have taken Nixon a matter of hours, and spent some time reflecting on the extent of their defeat. They might even make a list of their triumphant enemies, but ultimately they would have, after the dust settled, embraced a sense of relief that their campaigning days are over. Not Nixon. He put himself back on Frankenstein’s table and said “hit me with the go go juice Father”.
When Dick came back from the lab he just wasn’t the same.
There was one story involving Nixon and Kennedy that I have never heard before, but has left a lasting impression on me. This happened right after The Bay of Pigs disaster.
”(Earl) Mazo went into Nixon’s office and found him on the phone. ‘He kept making call after call, while I waited for nearly an hour. He was calling Republican officials. Some he asked, others he begged, some he even threatened. He was telling them not to attack Kennedy on this thing. When he finally got to me, I said, ‘What is this? Here’s the perfect issue for your party. Why aren’t you using it?’ He told me, ‘I just saw a crushed man today. He needs our help. I told him to go upstairs and have a drink with his wife, and avoid making any decision until things brighten up a bit.’”
Maybe it was because he coveted that position so much or maybe it was a leftover glow from the reverence he felt for his lifelong hero Woodrow Wilson or the esteem he still felt for Dwight D. Eisenhower, but in that moment he showed a nonpartisan respect for the office of the presidency that had nothing to do with the man currently filling the position. Just when you think you have a handle on the character of Nixon he reveals another part himself that adds to the mystic of the enigma.
Eisenhower didn’t pick Nixon to be his running mate. He didn’t really seem to care who he ran with or even if he liked him personally or agreed with him on the issues. They make an odd pairing almost as odd as the Kennedy/Johnson ticket. Both Johnson and Nixon were on the ticket because of math, electoral college math. Nixon’s relationship with Eisenhower was complicated as people like to say about their relationship status on Facebook these days.
”For Nixon’s relationship with Eisenhower was like a Calvinist’s relation to God, or Ahab’s to the whale--awe and fascination soured with fear and desire to supplant; along with a knowledge, nonetheless, that whatever nobility one may aspire to will come from the attention of the Great One.”
Nixon almost lost his chance to be on the ticket before he even had a moment to luxuriate in the possibility of being one heartbeat away from the presidency. Improprieties were raised by the press and Eisenhower told him he had one chance to square things or he was going to have to bow himself off stage. This resulted in the famous Checkers speech. That speech, which inspired a mountain of support mail for Nixon, forced Eisenhower to re-evaluate not only the political savvy of his running mate, but also the resoluteness of his character. Nixon surprised everyone not only with his sincerity, but also with his ability to be convincing.
There ain’t nobody pushing me out of here before I’m ready to go.
Garry Wills makes the case that there are actually four political parties in the United States. One of the many times when Wills inspired me to rethink, and reevaluate my own thoughts about the political process.
”There are two presidential parties (Democrat and Republican), which address themselves to the nation as a whole, fashioning an inclusive philosophy of government and putting it up for debate every four years. But there are also two congressional parties (Democrat and Republican) composed of disparate local types running in staggered elections on local issues. Not only does Congress hamper the President; but each congressional party, controlling as it does the day-to-day ‘grass roots’ machinery, keeps its own presidential party from living up to that high vision created when platform-drafting time comes around.”
Even when Congress is of the same party as the President it is still extremely difficult in this country to achieve any comprehensive change because ultimately the agendas of the individuals, the pork for votes concept, will undermine the will of the President.
Wills talks about the anti-intellectual movement in this country with most of the criticism coming from the Right. He quotes Spiro T. Agnew who served as Vice President under Nixon from 1969-1973 until an investigation for bribery, extortion, tax fraud, and conspiracy charges forced him to resign.
Agnew zeroed in on his favorite demon, the Eastern Establishment, which does not represent the good folk of America, the silent majority who raise no doubts and do not question Presidents. Agnew had earlier called such types “ideological eunuchs, whose most comfortable position is straddling the philosophical fence,” men who are “effete...sniveling, hand-wringing” in their treatment of their own children, the willing victims of “an artificial and masochistic sophistication,” of an affliction “encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”
Not true Spiro. All an intellectual has to do is look it up and then he can park that bike up your you-know-where.
Statements like that, which still rear their ugly heads in congressional and presidential races today, might be a reason why the Republican party still struggles to make inroads in the Northeast.
Wills also wrote an intriguing statement regarding America’s involvement in foreign wars. ”All our wars are wars against wars.” It is a noble concept and there is a certain amount of truth to that statement, not that we always have been as virtuous as that line would imply.
Wars have historically been about conquest or acquisition of land or in some cases, the Crusades being a perfect example, over religion. America did not go to war in Europe and come away with France as part of their plunder or carry away the oil from Iraq or the opium crop from Afghanistan. Our reasons are sometimes nonsensical for why we have found ourselves involved in these places, but at the end of the day, maybe because we want to be seen as the good guys, we don’t exploit our military success(?) to the extent that powers have in the past.
Wills makes another interesting point in regard to Wilson’s Mexican policy during 1916 when America was trying to chase down Pancho Villa.
”The fact that he was put in office by an electoral-college majority does not make his actions America’s actions. An election cannot establish a unitary National Will. The belief that it does so leads to the belief that the Nation is deciding whatever Richard Nixon decides should be done, with American bombs and American lives, in Vietnam. Yet even if a President could embody a unanimous National Will--even if we grant that impossible hypothesis--what right does a Wilson or a Nixon have to impose that will on another country? If Wilson had embodied the National Will of America, he obviously was not the embodiment of Mexico’s will, any more than Nixon can embody the will of South Vietnam.”
Garry Wills
I’ve got pages and pages of notes from reading this book. Garry Wills has a beautiful mind. He is insightful, precise, and philosophically thoughtful. This book was published in 1969 so well before Nixon became a self-fulfilling prophet of his paranoia. I thought the book was even handed and much more concerned with putting aside party affiliation to look at the cause and effect of presidential decisions. Wills also examined Nixon’s opponents in his own party and those across the aisle creating these wonderful portraits of the movers and shakers of the late 1960s. I must say this book is probably not for the reader with a casual interest in these events. This book is better suited for presidential junkies, researchers, and the slightly insane, but still I hate to steer anybody away from such wonderful prose.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
I can’t imagine how it must have been to work for Richard Nixon. I would be mesmerized with watching the mechanics of his face. The shadow play of conflicting emotions that would be constantly being weighed, measured, discarded, and embraced. The tamping down of crippling paranoia and the constant battle to not inflict petty vengeance; and yet, knowing exactly what he needs to do politically to be successful. It is an intimidating face, a masterpiece of originality. There is no mistaking a picture of Richard Nixon for someone else. His face shows the craters of many emotional writhings revealing for all to see the damage his own internal conflicts have inflicted on himself. He is intelligent, certainly among the most intelligent to ever hold the presidency, but also possibly the president who like the people, his constituency, the least.
Nixon could grow a better beard than this by noon.
After losing a close election to a man who was one of the most charismatic politicians of the century most men would have considered their political ambitions at an end. They would have grown out a beard (Al Gore), which would have taken Nixon a matter of hours, and spent some time reflecting on the extent of their defeat. They might even make a list of their triumphant enemies, but ultimately they would have, after the dust settled, embraced a sense of relief that their campaigning days are over. Not Nixon. He put himself back on Frankenstein’s table and said “hit me with the go go juice Father”.
When Dick came back from the lab he just wasn’t the same.
There was one story involving Nixon and Kennedy that I have never heard before, but has left a lasting impression on me. This happened right after The Bay of Pigs disaster.
”(Earl) Mazo went into Nixon’s office and found him on the phone. ‘He kept making call after call, while I waited for nearly an hour. He was calling Republican officials. Some he asked, others he begged, some he even threatened. He was telling them not to attack Kennedy on this thing. When he finally got to me, I said, ‘What is this? Here’s the perfect issue for your party. Why aren’t you using it?’ He told me, ‘I just saw a crushed man today. He needs our help. I told him to go upstairs and have a drink with his wife, and avoid making any decision until things brighten up a bit.’”
Maybe it was because he coveted that position so much or maybe it was a leftover glow from the reverence he felt for his lifelong hero Woodrow Wilson or the esteem he still felt for Dwight D. Eisenhower, but in that moment he showed a nonpartisan respect for the office of the presidency that had nothing to do with the man currently filling the position. Just when you think you have a handle on the character of Nixon he reveals another part himself that adds to the mystic of the enigma.
Eisenhower didn’t pick Nixon to be his running mate. He didn’t really seem to care who he ran with or even if he liked him personally or agreed with him on the issues. They make an odd pairing almost as odd as the Kennedy/Johnson ticket. Both Johnson and Nixon were on the ticket because of math, electoral college math. Nixon’s relationship with Eisenhower was complicated as people like to say about their relationship status on Facebook these days.
”For Nixon’s relationship with Eisenhower was like a Calvinist’s relation to God, or Ahab’s to the whale--awe and fascination soured with fear and desire to supplant; along with a knowledge, nonetheless, that whatever nobility one may aspire to will come from the attention of the Great One.”
Nixon almost lost his chance to be on the ticket before he even had a moment to luxuriate in the possibility of being one heartbeat away from the presidency. Improprieties were raised by the press and Eisenhower told him he had one chance to square things or he was going to have to bow himself off stage. This resulted in the famous Checkers speech. That speech, which inspired a mountain of support mail for Nixon, forced Eisenhower to re-evaluate not only the political savvy of his running mate, but also the resoluteness of his character. Nixon surprised everyone not only with his sincerity, but also with his ability to be convincing.
There ain’t nobody pushing me out of here before I’m ready to go.
Garry Wills makes the case that there are actually four political parties in the United States. One of the many times when Wills inspired me to rethink, and reevaluate my own thoughts about the political process.
”There are two presidential parties (Democrat and Republican), which address themselves to the nation as a whole, fashioning an inclusive philosophy of government and putting it up for debate every four years. But there are also two congressional parties (Democrat and Republican) composed of disparate local types running in staggered elections on local issues. Not only does Congress hamper the President; but each congressional party, controlling as it does the day-to-day ‘grass roots’ machinery, keeps its own presidential party from living up to that high vision created when platform-drafting time comes around.”
Even when Congress is of the same party as the President it is still extremely difficult in this country to achieve any comprehensive change because ultimately the agendas of the individuals, the pork for votes concept, will undermine the will of the President.
Wills talks about the anti-intellectual movement in this country with most of the criticism coming from the Right. He quotes Spiro T. Agnew who served as Vice President under Nixon from 1969-1973 until an investigation for bribery, extortion, tax fraud, and conspiracy charges forced him to resign.
Agnew zeroed in on his favorite demon, the Eastern Establishment, which does not represent the good folk of America, the silent majority who raise no doubts and do not question Presidents. Agnew had earlier called such types “ideological eunuchs, whose most comfortable position is straddling the philosophical fence,” men who are “effete...sniveling, hand-wringing” in their treatment of their own children, the willing victims of “an artificial and masochistic sophistication,” of an affliction “encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”
Not true Spiro. All an intellectual has to do is look it up and then he can park that bike up your you-know-where.
Statements like that, which still rear their ugly heads in congressional and presidential races today, might be a reason why the Republican party still struggles to make inroads in the Northeast.
Wills also wrote an intriguing statement regarding America’s involvement in foreign wars. ”All our wars are wars against wars.” It is a noble concept and there is a certain amount of truth to that statement, not that we always have been as virtuous as that line would imply.
Wars have historically been about conquest or acquisition of land or in some cases, the Crusades being a perfect example, over religion. America did not go to war in Europe and come away with France as part of their plunder or carry away the oil from Iraq or the opium crop from Afghanistan. Our reasons are sometimes nonsensical for why we have found ourselves involved in these places, but at the end of the day, maybe because we want to be seen as the good guys, we don’t exploit our military success(?) to the extent that powers have in the past.
Wills makes another interesting point in regard to Wilson’s Mexican policy during 1916 when America was trying to chase down Pancho Villa.
”The fact that he was put in office by an electoral-college majority does not make his actions America’s actions. An election cannot establish a unitary National Will. The belief that it does so leads to the belief that the Nation is deciding whatever Richard Nixon decides should be done, with American bombs and American lives, in Vietnam. Yet even if a President could embody a unanimous National Will--even if we grant that impossible hypothesis--what right does a Wilson or a Nixon have to impose that will on another country? If Wilson had embodied the National Will of America, he obviously was not the embodiment of Mexico’s will, any more than Nixon can embody the will of South Vietnam.”
Garry Wills
I’ve got pages and pages of notes from reading this book. Garry Wills has a beautiful mind. He is insightful, precise, and philosophically thoughtful. This book was published in 1969 so well before Nixon became a self-fulfilling prophet of his paranoia. I thought the book was even handed and much more concerned with putting aside party affiliation to look at the cause and effect of presidential decisions. Wills also examined Nixon’s opponents in his own party and those across the aisle creating these wonderful portraits of the movers and shakers of the late 1960s. I must say this book is probably not for the reader with a casual interest in these events. This book is better suited for presidential junkies, researchers, and the slightly insane, but still I hate to steer anybody away from such wonderful prose.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
September 21, 2012
Originally assigned by Esquire magazine to cover the late stages of the 1968 presidential election from the vantage point of the Nixon campaign, featuring that political warhorse and his energetic team of legal associates and young fireballers, Garry Wills—under the prodding of his editor—turned a ruminative essay upon Tricky Dick into six hundred pages of analysis, diagnosis, deduction, induction, and reflection upon the state of the American national soul at the closing-out point of that tumultuous decade. It's an absolutely remarkable performance—character portraits of the primary players involved in the party nominating conventions and electoral races of the fifties and sixties, the period in which Nixon pursued the political career that seemingly brought him so much in the way of humiliation, anguish, devastation, and setback as compared to the fleeting joys and ephemeral exposures to power and influence, are offered up for dual exposure: that of the personalities involved and how they participated in what ofttimes appeared to be an unseemly charade, and that of their connexion to an American ethos that was deemed to be splintering at the seams and in danger of falling apart. Through it all Wills offers up his assessment of that ethos as part of the market structure that permeated the entirety of the classical liberal edifice that upheld and enclosed the country during its comparatively brief but burgeoning lifespan—markets in the moral, economic, intellectual, and political spheres that had long been working their contradiction-laden memes upon the process such that the election of Nixon could be viewed as the apotheosis of a system that, having thus achieved its ebb tide endpoint, was in desperate need of an injection of reform and restructuring. Astoundingly good by every measure: content, form, wit, depth, style, persuasiveness, coherence—and one of those tomes which, in my estimation, deserves to be read by as broad a segment of the American public as possible, in order that they might ingest the counter-intuitive, thought-provoking, and enduringly relevant themes worked out, at length, by the author, and (re)assess how the country has come to take on its disturbingly, nigh despairingly pretzel-like form in the early stages of the twenty-first century.
I had originally intended to make this book the followup to Rick Perlstein's Nixonland , based upon GRer AC's accurate positioning of the former as a superior tome to the latter, and hence better serving as a depth-provisioner to Perlstein's more broadly-based cultural-historical effort; and it is indeed the case the Wills paints a much more effective and detailed portrait of Nixon, an introvert in an extrovert's occupation enduring the loneliness of the long distance runner. It is also the case that Wills' logically drawn determination of the causation of and correlation between the strains of resentment bubbling below the surface of late-sixties America—from all corners and comers—is endowed with an inductive rigor and tiered process of intellectualization that withstands probing scrutiny better than Perlstein's more casually constructed polemics; and notwithstanding the (acknowledged) debt that Perlstein has to Wills in how he crafted the historic chain of American political evolution, the latter—in his linkage from the Founding Fathers through to the pivotal political philosophy of Woodrow Wilson and the bifurcation of the classical liberal spirit in the wake of the Great Depression via the instantiation of the New Deal—proffers an original take that is simply the better thought-out, constructed, and elucidated of the two. It's a closer match as regards the entertainment value contained in each, but even here Wills compares favorably with Perlstein—indeed, the dry and ironical tone with which Wills picks apart the latent absurdities within events, actions, words spoken or written, opining advanced or relegated, that transpired during the course of the political campaigns and backgrounds that are given coverage within, is deftly and wittily done—the pages flew by, which wasn't always the case with Nixonland. Another interesting connexion was presented in the similarities that I found in analytic avenues and market-moire discernment between Nixon Agonistes and the latest publication from Walter Russell Mead, the lamentably underrated and under-read God and Gold . In especial, both of these tomes viewed the twentieth century growths of liberal capitalist democracies via the prisms of the morality inherent within the foundational philosophies that underlay the entirety, moralities that stressed not only the equality of the citizen contenders within the nationality, but, perhaps even more so, the cherished individuality of each and the spirit of striving on one's own—a striving fully underwritten by the protestant theology that served as religious spinal cord—which was the integral component of that personal freedom within a constituted community. While both acknowledged the contradictions that also inhered within, ofttimes unnoticed, it was that moral element which stood as the centerpiece from which the other market constituents—the political, the intellectual, the economic—were ultimately derived.
It is with this Moral Market that Wills opens the book, segueing from his Esquire essay into a determination, by means of Richard Nixon's political career, of the centrality of the self-made man as an archetype of the American citizen. This is an Emersonian self-reliance, in which past defeats, setbacks, suffering is all of a purpose in forging one's current individuated self. One neither can nor should rely upon assistance or aide from anything or anyone beyond the self—we must earn our place at the table-setting of success. The homily that Anyone can succeed is matched in fervor and integrality with that which states you cannot get something for nothing; in this way, one betters oneself through hard work, sacrifice, and copious amounts of sweat; the end result being the reward of being able to provide more and better opportunities for one's children, while contributing to the pool of self-made individuals that comprise the grand success that is the American experiment.
