For a man derided by so many of our intellectuals, Nixon loomed large in 20th century history and culture. With the exception of Lincoln, Nixon has probably been portrayed by more great actors than any other chief executive. In addition to Frank Langella in "Frost/Nixon," he has been played by Rip Torn (in a 1979 CBS miniseries from a book by former Nixon staff member John Dean and Taylor Branch), Jason Robards Jr. (in the 1992 TV movie "Washington Behind Closed Doors") and Anthony Hopkins (in Oliver Stone's 1995 biopic "Nixon"). Robert Altman gave Nixon his own one-character movie, 1994's "Secret Honor," with Philip Baker Hall delivering a stream-of-consciousness printout of the post-Watergate Nixon mind. There is even John C. Adams' 1987 opera "Nixon in China," with James Maddalena as the heroic president who defied his own party to open up Red China. (Two questions: Has any other American president ever been the subject of an opera? Did Richard Nixon ever attend an opera?)
Of course, what fictional Nixon could adequately contain the same qualities of fake humility, forced pomposity and desperate longing for approval as the real thing? For some purists, only underground filmmaker Emile de Antonio's 1971 comedy, "Milhous: A White Comedy," will do. Many of Nixon's biggest hits, including his "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" speech (after losing the 1962 California gubernatorial race to Pat Brown), are collected in one exquisite movie.
If Nixon was, after all, so dull, why did he light the imaginations of so many serious writers? Peter Morgan, Gore Vidal ("An Evening With Richard Nixon"), Philip Roth ("Our Gang") and Norman Mailer ("Miami and the Siege of Chicago") have all taken their shots at him. Mailer, not entirely unsympathetic, nailed him, at least momentarily, at the 1968 Republican Convention: "His modesty was a product of a man, who, at worst, had grown from a bad actor to a surpassingly good actor, or from an unpleasant self-made man -- outrageously rewarded with luck -- to a man who had risen and fallen and been able to rise again, and so conceivably had learned something about patience and the compassion of others."
Even Mailer, though, couldn't sustain an accurate bead on Nixon. As he proved in his memoirs, "RN," Nixon was no better at figuring himself out than any of his many biographers -- which is why the books about what he did are better than the books about who he was. The library of books about and by Nixon (he wrote 11) offer the reader more than enough puzzle pieces to fill in the frame; the problem is that even after filling in all the spaces the picture in the puzzle is a perfect blank. In Garry Wills' famous phrase, "He lacked the stamp of place" that enables Americans to empathize with their president. There is simply no inkling as to what made Nixon tick, what motivated him beyond personal ambition -- and mere ambition doesn't begin to explain why he could be, when inspired, so spectacularly effective.
In the end, though, it isn't what a president was like that matters but what he did. In Nixon's case, just about everything that could be put on the plus side of the ledger has been, if not forgotten, at least obscured by time. Loathed by the left and having left no estate the neocon ideologues wish to claim, Nixon's stock sells cheap and still finds no takers. On Feb. 26, U.S. News & World Report's cover story was "America's Worst Presidents," which featured a photograph of Nixon, along with photos of Herbert Hoover, Ulysses S. Grant and John Tyler. In the actual feature, Nixon is only ranked ninth worst, tied with Hoover, but a magazine cover with, say, James Buchanan (first), Franklin Pierce (fourth) and Millard Fillmore (seventh) just wouldn't sell. Last December, when Nixon's second veep and successor, Gerald Ford, died, the nation, or at least the news media, went into an absurd paroxysm of grief for a man who was surely the most insignificant president to occupy the White House since Warren Harding. (Is Ford the only president whose accomplishments were outstripped by his wife's?)
Has Nixon left us any political legacy? His detractors would point, and rightfully so, to his startlingly candid pronouncement, "If the president does it, it isn't illegal." Such an idea is dangerous enough in the head of a pragmatist; in the mind of an ideologue, it's positively scary. But surely there is more than that to be learned from the career of the only other president besides FDR to have won on four out of five national tickets. (The only one he lost, to Kennedy in 1960, was by a handful of dubious votes.) He proved, at his best, the adage that politics is the art of the doable, and that pragmatism, as numerous American philosophers including William James could remind us, is not in and of itself cynical or unprincipled.
Nixon's life and work were much more than Watergate. But even if that scandal were to be the only thing that kept us talking about him, I'll bet the old sonuvabitch would grab the deal.
About the writer
Allen Barra was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's 2005 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. He can be reached at commentsforbarra@aol.com.
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