The fabulous Nixonland (2008) is historian Rick Perlstein’s second book, following the as fabulous Before the Storm I reviewed here not long ago.
If you want to understand the America of today, this is the book you will need most. It is not a biography of Nixon per se, even if it does give a lot of insights into his life and his mind, but the story of the loss of innocence of a nation, and its descent into a chaos from which it still hasn’t recovered.
The 37th president of the USA was without doubt an intelligent and cunning man, but also a very tormented one. Not born in privilege (his father owned a small lemon farm in California), his early life was mostly marked by hardships and the quakerism of his beloved mother. Once in college, young Nixon developed an acute sense of not belonging which ended up following him all his life. He ambitiously embarked on proving everybody wrong about his abilities, and his political career took off fast. He quickly discovered similarities between his frustrations and those of the American people at large.
Vietnam, civil rights, the backlash of the new conservative right, the endless Cold War, Richard promised himself he would master and answer the anxieties and angers of his fellow citizens. Inspired by none other than Reagan, when the young former actor became Governor of California, he articulated those feelings in his own way and made voting issues out of them. But by projecting his own complexes and fears on the populace, and making himself the champion of the white middle-class (the silent majority), he created a deadly polarization in society. He came to and remained in power by fanning it expertly. The atmosphere of lies and suspicions, the sometimes astonishingly unclever schemings, the double-dealings, the devilish pacts with racist southern Democrats, brought him power but also a spectacular fall.
Perlstein shows really well how it is difficult to be a politician across changing cultural conditions, and why it is interesting to study how successful politicians manage that. And this is what he gives us in this book. And he delivers in a masterful way. We are taken on a ride through the 60’s and 70’s as if we were there (for some, there again), and witness the full drama of political and societal upheaval. The pages jump at you, there are details and plot twists everywhere. Yes, it does read like a novel, but you often realise that all this happened, and you wonder how everything held together at all.
But importantly, he shows us how a man can squander his abilities into something negative and destructive. The most striking being how Nixon’s lying actually prolonged without need (assuming there was a need for it at all) the war in Vietnam, just so that he could access the White House and the presidency. And once there, he still wasn’t happy or satisfied. They wanted his skin, he was sure of that. He will make them pay for the humiliations; the elites.
It is the portrait of the creation of a paranoid age and also the continuation of the story of the Republican party started by Perlstein in the first volume.
A unique piece of historical work.
Nixonland by Rick Perlstein Scribner Books, 2008 881 pages
Oh how I love this book… After 680 pages, I can’t believe it’s finished and that Kay is not with us anymore (she died shortly after the book was published, in 2001, after suffering a head injury in a fall). She would have been 104 this year. I know, improbable… but what a destiny.
This is not a “look at rich, fabulous me and my fabulous life” book. it is a woman telling her story in a simple and honest way, a woman who was anxious and full of doubts about her abilities, never not grateful for her many privileges, but still highly attuned to the world around her.
Katharine Meyer Graham was born on the top floor of one of the most expensive buildings of the Upper East Side in New York, 820 Fifth Avenue. Her father, Eugene Meyer (of French Alsatian Jewish descent) was a financier and, later, chairman of the Federal Reserve, who also bought the Washington Post in 1933. Her mother, Agnes Ernst Meyer (a Lutheran of German descent) was an intellectual and a political activist, who among her many friends had Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, and John Dewey. Raised by nurses, attending Vassar college and the University of Chicago, Katharine had no such ambitions. A Democrat all her life, when both her parents were Republicans, she carved her own path. After a few newspaper jobs, she married Phil Graham, a middle-class damaged genius, and settled down to a bourgeois life in the opulence of Georgetown in Washington DC, mingling with the Kennedy’s and the Alsop’s.
Phil was brilliant, driven, an ambitious multitasker. He was against Kay staying at home, raising the kids, but it’s mostly what she did. She reckoned she was not up to much anything else. Her hyperactive mother had left her feeling inadequate, always criticising her, comparing her, subtly humiliating her through irony or cynicism. Phil soon took over her father’s Washington Post and, as time went by, the old patriarch gave them the reigns and ownership of the whole company.
But Phil’s bipolar disorder grew unmanageable and he committed suicide in 1963, leaving Katharine shattered but making her the first woman publisher of a major newspaper in American history, the first woman chairman of a company board, and finally the first woman on the Fortune 500 CEO list in 1972.