In Wills' determination, the mythological model of this self-reliance opening the doors to success via perduring struggle and determined effort is Horatio Alger; the existent one, none other than Richard Nixon, who exemplified the rags to riches theme that powered Alger's fictive works—and modest riches at that, at least as compared to today's standard of political remuneration for favors provided—in a way that resonated with the so-called Silent Majority, Americans who had committed to the Alger method whole-heartedly and were stunned to discover, in their children and the black minority, scorn and contempt for their work ethic wedded to a continuous demand for a larger share of the pie—a share that, in their estimation, could only come from an equally scornful and, worse, condescending Eastern elite taking that majority's hard earned money and doling it out, and in the process turning the truism of not getting something for nothing on its head. But Wills, in working through this Moral Market, concludes that it is, particularly in the twentieth century, a charade: nobody makes it on their own; indeed, that very Silent Majority had risen through inherent advantages and privileges, from governmental legislation and intervention, business favoring and protection, communal aide and support, exploitation of the disadvantaged and the underclass, and increasingly used it to hedge themselves off from any risk or challenge. The rage and resentment came as much from an understanding of this reality, one which, if admitted inside, would shatter the moral foundations that the myth of the earner required in order to perdure. Deeming themselves the heroes of the American dream, Wills portrays them as of a kin with Nixon: diminished, curdled, nursing grudges and resentments and perceived injuries, an oppressed majority held down by the very stringency of their striving ethos.
The Economic Market is delineated by means of a truly entertaining sequence of chapters focussing upon the Republican National Convention of 1968. As with its moral sibling, the economic market is one that encompasses a nation of earners ever in motion—running the race of competition, working, striving, seeking every advantage and taking advantage of every opportunity. As opposed to the Old World conflict between a landed aristocracy and wage-bound working class, the United States provided a dynamic, proclaimedly level playing field where every agent—an agent of the self, naturally—was in motion, sometimes being herded into a renewed and rejigged starting line so that a greater measure of equality might be injected into the race itself, but still powering forward under the propulsion achieved through one's efforts and willpower. But Wills shows a race with no end, merely a continuously unfolding track ever beckoning one on, unto exhaustion. In his calculation, the primary differences between the Left and Right in the United States, as versus that which had arisen in Europe, was that there was no vision of economic reform that deviated from this need for dynamic motion upon a competitive track. Attempts to craft some measure of stability to the platform, to achieve communal support and interdependence, was scorned as the gambits of the lazy or timid or unwilling; and this also meant that any work geared towards fostering such stabilities or alterations to the pattern of competitive striving was held in disregard as well. As the author saw it, there was little honor and even less coherence in such a frenzied pace of perpetual motion—no way to ever pause and take stock of where the country was at, what cracks were showing in the edifice, and what parts of this hollow, hying boast echoing forth from a mythological past might best be discarded or emended in order to address the current realities.
It is within the Intellectual Market of the academic world that Wills really gripped my attention and pulled me into the current of his reasoned thought. In the United States, academia displays the same adherence to Liberal ideals that permeates the markets moral and economic: the upholding of a free exchange of ideas, expressed via free speech and determined within a value-neutral environment in which the emergent champion will be that ideation which overcomes it challengers by means of its expressive rigor and logical strengths—a case of an invisible hand of the mind at work, self-regulating and advocating for the best of the mind's product. Yet Wills sees an intellectual system as riddled with contradictions and incoherencies as its siblings outlined above—for the American intellectual market abhors and refuses to countenance any beliefs or ideas that tend to the absolute, to a universality of truth, to systemic completeness, and hence pre-judges them as untenable ideologies. In this, the academic world acts as a judge upon the exchange of ideas, neutralizing any that will not admit to being value-free. What's more, the academic market is a propagator of an aristocratic mindset and a receiver of government funding that it uses in order to advance political agendas and furnish a continuous supply of minds designed for employment within the government and government-contracted industries, such as the massive military-industrial complex. But there is also conflict between the academic and political worlds, expressed through the former's adherence to freedom as a positive value, which leads to the exclusion of such as exclusionary religions or philosophies, and a tendency to bypass the production of an enlightened citizenry in order to directly gain the politician's ear. As Wills sees it, this lack of responsibility for its own failings and flaws was the primary impetus for the campus uprisings of the late sixties, which the universities attempted to counter with an even broader application of its contradictory Liberal mores. The academic market is blind to the fact that it has crafted an orthodoxy through its own preferential advocacy and lack of intellectual honesty—and hence that the ideals that it believes to have been determined to be the best by the invisible hand were done so through the firm guidance provided to that incorporeal extremity.
And the goods just keep on coming, as Wills saves his best for last. The analysis of the Political Market is just brilliantly executed, impossible to do any measure of justice without its entirety being ingested—but the key element is that from the Liberal devotion to the self-made man springs the same compulsion to champion the self-determination of nations, as a freely-elected government, preferably operating within the free enterprise system, serves as an enduringly effective check upon despotism whilst harnessing that same self-made striving through applied effort and will found in devolved form within the average citizen: witness the United States as Exhibit A. Unfortunately, such self-determination, a theme stridently promoted by Woodrow Wilson as part of the Fourteen Points he brought to the Peace Conference held in the aftermath of the Great War, presents a series of problematic barriers against its implementation. In a masterful deconstruction, Wills wends through the various elements that would comprise how a particular people might determine themselves as deserving of their own state of nationhood, highlighting the perennial problems inherent to the process: what is to be the conclusive factor? Language? Ethnicity? Religion? Numbers? Current mood? Former territorial status or partition? Historic state constitution? Furthermore, Wills works through the United States' history in dealing with self-determined nations effecting an (enforced) democratic system—Mexico under Wilson; Latin America under Eisenhower; Vietnam under Kennedy and Johnson—to show how the preference, from the point-of-view of the United States, or indeed any First World state, is for dealing with an authoritative personality through whom their wishes might readily be channeled and implemented; and, hence, that despots best serve the United States' interests. This preference for strongmen works in tandem with the puritanical elements operating within the perceived benevolence endemic to American promotions of freedom abroad, and which accounts for the comparative ease and rationalized acceptance of the use of force in implementing democratic ideals and determined sovereignty. As Wills pithily puts it:
And so we arrive back at Nixon. He is, properly, the central locus of the book, the figure, so ill at ease with his chosen profession, whose unwavering devotion to all of the tenets that constitute the various Liberal markets brought under the authorial microscope marked him as the ideal representative of the resentment-bound self-made man that formed the Silent Majority and made the rise of a slick and crafty rabble-rouser like Wallace possible; made him the perfect representative with which to diminish the occupancy of the White House and starkly limn the problems endemic to the American conception of Liberalism heading into the latter stages of the twentieth century. I felt that Wills nailed down far more of the inner makeup of Nixon, what made this tormented but undeniably brilliant man tick, than Perlstein managed in far more pages; in particular, the chapter on the infamous Checkers Speech is just perfectly done—highlighting Nixon's courage, political instincts, hard work, and aggressiveness in pursuit of his ambition in perfect balance with his continuous humiliation, belittling slights from the elite classes, shiftiness and abject kowtowing to those same forces in the name of that same ambition. It is impossible to read Nixon Agonistes—an exquisitely apt title, that—without a sense of sympathy and understanding for that man, indeed for all introverts and grinders who must endure much suffering, many slings and arrows on the course of the racetrack the country demands that they run. He was never a particularly bad man, but rather one whose hard and lengthy road to the top must perforce have seared the very soul that such gains were not achieved as something for nothing—and, in the process, curdled that spirit with the gnomic deformations of resentment, rage, bitterness, and paranoia at what was demanded of one both by the silver spoon Franklins looking down upon you from above and the minorities and underclass scrabbling up desperately and insolently from below.
Other characters are also given superb depictions, particularly Eisenhower's qualities as a politician and cautious president; Spiro Agnew as Nixon's point-man and kindred spirit on the domestic law and order platform in the face of riot and demonstration run rampant among young and black America; and Woodrow Wilson as the prototypical puritanical Liberal monger-of-modalities, Nixon's inspiration and model for what a president might and should achieve in the global marketplace of (arms-implemented) ideas. As Wills saw it, the classical liberal spirit of the US had been rent in twain in the aftermath of the Great Depression, with the free marketeers, combined with the authoritarians and religious fundamentalists, striving for an absolute individualism amongst the running earners as set against the progressive, socialist, and democratic strains that opted for tight social cohesion and rejigging of the race's starting line—but even this split evinced traits of their opposing side as part of the living contradiction that was the American Liberal system. As GRer AC also noted, Wills' discerned trending for a renewal and reworking of Liberalism's failures proved to be ridiculously optimistic; but, as has often been the case in books such as these, if his remedy is rather inordinately Panglossian and casually implied, his diagnosis of the problem is first rate, in every aspect. It amazes me how much a perceptive mind could induce about America from the unattractive character traits of one of its least-heralded twentieth century presidents—that this very contender would prove such a symbolic exemplar of the class writhing under the whiplash of demanded and unfolding changes. Tricky Dick, then, was America: and that's as alarming as it is astounding.
I had originally intended to make this book the followup to Rick Perlstein's Nixonland , based upon GRer AC's accurate positioning of the former as a superior tome to the latter, and hence better serving as a depth-provisioner to Perlstein's more broadly-based cultural-historical effort; and it is indeed the case the Wills paints a much more effective and detailed portrait of Nixon, an introvert in an extrovert's occupation enduring the loneliness of the long distance runner. It is also the case that Wills' logically drawn determination of the causation of and correlation between the strains of resentment bubbling below the surface of late-sixties America—from all corners and comers—is endowed with an inductive rigor and tiered process of intellectualization that withstands probing scrutiny better than Perlstein's more casually constructed polemics; and notwithstanding the (acknowledged) debt that Perlstein has to Wills in how he crafted the historic chain of American political evolution, the latter—in his linkage from the Founding Fathers through to the pivotal political philosophy of Woodrow Wilson and the bifurcation of the classical liberal spirit in the wake of the Great Depression via the instantiation of the New Deal—proffers an original take that is simply the better thought-out, constructed, and elucidated of the two. It's a closer match as regards the entertainment value contained in each, but even here Wills compares favorably with Perlstein—indeed, the dry and ironical tone with which Wills picks apart the latent absurdities within events, actions, words spoken or written, opining advanced or relegated, that transpired during the course of the political campaigns and backgrounds that are given coverage within, is deftly and wittily done—the pages flew by, which wasn't always the case with Nixonland. Another interesting connexion was presented in the similarities that I found in analytic avenues and market-moire discernment between Nixon Agonistes and the latest publication from Walter Russell Mead, the lamentably underrated and under-read God and Gold . In especial, both of these tomes viewed the twentieth century growths of liberal capitalist democracies via the prisms of the morality inherent within the foundational philosophies that underlay the entirety, moralities that stressed not only the equality of the citizen contenders within the nationality, but, perhaps even more so, the cherished individuality of each and the spirit of striving on one's own—a striving fully underwritten by the protestant theology that served as religious spinal cord—which was the integral component of that personal freedom within a constituted community. While both acknowledged the contradictions that also inhered within, ofttimes unnoticed, it was that moral element which stood as the centerpiece from which the other market constituents—the political, the intellectual, the economic—were ultimately derived.
It is with this Moral Market that Wills opens the book, segueing from his Esquire essay into a determination, by means of Richard Nixon's political career, of the centrality of the self-made man as an archetype of the American citizen. This is an Emersonian self-reliance, in which past defeats, setbacks, suffering is all of a purpose in forging one's current individuated self. One neither can nor should rely upon assistance or aide from anything or anyone beyond the self—we must earn our place at the table-setting of success. The homily that Anyone can succeed is matched in fervor and integrality with that which states you cannot get something for nothing; in this way, one betters oneself through hard work, sacrifice, and copious amounts of sweat; the end result being the reward of being able to provide more and better opportunities for one's children, while contributing to the pool of self-made individuals that comprise the grand success that is the American experiment.
In Wills' determination, the mythological model of this self-reliance opening the doors to success via perduring struggle and determined effort is Horatio Alger; the existent one, none other than Richard Nixon, who exemplified the rags to riches theme that powered Alger's fictive works—and modest riches at that, at least as compared to today's standard of political remuneration for favors provided—in a way that resonated with the so-called Silent Majority, Americans who had committed to the Alger method whole-heartedly and were stunned to discover, in their children and the black minority, scorn and contempt for their work ethic wedded to a continuous demand for a larger share of the pie—a share that, in their estimation, could only come from an equally scornful and, worse, condescending Eastern elite taking that majority's hard earned money and doling it out, and in the process turning the truism of not getting something for nothing on its head. But Wills, in working through this Moral Market, concludes that it is, particularly in the twentieth century, a charade: nobody makes it on their own; indeed, that very Silent Majority had risen through inherent advantages and privileges, from governmental legislation and intervention, business favoring and protection, communal aide and support, exploitation of the disadvantaged and the underclass, and increasingly used it to hedge themselves off from any risk or challenge. The rage and resentment came as much from an understanding of this reality, one which, if admitted inside, would shatter the moral foundations that the myth of the earner required in order to perdure. Deeming themselves the heroes of the American dream, Wills portrays them as of a kin with Nixon: diminished, curdled, nursing grudges and resentments and perceived injuries, an oppressed majority held down by the very stringency of their striving ethos.
The Economic Market is delineated by means of a truly entertaining sequence of chapters focussing upon the Republican National Convention of 1968. As with its moral sibling, the economic market is one that encompasses a nation of earners ever in motion—running the race of competition, working, striving, seeking every advantage and taking advantage of every opportunity. As opposed to the Old World conflict between a landed aristocracy and wage-bound working class, the United States provided a dynamic, proclaimedly level playing field where every agent—an agent of the self, naturally—was in motion, sometimes being herded into a renewed and rejigged starting line so that a greater measure of equality might be injected into the race itself, but still powering forward under the propulsion achieved through one's efforts and willpower. But Wills shows a race with no end, merely a continuously unfolding track ever beckoning one on, unto exhaustion. In his calculation, the primary differences between the Left and Right in the United States, as versus that which had arisen in Europe, was that there was no vision of economic reform that deviated from this need for dynamic motion upon a competitive track. Attempts to craft some measure of stability to the platform, to achieve communal support and interdependence, was scorned as the gambits of the lazy or timid or unwilling; and this also meant that any work geared towards fostering such stabilities or alterations to the pattern of competitive striving was held in disregard as well. As the author saw it, there was little honor and even less coherence in such a frenzied pace of perpetual motion—no way to ever pause and take stock of where the country was at, what cracks were showing in the edifice, and what parts of this hollow, hying boast echoing forth from a mythological past might best be discarded or emended in order to address the current realities.
It is within the Intellectual Market of the academic world that Wills really gripped my attention and pulled me into the current of his reasoned thought. In the United States, academia displays the same adherence to Liberal ideals that permeates the markets moral and economic: the upholding of a free exchange of ideas, expressed via free speech and determined within a value-neutral environment in which the emergent champion will be that ideation which overcomes it challengers by means of its expressive rigor and logical strengths—a case of an invisible hand of the mind at work, self-regulating and advocating for the best of the mind's product. Yet Wills sees an intellectual system as riddled with contradictions and incoherencies as its siblings outlined above—for the American intellectual market abhors and refuses to countenance any beliefs or ideas that tend to the absolute, to a universality of truth, to systemic completeness, and hence pre-judges them as untenable ideologies. In this, the academic world acts as a judge upon the exchange of ideas, neutralizing any that will not admit to being value-free. What's more, the academic market is a propagator of an aristocratic mindset and a receiver of government funding that it uses in order to advance political agendas and furnish a continuous supply of minds designed for employment within the government and government-contracted industries, such as the massive military-industrial complex. But there is also conflict between the academic and political worlds, expressed through the former's adherence to freedom as a positive value, which leads to the exclusion of such as exclusionary religions or philosophies, and a tendency to bypass the production of an enlightened citizenry in order to directly gain the politician's ear. As Wills sees it, this lack of responsibility for its own failings and flaws was the primary impetus for the campus uprisings of the late sixties, which the universities attempted to counter with an even broader application of its contradictory Liberal mores. The academic market is blind to the fact that it has crafted an orthodoxy through its own preferential advocacy and lack of intellectual honesty—and hence that the ideals that it believes to have been determined to be the best by the invisible hand were done so through the firm guidance provided to that incorporeal extremity.
And the goods just keep on coming, as Wills saves his best for last. The analysis of the Political Market is just brilliantly executed, impossible to do any measure of justice without its entirety being ingested—but the key element is that from the Liberal devotion to the self-made man springs the same compulsion to champion the self-determination of nations, as a freely-elected government, preferably operating within the free enterprise system, serves as an enduringly effective check upon despotism whilst harnessing that same self-made striving through applied effort and will found in devolved form within the average citizen: witness the United States as Exhibit A. Unfortunately, such self-determination, a theme stridently promoted by Woodrow Wilson as part of the Fourteen Points he brought to the Peace Conference held in the aftermath of the Great War, presents a series of problematic barriers against its implementation. In a masterful deconstruction, Wills wends through the various elements that would comprise how a particular people might determine themselves as deserving of their own state of nationhood, highlighting the perennial problems inherent to the process: what is to be the conclusive factor? Language? Ethnicity? Religion? Numbers? Current mood? Former territorial status or partition? Historic state constitution? Furthermore, Wills works through the United States' history in dealing with self-determined nations effecting an (enforced) democratic system—Mexico under Wilson; Latin America under Eisenhower; Vietnam under Kennedy and Johnson—to show how the preference, from the point-of-view of the United States, or indeed any First World state, is for dealing with an authoritative personality through whom their wishes might readily be channeled and implemented; and, hence, that despots best serve the United States' interests. This preference for strongmen works in tandem with the puritanical elements operating within the perceived benevolence endemic to American promotions of freedom abroad, and which accounts for the comparative ease and rationalized acceptance of the use of force in implementing democratic ideals and determined sovereignty. As Wills pithily puts it:
It is when America is in her most altruistic mood that other nations better get behind their bunkers.That authoritarian strain is something Wills detects as existing within the United States' citizenry from the very beginning, an obedience to authority—whether scriptural, political, communal, cultural, or familial—that abrades against the freedom championed as the engine of the various markets that make-up the national character. And this very freedom—being what Americans deemed to set them above realms not so constituted, the source of the fuel that empowered the self-made man, the earner, the runner, the idea advocate, the self-determined realm—was severely called into question by the time of Vietnam: for not only were the elections that Americans were championing, and dying for, in Southeast Asia failing in the face of conflict, but those that took place at home produced no better an executive entity than Richard Nixon, a man who inspired little enthusiasm and had risen from the ashes of successive political failures at the opening of the decade.
