Learning
to live
with
Nixon
Editor’s Note: With this issue the
Emerald introduces political columnist
Gary Wilis. Best known for his best
selling Nixon Agonistes, Wills is
generally considered the fastest rising
political commentator in the country.
He will replace Nicholas Von Hoff
man on the Emerald editorial page, and
will appear regularly with William F.
Buckley, Jr.
Wills, 38, was recently cited by Time
magazine for his perceptive coverage
of the November general election. He
holds a number of educational degrees,
including a doctorate from Yale
University. His field of interest, is
classic literature, an area he incredibly
incorporates into contemporary
political commentary.
The following article is the first of a
two part article reprinted from the New
Yorker. It is considerably longer than
Wills’ usual column, but will serve to
introduce his engagingly perceptive
style. Part II will appear in Tuesday’s
Emerald.
By Gary Wills
“Four more years.” Of what?
Germaine Greer claims Arthur Miller
gave her the answer in Miami: “If this
man wins another term, the Supreme
Court will be castrated, and the New
York Times will be a single
mimeographed page.” Almost, this
Miller makes me a hardhat. He would
no doubt have said the same kind of
thing before the 1968 election; yet here
is the same old limes, still very fat, like
the rest of us. The apocalypse has
better taste than to associate itself with
American elections. Our party
processes mash the candidates in
toward the middle — a law best proved
by those who try to defy it, like Senator
McGovern. After denouncing the
“regulars” in primaries and the con
vention, he was reduced to shameless
capitulation by the end of his cam
paign; and even then he has been
ineffectual. He started too far out from
the perceived middle of things.
Pressures don’t apply
But, we are warned, electoral
pressures no longer apply when a
President is entering his final term. To
reelect Nixon is, in Sargent Shriver’s
lurid phrase, to “unleash” him. No
longer controlled by the prospect of
defeat at the polls, he can at last go
bonkers for real. Another
"wleashing” theory, which Daniel
Patrick Moynihan applies to Nixon
sycophantically, is that the President —
quit of the task (and, for him, the
temptation) of naming for the office
one more time — can look now to the
history books. His deferred
aspirations, held in abeyance during all
those years of scrounging for votes, can
at last be realized.
Both these approaches assume there
is a “real” Nixon — an ogre barely
restrained, or a closet egghead — kept
under wraps for years because the sight
of him would scare off voters. A third
view exists: that there is no “real‘“
Nixon, just a campaigner, trimming his
sails and steering toward the next
election date; and such a man will not
know what to do when there is no
campaign left for him. Each of these
theories is based on a deeper assump
tion — that to go for reelection and to go
for the history books are two different
things. But a President who cannot
carry the electorate with his program is
going to be in trouble with the
historians.
The weavers of American mythology
have been as nice as can be to Woodrow
Wilson; but he failed, even though he
was too ill to run for a third term (still
legal in his day), when he could not get
the people to “buy” his League of
Nations. A President’s public claim,
and the source of his working power, is
that he represents the people. Whatever
his aspirations to leadership, he can
only be called a leader if people follow.
And the test of having a following is, in
our system, the vote. It doesnot matter
that judgement is rendered vicariously
in the case of a President who cannot
run again. Most votes are retrospective
sanctionings anyway; we know more
about what has been done to us than
what is bong promised us. That is why
we tend to vote the rascals out, to vote
against; and no President wants to be
the rascal, even at one remove. _
So the pressure is never entirely off
the President. He performs to win
acceptance, not only election by
election, but day by day. The idea of a
free hand in the second term is most
often used by Presidents to justify
failures of performance during their
first term — Kennedy got great mileage
out of this. And when Lyndon Johnson
tried to unleash himself as a
peacemaker by declaring himself a
lame duck, it did not do him much good,
at home or abroad.
Won’t he revert?
But the hopes or fears of an “un
fettered” second term acquire special
force in Nixon’s case. He is widely
believed to have “sold out” on his
former convictions — his hawkishness,
his crusading anticommunism, his free
enterprise fundamentalism and op
position to guaranteed income — out of
the desire for reelection. And now, with
no further need to sell out, won’t he
revert?
That whole question has been badly
posed. There is a sense in which Nixon
“sold out” on taking office — most
Presidents do. One of the self
balancing aspects of our system is that
candidates not only try to “out-middle”
each other, but also engage in com
pensatory blandishments toward
those who have least reason to trust
them. Thus the dovish side will peddle
superha wkish wares — as Kennedy did,
in his debates with Nixon, deploring the
missile gap, the loss of Cuba, the lack
of interventionist vigor in the
Eisenhower years. By the end of this
year’s campaign, McGovern could
rhetorically out policeman Nixon at
home and out-rabbi him abroad. That’s
T*I**e«xir
• WHY CAN'T I EVER HEAR THE CROWD SCREAMING. GIVE EM HELL. DICKIE!'?"
part of the game. Indeed, McGovern’s
first backers have tried to assure each
other that he was just foolin’. Once
elected, he would “come home” to his
friends on the Left. Forget the
regrettable interim, said Gloria
Steinem, and get him into the Oval
Office; then he’ll take good care of us.
It is a variant of the “unleashing”
theory.