These are her memoirs, but also the only book telling the story of her husband Phil (which is really astonishing considering his importance and influence, as you will find out if you read the book). It is also the story of a legendary newspaper and the media world surrounding it, and a roller-coaster ride through the most riveting decades of the American century: assassinations, the Pentagon papers, Watergate, freedom of the press, the pressmen’s strike in the 1970’s (for which she was highly misjudged). Through it all, Kay was frightened, lost, sometimes naive, but courageous, willing to learn and fight, an astute political observer, an emphatic human being, and among the first to push employment and opportunities for women and people of colour. Her writing is superb, many times full of delicate humour. Her insecurities are sometimes heartbreaking, but that is why she is always relatable. She is never pathetic or bitter. Her inadequacy in privilege always on her mind, she fought for her place in the sun and in the process elevated The Washington Post to journalistic stardom by upholding her civic ideals.
A highly recommended read.
Personal History by Katharine Graham Vintage Books, 1998 642 pages
This marvellous little book is a social history of American Newspapers written in 1978, but it has never been more important than today. Nobody is more proud of their press than Americans. It is at the center of their history and a core tradition that has played a predominant role in the development of the country. And objectivity is supposed to be its supreme virtue. But consider this passage in the introduction:
“Objectivity is a peculiar demand to make of institutions which, as business corporations, are dedicated first of all to economic survival. It is a peculiar demand to make of institutions which often, by tradition or explicit credo, are political organs (…) What kind of a world is ours and what kind of an institution is journalism that they sustain this particular ideal, objectivity?”
This is what the author, Michael Schudson, a professor of journalism at the graduate school of journalism of Columbia University and adjunct professor in the department of sociology, sets out to explain here. An earlier version of this book was a doctoral dissertation in the department of sociology at Harvard (how objectivity legitimates knowledge and authority in the professions). This is probably why it is clear and concise, and very neatly constructed, almost as a textbook. The author nevertheless adds many entertaining details, and the reading is never dry or boring.
After briefly explaining what is objectivity, how it is not only about what is true and reliable but also about moral philosophy (he rightly also acknowledges a political aspect to it), he presents, through five chapters, the different periods and thematics of press development in the US.
James Gordon Bennett, founder of the NY Herald
According to Schudson, there is a clear demarcation line in press history in America, a turning point: the 1830s. The Jacksonian Era saw the birth of “real news”, something most similar to our modern concept of it. Before that, news were supposed to be partisan, neutrality was a foreign concept in a field that was not yet a profession. He lengthily explains how it is a common mistake to think that society adapts to new concepts, when in fact new concepts adapt to the changes in society. The telegraph might have been invented in the 1840s and, yes, it pushed the creation of the Associated Press. But it was the democratization of politics, the expansion of the market economy and the ascent of the urban middles classes that changed the American Press. The press had to adapt and it was not always easy for the elites to give up certain privileges.
Schudson illustrates this with the reaction of the American writer and aristocrat, James Fenimore Cooper, upon his return from Europe after a 7 years absence. Finding the world of the press changed by democratic aspects he was supposedly championing himself,
“Cooper expressed a deep anxiety about the moral influence of the press which appeared to him to be ‘corrupting’, ‘vulgar’, and without decency. It had in his eyes the unwelcome characteristics of a middle-class institution: parochialism, scant regard for the sanctity of private life, and grasping self-interest. Most disturbing of all, it had enormous and unwarranted power over the shaping of opinion.”
The NY Herald, 1861
We are taken on a bird’s eye view of the emergence of the Penny Press in the big urban metropolises of the East coast. Unlike established newspapers (weeklies, and financed by political parties), full of editorials, opinions, and mostly advertisements and detailed time tables for the arrivals and departures of ships and their cargos, the new Penny dailies (they sold for a penny, not 6 cents) were full of facts and news that were important to a larger urban population. It sold on the streets and not by subscription, thus claiming to be politically independent. It turns out they were even politically indifferent, concentrating mostly on selling advertising space to the highest bidder. But as it reflected more and more the social life of the urban classes (the middle-classes of trade and manufacturing), that changed too. Everything went to print: police cases, court transcripts, and even political news, foreign and domestic, as well as everyday stories from the streets. Newspapers did not wait for the news to appear anymore, or for reports from members of Congress for their political news, they hired paid reporters to go and fetch the news at the source.
“With the growth of cities and of commerce, everyday life acquired a density and a fascination quite new, ‘society’ was palpable as never before, and the newspapers—especially the penny papers—were both agent and expression of this change.”