And so we arrive back at Nixon. He is, properly, the central locus of the book, the figure, so ill at ease with his chosen profession, whose unwavering devotion to all of the tenets that constitute the various Liberal markets brought under the authorial microscope marked him as the ideal representative of the resentment-bound self-made man that formed the Silent Majority and made the rise of a slick and crafty rabble-rouser like Wallace possible; made him the perfect representative with which to diminish the occupancy of the White House and starkly limn the problems endemic to the American conception of Liberalism heading into the latter stages of the twentieth century. I felt that Wills nailed down far more of the inner makeup of Nixon, what made this tormented but undeniably brilliant man tick, than Perlstein managed in far more pages; in particular, the chapter on the infamous Checkers Speech is just perfectly done—highlighting Nixon's courage, political instincts, hard work, and aggressiveness in pursuit of his ambition in perfect balance with his continuous humiliation, belittling slights from the elite classes, shiftiness and abject kowtowing to those same forces in the name of that same ambition. It is impossible to read Nixon Agonistes—an exquisitely apt title, that—without a sense of sympathy and understanding for that man, indeed for all introverts and grinders who must endure much suffering, many slings and arrows on the course of the racetrack the country demands that they run. He was never a particularly bad man, but rather one whose hard and lengthy road to the top must perforce have seared the very soul that such gains were not achieved as something for nothing—and, in the process, curdled that spirit with the gnomic deformations of resentment, rage, bitterness, and paranoia at what was demanded of one both by the silver spoon Franklins looking down upon you from above and the minorities and underclass scrabbling up desperately and insolently from below.
Other characters are also given superb depictions, particularly Eisenhower's qualities as a politician and cautious president; Spiro Agnew as Nixon's point-man and kindred spirit on the domestic law and order platform in the face of riot and demonstration run rampant among young and black America; and Woodrow Wilson as the prototypical puritanical Liberal monger-of-modalities, Nixon's inspiration and model for what a president might and should achieve in the global marketplace of (arms-implemented) ideas. As Wills saw it, the classical liberal spirit of the US had been rent in twain in the aftermath of the Great Depression, with the free marketeers, combined with the authoritarians and religious fundamentalists, striving for an absolute individualism amongst the running earners as set against the progressive, socialist, and democratic strains that opted for tight social cohesion and rejigging of the race's starting line—but even this split evinced traits of their opposing side as part of the living contradiction that was the American Liberal system. As GRer AC also noted, Wills' discerned trending for a renewal and reworking of Liberalism's failures proved to be ridiculously optimistic; but, as has often been the case in books such as these, if his remedy is rather inordinately Panglossian and casually implied, his diagnosis of the problem is first rate, in every aspect. It amazes me how much a perceptive mind could induce about America from the unattractive character traits of one of its least-heralded twentieth century presidents—that this very contender would prove such a symbolic exemplar of the class writhing under the whiplash of demanded and unfolding changes. Tricky Dick, then, was America: and that's as alarming as it is astounding.
July 16, 2011
I had to put this book down for several months - because I had to digest certain arguments (especially in Part IV) -- that went against long-standing views of mine, but are so brilliantly argued, that I simply couldn't go on until they had been simmered, stewed, and thoroughly digested.
Wills is one of the most intelligent, brilliant, sheerly logical writers I have read in a long time -- his classical and Jesuitical training evident on every page. As such, this book is utterly compelling. His thesis, as also the structure of the book, is, however, complex - and not presented all at once -- he proceeds inductively (as a good writer should) - and instead of telling you "I think X", now let me rummage around the attic to find some evidence that confirms that -- the method my students are taught to follow (to my constant complaining) - he dives into the swirl of American political life in search of its living currents. It really is a remarkable book.
His grand thesis is that America is built on a type of classical liberalism (small-l) that included two distinct components: the ruthless social darwinism of the survival of the economic fittest; and the puritan view of business and capitalism as morally uplifting -- that is, free market liberalism and an ameliorative view of capitalism (which allows some room for the State). This type of liberalism was found in the views of both parties up until the 1920's - both in Wilson and in Hoover (TR's view was quite distinct). But under the pressure of the Great Depression, these two views split apart, one going to the Republicans, and one going to the Democrats. The half that went to the Republicans (laissez-faire) linked up with the authoritarian troglodytes of the JBS, southern whites, the religious loons (hence, the alliance of Milton Friendman with the loons and racists who rallied behind Barry Goldwater). The ameliorative part that went to the Democrats, did not become socialistic because the Dems retained their liberal (laissez-faire) attitude towards academia (free thought, freedom of dissent) and politics (decentralization).
Nixon is (Wills wrote in 1969) misunderstood -- because he is being viewed through the lens of this Post-Depression "split". In fact, Nixon is a return to the classic liberalism of Woodrow Wilson and Hoover -- (much the the material Wills collects about Wilson, and about Nixon's admiration for Wilson is really persuasive and hard to gainsay).
The problem is.... Wills continues.... that classical liberalism is essentially dead --. He (Wills) offers a skewering of its logical foundations (I've quoted one long passage in the comments section, though that is only a part of it) -- and because the complexity of modern society with its enforced interdependencies have rendered it really an anachronism.
Thus, Nixon is the "last liberal".
The second problem is that Nixon himself is basically a slug -- which reveals the weakness in liberalism -- that this was the best man that the tradition of Adam Smith and Carnegie and Woodrow Willson and Hoover could come up with..., speaks volumes. (Wills).
What we need, instead, according to Wills, is to join the great accomplishments of liberalism (freedom, respect for others), with a more communitarian ethic.
Thus Wills ends on a forward-looking, optimistic note -- that looks quite ridiculous today (July 2011).
Some comments:
First, Wills spends a long section (Part IV) dissecting -- nay, skewering -- Wilson's "liberal" foreign policy -- willing to kill 'darkies' (Mexicans; thinking Vietnamese) in the name of moral improvement -- burning the village, in order to save it -- that is really overwhelming. What gives this passage a special resonance is the memory of how the Neoconservatives used Wilsonianism to justify their adventure in Iraq. To my mind, this was always a sham; the Neoconservatives are Straussians, not Wilsonians - and only an addled Washington Press corp ("silent assassins of the republic", in Mailer's great phrase) could ever have bought that line of crap that was shoveled to them. But if it HAD been true, then even more should the Public have read Wills' scathing critique of it before engaging in what has proved to be a military and geopolitical and economic and national blunder of a proportion which we cannot yet assess with any fullness.
Secondly, his account of the 'synthesis' of the American Right -- as merely a product of liberalism's opportunistic alliance with the religious and authoritarian Right -- doesn't do justice to the unity of that synthesis... as we can see today. As I've posted a LOT on this topic in my reviews of other books, I'll pass over this here.
Finally - his view of Nixon as the 'last liberal' (largely in the classic sense, remember) -- he even compares him to Churchill at one point! -- could not have been written in 1974 -- by which point the whirlwind of events -- Vietnam, dissent, revolution, riots, oil shock, financial crises (two bear markets), impeachment -- simply showed that Nixon, beneath the 'liberal' surface, was (in his domestic politics, at least) merely a thug, a crook, and willing to coddle to reactionaries.... Wills got it wrong. The book, therefore, is a failure. But a stunningly brilliant failure from which I have learned an enormous amount.
What follows is my original review, posted long before I finished this book - and there is some worthwhile material also in the comments sections.
[Original partial review:
(This is only a stump of a review -- but it contains ideas that are, imo, important, and that I wanted to get down in writing. I'll add to the review if anything strikes me as I finish the book. Needless to say, I think this is a spectacular book, and that everyone should have a look at it.)
Why is Obama so weak…? Why was the Liberal, Democratic establishment of the 1960's so fatally intertwined with the Military-Industrial complex that it basically wrecked this country with the debacle of the Vietnam War (from which we have yet fully to recover)….? Why did Friedrich Ebert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedric...) call out the proto-fascist Frei Korps to suppress, and brutally, a revolution in 1919 from… the Left -- thereby paving the way for Hitlerism? Why was Giovanni Giolitti and his method of "trasformiso" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trasform...) so fundamentally corrupt, that it destroyed Liberal Italy and paved the way for the March on Rome…? -- In other words, what's wrong with liberals?
Among other things, Wills takes a scalpel to liberalism, and his dissection leads him to the following conclusion:
Liberals, at bottom, are afraid of systematic thought (says Wills) -- for systematic thought has 'absolutist' tendencies. That is, given a system (if a system be accepted), certain ideas are ipso facto ruled out of court. One must judge certain ideas to be irrefutably true, and others to be irredeemably false. But liberalism is uneasy with any 'absolutist' claims to truth. It prefers to remain 'open' to all possibilities. It is pragmatic (in the Jamesian sense). There are, of course, primarily moral reasons for this -- for even Schlesinger admits that Pragmatism (like *every* philosophy) itself rests on certain metaphysical assumptions, -- that is, on certain irreducibles.
Any philosophy that wishes at bottom (and at whatever cost) to remain 'open' to ALL possibilities ( -- and indeed, this ALL…, in all consistency…, includes not only NEW possibilities, but contrary or contradictory possibilities -- the only ultimate truth being that there is no ultimate truth….) -- cannot ultimately confront an intransigent absolutism. It MUST be accommodative.
And hence, it is doomed….
The students of 1968 understood this -- at some level, anyway. As such, liberalism was confronted both by reactionaries on the Right AND by radicals on the Left, and so didn't have a prayer….
Clearly -- a similar dynamic is starting to play out today in the Democratic Establishment -- the party of Obama, Reid and their ilk (save, of course, for the fact that there is no radical left -- with the result that they are being squeezed simply between the Right and a Wall).
Still, looking at these men, men like Giolitti and Ebert would sympathize and understand….
Wills is one of the most intelligent, brilliant, sheerly logical writers I have read in a long time -- his classical and Jesuitical training evident on every page. As such, this book is utterly compelling. His thesis, as also the structure of the book, is, however, complex - and not presented all at once -- he proceeds inductively (as a good writer should) - and instead of telling you "I think X", now let me rummage around the attic to find some evidence that confirms that -- the method my students are taught to follow (to my constant complaining) - he dives into the swirl of American political life in search of its living currents. It really is a remarkable book.
His grand thesis is that America is built on a type of classical liberalism (small-l) that included two distinct components: the ruthless social darwinism of the survival of the economic fittest; and the puritan view of business and capitalism as morally uplifting -- that is, free market liberalism and an ameliorative view of capitalism (which allows some room for the State). This type of liberalism was found in the views of both parties up until the 1920's - both in Wilson and in Hoover (TR's view was quite distinct). But under the pressure of the Great Depression, these two views split apart, one going to the Republicans, and one going to the Democrats. The half that went to the Republicans (laissez-faire) linked up with the authoritarian troglodytes of the JBS, southern whites, the religious loons (hence, the alliance of Milton Friendman with the loons and racists who rallied behind Barry Goldwater). The ameliorative part that went to the Democrats, did not become socialistic because the Dems retained their liberal (laissez-faire) attitude towards academia (free thought, freedom of dissent) and politics (decentralization).
Nixon is (Wills wrote in 1969) misunderstood -- because he is being viewed through the lens of this Post-Depression "split". In fact, Nixon is a return to the classic liberalism of Woodrow Wilson and Hoover -- (much the the material Wills collects about Wilson, and about Nixon's admiration for Wilson is really persuasive and hard to gainsay).
The problem is.... Wills continues.... that classical liberalism is essentially dead --. He (Wills) offers a skewering of its logical foundations (I've quoted one long passage in the comments section, though that is only a part of it) -- and because the complexity of modern society with its enforced interdependencies have rendered it really an anachronism.
Thus, Nixon is the "last liberal".
The second problem is that Nixon himself is basically a slug -- which reveals the weakness in liberalism -- that this was the best man that the tradition of Adam Smith and Carnegie and Woodrow Willson and Hoover could come up with..., speaks volumes. (Wills).
What we need, instead, according to Wills, is to join the great accomplishments of liberalism (freedom, respect for others), with a more communitarian ethic.
Thus Wills ends on a forward-looking, optimistic note -- that looks quite ridiculous today (July 2011).
Some comments:
First, Wills spends a long section (Part IV) dissecting -- nay, skewering -- Wilson's "liberal" foreign policy -- willing to kill 'darkies' (Mexicans; thinking Vietnamese) in the name of moral improvement -- burning the village, in order to save it -- that is really overwhelming. What gives this passage a special resonance is the memory of how the Neoconservatives used Wilsonianism to justify their adventure in Iraq. To my mind, this was always a sham; the Neoconservatives are Straussians, not Wilsonians - and only an addled Washington Press corp ("silent assassins of the republic", in Mailer's great phrase) could ever have bought that line of crap that was shoveled to them. But if it HAD been true, then even more should the Public have read Wills' scathing critique of it before engaging in what has proved to be a military and geopolitical and economic and national blunder of a proportion which we cannot yet assess with any fullness.
Secondly, his account of the 'synthesis' of the American Right -- as merely a product of liberalism's opportunistic alliance with the religious and authoritarian Right -- doesn't do justice to the unity of that synthesis... as we can see today. As I've posted a LOT on this topic in my reviews of other books, I'll pass over this here.
Finally - his view of Nixon as the 'last liberal' (largely in the classic sense, remember) -- he even compares him to Churchill at one point! -- could not have been written in 1974 -- by which point the whirlwind of events -- Vietnam, dissent, revolution, riots, oil shock, financial crises (two bear markets), impeachment -- simply showed that Nixon, beneath the 'liberal' surface, was (in his domestic politics, at least) merely a thug, a crook, and willing to coddle to reactionaries.... Wills got it wrong. The book, therefore, is a failure. But a stunningly brilliant failure from which I have learned an enormous amount.
What follows is my original review, posted long before I finished this book - and there is some worthwhile material also in the comments sections.
[Original partial review:
(This is only a stump of a review -- but it contains ideas that are, imo, important, and that I wanted to get down in writing. I'll add to the review if anything strikes me as I finish the book. Needless to say, I think this is a spectacular book, and that everyone should have a look at it.)
Why is Obama so weak…? Why was the Liberal, Democratic establishment of the 1960's so fatally intertwined with the Military-Industrial complex that it basically wrecked this country with the debacle of the Vietnam War (from which we have yet fully to recover)….? Why did Friedrich Ebert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedric...) call out the proto-fascist Frei Korps to suppress, and brutally, a revolution in 1919 from… the Left -- thereby paving the way for Hitlerism? Why was Giovanni Giolitti and his method of "trasformiso" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trasform...) so fundamentally corrupt, that it destroyed Liberal Italy and paved the way for the March on Rome…? -- In other words, what's wrong with liberals?
Among other things, Wills takes a scalpel to liberalism, and his dissection leads him to the following conclusion:
Liberals, at bottom, are afraid of systematic thought (says Wills) -- for systematic thought has 'absolutist' tendencies. That is, given a system (if a system be accepted), certain ideas are ipso facto ruled out of court. One must judge certain ideas to be irrefutably true, and others to be irredeemably false. But liberalism is uneasy with any 'absolutist' claims to truth. It prefers to remain 'open' to all possibilities. It is pragmatic (in the Jamesian sense). There are, of course, primarily moral reasons for this -- for even Schlesinger admits that Pragmatism (like *every* philosophy) itself rests on certain metaphysical assumptions, -- that is, on certain irreducibles.
Any philosophy that wishes at bottom (and at whatever cost) to remain 'open' to ALL possibilities ( -- and indeed, this ALL…, in all consistency…, includes not only NEW possibilities, but contrary or contradictory possibilities -- the only ultimate truth being that there is no ultimate truth….) -- cannot ultimately confront an intransigent absolutism. It MUST be accommodative.
And hence, it is doomed….
The students of 1968 understood this -- at some level, anyway. As such, liberalism was confronted both by reactionaries on the Right AND by radicals on the Left, and so didn't have a prayer….
Clearly -- a similar dynamic is starting to play out today in the Democratic Establishment -- the party of Obama, Reid and their ilk (save, of course, for the fact that there is no radical left -- with the result that they are being squeezed simply between the Right and a Wall).
Still, looking at these men, men like Giolitti and Ebert would sympathize and understand….
April 4, 2024
A masterful, panromantic presentation of the world America built for itself in 1968. Paired with his book on Lincoln's Gettysburg address, Garry Wills writes about the American psyche with the depth of a Greek drama. Absolutely must read
April 19, 2018
https://bestpresidentialbios.com/2018...
“Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man” by Garry Wills was published in 1970, about a year after Nixon’s inauguration as president. Wills is a journalist, former professor of history and classics and a prolific author. His book “Lincoln at Gettysburg” won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and his most recent book “What the Qur’an Meant: And Why it Matters” was published in 2017.
Evident by its publication date, “Nixon Agonistes” is not a comprehensive biography. And obvious during its earliest pages is that it is not a biography at all. But exactly what it is proves difficult to explain.
Its 546 pages are organized into five major sections which eventually yield the author’s overarching thesis: that America is essentially liberal at its core. But Wills argues that classic liberalism is dead and Richard Nixon is the political heir to whatever remains of its ideals. And while Nixon is never the primary subject of the book, he is always at its center. America’s political life is really under the microscope but Nixon is the glue Wills uses to bind everything together.
Although this book spends a great deal of time analyzing political, social and cultural trends, it also carefully observes the most important political and cultural figures of Nixon’s era. Wills is an incredibly astute observer and a gifted literary artist. His character portraits – covering subjects such as Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, Strom Thurmond, George Romney, George Wallace, Spiro Agnew and Richard Goodwin – are crisp, witty and often biting.
More generally, Wills’s writing style is erudite and complex, clever, sometimes baffling and often brilliant. It feels a bit like the literary convergence of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Tom Wolfe and Timothy Leary. Like most “deep” writing of substantial value, this book is not geared toward neophytes. Anyone new to Nixon – or political philosophy – will spend an inordinate amount of time wondering what is being discussed.
In addition, this book is often cumbersome and unwieldy. The author frequently bounces between discrete moments in Nixon’s political life (most of them occurring during his presidential campaign of 1968), highbrow philosophical discussions and digressions into Nixon’s early life. And at various times the book seems to serve different functions: history text, biography, political science treatise and political philosophy thesis.
But even readers who are expecting traditional coverage of Nixon’s life and times – and who are able to persevere to the end – will uncover countless pearls of wisdom and insightful nuggets. I discovered (and recorded for later consumption) more incredibly penetrating, shrewd and memorable one-liners in this book than in perhaps anything I’ve read over the past five years. These treasures alone made this book worth the effort.
