Long Pauses

Tag: Nixon

  • Confidence Man

    A new poll reveals that 70 percent of Americans now believe that any gains we’ve made in Iraq have come at an “unacceptable” cost, and 56 percent now believe the conflict was “not worth fighting.” Poll numbers are poll numbers, of course, but these seem significant if only because they suggest an interesting trend. A real majority now question the validity of the policy that most clearly defines the Bush administration. (And if Bush can call his margin of victory a “mandate,” then I can call 56 percent a “real majority.”)

    Also headlining the front page of The Washington Post website are breaking reports of 22 dead in an attack on a U.S. base, Dana Milbank’s coverage of Bush’s elusive tactics at yesterday’s press conference, and a report of Bush’s confidence in his Iraq policy. What interests me is the juxtaposition of stories — the images of death and destruction jutted up against Bush’s “confidence.” Reminds me of another president.

    Back in January, after reading Jeffrey Alexander’s The Meanings of Social Life, I predicted to a co-worker that the 2004 election would be a repeat of ’72, when Nixon won re-election with 60% of the popular vote despite the Watergate scandal. From my response to Alexander’s book:

    In November 1972, just four months after the Watergate break-in, 84% of voters claimed that the scandal did not influence their decision on election night. Two years later, the event had taken on such symbolic significance that Nixon was forced to resign. “Watergate could not, as the French might say, tell itself. It had to be told by society; it was, to use Durkeim’s famous phrase, a social fact. It was the context of Watergate that had changed, not so much the raw empirical data themselves” (156). In his thoughtful analysis, Alexander explains how Watergate, as a symbol, came to transcend the world of petty politics and to touch upon fundamental moral concerns, thus polluting the executive office with the counterdemocratic code. This process was greatly influenced by the ritualizing experience of the televised hearings and by the release of Nixon’s taped conversations. “By his words and recorded actions,” Alexander writes, “he had polluted the very tenets that the entire Watergate process had revivified: the sacredness of truth and the image of America as an inclusive, tolerant community” (169).

    As an example of how the Watergate context had changed, Alexander reminds us of Nixon’s infamous line, “I am not a crook.” In ’72 those words would have comforted Americans and reinforced their sacred faith in the presidency; by ’74, after the tapes and after the hearings, Nixon’s utterance of the word “crook” only reminded voters of their growing suspicions. Nixon had lost control of his rhetoric.

    I was mostly joking when I mentioned all of this to my co-worker a year ago, but I’m starting to wonder if there might be some truth to it. In the last month, Bush has given America’s highest civilian honor to George Tenet, the man who most on the right scapegoated for his “slam dunk” on Iraq intelligence. He’s nominated a petty criminal for the nation’s top security position. And he’s repeatedly emphasized his support of Donald Rumsfeld. I think we’re reaching a point when Bush’s statement of “confidence” will be read quite differently from how it’s intended.

  • Nixon on Art

    It’s not every day that I link to the Weekly Standard, but this is just too surreal to pass up. In “Still the One,” Andrew Ferguson goes digging through the Nixon tapes and finds gold. Old Dick will always be a wonderful mystery to me. (That last sentence might get me some Google traffic.) I can’t imagine that I could possibly offer comments that would do this stuff justice. Kind of speaks for itself, eh?

    The next meeting that morning concerned the arts.

    Nixon’s presidency was the most generous ever enjoyed by the arts establishment in the United States. Representing that establishment in the administration were Nixon’s old law partner Leonard Garment and, preeminently, Nancy Hanks, a former director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and thus, ex officio, a life member of the Eastern Establishment.

    On the tape, Nixon says he wants to talk about the film industry.

    “Now, Nancy, it turns out, 52 percent of the movies we see here in the United States were made abroad. What I want to do is find a way to keep these damn foreign movies out. Oh, I know they’re supposed to be so damn great and so forth. To tell you the truth, I don’t see many movies. Saw ‘Love Story.’ ‘Patton.’ But my point is, I will not have America slip to number two in the world when it comes to movies.”

    Mrs. Hanks protests that the popularity of foreign movies is owing to their superior quality.

    “Well, then, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to take it to the movie industry. You tell ’em, You’ve got to start producing good movies. Say: No more of this weird stuff! Shape up!

    “The family movie is coming back, you know. People don’t like arty. They don’t like offbeat.

    “But the film industry, they’re trying to reflect the intelligentsia”–the word drips with venom–“and that is their big mistake. Following the intelligentsia is where they always go wrong. Look at these film schools today. All they do is the weird stuff. They produce weird movies. They produce weird people.”

    But Hanks and Garment have come to talk not about the movies but about the government’s grandest current project for the arts, the construction of the Hirshhorn Sculpture Museum on the National Mall.

    “Is this going to be some of that–that modern art?” Nixon asks suspiciously.

    “It is, Mr. President,” Mrs. Hanks replies, in her Rockefeller voice. “It’s one of the finest collections of modern sculpture in the world.” In the wuld.

    quot;Oh yeah?” Silence. Then: “Don’t let it be one of those horrible modern buildings, all right? ‘Cause if it is, we’re not going to do it.”

    Garment and Hanks try to explain that the plans have already been approved.

    Nixon’s voice deepens. “I will not have the Mall desecrated with one of those horrible goddamn modern atrocities like they have in New York with that, what is it, that Whitney thing. Jesus H. Christ. If it looks like that, it–will–not–happen.”

    Silence.

    “And I don’t want ‘controversial,’ either. All right? Now this list for the board or whatever. Am I stuck with these names?”

    Garment assures him the list for the museum’s board of directors can still be changed.

    “Good. I’m taking all the Easterners off of here. Got that? Every single one. And this name–what’s–some Harvard name. Know him. Part of the Eastern Establishment. Rich guy, but he’ll never lift a finger to help us. Well, the hell with him. Am I right?”