First published issue of New-York Daily Times, on September 18, 1851
It was the “democratization of business and politics sponsored by an urban middle-class which trumpeted ‘equality’ in social life.” What can account for this revolution in journalism? The author has a technological argument, a literacy argument (quite an interesting one at that), and a natural history argument (that “the development of the press is governed by a self-explanatory evolutionary dynamic.”) But he also stresses the overwhelming importance of egalitarianism. Contrary to popular belief, America “did have to suffer a democratic revolution.” In the 1830s and 1840s, it turned from a quasi aristocratic “mercantilistic republic” to an “egalitarian market democracy, where money had new power, the individual new standing, and the pursuit of self-interest new honor.” As readership grew, the “news” became the product sold, and advertisers started buying the readers’ attentions. Schudson also makes a particularly good analysis of the political changes in that period.
Journalism became a vocation only after 1880. The author cites the growing importance of the reporter as a central figure (compared to the more controlling world of editors earlier in the century). The news-gathering process became central, and newspapers started competing on that level, “to satisfy public standards of truth”. The Civil War was also a new turning point. It “pushed the newspapers closer to the national consciousness.” Circulation rose and war correspondents were everywhere. Reporting became a highly esteemed position. Schudson introduces us to many star reporters of that time, many of them now holding a college degree. But there was not yet talk of objectivity. The author explains really well how the democratization of science and literary realism fashioned that “new journalism”. Familiar names pop up: H. L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Hearst, Jacob Riis, McClure’s, and Julius Chambers.
Joseph Pulitzer
I found the chapter on the “two journalism in the 1890s” especially captivating. As the desire of pursuing facts grew, so did the demand for entertainment. Schudson calls them the “ideal of information” and the “ideal of the story”. Should facts be straightforward, or framed and interpreted? We are presented these two ideals through two famous examples: the rise of the New York Times (information) with Joseph Pulitzer, and the New York World (entertainment). Schudson asks the pertinent questions: Why is information favored by the educated middle-class and why is the story a working class preference? Is one a higher form of journalism? Is information always more objective? But as the notion of objectivity finally appeared after WWI, it soon became just a professional ideology.
Because what Schudson reveals to the reader is that objectivity actually arose from suspicion, the kind that comes with disillusionment. When democracy had first expended people didn’t doubt their reality, and the inevitability of progress gave hope for an eternal better tomorrow. All that was shattered after 1918. As the Great War changed everything, it changed journalism. There were now doubts about human nature in general, and a concern about the folly of crowds. The urban masses once seen as something extraordinary now began to be seen as a monster from whom elites wished to escape. Fate in the market was shaken as well, especially after the Wall Street Crash. The new waves of immigrants only added to the feeling of unease. So much so, that
“Public relations developed in the early part of the 20th century as a profession which responded to, and helped shape, the public, newly defined as irrational, not participant; consuming, not productive. This had a far-reaching impact on the ideology and daily social relations of American journalism.”
“Boys Selling Newspapers on Brooklyn Bridge” by Lewis Hine, 1908
With many references to the great Walter Lippmann (excellent and prescient citations) who was among the first to advocate a professionalization (a method of objectivity) and a regulation of the press, Schudson tells us in the remaining chapters about the innocence lost and how the press unfortunately betrayed itself and the public, especially by participating in war propaganda. As one of the founders of modern public relations, Edward Bernays, wrote: “It was the astounding success of propaganda during the war which opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind.” A manipulation of collective passions as historian Jack Roth put it. It undermined the old faith in facts. And as another founder of public relations, Ivy Lee, rightly observed: “There are no facts, everything is interpretation.” This became an obsession for newspapers and journalists, who soon gave in to subjective reporting in different ways. Journalism schools became more important, reporters specialised so they could interpret the news in the best possible way, signed syndicated columns made their appearance. The new complexity of the world could not do with just plain facts anymore. The most striking change was how government had embraced public relations after its affair with propaganda during the wars. Setting up public relations and press bureaus centralized in Washington, there was no more direct relation between the politician and the reporter. Was this new filter good or bad? What came out of it, Information or stories?
Walter Lippmann, about 1920
This book was one of the first to deal with the social impact of journalism in the US. It is important to remind ourselves again when it was written: 1978. After Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. After the humiliation of Richard Nixon. When citizen participation in politics was at its lowest, and even the attained professionalism of journalism was mocked. The last chapter is dedicated to the culture wars (counterculture) of the 1960s, and the rise of doubt in science and professional authority, notably with the advent of deconstruction and structuralism in American academia through the influence of the French post-modernists. It is the most relevant one for our current predicament. The author imagined rock bottom had been reached. But Schudson being a media expert, he has since written many other books on the subject, notably most recently Journalism: why it matters, as well as Why democracies need an unlovable press in 2013, and The rise of the right to know: Politics and the culture of transparency, 1945-1975 in 2015.