Overall, Garry Will’s “Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man” is far less about Nixon than the political and social culture in which he operated. Published five years before his presidency ended, this book is an unusual confluence of historical observations and intellectual reflections. Readers familiar with Nixon and his era who also possess an interest in political philosophy will find it enormously rewarding. Others may simply find it difficult to finish.
Overall rating: “Unrated” as a biography
“Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man” by Garry Wills was published in 1970, about a year after Nixon’s inauguration as president. Wills is a journalist, former professor of history and classics and a prolific author. His book “Lincoln at Gettysburg” won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and his most recent book “What the Qur’an Meant: And Why it Matters” was published in 2017.
Evident by its publication date, “Nixon Agonistes” is not a comprehensive biography. And obvious during its earliest pages is that it is not a biography at all. But exactly what it is proves difficult to explain.
Its 546 pages are organized into five major sections which eventually yield the author’s overarching thesis: that America is essentially liberal at its core. But Wills argues that classic liberalism is dead and Richard Nixon is the political heir to whatever remains of its ideals. And while Nixon is never the primary subject of the book, he is always at its center. America’s political life is really under the microscope but Nixon is the glue Wills uses to bind everything together.
Although this book spends a great deal of time analyzing political, social and cultural trends, it also carefully observes the most important political and cultural figures of Nixon’s era. Wills is an incredibly astute observer and a gifted literary artist. His character portraits – covering subjects such as Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, Strom Thurmond, George Romney, George Wallace, Spiro Agnew and Richard Goodwin – are crisp, witty and often biting.
More generally, Wills’s writing style is erudite and complex, clever, sometimes baffling and often brilliant. It feels a bit like the literary convergence of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Tom Wolfe and Timothy Leary. Like most “deep” writing of substantial value, this book is not geared toward neophytes. Anyone new to Nixon – or political philosophy – will spend an inordinate amount of time wondering what is being discussed.
In addition, this book is often cumbersome and unwieldy. The author frequently bounces between discrete moments in Nixon’s political life (most of them occurring during his presidential campaign of 1968), highbrow philosophical discussions and digressions into Nixon’s early life. And at various times the book seems to serve different functions: history text, biography, political science treatise and political philosophy thesis.
But even readers who are expecting traditional coverage of Nixon’s life and times – and who are able to persevere to the end – will uncover countless pearls of wisdom and insightful nuggets. I discovered (and recorded for later consumption) more incredibly penetrating, shrewd and memorable one-liners in this book than in perhaps anything I’ve read over the past five years. These treasures alone made this book worth the effort.
Overall, Garry Will’s “Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man” is far less about Nixon than the political and social culture in which he operated. Published five years before his presidency ended, this book is an unusual confluence of historical observations and intellectual reflections. Readers familiar with Nixon and his era who also possess an interest in political philosophy will find it enormously rewarding. Others may simply find it difficult to finish.
Overall rating: “Unrated” as a biography
November 4, 2023
A classic work of political science, Garry Wills' Nixon Agonistes remains an insightful look at the rise of the 37th President and the environment which enabled his rise to power. Wills alternates coverage of the 1968 presidential campaign with a broader analysis of the United States, riven by Vietnam, racial tension and cynical politicians increasingly willing to take advantage of these divisions. Wills views Nixon as "the Last Liberal" in American politics, not in our modern sense but as a self-made man who achieved success working through the System. Thus, he became a spokesman for Americans angry that success no longer seemed assured for them. For all the musings about Nixon's lack of authenticity, on this level at least he was fundamentally sincere; he found his insecurities mirrored in that of many Americans, enabling to rise from his political grave, win election and preside over one of the country's most tumultuous periods. "Every campaign" from his Red-baiting Congressional days to the presidency "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power." And while Nixon laid no claim to the radicalism of the New Left and eschewed the coarser rhetoric of the Wallace-Bircher Far Right, he persuaded tens of millions of voters that "those in power" - Lyndon Johnson's Democratic Party, their allies in the media, judiciary and classroom, the minority interest groups they supposedly coddled and fawned over - were not just wrong, but un-American enemies to be ostracized and destroyed.
Written in 1970, Nixon Agonistes is, to be sure, a difficult book to recommend to nonexperts. Wills jumps between topics almost at random, following only the loosest thematic structure. Readers will find amusing, and valuable his portraits of that year's political figures - Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney, Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, the monstrous George Wallace and asinine Spiro Agnew. He's also quite astute showing that Nixon's "Silent Majority" was motivated by a sense of displacement, viewing liberal expansions of minority rights as infringing upon theirs; Lyndon Johnson's Great Society fostered an impression, justified or not, that middle class Americans no longer mattered to "the Establishment" - a resentment that Nixon brilliantly exploited. He also shows why Kennedy-Johnson liberals failed to anticipate the era's radical movement; Black Power, student activists and others felt that the "soft intolerance" of Democratic rulers dismissed their causes as unworthy of concern, thus driving them to increasingly extreme courses of action. Thus '60s liberalism, however idealistic its intention, failed to truly address systemic issues while alienating Americans unpersuaded of the need for drastic change. And Wills notes that liberal writers like Arthur Schlesinger were happy to praise in Kennedy and Johnson traits (reliance on charisma and image, strident anticommunist rhetoric, a desire for sweeping presidential power) that they decried as monstrous in Nixon and other Republicans.
Perhaps Wills' biggest failing, besides the book's rambling and orotund prose style, is that his central premise sometimes contradicts the actual text. Certainly, Wills relies on a nebulous definition of "liberalism" that few modern readers will recognize, since clearly he doesn't mean to suggest Nixon is a liberal in the sense that Kennedy, Johnson or Gene McCarthy were liberals. One can agree with his views on the shortcomings of Great Society liberalism while also wondering how Nixon himself embodied the same worldview (after all, most of the progressive initiatives Nixon supported were largely opportunistic or cynical - certainly not sharing LBJ's views about the power of government). Even so, he's astute in recognizing Nixon's achievement: persuading white, middle-class voters that, however troubled minority groups and the disadvantaged might be, their own grievances (some real, others imagined) and everyday frustrations were worse. That's remained the Republican Party's underlying appeal, in increasingly strident form; and Wills, writing before Watergate and Reagan's rise to the White House, when Donald Trump was a minor figure in New York real estate, recognizes the lasting power of this message.
Written in 1970, Nixon Agonistes is, to be sure, a difficult book to recommend to nonexperts. Wills jumps between topics almost at random, following only the loosest thematic structure. Readers will find amusing, and valuable his portraits of that year's political figures - Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney, Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, the monstrous George Wallace and asinine Spiro Agnew. He's also quite astute showing that Nixon's "Silent Majority" was motivated by a sense of displacement, viewing liberal expansions of minority rights as infringing upon theirs; Lyndon Johnson's Great Society fostered an impression, justified or not, that middle class Americans no longer mattered to "the Establishment" - a resentment that Nixon brilliantly exploited. He also shows why Kennedy-Johnson liberals failed to anticipate the era's radical movement; Black Power, student activists and others felt that the "soft intolerance" of Democratic rulers dismissed their causes as unworthy of concern, thus driving them to increasingly extreme courses of action. Thus '60s liberalism, however idealistic its intention, failed to truly address systemic issues while alienating Americans unpersuaded of the need for drastic change. And Wills notes that liberal writers like Arthur Schlesinger were happy to praise in Kennedy and Johnson traits (reliance on charisma and image, strident anticommunist rhetoric, a desire for sweeping presidential power) that they decried as monstrous in Nixon and other Republicans.
Perhaps Wills' biggest failing, besides the book's rambling and orotund prose style, is that his central premise sometimes contradicts the actual text. Certainly, Wills relies on a nebulous definition of "liberalism" that few modern readers will recognize, since clearly he doesn't mean to suggest Nixon is a liberal in the sense that Kennedy, Johnson or Gene McCarthy were liberals. One can agree with his views on the shortcomings of Great Society liberalism while also wondering how Nixon himself embodied the same worldview (after all, most of the progressive initiatives Nixon supported were largely opportunistic or cynical - certainly not sharing LBJ's views about the power of government). Even so, he's astute in recognizing Nixon's achievement: persuading white, middle-class voters that, however troubled minority groups and the disadvantaged might be, their own grievances (some real, others imagined) and everyday frustrations were worse. That's remained the Republican Party's underlying appeal, in increasingly strident form; and Wills, writing before Watergate and Reagan's rise to the White House, when Donald Trump was a minor figure in New York real estate, recognizes the lasting power of this message.
November 26, 2012
This is a rather remarkable book. I've read several, more recent books by Wills, but nothing quite like this. One presumes from the style of his writing--dense, sometimes almost lyrical--that he spent a great deal of time stitching together and revising the original National Review, Esquire, New Politics and Saturday Evening Post articles into this subtle analysis of American political culture.
This is not really a biography of Richard Nixon, though it does have many elements of biography, including visits to Whittier, California and interviews with friends of the Nixon family. The focus, however, is on Nixon, the "new" Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign, the one he won, albeit with many retrospective reflections back to the Hiss case, the 1960 campaign, the 1962 gubenatorial campaign, etc. However, there are also minibiographies here as well, biographies of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard N. Goodwin and others.
All of these biographies are chosen as representative of a broader theme, namely, the nature of "liberalism" in American during the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, the book may be looked at as being primarily a meditation on this, the prevailing ideology of the period, and on why and how liberalism fractured in stresses of U.S. imperialism abroad (SE Asia) and the struggle for racial equality at home.
This is early Wills, but he is no longer the conservative follower of William Buckley, no longer the National Review writer. His sympathies by the late sixties had turned, turned sympathetically towards the Civil Rights movement, antipathetically against the war in Vietnam. There is even a hint of identification with the "New Left" as a movement, inchoate at times, in opposition to and differentiated from an "Establishment" or "System" in crisis.
For anyone interested in a thoughtful study of what the term "liberal" has come to mean in this country in its interconnected philosophical, political, economic and cultural senses, this is a good introduction. So too for anyone wanting a sense of the sixties and of how that decade realigned American politics.
This is not really a biography of Richard Nixon, though it does have many elements of biography, including visits to Whittier, California and interviews with friends of the Nixon family. The focus, however, is on Nixon, the "new" Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign, the one he won, albeit with many retrospective reflections back to the Hiss case, the 1960 campaign, the 1962 gubenatorial campaign, etc. However, there are also minibiographies here as well, biographies of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard N. Goodwin and others.
All of these biographies are chosen as representative of a broader theme, namely, the nature of "liberalism" in American during the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, the book may be looked at as being primarily a meditation on this, the prevailing ideology of the period, and on why and how liberalism fractured in stresses of U.S. imperialism abroad (SE Asia) and the struggle for racial equality at home.
This is early Wills, but he is no longer the conservative follower of William Buckley, no longer the National Review writer. His sympathies by the late sixties had turned, turned sympathetically towards the Civil Rights movement, antipathetically against the war in Vietnam. There is even a hint of identification with the "New Left" as a movement, inchoate at times, in opposition to and differentiated from an "Establishment" or "System" in crisis.
For anyone interested in a thoughtful study of what the term "liberal" has come to mean in this country in its interconnected philosophical, political, economic and cultural senses, this is a good introduction. So too for anyone wanting a sense of the sixties and of how that decade realigned American politics.
July 7, 2021
Wills convincingly argues for the view that Nixon was really a liberal in the modern political sense. His approach to Nixon, based on this premise, is both enlightening and intelligent. Richard Nixon was certainly a national enigma, our president of polarization--I personally saw that happen in my family. Considering the policies initiated by Nixon; for example, going off the gold standard, expanding major government programs like the EPA, and opening ties to Red China, the view of Nixon as a liberal is not unreasonable. Wills absolutely nailed Nixon's character, and not unsympathetically. He noted, for instance, that Nixon revered Woodrow Wilson, the only Democrat whose picture hung in Nixon's oval office. Although Nixon was "not a convincing moralist," Wills explained, he was nonetheless (like Wilson) a moralist by conviction: "He does not woo the Forgotten American cynically; he agrees with the silent majority." The result is an unbiased portrait that has the virtue of avoiding some of the excesses of Nixon's many detractors. Combined with his always excellent prose this book is one of Wills' best and in my experience one of the best analyses of Richard Nixon.
December 24, 2022
Hat tip to the "Know Your Enemy" podcast for the episode that clued me in on this odd book. Written before Watergate, Wills builds a convincing argument that reveals Nixon, in all his subpar glory (if that's the word), to be a perfect microcosm for what America was in 1970. A country whose myths had been shattered by Vietnam and social malaise, but still had nothing left to fall back on but these same beaten-down myths of self reliance, the market, the self-made man, and therefore voted for the tired, broken man who most embodied these same myths.
Really interesting book to read if you want a cinema verite look into 1968 before all the chaos has fossilized into the culture wars we still fight in this country.
Really interesting book to read if you want a cinema verite look into 1968 before all the chaos has fossilized into the culture wars we still fight in this country.
March 28, 2022
Another, doubtless somewhat different, postliberalism
May 25, 2023
Nixon Agonistes is maybe the best book that I would hesitate to recommend to people. It's not an approachable text; it demands of its readers a knowledge of history, American political science, midcentury American political events and figures, canonical literature, liberal political theory, and even vocabulary that it is not interested in supplying itself.
But all of that context is key to a stellar book mixing New Journalism, biography, and philosophical treatise. Wills's central thesis is that Richard Nixon embodies classical liberalism, subscribing wholly to its doctrine of markets and unitary rational actors. While that may be an implicit rebuttal to critics of Nixon who saw him as amoral and devoid of beliefs, this is book is deeply critical of Nixon, using him as a lens through which to pick at the contradictions and incoherences of classical liberalism until it unravels.
Classical liberalism is often reduced to only its economic implications, but this is only one of the "markets" Wills is concerned with. He also critiques the intellectual, political, and moral markets that liberalism constructs (or at least imagines), all of which build upon each other.
Many of these critiques, or at least similar critiques, have been made before. The political market fails because the intangibility of a volonté générale. The intellectual market fails because some ideas must be foreclosed on and some must be assumed for you to be able to act. The economic market fails because it is impossible to define and achieve 'equality of opportunity.' But Wills uses the context of Nixon and America to skillfully illustrate these critiques.
For me, Wills's account of the moral market was by far the most memorable. Classical liberalism is often thought of as a morally minimalist political theory, where virtue means little more than leaving other people alone to do as they will. But for Wills liberalism does have moral content. It comes in each individual's self-making. "Making the self strong is the task proposed to man by the Whittier of [Nixon's] youth, by the moral old America of [Ralph Waldo] Emerson," Wills writes. The book is subtitled "The Crisis of the Self-Made Man," but it perhaps is better understood as addressing the crisis of the self-making man, the man, like Nixon, for whom "the emphasis is not on having risen, but on rising."
Indeed, Nixon the liberal came from a poor Southern California family and was always making himself. He made himself a college football player despite his innate inability at the game. He made himself a top law student through hours in the stacks, gaining the moniker "iron butt" for his endurance on hard library chairs. He made himself a relatable everyman in his famous Checkers speech. He made himself a reborn Republican leader after a series of embarrassing losses in the early '60s by campaigning in 1966 without rest for any and every Republican candidate. And after this book ended he made himself a landslide-election winner, by any means necessary. (Nixon Agonistes, published in 1969, does not touch on Watergate.)
Wills's problem with the moral market is a bit less pointed than his criticisms of the other three. He thinks that an obsession with constant and apparent exertion in order to be morally deserving is not a great way to lead a life. He also is skeptical of the moral market of striving for the same reason he doubts the value of the economic market of success: you do not simply start with a clean slate every morning to prove your merits.
But I am not sure I buy this critique as thoroughly as I do the other three. Slowly working through that uncertainty will keep this book — its account of the moral market in particular — with me for a while.
But all of that context is key to a stellar book mixing New Journalism, biography, and philosophical treatise. Wills's central thesis is that Richard Nixon embodies classical liberalism, subscribing wholly to its doctrine of markets and unitary rational actors. While that may be an implicit rebuttal to critics of Nixon who saw him as amoral and devoid of beliefs, this is book is deeply critical of Nixon, using him as a lens through which to pick at the contradictions and incoherences of classical liberalism until it unravels.
Classical liberalism is often reduced to only its economic implications, but this is only one of the "markets" Wills is concerned with. He also critiques the intellectual, political, and moral markets that liberalism constructs (or at least imagines), all of which build upon each other.
Many of these critiques, or at least similar critiques, have been made before. The political market fails because the intangibility of a volonté générale. The intellectual market fails because some ideas must be foreclosed on and some must be assumed for you to be able to act. The economic market fails because it is impossible to define and achieve 'equality of opportunity.' But Wills uses the context of Nixon and America to skillfully illustrate these critiques.
For me, Wills's account of the moral market was by far the most memorable. Classical liberalism is often thought of as a morally minimalist political theory, where virtue means little more than leaving other people alone to do as they will. But for Wills liberalism does have moral content. It comes in each individual's self-making. "Making the self strong is the task proposed to man by the Whittier of [Nixon's] youth, by the moral old America of [Ralph Waldo] Emerson," Wills writes. The book is subtitled "The Crisis of the Self-Made Man," but it perhaps is better understood as addressing the crisis of the self-making man, the man, like Nixon, for whom "the emphasis is not on having risen, but on rising."
Indeed, Nixon the liberal came from a poor Southern California family and was always making himself. He made himself a college football player despite his innate inability at the game. He made himself a top law student through hours in the stacks, gaining the moniker "iron butt" for his endurance on hard library chairs. He made himself a relatable everyman in his famous Checkers speech. He made himself a reborn Republican leader after a series of embarrassing losses in the early '60s by campaigning in 1966 without rest for any and every Republican candidate. And after this book ended he made himself a landslide-election winner, by any means necessary. (Nixon Agonistes, published in 1969, does not touch on Watergate.)
Wills's problem with the moral market is a bit less pointed than his criticisms of the other three. He thinks that an obsession with constant and apparent exertion in order to be morally deserving is not a great way to lead a life. He also is skeptical of the moral market of striving for the same reason he doubts the value of the economic market of success: you do not simply start with a clean slate every morning to prove your merits.
But I am not sure I buy this critique as thoroughly as I do the other three. Slowly working through that uncertainty will keep this book — its account of the moral market in particular — with me for a while.
