President Nixon: Alone in the White House

Dear Chris,

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Your point on Greenspan and presidential IQ is well taken. And as for my presidency, I agree that it would be a disaster, except that we'd be a stronger nation after I ordered Ken Burns, the king of video-treacle, publicly flogged for oversimplifying the American experience.

You're right; "dazzling" was a bad word for Nixon's foreign policy. It's a bad word for anything. I was hyperventilating because of one scene, early in the book where Nixon's advisers are commenting on the bitter Soviet-Chinese rivalry, and Nixon alone has the foresight that it is in America's long-term interest to approach China, not Russia. Not only for strategic reasons, but also for the human reason that a world in which all white people were enemies of all non-white people would be devastating to both. George Orwell wrote a thing or two about that. Did Nixon read him?

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty in this book to justify everything every black nationalist ever said about Nixon. He's worse than tone deaf, he's downright cruel about race throughout the book. He gives covert aid to segregationists every chance he gets, and he makes crude comments whenever the subject comes up (why don't presidents, otherwise so brilliant, ever remember that the freaking tape recorder is running?).

But when Sino-Soviet relations came up, he looked into a murky crystal ball more penetratingly than his advisers and made a brave decision that proved over time to be correct. It's just what a president should do: Listen to everyone, decide they're wrong, and move ahead. Reeves quotes a well-known anecdote about Lincoln polling his Cabinet on an issue, losing the vote 14-11, and then declaring victory by announcing, "The ayes have it!"

I appreciate your (and Reeves') argument about the unpleasant corollaries of recognizing China, including our shared support for a series of repressive Pakistani regimes, including the current one, our new best friend. To say nothing of the cruelties the Chinese government has inflicted on its own people since 1972, which we have mostly ignored under a series of Democratic and Republican presidents for the simple reason that we have never figured out how to stop it from happening. Despite those mea culpas, I think recognizing the PRC was a great leap forward in U.S. foreign policy and world history.

But even as I discovered some things to respect in his foreign policy, I tried to put the brakes on by mentioning Vietnam and Cambodia. I purposefully didn't go into Cambodia in detail in my first e-mail, because I wanted to treat as much of the book as I could and to register my enthusiasm for Reeves' inventive approach to getting inside Nixon's head. But no matter how you write the history of the decision to bomb Cambodia, it looks bad. It's not just that they named the operation after what sound like breakfast specials: Operation Menu, Operation Breakfast, Operation Brunch, etc. It was deplorable because of exactly what so many protesters charged at the time: Bombing a neutral nation was illegal, immoral, and insulting to the sovereignty of two peoples, Cambodians and Americans (who were not told at any level about the secret bombings). It advanced no clear military goal, and it led to the destabilization that made possible the Khmer Rouge genocide. It's a shame, because Nixon understood on his good days that it was politically feasible to wind down the war effort. Americans wanted it to happen, and he acted on that impulse by pulling hundreds of thousands of American soldiers out of the theater and sending them home.

Incidentally, I would dispute your characterization of Vietnam as Kennedy's war--there is a vast amount of scholarship on the subject of whether JFK would have accelerated or decelerated the war effort, and it does what scholarship does best: dither and obfuscate. But I find it very difficult to believe that he would have escalated to the level LBJ did. As we gain more and more perspective, I think it's fitting that the four leaders who presided over our adventure in Southeast Asia were evenly split between two Republicans and two Democrats (I'm giving you a pass on Gerry Ford, technically president when Saigon fell). It was a bipartisan disaster; led by both, supported by both, dissented against by both.

I enjoyed your deeper probing of Nixon's policy toward the Middle East and Pakistan. I wanted to raise Chile also, because it's of course very important, and the Allende coup has festered in the memories of Latin Americans for decades. You're right to use the word "delusional" about some of these episodes. Reeves writes that Nixon wanted his enemies to fear that he was a little crazy; the sad thing is how many times in this book he really seems nuts. Remember the old Dan Aykroyd sketches on SNL, impersonating a Nixon who curses Kennedy at every turn and whines to Abraham Lincoln? After reading this book, I felt they were uncomfortably accurate.

Did you wonder how Nixon would respond to the current crisis? Reeves briefly recounts another terrorist episode that almost seems innocent in comparison, when terrorists hijack five airplanes in 1970 and take them to Jordan to protest the jailing of Palestinian leaders in European prisons. It's hard to project Nixon into October 2001, but I think he'd have mixed results. He'd be very good at deepening the U.S. partnership with Putin, whom he would respect as a fellow traveler of sorts--a tough survivor. He would not need to stare into his soul--he would just sign him up to help us kill our enemies, and he'd have no trouble overlooking Chechnya. Ditto with China and Xinjiang province. He'd be good at getting squishy Arab allies to knuckle down and kick some terrorist ass (hello, Saudi Arabia). On the other hand, he'd be terrible at the human diplomacy so urgent at a moment like this. He'd have trouble articulating anything noble about American values at a time when we need to convince Muslims to help us. He'd stumble at unifying the American people when things got difficult.

But as much as we both enjoy foreign policy, we should go over some other aspects of the book, too. How did you like Reeves' use of sources? I thought he pulled off a difficult balancing act, using memoirs, tape recordings, and conventional biographies to weave a pretty convincing pastiche. And how about his personal take on RN? He tries to simulate a neutral tone, but he obviously takes pleasure in revealing those special details that journalists loved then and that we still enjoy: Nixon's dog refusing to go near him, the presidential predilection for Hef-like smoking jackets, his swimming apparel (always a bathing cap), and so forth.

One last question: we've had Henry V and Iago--will we get Richard III in your next e-mail?

Peace with honor,
Ted

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This week, Slate's Book Club investigates Richard Reeves' new biography of Richard Nixon. (Click here for more on our format, here to learn how you can write for the Book Club, and here to buy the book.)

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