In an essay in the Atlantic monthly (1920), Walter Lippmann wrote that “the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism.” Can democracy survive where “the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise”? Here is a quote from Lippman’s essay:
“Men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information. But where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumours, and guesses. The whole reference of thought comes to be what somebody asserts, not what actually is.”
The book’s concluding message is that objectivity became an ideal in American journalism when human subjectivity proved itself impossible to overcome. Schudson points that “objectivity as an ideal has been used and is still used, even disingenuously, as a camouflage for power. But its source lies deeper, in a need to cover over neither authority nor privilege, but the disappointment in the modern gaze.”
A very important and highly recommended read on a complex thematic, with many excellent references.
Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers by Michael Schudson Basic Books, 1978, USA 228 pages
“Here is one time, at least, in which history was written by the losers.” This is how Rick Perlstein introduces his subject matter and announces the rollercoaster ride he is about to embark us on, not just in this book but in three more. It is the incredible story of how the Republican Party was overtaken by conservative ideology, and how it changed America (or didn’t).
Perlstein is a master storyteller. Dubbed by Politico as “a chronicler extraordinaire of modern conservatism”, he received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History for Before the Storm in 2001. Being an independent scholar (a graduate from the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan), and evidently passionate about his subject, all his books benefit from it immensely.
This is not binary history, good fighting evil, or a black and white representation of the world, burdened by a set ideology, or deference to a higher established order. It is a deep analysis, real, without apologies. It is lively and exciting prose, so much so that you can feel America breathing, shouting, revolting, cheering, and anguishing. It is probably why both left and right critics praised it immensely. In the words of another gifted historian and political analyst, Thomas Frank, it is “one of the finest studies of the American right to appear since the days of Hofstadter.” For anyone familiar with Hofstadter, this says a lot.
Barry Goldwater
But back to Before the Storm. I should warn immediately that this is not a biography of Barry Goldwater, as some might suspect. The life of the flamboyant former Senator of Arizona is examined in these pages, his character studied, his actions exposed, but only because he is the main character of the first part of this Republican conservative saga. He was supposed to be the winning horse of “a little circle of political diehards”, as Perlstein calls them. He lost, but he became a symbol of conservatism rising from its ashes, a hero “of a state of mind”.
A common mistake is to define the current Republican Party as the creation of Ronald Reagan and his enablers. But everything started much earlier, at the beginning of the 60s. Perlstein, surprisingly and intelligently, starts his book by telling us to look at the world from a Middle America perspective, or more precisely from the perspective of a Babbitt, a materialistic and societally conforming businessman, whose American identity, especially after WWII, was forged by virulent anti-communism and the emergence of the consumer society and mass production. It was the America of small town, Main Street, hard work, improvement, family, religion, of business and personal morals. Safe and wholesome.
Babbitts (an archetype inspired by George F. Babbitt, the main character of Sinclair Lewis’ novel Babbitt from 1922), and everything they represent, were supposed to have vanished by the early 1960s. The New Deal and Progressive politics, a new establishment, a new role for America, all that had brought the illusion of a new era. But why this error in judgement? Perlstein points that many developments were
“slowly disproving the Establishment cliché that an increasingly complex, urban society would necessitate politicians committed to finding solutions for the manyfold problems of modern urban life. The cliché was based on a demographic error anyway, which few noticed: perhaps half the people the U.S. Census Bureau classed as “urban” lived in the suburbs. And suburbanites would demand a different kind of politician.”
But the pundits were blind, sidetracked by the myth of the “consensus” that had supposedly been attained in politics. The Eastern industrialists (Republicans) and the Western and Midwestern homesteaders (also Republicans) had split after the Eastern Establishment had decided it loved free-trade internationalism and started championing liberal reform with the Northern Democrats, to the horror of their historical Republican allies. Peak liberalism had been reached, everyone agreed with everyone else, it was the best of worlds (among the elites, that is). Not so…
John Birch Society road advert (photo source: The New Yorker)
The narrative flows chronologically and is fast paced. We are introduced to the anger and hatred the “babbitt” has for the Eastern Establishment (New York controlled over a quarter America’s banking reserves, one always had to go east to beg for loans), for the New Deal, Roosevelt, the progressives, the taxes, federal investments, the unions, and the new foreign policy (the leaving of Eastern Europe to the Godless Communists, arrangements with the Soviets, the losing of China to Stalin, spies on American soil, the fact that your taxes were used to fight foreign wars), the “imperial” presidency, and the ever growing power of the Federal government.