February 20, 2024
Wills is able to convey such mastery of the American psyche in this book, it makes up for everything-- the minutia of 1968 references I'll never fully understand, the need to pull out all the stops to dunk on his intellectual opponents, and some of the disjointed coverage events that presupposes an intimate knowledge current events at the time.
Despite it all, what kept me going was Wills' ability to use those small details to build to enthralling conclusions, which are still relevant to today. Despite the need for the reader to come to the book already understanding the intricate details of the 1968 political landscape, Wills draws unique conclusions that are prescient to this day about our modern politics. It's weirdly extremely time-bound yet timeless?
Despite it all, what kept me going was Wills' ability to use those small details to build to enthralling conclusions, which are still relevant to today. Despite the need for the reader to come to the book already understanding the intricate details of the 1968 political landscape, Wills draws unique conclusions that are prescient to this day about our modern politics. It's weirdly extremely time-bound yet timeless?
September 19, 2017
I struggled finishing Gary Wills’ Nixon Agonistes, but finish it I did. The book’s first half comprising on-site 1968 convention reporting from Miami and Chicago is superb, as sharp and funny as Norman Mailer or Hunter Thompson at their best. The second half of Nixon Agonistes is a series of thinkpieces on the decline of American liberalism written in the bloviating manner of David Brooks or Thomas Friedman at their worst. Wills discussed a few book titles I haven’t read but am interested in checking out: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1964) by Richard Hofstadter; The End of Ideology (1960) by Daniel Bell; and The Vital Center (1949) by Arthur Schlesinger.
March 21, 2023
this is a book about nixon written before watergate which is a really cool perspective. It also argues nixon was “the last liberal” which is great and makes a lot of sense given the long diatribes on liberal individualism. also, the analysis of daniel patrick moynihan was brutal and thorough
March 28, 2024
"The book takes up what Frost would have called “a lover’s quarrel with my country”; and lovers take delight, even when quarreling, in the particular features of the beloved."
I've been interested in Garry Wills for a bit — a guy with a strange biography and and an incredibly diverse field of work. He's positioned as the National Review conservative who said sorry, and that's true in a way, but he's always been a catholic distributist, not neatly fitting into the American mid-century paradigm of liberalism with either right or left tinged emphasis, though he's more openly broken with "the right" over the decades.
Here he takes on Nixon in a pre-Watergate biography of the man, a book that looked prescient and insightful from the moment that event happened. He sees Nixon as the culmination of classical liberalism, the last man of the market. It's anachronistic in some ways, in the turmoil of the 60s it foresees some greater societal change in perspective on liberalism's overall project. That it misses on seeing the Reagan "revival" of our founding myths is hardly disqualifying, liberalism has yet to exhaust its ability to double down on itself, rewrite itself, integrate all forces it faces into the almighty market, though the anxieties it produces remains. Still, this is an astounding piece of rhetoric, definitely the best general critique of the liberal world we are in — neither reactionary nor hateful of its history.
As far as the structure of the book, I went in assuming it would be all Nixon all the time, and instead it uses Nixon as a device talk about America, and then America to talk about Nixon. It contains a number of setpieces — the '68 RNC in Miami featuring Nelson Rockefeller (kinda dumb, devout SBC, "philanthropy" attitude of the born rich) and George Romney (good salesman for corps), Reagan (glamour boys), RNC riots, '68 DNC in Chicago featuring Tom Hayden and white supremacist candidate George Wallace, DNC riots, and a setpiece of Garry Wills traveling through Nixon's Quaker hometown Whittier "Even one day in Whittier, spent imagining the America of Nixon’s childhood, is suffocating. That world has a locker-room smell, of spiritual athleticism."
Beyond the setpieces, the book is actually organized around Wills taking on different aspects of the "Market Myth." The metaphor of the race in America that doesn't hold. The table of contents reads as
l. The Moral Market (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Il. The Economic Market (Adam Smith)
Ill. The Intellectual Market (John Stuart Mill)
IV. The Political Market (Woodrow Wilson)
V. The Future of Liberalism
He takes a lot of contemporary intellectuals to task, most of whom I don't have context for. There's too many people to properly sort through, so I have some note sections for major people/things.
Alger Hiss —
Me: The omnipresence of the Hiss trial is so odd for mid century rw politics, Father John Cronin talked to Nixon
Kevin Phillips —
Southern Strategy
By the age of fifteen, he was making intricate maps of voting patterns...Always animated by one ambition—to know who hates who.
Jaffa claims that each revolution was in the direction of greater equality, and therefore “from the Left” in American politics. How could that apply to the Republican Party in 1968? “The clamor in the past has been from the urban or rural proletariat. But now ‘populism’ is of the middle class, which feels exploited by the Establishment. Almost everyone in the productive segment of society considers himself middle-class now, and resents the exploitation of society’s producers. This is not a movement in favor of laissez faire or any ideology; it is opposed to welfare and the Establishment”
I asked Phillips if the growth of Negro registration would not recompense Southern Democrats for their losses to the Republican Party. “No, white Democrats will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party. When white Southerners move, they move fast.
George Wallace —
Racist senator, independent candidate, speaking to crowd
Their happiness is enough to break the heart. They vomit laughter. Trying to eject the vacuum inside them. They are not hungry or underprivileged or deprived in material ways. Each has, in some minor way, “made it.” And it all means nothing...The desire for “law and order” is nothing so simple as a code word for racism; it is a cry, as things begin to break up, for stability, for stopping history in mid-dissolution.
Tom Hayden / Abbie Hoffman / "The radicals" / Herbert Marcuse —
Yet criticism of the radicals should not confine itself to deviations from their own ideal; it should go to the contradictions within that ideal...The submission of everything to a single test—one’s own experience—precludes these important supplements to experience—the tests, as it were, of that test. This is not only an impoverishment in itself; it prevents the one encounter that matters most—self-encounter, which is nominally the students’ aim. To be totally present in one’s own spontaneity may be a way of confronting others; but it does not allow one to stand apart from the sensing and acting self and, during an experience, to judge both the experience and the self. Guerrilla acts of confrontation with the world leave no apparatus for confronting oneself. Seen in this light, “authenticity” becomes one-dimensional...Marcuse’s remarks were directed at the immediate satisfactions offered people by America’s consumer society. The result of this constant flow of satisfactions is to “desublimate” longing, enclose men within the present, destroy their sense of history, and block all efforts at transcendence—which, of course, makes it impossible to judge society in radical ways. Yet the radicals are adopting just this kind of imprisonment in action and reaction, stimulation and response to stimuli. This reveals the main cultural link between the students and their elders. For the kids, the less guided action is, the more does it “open” one to good. Experience, tested by the free play of feelings, will sort itself out into patterns of wisdom—just as, for their teachers, the free play of ideas must lead to serviceable truths. In each case, the process is automatic, concatenated as by an invisible hand. And the code of “authenticity,” with its concentration on immediate empirical contact with things, is a caricature of the promise held out by our consumer society of affluence and stimulation, of business prosperity guaranteed through maximum expansion, competition, marketplace activity. Despite the mutual misunderstanding known as our “generation gap,” these kids are as clearly the sons of America’s middle class as Peter Verkhovensky was, to Stepan’s bewilderment (but not ours), Stepan’s son. (My note: Dostoevsky Demons.)
One cannot possibly achieve the “whole self” on such a program—how would one know it was whole? By what norm? All norms must be dissolved in the wash of constant sensation.
It is not Marxism that makes Cuba crucial to the kids. It is quite a different thing. It is The Myth. Abbie Hoffman quotes a key passage from Fidel: “There are those who believe that it is necessary for ideas to triumph among the greater part of the masses before initiating action, and there are others who understand that action is one of the most efficient instruments for bringing about the triumph of ideas among the masses.” Hoffman also quotes Che: “The best way to educate oneself is to become part of the revolution.” Cuba, in other words, offers the hope that action can be self-directing, can automatically beget enlightenment; can lead somewhere, and create.
(Abbie Hoffman says, “The revolution is where my boots hit”), but where does one go from there; how can one possibly end the revolution, by fixing people in a social arrangement? Marcuse, still longing for a proletariat but admitting that workers are lost to the revolution, is caught between old and new, and sees no way either to begin or to end. He has to posit a Utopian “new man,” with completely rewired sensibilities, who will free us. (But if the new man is really new, how do we know ahead of time—as Marcuse pretends to—what vision he will bring with him? How, for that matter, did Marcuse escape the social determinants imprisoning lesser men around him? As usually happens, the dreamer is covertly his own superman: he imagines a Utopian race created in his own image.)
Chotiner — campaign manager
Bentham and Mill — market orthodoxy until the New Deal
Prof Arthur Schlesinger —
What we have, in theory, is not so much an establishment of any favored truths as a unity of method in both spheres, the educational and political. Liberalism, after all, is more a mode of working toward the truth than a set of truths. It is, in its apologists’ own view, “value free.” As Schlesinger puts it, “ideas are relative”—as opposed to ideologies, which are absolute...To claim that one is right, over against the decision of the majority, is, in Schlesinger’s terminology (taken from Mill), a claim to “infallibility,” a wish to destroy the market."
Richard Goodwin —
Goodwin was the road rhetorician for Kennedy’s campaign of 1960 and Johnson’s of 1964. JFK’s “Alliance for Progress” LBJ “The Great Society” “We Shall Overcome”
Participatory politics as a wonder drug for modern malaise.
Distrusted, "forever an Iago looking for his Othello"
Neustadt —
Presidential Power, "He 'baptizes' political ambition, just as self-help manuals for businessmen baptize greed"
Horatio Alger —
The pull you up by your bootstrap author of rags to riches
Dr. Norman Vincent Peale —
power of positive thinking/prosperity gospel dogshit, Nixon spiritual guide.
"Peale is not really concerned to keep religion out of politics. He wants to keep other religions out—every kind but his. As Donald Meyer puts it in The Positive Thinkers, Peale’s constituency is that great middle class afflicted by anomie—the kind of people drawn to Wallace rallies. They have affluence without satisfaction, privilege without style"
To “vote for Christ” is to vote for oneself as Christ-like—a process of self-hypnosis that says the consumer life of middle America is, no matter what it seems, a godly life. But one can only learn such passivity toward affluence if the system blessing the nation is kept beyond question. If a man is always discussing the rules of the game, trying to change or improve them, he cannot relax into contentment with his lot. That is why Peale denounces “preachers offering intellectualized sermons on social problems.” It distracts man from the search for inner joy to be always “fumbling with materialistic processes.” The Pealite’s main commerce with material things is peaceful enjoyment of them, putting off all doubt that they reflect God’s blessing:
"A religion of the “deserving poor” has become the religion of the undeserving rich"
Liberalism (generic ground for passages)—
That market was necessarily insincere because it dealt with the entire society as its basic unit. Adam Smith’s individualism was more social in its conceptual orientation than many conservative philosophies (e.g., royalism) that preceded it: laissez faire means, in effect, let the other man do what he wants, and the whole point of liberalism was this deference to others, the elaborate arrangement that made everyone keep “hands off” everyone else. The market, in order to work, must invite people in, encourage (in that sense) participation, stimulate the widest possible competitive initiative. But all those who enter the game must abide by its outcome. The trouble with this constant deference to others is that one must, as it were, put off one’s own deciding and acting until consensus has been reached, until market tests come up with the acceptable products, or presidents, or programs. One must go along with the majority, hedging one’s own action in such a way that the group moves as a whole, by compromise, no one shoving or getting shoved too hard, various inhibitions working against forcible impingement by conviction or passion.
Certain ideas cannot be entertained, at least not seriously, because they would of their nature “close the market.” Totalist systems, therefore—revealed religions, philosophies that proclaim an absolute truth, political systems (whether fascist or communist) that proscribe certain kinds of opinion—cannot in theory be advocated at public schools. These are not, notice, excluded because they are false but because they are exclusionary. Their fault is a methodological one, and can be detected and condemned on grounds of procedure, without value-prejudice. The only things that can be excluded are things that would exclude—things that reveal the evil of system.
Right-Wingers who denounced Roosevelt’s “socialistic” experiments could not have been more mistaken. The New Deal was not collectivist in impulse; it was always emulative, looking toward a restoration of free competition. That was its trouble; it was, like all variations of the market system, based on envy.
Since economic planning was meant to revitalize the competitive “race” of American life, not abolish it, the Lockean mystique was untouched by the New Deal. Indeed, that mystique was held with a new fervor in noneconomic areas, as a sign of sustained loyalty to liberal individualism. Liberals became even more insistent on the right of dissent, on freedom for all to engage in the activities of the political and academic marketplace, on opposition to censorship and any control of ideas. Only in economics was “individualism” considered a bad word. Systematic Marxians and socialists who tried to bend the New Deal to their purposes were frustrated—an outcome so satisfactory to Americans that little regret was expressed over the philosophical contradictions it caused in the liberal view of things. The picture on the Right was even more confused. If logically, the Left was expected to adopt socialist underpinnings for its new experiments in control, the Right should have moved toward an unfettered individualism, toward philosophical anarchism. Even the moderate liberal state had been unable to prevent economic planning on the New Deal scale, so why feel bound by the state at all? This line of thought has been followed by a few, by those who adopt Ayn Rand’s laws of the jungle. But there is a great force inhibiting such a development. Though “rugged individualism” is native to America, it is held in check by an emphasis on moral orthodoxy, social conformity, and community solidarity—the spirit that creates local blue laws, on the one hand, and founds stable labor unions on the other. This authoritarian sentiment is not based on articulated political theory. Indeed, the conformist faction in American life has used, for its own purposes, the dominant liberal philosophy. It uses Locke to restrict the federal government, yet does this only so it can impose rigid controls at the local level. The classic instance of this was Southern devotion to states’ rights arguments (arguments based on opposition to governmental encroachment) used to protect segregation laws (which typify governmental interference in private life).
...
This conjunction of extreme social atomists with extreme social conformists would have been unthinkable but for one thing—the large dose of religiosity that had been mixed, historically, with the American cult of free enterprise. Academic economists conceived their individualism in terms of Locke and Mill; but the emulative ethic, as it was glorified out among the American people, was based on the pursuit of success as a form of spiritual discipline. Horatio Alger represented a union of economic opportunity with deep religious compulsion—the free linked with what is forced. And in that juncture lies the secret of the Right-Wing alliance.
...
It is easy to see why socialists or communists might lend peripheral support to welfare liberals of the New Deal. It is not so easy to see why authoritarians felt drawn to the libertarian Right. To understand that, one has to have a sense of the manifold and volatile nature of this combination—a sense lost by those who analyze the Right as if it were one thing, explicable by one theory (the authoritarian personality, status resentment, Cold War anxiety, the residue of Populism, etc.). One also has to discern, beneath the conflicts and multifariousness, a historical force that made the alliance possible (a religious fundamentalism that had been grafted onto the ideal of free enterprise). This, in turn, involves an understanding of the degree to which free-market theorists offer an excuse to the Right, rather than a philosophy. And, finally, in order to “place” the Right, one has to remember that this covering theory of the free market is part of an original, broader liberalism held in the past. When, in the fifties, an attempt to sort out America’s ideological framework was begun, there was great confusion in the terminology of Left and Right, liberalism and conservatism, Democrats and Republicans. And the source of the confusion was not clearly grasped—the original union of Left and Right theories in one consistent system. The parts tended back toward each other, yet fought this tendency. The New Deal did not become socialist; in fact, it became even more libertarian on questions of academic freedom and the toleration of dissent. The apostles of a free market did not become anarchistic; instead, they were thrown together with religious and social authoritarians, who tried to introduce the force of social custom (e.g., the social bias that makes life hard on atheists, homosexuals, communists, and other nonconformers) into the realm of law. Incomplete, the two half-theories were vulnerable, their contradictions easily exploited. Those who tried to think consistently, on either side, were forced back toward the liberalism of their common origin. But by now the “other side” was an enemy camp, hostile because of historical clashes, and it was necessary to avoid Left or Right “deviationism.” A natural bias of the two parts toward each other was therefore countered by deliberate effort to invent or stress differences between them. The resulting tug and counter-tug gave postwar politics an unreal lunar quality, a half-light proper to such half-theories. Americans thought they had broken the liberal philosophy’s circular perfection into two contained parts, that each side had gone off with its own smaller moon to live under different skies. But the moon was never broken. The half-moons were created by darking out part of the theory; and if one looked hard enough, the thin completion of the circle was still visible, implicit in the dark half. The individualist economy was still implied in the individualist politics, and vice versa.
A coalition based on the starting-line metaphor is, within the individualist framework, self-canceling. Once several large blocs of starters become runners, the politics of the starting line loses its appeal for them. If the various proletariats of the New Deal coalition become sufficiently bourgeoisified (as the labor movement has), Nixon’s appeal to the forgotten American—the one who earns, pays taxes, “pays his way”—becomes irresistible.
(Market section summation passage begins with) "The moral market proposes an..."
...techniques developed under liberalism are not only admirable but can be put to better use when we abandon liberal efforts to reduce all social life back to individualist terms
As Walter Lippmann observed, the religious doctrine that all men will at last stand equal before the Throne of God was somehow transmuted in William Jennings Brian's mind to the idea that all men were equally good biologists before the Ballot Box of Tennessee.
I've been interested in Garry Wills for a bit — a guy with a strange biography and and an incredibly diverse field of work. He's positioned as the National Review conservative who said sorry, and that's true in a way, but he's always been a catholic distributist, not neatly fitting into the American mid-century paradigm of liberalism with either right or left tinged emphasis, though he's more openly broken with "the right" over the decades.
Here he takes on Nixon in a pre-Watergate biography of the man, a book that looked prescient and insightful from the moment that event happened. He sees Nixon as the culmination of classical liberalism, the last man of the market. It's anachronistic in some ways, in the turmoil of the 60s it foresees some greater societal change in perspective on liberalism's overall project. That it misses on seeing the Reagan "revival" of our founding myths is hardly disqualifying, liberalism has yet to exhaust its ability to double down on itself, rewrite itself, integrate all forces it faces into the almighty market, though the anxieties it produces remains. Still, this is an astounding piece of rhetoric, definitely the best general critique of the liberal world we are in — neither reactionary nor hateful of its history.