    Nixon mentions names of California donors he would like placed on the Hirshhorn board.

    “Just put ’em on the list,” he says. “I mean, why not? Think they’ll make the thing a disaster? They can’t make it a disaster because it’s a disaster already!”

    “No, no, Mr. President,” Mrs. Hanks scolds. “It will not be a disaster!”

    “Oh, come on, Nancy,” Nixon says quietly. “I’ve seen the plans.”

    Another silence.

    “Well,” he says at last, “I wash my hands of the damn thing. Just make sure I don’t have to see it when I look out this window.”

    And there it is: an entire administration in miniature, the capitulation of the tough-talking Republican. The damn building got built, of course, and the Hirshhorn is indeed an atrocity, as Nixon knew it would be, rising up on the Mall without windows or warmth, poured from dun-colored concrete in the shape of a giant automotive air filter.

    Why did they hate him so? “They” did get their building, after all, and so much else from him, too. A few hours in the tape room at Archives II, though, makes the answer plain: They hated him because he hated them. Deep as it was, the hatred wasn’t about politics. It cut much closer to the vitals–into culture, disposition, class, I’m not sure what to call it. One of Nixon’s legacies indeed is to demonstrate the puniness of politics, its relative insignificance in the larger scheme of what moves men to do what they do. His enemies knew he wasn’t one of them, and though he may have tried to buy their trust with every kind of political concession, Nixon knew it too. He hated them for it and vice versa. And the hatred, both his and theirs, is what did him in at the end, as he also knew.

    Sorry that was so long, but I want to capture it all in case the Standard pulls it down.

  • The Public Burning (1976)

    By Robert Coover

    In the opening pages of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, the narrator, Vice President Richard Nixon, insecure about his notoriously sinister jowls, thinks to himself, “isn’t that a hell of a thing—that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles?” Set during the days immediately preceding the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Coover’s satire explodes the absurd ties that bind infotainment to politics, words to history, and images to morality. Nixon makes a suitable and surprisingly sympathetic anti-hero, then, for he was perhaps America’s first politician to be publicly made, broken, reborn, then destroyed, each act broadcast live on television. Coover assumes our familiarity with those images and puts them to effective use, deliberately sounding echoes of Nixon’s “I am not a crook” Watergate days while revisiting the glorious victory of his “Checkers” speech. Nixon is simultaneously the candidate on stage, sweat-soaked and scruffy beside Kennedy’s sheen, and the President-elect with arms raised, victorious, finally, in ’68.

    “In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind the moralities—why did I keep forgetting that?” The fictional Nixon’s question is at the heart of Coover’s satire, and the heydays of the McCarthy Era give him ample fodder. It’s as if Coover is attempting to embody all of the complicated contradictions of the ’50s in a single novel, often to hilarious affect. Betty Crocker comes to life as the personification of idealized Eisenhower-era domesticity. Hollywood horror creatures walk the streets in 3D Technicolor, living projections of xenophobic hysteria. Walt Disney and Cecille B. DeMille elbow each other aside in their fight for marketing rights to the execution. Eisenhower morphs into Gary Cooper, strutting toward a potentially apocalyptic showdown at High Noon while uttering the lyric verse of Time Magazine (the nation’s Poet Laureate). And, most prominently, the irrational demands of the American populace become a walking, talking, cursing, spitting caricature in the person of Uncle Sam, who wants only to defeat his nebulous arch-villain, The Phantom, an enemy that most closely resembles communism, but is actually anything that might be labeled “un-American,” a loaded term, no doubt, in the early-’50s.

    Knowing something of The Public Burning‘s infamous reputation, I picked it up expecting to read a didactic denouncement of conservative hate-mongering built upon an equally didactic eulogy to the Rosenbergs, those most tragic and useable icons of the Old Left. What I got, instead, was something much more ambivalent and cynical: a satire with targets across the political spectrum. In an onanistic fantasy that would make Portnoy blush, Nixon attacks Ethel’s naïve devotion to an irrelevant idealism, voicing the questions that all on the Left have struggled to answer in post-WWII America: “What about Stalin’s purges? The death camps in Siberia? The massacres in Poland? What about Rudolph Slansky just last fall in Prague? Eh?” Her response is typical of the impotent liberalism that has characterized so much of the New Left. Coover captures this beautifully in an image of Julius and Ethel exchanging letters of praise for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team that they root for despite their complete ignorance of baseball. Edith writes: “It is chiefly in their outstanding contribution to eradication of racial prejudice that they have covered themselves with glory.”

    The warden at Sing-Sing offers an interesting insight into the Rosenbergs: “the problem has been their habit of behaving in what they probably think of as, well, symbolic ways—you know, acting like they’re establishing historical models or precedents or something.” There’s a strange irony to the line, given its context within a novel that, even in its title, treats their execution as a sacrificial rite. As with much postmodern fiction of the ’70s, that irony is often so thick here that it becomes difficult to find a foundation. Are the Rosenbergs heroic martyrs or treasonous dupes? Both, Coover seems to say, and neither. Left and Right, right and wrong all collapse into an absurd political/social/moral quagmire that is put on ridiculous display in the novel’s final pages. At the site of the execution—fantastically transposed from Sing Sing to the middle of Times Square—Nixon appears with his pants around his ankles, fully erect, then brings the crowd to a riotous frenzy as history dissolves around them. Abolitionists, comanches, and redcoats stand shoulder to shoulder with the members of the Supreme Court, who roll around in the piles of shit left there by the Republican elephant. Uncle Sam appears in a flash of light, then bends Nixon over, sodomizing him. “You’re not the same as when I was a boy,” is all the Vice President can muster in reply. It ain’t a pretty scene, but neither is America, Coover screams.