Young William F. Buckley Jr. and Brent Bozell Jr. (the ghostwriter of Goldwater)
Perlstein presents us the first most prominent conservative star, who is little remembered today: Clarence Manion, the father of conservative media activism. A radio talk-show host and the Dean of Notre Dame Law School, he organized the first grassroots efforts of a frustrated conservative populace in the late 1950s. He, and a few other media figures, also later created the PAC that would finance the rise of their chosen one, Barry Goldwater. After the demise, in 1952, of the darling of Midwestern conservatives, Robert Taft, spirits were low. A new hero was needed. Third-party candidates were reluctantly proposed, but conservatives knew there was only one way to get to the White House, take control of the Republican Party. They also knew a big chunk of America’s population was tired of being asked “to choose between New Deal Democrats and New Deal Republicans.”
So they closed ranks and created, slowly but surely, a moral army, a grassroots movement on a scale never seen before. It was to be a crusade, a calling, a higher purpose. Perlstein has them all. He drops names at every turn of the page. It might sometimes be hard to keep track of the whole caravane, but this is definitely a book for the politics aficionado. We witness the creation of the National Review by William F. Buckley Jr., the rise of the far-right John Birch Society, we learn about the peculiar role of Orange County, CA, in the conservative fight, but also about master political operatives as Steven Shadegg and F. Clifton White, an absolutely amazing talent in the art of political organizing. It’s all there, the nasty fights with the Unions, the lying, the scheming, the taping into people’s fears, the low blows between political allies, the party machines, the stealing of delegates, the completely out-of-this world nominating conventions and the presidential election of 1964.
The Republican National Convention, 1964, Cow Palace.
Most of all, Perlstein shows really well the alliance between Taft Republicans and Southern Democrats in what came to be known as The Southern Strategy, how the Southerners never really shared very close ideological points with the conservative Republicans, especially since the South never really cared about what happened in foreign policy. All they were interested in was fighting the Civil Rights movement and Johnson’s agenda for it. Their alliance with the Republicans was more about fighting Brown vs. Board of Education, and preventing the full insertion of black people into southern society. The conservative Republicans decided it was something they could live with.
President Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, Oval Office
The passages on the fight for black rights are really well incorporated into the narrative and are heart-wrenching, as are the many other historic landmarks: the assassination of Kennedy, Johnson’s presidency and election (often in a fairer way then is usually the case, Johnson was an exceptional president despite his blunder with Vietnam), the despicable politics of George Wallace and Strom Thurmond, Reagan’s appearance on the political stage, Nixon’s spineless ingratiations and eternal comebacks, and Nelson Rockefeller’s (sometimes really rocky) attempts and failure to reach the presidency. Lighter passages tell us how advertising agencies became a must for effective elections. The most amusing results being the now famous Daisy TV commercials commissioned by the Johnson campaign to paint Goldwater as a crazy, trigger happy, nuclear bomb lover. I had a lot of fun searching You Tube for the many TV specials mentioned by the author.
We all know how it ended. Goldwater lost and Johnson won in what was then the biggest landslide in American political history. The Republican Party was saved. But it seems pundits never learn. “The power was in the cities now. The Republican Party couldn’t afford to court that population with 19th century ideologies.” Even Arthur Schlesinger, the “imperial historian”, reflected that “the election results of 1964 seemed to demonstrate Thomas Dewey’s prediction about what would happen if the parties were realigned on an ideological basis: ‘The Democrats would win every election and the Republicans would lose every elections.’” “At that, there seemed nothing more to say” adds Perlstein.
The impression one gets from this book is that Barry Goldwater was just not conservative, or vicious enough, to win this fight. We see him surrounded by his “Arizona mafia”, very often not in the mood to campaign at all, saying the wrong things to the wrong audiences, many times doubting himself and the methods used. We also see a Republican Establishment completely oblivious to anything that is out of their immediate world, misunderstanding every major development, and a Democratic Party still true to its progressive principles. But we see a country destabilized by that very progress, white people wrongly perceiving (or being nudged to wrongly perceive) new black rights as easy handouts, white immigrant communities being led to believe that black people would take their place in the pecking order, even that Communists were slowly invading the country, and conservative mandarins orchestrating the whole thing just so a group of rich entrepreneurs could bring back the Gilded age of laissez-faire economics, where it was every man for himself. As Perlstein rightly notes the result, three decades later, half of all Americans would be telling pollsters that” the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses a threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”
A highly, highly, recommended read.
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein Nations Books, Perseus Books Group, 2009, USA (for my edition). Originally published in 2001 by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, USA 671 pages
Bookish Felix 