As far as the structure of the book, I went in assuming it would be all Nixon all the time, and instead it uses Nixon as a device talk about America, and then America to talk about Nixon. It contains a number of setpieces — the '68 RNC in Miami featuring Nelson Rockefeller (kinda dumb, devout SBC, "philanthropy" attitude of the born rich) and George Romney (good salesman for corps), Reagan (glamour boys), RNC riots, '68 DNC in Chicago featuring Tom Hayden and white supremacist candidate George Wallace, DNC riots, and a setpiece of Garry Wills traveling through Nixon's Quaker hometown Whittier "Even one day in Whittier, spent imagining the America of Nixon’s childhood, is suffocating. That world has a locker-room smell, of spiritual athleticism."
Beyond the setpieces, the book is actually organized around Wills taking on different aspects of the "Market Myth." The metaphor of the race in America that doesn't hold. The table of contents reads as
l. The Moral Market (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Il. The Economic Market (Adam Smith)
Ill. The Intellectual Market (John Stuart Mill)
IV. The Political Market (Woodrow Wilson)
V. The Future of Liberalism
He takes a lot of contemporary intellectuals to task, most of whom I don't have context for. There's too many people to properly sort through, so I have some note sections for major people/things.
Alger Hiss —
Me: The omnipresence of the Hiss trial is so odd for mid century rw politics, Father John Cronin talked to Nixon
Kevin Phillips —
Southern Strategy
By the age of fifteen, he was making intricate maps of voting patterns...Always animated by one ambition—to know who hates who.
Jaffa claims that each revolution was in the direction of greater equality, and therefore “from the Left” in American politics. How could that apply to the Republican Party in 1968? “The clamor in the past has been from the urban or rural proletariat. But now ‘populism’ is of the middle class, which feels exploited by the Establishment. Almost everyone in the productive segment of society considers himself middle-class now, and resents the exploitation of society’s producers. This is not a movement in favor of laissez faire or any ideology; it is opposed to welfare and the Establishment”
I asked Phillips if the growth of Negro registration would not recompense Southern Democrats for their losses to the Republican Party. “No, white Democrats will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party. When white Southerners move, they move fast.
George Wallace —
Racist senator, independent candidate, speaking to crowd
Their happiness is enough to break the heart. They vomit laughter. Trying to eject the vacuum inside them. They are not hungry or underprivileged or deprived in material ways. Each has, in some minor way, “made it.” And it all means nothing...The desire for “law and order” is nothing so simple as a code word for racism; it is a cry, as things begin to break up, for stability, for stopping history in mid-dissolution.
Tom Hayden / Abbie Hoffman / "The radicals" / Herbert Marcuse —
Yet criticism of the radicals should not confine itself to deviations from their own ideal; it should go to the contradictions within that ideal...The submission of everything to a single test—one’s own experience—precludes these important supplements to experience—the tests, as it were, of that test. This is not only an impoverishment in itself; it prevents the one encounter that matters most—self-encounter, which is nominally the students’ aim. To be totally present in one’s own spontaneity may be a way of confronting others; but it does not allow one to stand apart from the sensing and acting self and, during an experience, to judge both the experience and the self. Guerrilla acts of confrontation with the world leave no apparatus for confronting oneself. Seen in this light, “authenticity” becomes one-dimensional...Marcuse’s remarks were directed at the immediate satisfactions offered people by America’s consumer society. The result of this constant flow of satisfactions is to “desublimate” longing, enclose men within the present, destroy their sense of history, and block all efforts at transcendence—which, of course, makes it impossible to judge society in radical ways. Yet the radicals are adopting just this kind of imprisonment in action and reaction, stimulation and response to stimuli. This reveals the main cultural link between the students and their elders. For the kids, the less guided action is, the more does it “open” one to good. Experience, tested by the free play of feelings, will sort itself out into patterns of wisdom—just as, for their teachers, the free play of ideas must lead to serviceable truths. In each case, the process is automatic, concatenated as by an invisible hand. And the code of “authenticity,” with its concentration on immediate empirical contact with things, is a caricature of the promise held out by our consumer society of affluence and stimulation, of business prosperity guaranteed through maximum expansion, competition, marketplace activity. Despite the mutual misunderstanding known as our “generation gap,” these kids are as clearly the sons of America’s middle class as Peter Verkhovensky was, to Stepan’s bewilderment (but not ours), Stepan’s son. (My note: Dostoevsky Demons.)
One cannot possibly achieve the “whole self” on such a program—how would one know it was whole? By what norm? All norms must be dissolved in the wash of constant sensation.
It is not Marxism that makes Cuba crucial to the kids. It is quite a different thing. It is The Myth. Abbie Hoffman quotes a key passage from Fidel: “There are those who believe that it is necessary for ideas to triumph among the greater part of the masses before initiating action, and there are others who understand that action is one of the most efficient instruments for bringing about the triumph of ideas among the masses.” Hoffman also quotes Che: “The best way to educate oneself is to become part of the revolution.” Cuba, in other words, offers the hope that action can be self-directing, can automatically beget enlightenment; can lead somewhere, and create.
(Abbie Hoffman says, “The revolution is where my boots hit”), but where does one go from there; how can one possibly end the revolution, by fixing people in a social arrangement? Marcuse, still longing for a proletariat but admitting that workers are lost to the revolution, is caught between old and new, and sees no way either to begin or to end. He has to posit a Utopian “new man,” with completely rewired sensibilities, who will free us. (But if the new man is really new, how do we know ahead of time—as Marcuse pretends to—what vision he will bring with him? How, for that matter, did Marcuse escape the social determinants imprisoning lesser men around him? As usually happens, the dreamer is covertly his own superman: he imagines a Utopian race created in his own image.)
Chotiner — campaign manager
Bentham and Mill — market orthodoxy until the New Deal
Prof Arthur Schlesinger —
What we have, in theory, is not so much an establishment of any favored truths as a unity of method in both spheres, the educational and political. Liberalism, after all, is more a mode of working toward the truth than a set of truths. It is, in its apologists’ own view, “value free.” As Schlesinger puts it, “ideas are relative”—as opposed to ideologies, which are absolute...To claim that one is right, over against the decision of the majority, is, in Schlesinger’s terminology (taken from Mill), a claim to “infallibility,” a wish to destroy the market."
Richard Goodwin —
Goodwin was the road rhetorician for Kennedy’s campaign of 1960 and Johnson’s of 1964. JFK’s “Alliance for Progress” LBJ “The Great Society” “We Shall Overcome”
Participatory politics as a wonder drug for modern malaise.
Distrusted, "forever an Iago looking for his Othello"
Neustadt —
Presidential Power, "He 'baptizes' political ambition, just as self-help manuals for businessmen baptize greed"
Horatio Alger —
The pull you up by your bootstrap author of rags to riches
Dr. Norman Vincent Peale —
power of positive thinking/prosperity gospel dogshit, Nixon spiritual guide.
"Peale is not really concerned to keep religion out of politics. He wants to keep other religions out—every kind but his. As Donald Meyer puts it in The Positive Thinkers, Peale’s constituency is that great middle class afflicted by anomie—the kind of people drawn to Wallace rallies. They have affluence without satisfaction, privilege without style"
To “vote for Christ” is to vote for oneself as Christ-like—a process of self-hypnosis that says the consumer life of middle America is, no matter what it seems, a godly life. But one can only learn such passivity toward affluence if the system blessing the nation is kept beyond question. If a man is always discussing the rules of the game, trying to change or improve them, he cannot relax into contentment with his lot. That is why Peale denounces “preachers offering intellectualized sermons on social problems.” It distracts man from the search for inner joy to be always “fumbling with materialistic processes.” The Pealite’s main commerce with material things is peaceful enjoyment of them, putting off all doubt that they reflect God’s blessing:
"A religion of the “deserving poor” has become the religion of the undeserving rich"
Liberalism (generic ground for passages)—
That market was necessarily insincere because it dealt with the entire society as its basic unit. Adam Smith’s individualism was more social in its conceptual orientation than many conservative philosophies (e.g., royalism) that preceded it: laissez faire means, in effect, let the other man do what he wants, and the whole point of liberalism was this deference to others, the elaborate arrangement that made everyone keep “hands off” everyone else. The market, in order to work, must invite people in, encourage (in that sense) participation, stimulate the widest possible competitive initiative. But all those who enter the game must abide by its outcome. The trouble with this constant deference to others is that one must, as it were, put off one’s own deciding and acting until consensus has been reached, until market tests come up with the acceptable products, or presidents, or programs. One must go along with the majority, hedging one’s own action in such a way that the group moves as a whole, by compromise, no one shoving or getting shoved too hard, various inhibitions working against forcible impingement by conviction or passion.
Certain ideas cannot be entertained, at least not seriously, because they would of their nature “close the market.” Totalist systems, therefore—revealed religions, philosophies that proclaim an absolute truth, political systems (whether fascist or communist) that proscribe certain kinds of opinion—cannot in theory be advocated at public schools. These are not, notice, excluded because they are false but because they are exclusionary. Their fault is a methodological one, and can be detected and condemned on grounds of procedure, without value-prejudice. The only things that can be excluded are things that would exclude—things that reveal the evil of system.
Right-Wingers who denounced Roosevelt’s “socialistic” experiments could not have been more mistaken. The New Deal was not collectivist in impulse; it was always emulative, looking toward a restoration of free competition. That was its trouble; it was, like all variations of the market system, based on envy.
Since economic planning was meant to revitalize the competitive “race” of American life, not abolish it, the Lockean mystique was untouched by the New Deal. Indeed, that mystique was held with a new fervor in noneconomic areas, as a sign of sustained loyalty to liberal individualism. Liberals became even more insistent on the right of dissent, on freedom for all to engage in the activities of the political and academic marketplace, on opposition to censorship and any control of ideas. Only in economics was “individualism” considered a bad word. Systematic Marxians and socialists who tried to bend the New Deal to their purposes were frustrated—an outcome so satisfactory to Americans that little regret was expressed over the philosophical contradictions it caused in the liberal view of things. The picture on the Right was even more confused. If logically, the Left was expected to adopt socialist underpinnings for its new experiments in control, the Right should have moved toward an unfettered individualism, toward philosophical anarchism. Even the moderate liberal state had been unable to prevent economic planning on the New Deal scale, so why feel bound by the state at all? This line of thought has been followed by a few, by those who adopt Ayn Rand’s laws of the jungle. But there is a great force inhibiting such a development. Though “rugged individualism” is native to America, it is held in check by an emphasis on moral orthodoxy, social conformity, and community solidarity—the spirit that creates local blue laws, on the one hand, and founds stable labor unions on the other. This authoritarian sentiment is not based on articulated political theory. Indeed, the conformist faction in American life has used, for its own purposes, the dominant liberal philosophy. It uses Locke to restrict the federal government, yet does this only so it can impose rigid controls at the local level. The classic instance of this was Southern devotion to states’ rights arguments (arguments based on opposition to governmental encroachment) used to protect segregation laws (which typify governmental interference in private life).
...
This conjunction of extreme social atomists with extreme social conformists would have been unthinkable but for one thing—the large dose of religiosity that had been mixed, historically, with the American cult of free enterprise. Academic economists conceived their individualism in terms of Locke and Mill; but the emulative ethic, as it was glorified out among the American people, was based on the pursuit of success as a form of spiritual discipline. Horatio Alger represented a union of economic opportunity with deep religious compulsion—the free linked with what is forced. And in that juncture lies the secret of the Right-Wing alliance.
...
It is easy to see why socialists or communists might lend peripheral support to welfare liberals of the New Deal. It is not so easy to see why authoritarians felt drawn to the libertarian Right. To understand that, one has to have a sense of the manifold and volatile nature of this combination—a sense lost by those who analyze the Right as if it were one thing, explicable by one theory (the authoritarian personality, status resentment, Cold War anxiety, the residue of Populism, etc.). One also has to discern, beneath the conflicts and multifariousness, a historical force that made the alliance possible (a religious fundamentalism that had been grafted onto the ideal of free enterprise). This, in turn, involves an understanding of the degree to which free-market theorists offer an excuse to the Right, rather than a philosophy. And, finally, in order to “place” the Right, one has to remember that this covering theory of the free market is part of an original, broader liberalism held in the past. When, in the fifties, an attempt to sort out America’s ideological framework was begun, there was great confusion in the terminology of Left and Right, liberalism and conservatism, Democrats and Republicans. And the source of the confusion was not clearly grasped—the original union of Left and Right theories in one consistent system. The parts tended back toward each other, yet fought this tendency. The New Deal did not become socialist; in fact, it became even more libertarian on questions of academic freedom and the toleration of dissent. The apostles of a free market did not become anarchistic; instead, they were thrown together with religious and social authoritarians, who tried to introduce the force of social custom (e.g., the social bias that makes life hard on atheists, homosexuals, communists, and other nonconformers) into the realm of law. Incomplete, the two half-theories were vulnerable, their contradictions easily exploited. Those who tried to think consistently, on either side, were forced back toward the liberalism of their common origin. But by now the “other side” was an enemy camp, hostile because of historical clashes, and it was necessary to avoid Left or Right “deviationism.” A natural bias of the two parts toward each other was therefore countered by deliberate effort to invent or stress differences between them. The resulting tug and counter-tug gave postwar politics an unreal lunar quality, a half-light proper to such half-theories. Americans thought they had broken the liberal philosophy’s circular perfection into two contained parts, that each side had gone off with its own smaller moon to live under different skies. But the moon was never broken. The half-moons were created by darking out part of the theory; and if one looked hard enough, the thin completion of the circle was still visible, implicit in the dark half. The individualist economy was still implied in the individualist politics, and vice versa.
A coalition based on the starting-line metaphor is, within the individualist framework, self-canceling. Once several large blocs of starters become runners, the politics of the starting line loses its appeal for them. If the various proletariats of the New Deal coalition become sufficiently bourgeoisified (as the labor movement has), Nixon’s appeal to the forgotten American—the one who earns, pays taxes, “pays his way”—becomes irresistible.
(Market section summation passage begins with) "The moral market proposes an..."
...techniques developed under liberalism are not only admirable but can be put to better use when we abandon liberal efforts to reduce all social life back to individualist terms
As Walter Lippmann observed, the religious doctrine that all men will at last stand equal before the Throne of God was somehow transmuted in William Jennings Brian's mind to the idea that all men were equally good biologists before the Ballot Box of Tennessee.
March 31, 2024
I was drawn to read this examination of Nixon's campaign and first term. I can't help but wonder if there is a connection between the GOP base now and then which lurched into having a criminal head.
In exploiting fear and differences, this was the birth of the "Southern Strategy". Is the "solid South" crumbling, now? It certainly feels purplish in parts at least to me, now. The exploration here of the birth of that approach in racial and class differences also got the attention of Brad DeLong, author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century interested.
I still feel today it is a lot more about urban versus rural differences, than it is about state borders, especially when current and historical gerrymandering is considered. Also, I resent how I feel from the Republican side it is about stoking prejudices.
Ultimately, this was a vision
The vision of a rabid base feels current:
In a chapter with the epigram from Shakespeare
I find the people strangely fantasied;
Possess'd with rumours, full of idle dreams,
Not knowing what they fear, but full of fear
It interests me how in this book an examination of the context of the first Nixon presidency considers the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson and an evolution of Liberalism which includes Liberal elements of the Nixon worldview.
To my ears today, “the Super-President of Richard Neustadt” hardly Unitary executive theory sounds “liberal”, but more like the Unitary executive theory which I associate with Reagan, Bush, etc. in its strong version.
A good summary of some inherent Americanism hypocrisy.
Here is an interesting observation:
There are many books referenced here. Two that sounded interesting are:
* The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-party Politics in America
* Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan
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In exploiting fear and differences, this was the birth of the "Southern Strategy". Is the "solid South" crumbling, now? It certainly feels purplish in parts at least to me, now. The exploration here of the birth of that approach in racial and class differences also got the attention of Brad DeLong, author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century interested.
Only the South added Republican strength in 1964 when Goldwater ran at the top of the ticket; and convention votes are apportioned to the states according to their performance in the last national election. Moreover, each state that gave its electors to Goldwater—and only Southern states did—got a bonus of six extra votes. This meant that the Southern states had a whopping 316 votes to cast in Miami. “. Add Arizona and Texas, and the total came to 388 “votes. If Nixon could add a border state like Maryland (by adopting its governor), he would be bargaining for a package of 414 votes (with only 667 needed to nominate him).
Nor was it only a question of Miami. The South was just as important in November...
...What is at stake, if one accepts the Southern strategy as the basis for Republican growth, is a reversal of the Democrats’ reign as the majority party—a reversal that is likely to last for decades. Political scentists like Harry Jaffa and Samuel Lubell point out that the American party system has not been a matter of fairly equal see-sawing. The normal situation is to have one solidly established party, to which a minority party can make only partial challenges, until an electoral revolution effects a change in their relationship, giving the minority party a new dominance.
According to Jaffa, there have been only four such “electoral revolutions”—those marked by the rise of Jefferson (1800), Jackson (1823), Lincoln (1860), and Roosevelt (1932). The significance of Rusher’s article—and of the Nixon campaign which, far more than Goldwater’s, was based on its insights—is that Nixon’s election may go down in history as such a turning point. That is clearly what the Nixon organization had in mind. There was much talk among them, all through 1968, of “new coalitions,” of “the passing of the New Deal”—the meeting of their man with a great historic hinge and moment “of reversal.
...Always animated by one ambition—to know who hates who. “That is the secret,” he says with a disarming boyish grin, one that snags a bit on his front tooth, like an unmalevolent Richard Widmark’s. “In New York City, for instance, you make plans from certain rules of exclusion—you can’t get the Jews and the Catholics. The Liberal Party was founded here for Jews opposing Catholics, and the Conservative Party for Catholics fighting Jews. The same kind of basic decision has to be made in national politics. The Civil War is over now; the parties don’t have to compete for that little corner of the nation we live in. Who needs Manhattan when we can get the electoral votes of eleven Southern states? Put those together with the Farm Belt and the Rocky Mountains, and we don’t need the big cities. We don’t even want them.
...Jaffa claims that each revolution was in the direction of greater equality, and therefore “from the Left” in American politics. How could that apply to the Republican Party in 1968? “The clamor in the past has been from the urban or rural proletariat. But now ‘populism’ is of the middle class, which feels exploited by the Establishment. Almost everyone in the productive segment of society considers himself middle-class now, and resents the exploitation of society’s producers. This is not a movement in favor of laissez-faire or any ideology; it is opposed to welfare and the Establishment…
...I asked Phillips if the growth of Negro registration would not recompense Southern Democrats for their losses to the Republican Party. “No, white Democrats will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party. When white Southerners move, they move fast. Wallace is helping, too—in the long run. People will ease their way into the Republican Party by way of the “American Independents”—just as Thurmond eased himself over by way of his Dixiecrat candidacy in 1948 and his independent write-in race in 1956. “We’ll get two thirds to three fourths of the Wallace vote in nineteen seventy-two.”