But that’s not the way it works, Ms.
Steinem. All the sell-outabie space is on
the other side. The one group a
President has least chance of pleasing
is his primary constituency. Lyndon
Johnson, trotted out to please the
South in 1960, could not ever take a soft
stand on civil rights. John F. Kennedy
took the hardest position against aid to
parochial schools of any recent
President or candidate. Franklin
Roosevelt was withering in his com
ments mi the patrician class he came
from. There is, thus, some reason to
take the cynical view that a vote for
your political enemy is the wisest
course — he has no one to sell out to but
you. Eugene Rostow, in his long New
Yorker interviews, argued that Ken
nedy’s tough stands were aimed more
at domestic placation than foreign
intimidation. Elected a liberal
Democrat, he was suspected of
weakness toward “the Communist
menace” and had to keep displaying
his strength. The Left, in other words,
gave a hostage to the Right by voting in
its own man. By the dynamics of this
process, a President McGovern would
be automatically belligerent with
regard to Israel’s safety. Any
weakening there would undercut a
basic part of his support.
Room to maneuver
These pressures allow a President to
achieve important things in the sell
outable territory. Only a Southerner
like Lyndon Johnson could have passed
the most extensive civil rights laws in
our history. Only a Republican patriot
of Ike’s unquestionable standing could
bring an end to McCarthyism (whose
energies went far beyond its eponym).
Humphrey, if elected in 1968, could not
have gone to Peking or Moscow.
Because a President has more room to
maneuver near what seem to be his
opponents, he is impelled to use that
maneuverablity; it allows him to
achieve something, at least — an im
portant consideration to any politician
making a record. The effective
President will be the one who moves
into that open space on the other side.
Roosevelt reversed his campaign
promises to balance the budget and cut
back on Hoover’s spending, and did it
with spectacular speed and efficiency.
Ike would sell you out in a flash —
something Richard Nixon learned over
and over. In a way, Eisenhower kept
people like Nixon and Dulles around to
have somebody to sell out as occasion
warranted.
Sellout not real
Usually, of course, the sellout is more
apparent than real. Johnson, though a
Southerner, had arrived at a sincere
concern for black Americans by the
time he became President.
Eisenhower, though a General of the
Army, sincerely detested the Mc
Carthyites. And it is just on this
question of sincerity that Nixon’s
critics have misgivings. If Nixon was
sincere about anything, they feel, it was
his early "hard-line” anticommunism,
a trait kept alive in his unyielding at
titude toward the Vietnam war, despite
any chumminess at Peking or Moscow.
But his original connection with the
Right was in large measure tactical.
He was given the opportunity to achieve
something in the Hiss case, and his
subsequent reputation was used by
Eisenhower to placate the Taft wing of
the party while restraining its Mc
Carthy ites. He was programmed to be
Ike’s concession to the Right — a role
Agnew now plays. Nixon played the
role well, in part from ambition, but
also because he believes in such
negotiatory balance over a broad
spectrum. But all the time he was
assigned to do the party’s domestic
dirty work, he yearned toward the
larger opportunities of building a world
order. The Dewey Establishment that
put forward Eisenhower’s candidacy
thought in crude terms of "in
ternationalists” (the good guys) being
pestered by “isolationists” like Taft.
Nixon was to drag isolationists into the
world by tickling their an
ticommunism. It was thought that the
country would only indulge a foreign
policy if it offered the chance of beating
up on commies somewhere along the
line. The Establishment, both
Democratic and Republican, put itself
in the post war position of inciting anti
communist passions and then trying to
check them — with strange results in a
man like Acheson. Nixon’s record of
"toughness has to be understood in this
context.
Hero was Wilson
But his hero from childhood was
Woodrow Wilson. Nixon transcended
his original constituency, and said so;
but no one believed him. (The same
thing may prove true, in time, of
Agnew.) Men did not take Nixon
seriously eneough in his longstanding
reverence for Wison as the President of
peace — a devotion bequeathed Nixon,
he says, by his Quaker mother. Even as
Vice President, he rescued Wilson’s
desk from White House attic status, and
made a cult of it. The same desk, now
installed in the Oval Office, is the
omphalos of American power — Nixon
touched it reverentially, and told the
nation he was working in Wilson’s
spirit, during a 1969 broadcast on
Vietnam. He ordered Wilson’s portrait
hung in the Cabinet Room — the only
Democratic icon on those walls. Wilson
is Nixon’s favorite superstition, a
talisman of his own destiny as he
perceived it all along.
This superstition is backed, as one
would expect, by personal needs and
deficiencies. Not a person of great
charm, dispatched to personal con
frontations where a mean response was
desired, he liked the facelessness of
large impersonal diplomacy, where
statesmen rise above the pettier tricks
of the politician. It has surprised some
that he lets Henry Kissinger take so
much credit for the face-to-face day-to-.
day negotiation of his very own grand
alliance. People thus surprised forget
(as he does not) what Nixon’s face looks
like in purely political terms. He has
always had the brains to overcome his
face; and now he has the chance to
prove it. (McGovern aides, in their
desperation, thought Nixon was
salivating to rush out and lose votes by
some ogre act in public — so little did
they understand their foe.)