Mister Nixon

What does "crisis" mean to Mr. Nixon? At times it means conflict, at times dilemma, or battle, or the throwing of rocks. But most often it means decision--an important decision that Mr. Nixon has had to make. Indeed it is this strange nomenclature that makes his book so different from the ordinary memoir, for he has related his public doings not as actions but as struggles, dark, tortured, private struggles.

Six Crises is therefore enormously interesting, but also repellent and almost indecent. The character which its author reveals possesses an awful sincerity, and that is just the trouble, because this definitive biography of him shows Richard Nixon to be Ragged Dick after all. A hugely complex and bewildering Nixon to be sure, but a tattered and soiled one nonetheless.

Here are the Old and the New Nixons, as the columnists used to call them, inextricably merged into a curious figure who for fourteen years climbed the political ladder of America using his crises as the rungs. His first (if we, like him, do not mention in detail the Voorhis and Douglas campaigns) was the Hiss case, in which the freshman Congressman used a seat on the Un-American Activities Committee to ensure the conviction of Alger Hiss for perjury. He built on his success a reputation for finding subversives, and so it was that General Eisenhower, who hardly knew him in 1952, chose him as a running mate able to push the first two anti-Truman planks in the Republican platform. Communism, corruption, Korea; the General attended to the third.

From the partnership arose the New Nixon, the Old one plus Ike's conception of what a President ought to be. That conception runs all through the chapter on the Third Crisis (Eisenhower's heart attack); the chief Executive ought to be a man immensely impressed, almost overwhelmed, with the dignity and solemnity of his office. More essentially, he runs the government as the Republican Party has throughout this century hoped it to be run, as the benign head of a Cabinet system that determines fundamental policy. There are no messy, squabbling, White House staffs. The President, like Mr. Nixon when his chief was in the hospital, consults his Cabinet, resolves its views into harmony, and distills from it the vital "essences" of decision that will keep the nation peaceful and prosperous.

If he has not been so all along (the author implies), then armed with this concept he is Nixon reformed, Nixon respectable, Nixon virtuous, Nixon--very nearly--victorious. But he is not really anything of the kind. Still the professional politician of the Douglas days, he speaks to fund-raising dinners, ward banquets, and National Committee Chairmen, but not to the people. Eisenhower (elevated above the people), missions to Venezula and Russia, have brought him no closer to them.

That is certainly the mark of the professional, and just how thoroughly and exclusively a professional Mr. Nixon is glows in every page of his book. He pictures each crisis as a physical ordeal, before which his blood-pressure must thump at the right level and his mind work coolly, cleared for action; and after which he must not relax too soon. His questioning of Hiss, his speech on the "Nixon Fund," and his interviews with Khrushchev are prizefights; the analogy occurs again and again.

"I felt like a fighter wearing 16-ounce gloves . . . up against a bare-knuckle slugger who had gouged, kneed, and kicked"--so he writes of his feelings after the "kitchen debate." Of the 1952 campaign he reflects: "The idea of putting Stevenson in the ring with a man like Stalin simply petrified me." The quality the U.S. needs most of in the Cold War is "moral, mental, and physical stamina"; the men who make policy do not require imagination or intelligence so much as "facing up to hard realities." Well-researched, well-briefed, in a word, well-trained, Mr. Nixon battles his way through mobs in South America and debates with Mr. Kennedy.

He wonders fitfully, through it all, why so many intellectuals continue to distrust him--even when they readily acknowledge his courage and skill in Moscow and Caracas. He concludes, with a truly disquieting ingenuousness, that his role in the Hiss case marked him; those who refused to believe in Hiss' guilt disliked him for convincing them they were wrong. What he does not realise is that his theory is only partly right. They dislike him largely because they do not suppose his nicer suits, quieter ties, and speeches about diplomacy rather than subversives to be evidences that he has changed very much.

They think, in short, that he has never grasped the moral content of his struggles, decisions, and crises. I mostly agree with them, and am not sure he has grasped the intellectual content either. Mr. Kennedy is a sort of prize-fighter too, but he seems at least able to deal with the concepts he uses as weapons; Mr. Nixon, by contrast, simply beats his enemies over the head with them, and rarely fails to call the utterances of the opposition irresponsibility or smear. At one point he even attacks, for reasons impossible to guess at, what he calls positivists, pragmatists, and "ethical neutralists."

Perhaps the most conspicuously disagreeable apect of Six Crises--although one is reluctant to admit it--is the book's sheer lack of taste. It reads like some bizarre hybrid of the worst elements of Rousseau's Confessions and Whittaker Chambers' Witness; its most private disclosures are embarrassing and theatrical. There is something not quite right, for example, in Mrs. Nixon's urging her husband not to withdraw from the ticket during the "Fund Scandal." "If you, in the face of attack," she says, "do not fight back but simply crawl away, you will destroy yourself. Your life will be marred forever and the same will be true of your family, and particularly, your daughters." The troubling notes sound again in the Fund speech; when Mr. Nixon says, "It isn't easy to come before a nationwide audience and bare your life, as I have done," one senses it to be an extravagant and horrible impropriety. Just that may be said of the entire book, and Mr. Nixon's tragedy is that he cannot recognize it.