The demographic shifts in America have been away from the old centers of population. The big cities are declining in population, and declining even more drastically in voting population. The large cities now make up only 30 percent of the national population, against 35 percent suburban, and 35 percent rural and small-town dwellers. This diffusion means that economic climbers do not try to adopt Brahmin standards from old social leaders. The suburbs of the new rich are, like the Sunbelt, unashamed of their gains, unburdened by liberal conscience.
I still feel today it is a lot more about urban versus rural differences, than it is about state borders, especially when current and historical gerrymandering is considered. Also, I resent how I feel from the Republican side it is about stoking prejudices.
Ultimately, this was a vision
...animated by one ambition to know who hates who. ... "In New York City, for instance, you make plans from certain rules of exclusion you can't get the Jews and the Catholics. The Liberal Party was founded here for Jews opposing Catholics, and the Conservative Party for Catholics fighting Jews. The same kind of basic decision has to be made in national politics. The Civil War is over now; the parties don't have to compete for that little corner of the nation we live in. Who needs Manhattan when we can get the electoral votes of eleven Southern states? Put those together with the Farm Belt and the Rocky Mountains, and we don't need the big cities. We don't even want them. Sure, Hubert will carry Riverside Drive in November. La-de-dah. What will he do in Oklahoma?"
The vision of a rabid base feels current:
…They are not, as Nixon knows, the kind who march or riot. They just lock their doors. And they vote. They do not, most of them, go to Wallace rallies; but those who do go speak for them in growing measure. This is the vague unlocalized resentment that had such effect in the 1968 campaign, tainting all the air around talk of law and order. America itself, like her major cities, has blight at the core, not in limbs and extremities. As I stood, bewildered like most reporters, in the insane din of that Wallace rally, saw a crowd of eight thousand tormented by a mere few hundred, I realized at last what had not sunk in at Miami's riot, or Chicago's. I realized this is a nation that might do anything. Even elect Nixon.
In a chapter with the epigram from Shakespeare
I find the people strangely fantasied;
Possess'd with rumours, full of idle dreams,
Not knowing what they fear, but full of fear
…The maker of international mischief was no longer the UN, but the CIA. The chemical that poisoned the world was no longer fluoridated water but Dow Chemical napalm. Instead of Roosevelt's treachery at Pearl Harbor, we had the CIA's plot to kill Kennedys. The point of McCarthyism, old or new, is that whatever has gone wrong was planned to go wrong. It was treason, conspired at. The uncovering of this labyrinthine plot or plots is almost hopeless, so encased in protective secrecy is The System, so deeply has it brainwashed the public; but virtuous citizens must make the effort. This conspiratorial view exactly reflects what Richard Hofstadter, analyzing McCarthyism, called the paranoid style in politics: "When it argues that we are governed largely by means of near-hypnotic manipulation (brainwashing), wholesale corruption, and betrayal, it is indulging in something more significant than the fantasies of indignant patriots: it is questioning the legitimacy of the political order itself."
At the end of World War II, a strong sentiment for what was called internationalism, a tendency to blame the world's past troubles on "nationalism," led to the expectation that there would be greater cohesion in the world, an amalgamation of groups (e.g., a United States of Europe), experiments in federalism leading eventually to World Government. But the very steps taken to promote this movement seem to have had an opposite effect. Not only were many new nations born, but "double nations" arose (Germany, China, Korea, Laos, Vietnam, Nigeria). Liberals, forced to explain these unintended effects, tried to distinguish Bad Nationalism (attacked in propaganda for the UN) from Good Nationalism (nurtured by the UN). Professor Schlesinger was ready to oblige: "The nationalism that arose after the Second World War was, in the main, not the aggressive and hysterical nationalism that had led nations before the war to try to dominate other nations. [That is: It was not Bad Nationalism.] It was, rather, the nationalism generated by the desire to create or restore a sense of nationhood. [That is: It was Good Nationalism.]" Yet this Good Nationalism had all the marks of the Bad jealousy of one's own sovereignty, prickliness toward neighbors, militarism. Most of the nationalist lead-
It interests me how in this book an examination of the context of the first Nixon presidency considers the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson and an evolution of Liberalism which includes Liberal elements of the Nixon worldview.
Schlesinger's nondistinction was based on the assumption that nationalism is an anomaly in the framework of liberal internationalism. But it is not; it was implicit in liberal theory from the outset a point recently stressed by Professor Seliger of the University of Jerusalem (in John Locke, Problems and Perspectives, edited by John W. Yolton): "To the extent that liberalism provides foundations of modern democracy, it does so also with regard to modern nationalism," since "collective is derived from individual self-determination."
Now we see why it was so urgent for Wilson to demand open elections everywhere in the world as a necessary condition for peace anywhere in the world. We need some uniform mechanism to discover what the people want, who the people are, who shall represent each people in the Covenant. Where the ballot does not exist, we must introduce it; where voting is restricted or rigged, we must supervise the elections; and then, having created the conditions for free choice, we must abide by the results. Which means there must be results. Clear results some policies and leaders chosen, others rejected. If there is no popular will expressed through this machinery, there is certifiably existing no people. If two wills are expressed, there are two peoples. If more than that, then more peoples. If an ambiguous will is expressed, then there is no moral agent for the nation, no body to house the ghostly rights of nationhood. That is why we must have faith in the power of elections to "settle matters." We must believe, even, that where no clear popular will existed previously, election can create one (not just reflect it) can, in that sense, create nationhood, call a people into being. So Nixon summons a new nation to arise in South Vietnam, the result of an election internationally supervised. Though the power of elections is in many…
[…]
A false analogy underlies this whole complex of beliefs. The analogy runs: as the individual is to the nation-state, so the nation-state is to the international organization. We have already seen Wilson's expression of this equation: he said nations must be "governed in their conduct toward each other by the same principles of honor and respect for the common law of civilized society that govern the individual citizens of all modern nations in their relations with one another." The analogy suggests that each country has a unitary national will, expressed in the result of its elections. This leads to difficulties already mentioned in the case of inchoate or crumbling or questionably existent nations. But it leads to even more pervasive (and less suspected) misunderstanding in the established nations, those which have apparently successful electoral systems. America, for instance, is presumed to have a machinery capable of expressing the national will, at least on matters of great importance to the nation. That is why Nixon refers to "what America wants in Vietnam." Yet it is clear, from an analysis of the 1968 election, that the American people had no way of indicating what they wanted in Vietnam that no one can know for sure what they want there, or know whether they know what they want. And if America, with an electoral system as open and flexible as any in the world, cannot say with confidence what its national will is on such a crucial issue, how can countries without settled constitutional processes arrive at knowledge of the popular will?
Yet the concept of a unitary popular will cannot be shed by liberal thinkers. That is why, despite his antiauthoritarian philosophy, the liberal so often yearns for a strong executive - the Super-President of Richard Neustadt, of all those liberals who canonize maximum leaders like Wilson, FDR, and John Kennedy. The clash of blocs and interests in Congress is a constant reminder that there is no such thing as a single will in the nation.
To my ears today, “the Super-President of Richard Neustadt” hardly Unitary executive theory sounds “liberal”, but more like the Unitary executive theory which I associate with Reagan, Bush, etc. in its strong version.
A good summary of some inherent Americanism hypocrisy.
…when we are willing to "send the gunboats" to "protect the flag" when one American citizen is threatened abroad, by foreigners, but are unwilling to think of the national prestige as engaged in the protection of American children from rats in this country's slums. The competitive ethic makes us think of any American as "on our team" when we are competing abroad, with other countries, but reduces that same American to a rival, a potential enemy, in our domestic competition, our struggles against each other in the marketplace; so that patriotism is degraded from love of countrymen to mere hatred of foes, mere xenophobia, and men consider it "patriotic" to prefer the muddled abstractions of "confrontation with Communism" in Vietnam to the lives of our young men.
The growth of American business has little to do with the free market. The reality behind that growth was governmental favoring of manufacture over agriculture (e.g., in the great preferential tariff fights that led up to the Civil War), governmental expansion at the proddings of commerce (e.g., in the political deals for rail rights and land grants that determined the westward expansion), governmental protection of capital risks abroad by "gunboat diplomacy," governmental shelter for big combines in turn-of-the-century Supreme Court decisions. Big business and big government grew in the past by feeding each other - and they still do. That is why Republican fundamentalists, who took the strictures against big government seriously, were regularly defeated by the party's Eastern Establishment. Senator Taft, defeated in 1952, huffed that "Every Republican candidate for President since 1936 has been nominated by the Chase National Bank." And now, as money shifts westward following population trends, Richard Nixon combines old-fashioned attacks on "Big Government" with the promise of big government contracts to the military industries of the Sunbelt.
Here is an interesting observation:
"Participatory politics" is not the way to make men happy, whole, humane. We should have learned that long ago, simply by observing the effect of politics on its most intimate participants the pros, the politicians themselves. If anything, politics is a drain upon the humanity of its practitioners, not a heart-pump to restore it. The most fully "politicized" man in the world may well be Richard Nixon.
There are many books referenced here. Two that sounded interesting are:
* The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-party Politics in America
* Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan
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August 11, 2011
This may well be the ultimate book on Nixon and his rise to power. However, I shan't pass judgment until I've read his autobiographical, Six Crises. While Perlstein's Nixonland is an insightful overview of the historical milieu that gave rise to Nixon, Wills' book explores not only the historical events that landed this self-made man in the White House, but the waves of American philosophical thought that lead to his rise. To put it more succinctly, Perlstein's book is an appetizer to Wills' main course. I highly recommend that the books be read in succession.
Per Wills, the long march to Nixon began at the turn of the 20th century as Woodrow Wilson and a succession of free market thinkers ratcheted up the liberal -- yes, I said liberal -- philosophy of individualism that gave rise to the robber barons of the previous century. It was a mode of thought that guided not only the economic life of the country, but its spiritual as well, making work and enterprise a religious endeavor. Morality could be measured by material success. Virtue lead to hard work which lead to success which lead to material wealth, rendering a man's inner morality visible. It was a very simple mantra, as Wills points out many times, straight out of Horatio Alger. Indeed, the rise of Nixon may well have been the last gasp of that mantra before its collapse into a coma where it has remained for some 40 years, twitching from time to time (Reagan, Gingrich, Tea Party), but never truly awakening before being knocked cold again by another damn recession.
The lid came off the middle class in the '60s, and Nixon was the silent majority's answer to putting it back on. We all know where that lid wound up, even though Wills, while writing the book, did not. Formerly invisible factions - blacks, women, college students -- were now visible, and the white working class were appalled at having their mores challenged in the streets by "non-earners." In 1968, George Wallace came along, and had his rather vocal following (is it me or is Ron Paul our modern day George Wallace?), scaring the bejesus out the GOP establishment who were afraid the Democrat/3rd Party man could swipe a good chunk of their base. Nixon, despite having a loser label on his head, having lost the 1960 Presidential race and the California Governor's race 2 years later ("You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more," he told a flock of reporters who had dogged him throughout the latter campaign), Nixon swooped-in to take the nomination in Miami from Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, and George Romney.
He and Agnew went to DC promising law and order, uh, for everyone else anyway. How could such a straight and narrow Quaker (he formed a club at Whittier College called the Orthogonian, or Right Angles), go off the rails the way he did. Wills gives some pretty strong clues in this book. Hint- it was not just Nixon that got us that point, but the nation as a whole.
Per Wills, the long march to Nixon began at the turn of the 20th century as Woodrow Wilson and a succession of free market thinkers ratcheted up the liberal -- yes, I said liberal -- philosophy of individualism that gave rise to the robber barons of the previous century. It was a mode of thought that guided not only the economic life of the country, but its spiritual as well, making work and enterprise a religious endeavor. Morality could be measured by material success. Virtue lead to hard work which lead to success which lead to material wealth, rendering a man's inner morality visible. It was a very simple mantra, as Wills points out many times, straight out of Horatio Alger. Indeed, the rise of Nixon may well have been the last gasp of that mantra before its collapse into a coma where it has remained for some 40 years, twitching from time to time (Reagan, Gingrich, Tea Party), but never truly awakening before being knocked cold again by another damn recession.
The lid came off the middle class in the '60s, and Nixon was the silent majority's answer to putting it back on. We all know where that lid wound up, even though Wills, while writing the book, did not. Formerly invisible factions - blacks, women, college students -- were now visible, and the white working class were appalled at having their mores challenged in the streets by "non-earners." In 1968, George Wallace came along, and had his rather vocal following (is it me or is Ron Paul our modern day George Wallace?), scaring the bejesus out the GOP establishment who were afraid the Democrat/3rd Party man could swipe a good chunk of their base. Nixon, despite having a loser label on his head, having lost the 1960 Presidential race and the California Governor's race 2 years later ("You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more," he told a flock of reporters who had dogged him throughout the latter campaign), Nixon swooped-in to take the nomination in Miami from Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, and George Romney.
He and Agnew went to DC promising law and order, uh, for everyone else anyway. How could such a straight and narrow Quaker (he formed a club at Whittier College called the Orthogonian, or Right Angles), go off the rails the way he did. Wills gives some pretty strong clues in this book. Hint- it was not just Nixon that got us that point, but the nation as a whole.
January 21, 2019
This was a real doorstopper and a dead weight on my Currently Reading shelf throughout 2018. At last, I have finished Nixon Agonistes, the famous Nixon book (written in 1970, pre-Watergate) proposing that Nixon was actually a liberal.
What I expected:
*A biography of Nixon, the "self-made man" described in the book title.
*Some diving into Nixon's policies, way of thinking, etc.
*Coverage of Nixon as Eisenhower's VP, his loss to Kennedy in 1960, boucing back to win the 1968 presidential election, whatever.
What I got:
*Some truly great chapters about Nixon as a man with a lifelong chip on his shoulder, a constant drive to prove himself, and an overpreparer on every level to build his public facade.
*Pretty good essays about Spiro T. Agnew, Wallace, George Romney, Moynihan, Nelson Rockefeller, and some other major characters of this time period that do not support his overall thesis (Nixon was actually a liberal?) and maybe did not belong here, but Garry Wills is all about the kitchen sink approach.
And also.....
*On the ground descriptions of public sentiment, rallies, protests, etc, and the people involved that go on forever without really providing a sense of what it was like to live through this, and without ever providing much beyond some sketches and caricature (despite GOING ON FOREVER).
*Tedious discussion about the philosophy of war (Wilsonian vs.... Rooseveltian?)
*Tedious discussion about the philosophy of liberalism, what is a liberal, what does it mean to be liberal, WHAT IS LIBERAL?
*Less tedious digression about the meaning of elections, the purpose of elections, the meaning of democracy, the role of elections in expressing public will (or not).
*Even more tedious digression into the role of liberalism in philosophy of war and liberalism in philosophy of elections.
*A lot of generalizing about national vs local political parties and the role of minorities that was dated, but also too general to be helpful in understanding the time period.
*Actually, a metric ton of generalizing about lots of topics in a way that is simultaneously too broad to be helpful and too specific to not be dated.
Overall: A long disorganized ramble about a LOT of topics but with some gems. The latter half seemed to contain the bulk of the philosophizing and was almost unbearable. Probably a better read for more academically/philosophically minded people who like to ask questions like "what is the purpose of war" and have debates about the purpose of democracy.
What I expected:
*A biography of Nixon, the "self-made man" described in the book title.
*Some diving into Nixon's policies, way of thinking, etc.
*Coverage of Nixon as Eisenhower's VP, his loss to Kennedy in 1960, boucing back to win the 1968 presidential election, whatever.
What I got:
*Some truly great chapters about Nixon as a man with a lifelong chip on his shoulder, a constant drive to prove himself, and an overpreparer on every level to build his public facade.
*Pretty good essays about Spiro T. Agnew, Wallace, George Romney, Moynihan, Nelson Rockefeller, and some other major characters of this time period that do not support his overall thesis (Nixon was actually a liberal?) and maybe did not belong here, but Garry Wills is all about the kitchen sink approach.
And also.....
*On the ground descriptions of public sentiment, rallies, protests, etc, and the people involved that go on forever without really providing a sense of what it was like to live through this, and without ever providing much beyond some sketches and caricature (despite GOING ON FOREVER).
*Tedious discussion about the philosophy of war (Wilsonian vs.... Rooseveltian?)
*Tedious discussion about the philosophy of liberalism, what is a liberal, what does it mean to be liberal, WHAT IS LIBERAL?
*Less tedious digression about the meaning of elections, the purpose of elections, the meaning of democracy, the role of elections in expressing public will (or not).
*Even more tedious digression into the role of liberalism in philosophy of war and liberalism in philosophy of elections.
*A lot of generalizing about national vs local political parties and the role of minorities that was dated, but also too general to be helpful in understanding the time period.
*Actually, a metric ton of generalizing about lots of topics in a way that is simultaneously too broad to be helpful and too specific to not be dated.
Overall: A long disorganized ramble about a LOT of topics but with some gems. The latter half seemed to contain the bulk of the philosophizing and was almost unbearable. Probably a better read for more academically/philosophically minded people who like to ask questions like "what is the purpose of war" and have debates about the purpose of democracy.
July 11, 2011
This book earned Wills a listing on Nixon's famous enemies list because of statements like "The belief that our electoral system guarantees the choice of the best men and policies can only give voters a sense that the whole operation is a mockery when Richard Nixon is freely chosen to preside". Overall, Wills treatment of Nixon is fairly balanced. I actually felt sorry for the misery Ike put Tricky Dick through before Nixon's 1952 Checker's Speech.
Some reviewers make the point that Wills postulates in the final chapter that Nixon was actually a Liberal. Some even point to Nixon's leaving the gold standard, strenthening the EPA, and his rapprochement with Red China as proving the point. Unfortunately, all of these initiatives occurred after this book was written. However, throughout the book Wills made some curious definitions of Liberalism and Conservatism (or so it seemed to me). In his world, Liberals includes Jeffersonians, the self-diciplined self-made man, entrepreneurial businessmen, and individualists. Conservatives are defined as Hamiltonians and labor unions leaders. Were those labels defined that differently in 1970? I was a senior at UCal at the time and it sounds like Jabberwocky to me.
The portions I mostly enjoyed were the insights into the primaries and general presidential election of 1968. Wills was on the campaign trail with the candidates most if not all of the time and writes from and insider's perspective. A national election is a brutal process and it is a wonder (and an enlightenment) that any candidate would want to submit to it.
Some reviewers make the point that Wills postulates in the final chapter that Nixon was actually a Liberal. Some even point to Nixon's leaving the gold standard, strenthening the EPA, and his rapprochement with Red China as proving the point. Unfortunately, all of these initiatives occurred after this book was written. However, throughout the book Wills made some curious definitions of Liberalism and Conservatism (or so it seemed to me). In his world, Liberals includes Jeffersonians, the self-diciplined self-made man, entrepreneurial businessmen, and individualists. Conservatives are defined as Hamiltonians and labor unions leaders. Were those labels defined that differently in 1970? I was a senior at UCal at the time and it sounds like Jabberwocky to me.
The portions I mostly enjoyed were the insights into the primaries and general presidential election of 1968. Wills was on the campaign trail with the candidates most if not all of the time and writes from and insider's perspective. A national election is a brutal process and it is a wonder (and an enlightenment) that any candidate would want to submit to it.
February 21, 2013
Written back when political commentary had more of an academic/elitist bent, Garry Wills explores the life and career of Richard M. Nixon from the lemon ranches of southern California to the White House. Published in 1970, Wills writes of the poisoned America of 1968, of LBJ's Vietnam War and how it disillusioned the public and how the cooly efficient political machine of Nixon is able to resurrect his dreams and emerge from a Republican pack of eager politicians that included Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney and Ronald Reagan. Wills concluded over 40 years ago that Nixon was really a liberal at heart, and had little in common with the Birchers and Goldwaterites. Whatever the case, his commentary got him on Nixon's enemies list. There are the occasional flashes of the deep resentment that Nixon carried with him from his youth and as vice president, with some detail about Ike's disdain for him, (that clearly made Nixon the paranoid wreck he was as president.) A rambling book, but very interesting. Wills spends a lot of time on Nixon's life up to his 1968 run and covers other candidates, too, like Agnew and the George Wallace campaign.
March 26, 2014
I would recommend this book because Nixon is an important historical figure: he took the US off the gold standard, he opened relations with China, he withdrew from the Vietnam war and he invented the war on drugs. These acts still influence the US profoundly 40 years later. But even more because Nixon pioneered the use of polarization in modern electoral politics, a phenomenon that is still sticking like a spear out of the body politic 50 years later. But mostly because Wills is a great writer and a deep thinker and he uses Nixon as a lens to examine the values and philosophy that shaped modern American society.
July 12, 2014
Good book - very thought-provoking. I found it gave me some new insights (albeit fuzzy ones - hard to pin down) into American politics and social thought that is hard to pick up from more conventional sources. For example, the distinction between the Presidential and non-Presidential parts of the political parties. In a sense, it's not really about Nixon at all but about ways of thinking. Some sections (eg. on the nature of liberalism) were fairly hard work.
March 24, 2024
Nixon as the last liberal-the sweaty, pathetic, eternal striver that embodies American liberalism’s reliance on the “mystique of the earner”- seems pretty spot on. Some sections of this are 10/10 and helped me organize my own thoughts on Republican politics in the 60s, issues in academia, and how we discuss welfare. Other chapters are a little less fun but I still found them insightful.
January 1, 2013
Maybe the best book I've ever read? It's certainly up there. An incredibly great insight into the most savage president ever sworn in, and makes some really tremendous arguments in terms of how his policies would be placed today.
March 7, 2018
Too much theatrical nonsense
I wanted to read and too learn more about President Nixon and this book was not worth my time. If he had stayed with the subject and not drifted to long drawn out personal tangents I think the book would have been insightful. But it wasn't!
I wanted to read and too learn more about President Nixon and this book was not worth my time. If he had stayed with the subject and not drifted to long drawn out personal tangents I think the book would have been insightful. But it wasn't!
February 22, 2023
When Esquire magazine commissioned an article from Garry Wills about Richard Nixon and the New Hampshire primary—the opening salvo of the 1968 presidential election campaign— the assumption was that this would be a requiem for a has-been who had dictated his own political obituary to reporters six years earlier, at the close of his failed attempt to win the California governorship.
Yet less than one year later, when Nixon stood on the steps of the Capitol to take the oath of office, there was a sense of inevitability that he should become president at that fraught moment in U. S. history.
One of the points Wills stresses in Nixon Agonistes is that it’s a fallacy to believe that the lumbering, flawed American political process churns out, every four years, the best man (and it has always been a man so far). It would be more accurate, Wills maintains, to say that it serves up the most appropriate for a given moment. And this was never so true, in his view, as in 1968. As he writes in his Preface, “What is best and weakest in America goes out to reciprocating strengths and deficiencies in Richard Nixon.”
A second inevitability, in retrospect, is that one article assignment would lead to more, and these, in turn—given that Wills’s expertise extends to a deep-rooted knowledge of the origins of American political philosophy—would result in this book.
Nixon Agonistes stands out in the genre of books that report on political campaigns—a genre that blossomed in the wake of the success of T. H. White’s Making of the President 1960. Less than a third of its six hundred pages are devoted to that. And although Wills is an insightful, observant reporter, it is not this that gives this book its continued relevance.
Instead, the importance of this book lies in the interpretive framework Wills constructs for his deeper analysis. Much of what he writes in these chapters remains true of American society.
This framework views the American political experiment as a market, or rather an interplay of four markets—moral (personified by Ralph Waldo Emerson), economic (Adam Smith), intellectual (John Stuart Mill), and political (Woodrow Wilson). The underlying philosophy of these intersecting markets is, Wills writes, classic liberalism. For all the surface conflict between left and right in the American political spectrum, the debates are framed in terms that originate here, assumptions often unexamined.
Yet classic liberalism, which Wills explains as a combination of the political philosophy of John Locke and the economic views of Adam Smith, has broken into two branches, with those who continue to uphold Smith finding themselves on the right, where their strange bedfellows tend to authoritarian views, while students of Locke tend to cluster on the left. The last intellectual to fully unite both strands was John Stuart Mill. Even Woodrow Wilson was, in his time, an anachronism.
Yet it was Wilson who was Nixon’s model—something Nixon never hid and which Wills takes seriously. But if Wilson was already, in his time, a throwback to an earlier political philosophy, what does that make Nixon? For Wills, “Nixon’s victory was the nation’s concession of defeat, an admission that we have no politics left but the old individualism, a web of myths that have lost their magic.” Wills asks in the title of the book’s final chapter whether Nixon is not the last liberal. By the way, it’s important to recognize that, in addition to writing of “classic liberalism,” at times, Wills uses the term “liberal” in the way it’s commonly used in American political discourse, for instance, in his criticism of Arthur Schlesinger and other academics.
For all the strength of Wills’s analysis, suggesting that Nixon is the last liberal demonstrates the limits of punditry. Like Nixon’s election, this book is a product of its historical moment. Mired in an unwinnable war, riven by domestic turbulence, it truly seemed that—in the memorable phrase of Yeats that Wills used for the title of his second chapter—the center could not hold.
For Wills, classic liberalism, for all its accomplishments, was in terminal decline. The emphasis on individual achievement, inextricably wedded to emulation; the dream of getting ahead balanced by the fear of falling behind had created what he at one point calls “moral monsters.”The crisis of the self-made man Wills diagnoses in the subtitle of his book is not only Nixon but the mainstream American formed by Horatio Alger, Emerson, and Peale. He laments that “[t]here is, in our legends, no heroism of the office clerk, no stable industrial ‘peasantry’ of the men who actually make the system work.” His prescription is that the “facts of community life” be integrated into America’s political theory.
A half-century later, any faltering step in this direction is still decried as “collectivist,” and our political system seems even more in need of an overhaul than it did in 1968, placed in office in 2016, a caricature of Nixon’s worst traits and impulses. The American myth is nothing if not resilient.
Yet less than one year later, when Nixon stood on the steps of the Capitol to take the oath of office, there was a sense of inevitability that he should become president at that fraught moment in U. S. history.
One of the points Wills stresses in Nixon Agonistes is that it’s a fallacy to believe that the lumbering, flawed American political process churns out, every four years, the best man (and it has always been a man so far). It would be more accurate, Wills maintains, to say that it serves up the most appropriate for a given moment. And this was never so true, in his view, as in 1968. As he writes in his Preface, “What is best and weakest in America goes out to reciprocating strengths and deficiencies in Richard Nixon.”
A second inevitability, in retrospect, is that one article assignment would lead to more, and these, in turn—given that Wills’s expertise extends to a deep-rooted knowledge of the origins of American political philosophy—would result in this book.
Nixon Agonistes stands out in the genre of books that report on political campaigns—a genre that blossomed in the wake of the success of T. H. White’s Making of the President 1960. Less than a third of its six hundred pages are devoted to that. And although Wills is an insightful, observant reporter, it is not this that gives this book its continued relevance.
Instead, the importance of this book lies in the interpretive framework Wills constructs for his deeper analysis. Much of what he writes in these chapters remains true of American society.
This framework views the American political experiment as a market, or rather an interplay of four markets—moral (personified by Ralph Waldo Emerson), economic (Adam Smith), intellectual (John Stuart Mill), and political (Woodrow Wilson). The underlying philosophy of these intersecting markets is, Wills writes, classic liberalism. For all the surface conflict between left and right in the American political spectrum, the debates are framed in terms that originate here, assumptions often unexamined.
Yet classic liberalism, which Wills explains as a combination of the political philosophy of John Locke and the economic views of Adam Smith, has broken into two branches, with those who continue to uphold Smith finding themselves on the right, where their strange bedfellows tend to authoritarian views, while students of Locke tend to cluster on the left. The last intellectual to fully unite both strands was John Stuart Mill. Even Woodrow Wilson was, in his time, an anachronism.
Yet it was Wilson who was Nixon’s model—something Nixon never hid and which Wills takes seriously. But if Wilson was already, in his time, a throwback to an earlier political philosophy, what does that make Nixon? For Wills, “Nixon’s victory was the nation’s concession of defeat, an admission that we have no politics left but the old individualism, a web of myths that have lost their magic.” Wills asks in the title of the book’s final chapter whether Nixon is not the last liberal. By the way, it’s important to recognize that, in addition to writing of “classic liberalism,” at times, Wills uses the term “liberal” in the way it’s commonly used in American political discourse, for instance, in his criticism of Arthur Schlesinger and other academics.
For all the strength of Wills’s analysis, suggesting that Nixon is the last liberal demonstrates the limits of punditry. Like Nixon’s election, this book is a product of its historical moment. Mired in an unwinnable war, riven by domestic turbulence, it truly seemed that—in the memorable phrase of Yeats that Wills used for the title of his second chapter—the center could not hold.
For Wills, classic liberalism, for all its accomplishments, was in terminal decline. The emphasis on individual achievement, inextricably wedded to emulation; the dream of getting ahead balanced by the fear of falling behind had created what he at one point calls “moral monsters.”The crisis of the self-made man Wills diagnoses in the subtitle of his book is not only Nixon but the mainstream American formed by Horatio Alger, Emerson, and Peale. He laments that “[t]here is, in our legends, no heroism of the office clerk, no stable industrial ‘peasantry’ of the men who actually make the system work.” His prescription is that the “facts of community life” be integrated into America’s political theory.
A half-century later, any faltering step in this direction is still decried as “collectivist,” and our political system seems even more in need of an overhaul than it did in 1968, placed in office in 2016, a caricature of Nixon’s worst traits and impulses. The American myth is nothing if not resilient.
January 8, 2022
In this book, Wills discusses Nixon's upbringing/psychological background and 1968 campaign in great detail, and then provides context by exploring the ideas and lives of other major players during Nixon's time (like Agnew, Romney, and Rockerfeller). He uses both Nixon's story and this context (and a lot of exposition around American political thought in general) to further his contention that Nixon is actually a political liberal. I think that Wills provides a great combination of information about Nixon's life, background knowledge about the world he was working in, and his own arguments about how Nixon's actions and beliefs fit into that world.
I especially enjoyed Wills's framing around the self-made man as the center of the political and economomic market forces that shaped the American political zeitgeist. His use of Nixon here as a lens by which through view American political thought proved to be a compelling rhetorical device, and it made his commentary feel a lot more concrete than similar authors' (thinking Bell, Lasch, Hofstader) work can feel.
I gave this book four out of five stars because while I found it genuinely thought-provoking and rigorously well-researched, I would hesitate to reread it or blindly recommend it to a friend who might be interested in this topic. While I did enjoy reading this book, I did feel as if Wills never fully finds his stride here when trying to balance both accounts of Nixon's day-to-day/personal state and trying to comprehensively frame the broader political and philosophical world within which Nixon's life and work and work reside. This is reasonable given that it is difficult to balance discussion of both political and of historical thought, especially given they are so interwoven, but it also means that it sits somewhere in the uncanny valley between a casual read and an academic one, where his descriptions are simultaneously too general and too specific. This weakened the strength of his actual thesis, as he ends up with neither a simple, easy-to-understand presentation of his ideas nor an airtight, rigorous one.
I especially enjoyed Wills's framing around the self-made man as the center of the political and economomic market forces that shaped the American political zeitgeist. His use of Nixon here as a lens by which through view American political thought proved to be a compelling rhetorical device, and it made his commentary feel a lot more concrete than similar authors' (thinking Bell, Lasch, Hofstader) work can feel.
I gave this book four out of five stars because while I found it genuinely thought-provoking and rigorously well-researched, I would hesitate to reread it or blindly recommend it to a friend who might be interested in this topic. While I did enjoy reading this book, I did feel as if Wills never fully finds his stride here when trying to balance both accounts of Nixon's day-to-day/personal state and trying to comprehensively frame the broader political and philosophical world within which Nixon's life and work and work reside. This is reasonable given that it is difficult to balance discussion of both political and of historical thought, especially given they are so interwoven, but it also means that it sits somewhere in the uncanny valley between a casual read and an academic one, where his descriptions are simultaneously too general and too specific. This weakened the strength of his actual thesis, as he ends up with neither a simple, easy-to-understand presentation of his ideas nor an airtight, rigorous one.
February 18, 2024
Liberalism- the call's coming from inside the house. Using Nixon as a structuring presence, Wills builds out a vision of 60's liberalism in its span between the student movement, a growing intellectual-governmental complex, and the different tendancies within the US party structure.
This book's approach, of intermittently sketching Nixon as a 'self-made man', and the forces he was constantly defining himself in struggle against. I particularly appreciated the starting section where his constant subjugation as vice President by Ike gives a stark picture of the incompatibility of these two canny political operators.
Remarkable for a left liberal, Wills is not a coward in his analysis. He's direct in confronting the contradictions of liberal democracy, whether that's the absurdity of electoral principles or the alliances between the libertarian economists and religious moralists. To me, this seems like the best of idealist analysis, which has clear fault lines where symptoms are fantastically identified, but causes cannot be deeply examined. This isn't to fault the book, since I think speaking to American liberalism in it's own language is a powerful tool.
This book's approach, of intermittently sketching Nixon as a 'self-made man', and the forces he was constantly defining himself in struggle against. I particularly appreciated the starting section where his constant subjugation as vice President by Ike gives a stark picture of the incompatibility of these two canny political operators.
Remarkable for a left liberal, Wills is not a coward in his analysis. He's direct in confronting the contradictions of liberal democracy, whether that's the absurdity of electoral principles or the alliances between the libertarian economists and religious moralists. To me, this seems like the best of idealist analysis, which has clear fault lines where symptoms are fantastically identified, but causes cannot be deeply examined. This isn't to fault the book, since I think speaking to American liberalism in it's own language is a powerful tool.
January 22, 2019
I have read other works by Wills and I liked his writing. This, however, was a ver4y difficult read. I also found that the title was somewhat deceptive. The first half of the book discussed Nixon and the last couple chapters did also but in between was discussions of various items. It seemed to ramble a lot. He also seemed to want to write for as much more educated crowd than myself. He used the following words: infelicitous, chiastic, philhellene, ictus, orotundity, camelotitis, eschaton, agonistes, nugatory, concatenated, canted, palinodes, remasticating, stichically, eructated, semihiant, singultus, affiches, premasticated, regnant, concatenated, sinuosities, deliquescence, lacuna, fictive, plangent, suasiveness, demimonde and aridities. There were some more but I didn't start compiling this list until chapter 2 and I wasn't willing to go back. I read a lot and I will admit that I am not that well versed in English but, really! What comes to mind is "there are a lot of big words in there missy, we are but ‘umble pirates" - H Barbossa.
February 12, 2023
The first two parts were deliciously poignant and were stuffed with keen observations and extremely well-researched gossip.
Everything past those two, well it was dry in the same way that florida is humid. Dry and irritating because you know garry wills has changed his position on some of the subjects and philosophical positions to which he irreverently opines.
It's a hard but likely worthy task to take him at his word and judge him through the lens of mid-20th century thought despite having the hindsight to know of their results. The overall effect is a book steeped in the political rituals and the will to power of mid-century america, but although it grasps the whole of that world, he simply can't simplify reify the sights and he kind of just sits on mount sinai trying to relay the god of the machine that is nixon.
Educing, though, is hard to do prior to the pivotal 1972 re-election campaign and the resultant watergate scandal drip-feed.Gary did well enough, one feels, if Nixon felt strongly enough to put him on Nixon's infamous "enemies list"
Everything past those two, well it was dry in the same way that florida is humid. Dry and irritating because you know garry wills has changed his position on some of the subjects and philosophical positions to which he irreverently opines.
It's a hard but likely worthy task to take him at his word and judge him through the lens of mid-20th century thought despite having the hindsight to know of their results. The overall effect is a book steeped in the political rituals and the will to power of mid-century america, but although it grasps the whole of that world, he simply can't simplify reify the sights and he kind of just sits on mount sinai trying to relay the god of the machine that is nixon.
Educing, though, is hard to do prior to the pivotal 1972 re-election campaign and the resultant watergate scandal drip-feed.Gary did well enough, one feels, if Nixon felt strongly enough to put him on Nixon's infamous "enemies list"
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