Richard Nixon: The Life

John A Farrell

Scribe, £30

Review by Brian Morton

WHEN Richard Nixon was 10 years old, he wrote a school essay in the form of a letter from a family pet. He goes hunting with his master. “While going through the woods one of the boys triped and fell on me. I lost my temper and bit him. He kiked me in the side we started on. While we were walking I saw a black round thing in a tree. I hit it with my paw. A swarm of black thing came out of it. I felt pain all over.” The letter is signed “Your good dog Richard”. It would be hard to find a more potent foretelling of the adult in the child. The grown Nixon – introverted, self-pitying, tortured – regularly bit the hands that fed him. His megalomania, or dogged pursuit of what he perceived as “greatness” led directly to the swarm of black thing that was Watergate.

And yet it was a speech about a dog that rescued Nixon’s political career. He’d been accused of taking bribes, but only admitted to accepting the gift from a political supporter of a cocker spaniel called Checkers, which he was going to keep. Sixty million Americans choked up. In one impromptu moment, the ambitious young senator from California had done the impossible and convinced Americans (and the presidential candidate who that very day had asked him stand down from candidacy for the vice-presidency) that the new representative of the common man was a Republican. Dwight Eisenhower, clubby, convivial and open, never got along with his running mate, but Nixon served him loyally, tactfully when Ike’s health faltered, and with moments of physical bravery, too.

The whipped dog was always at the door, though. Having made television a formidable political vehicle with the Checkers speech, television (and some electoral rigging in Illinois) cheated Nixon out of the 1960 presidential election, turning a warm friendship with John F Kennedy into an implacable hatred matched by self-loathing. The handsome young “Nick” Nixon, who’d battled his way through college football despite having no talent for team sport whatsoever, and who’d won the heart of Pat Ryan, was poisoned from within and turning slowly into the sweaty, jowly misanthrope who could not relate even to family, who grew used to his absence and to having late night notes pushed under their doors in lieu of a relationship.

Two years after losing to Kennedy, Nixon was defeated by the Democratic incumbent Pat Brown in the 1962 California gubernatorial election. He gave what he promised was his “last” press conference, a rambling monologue at which he berated the press corps for their long-standing enmity, ending with a whimper: “you don’t have Nixon to kick around any more”. Whatever its psychic impact on the man, it guaranteed that when he made the most astonishing comeback in American political history – Martin Van Buren in 1837 was the only vice ever to succeed a healthy president, and he did so consecutively without a spell in the wilderness – the press corps was there to savage him.

To Nixon, they were the representatives of the same East Coast establishment that had spawned such hate figures as the traitor Alger Hiss, the Jewish banker oligarchy (he somehow made an exception for Henry Kissinger) and the Harvard elite that had delivered not only the Kennedy clan but also the new counterculture generation of middle-class war protesters and social drop-outs who challenged his bid to change the world.

John A Farrell was almost certainly writing his monumental biography before Donald Trump became president. The index runs from Dalton Trumbo, one of the other prominent figures that Nixon the Communist hunter had driven into obscurity, and tuberculosis, the disease that claimed two Nixon brothers. But it’s hard to miss parallels between Trump’s off-message style and Nixon’s. Farrell describes the occasion when Nixon wakened his valet Manolo Sanchez in the middle of the night and went walkabout among the student protesters at the Lincoln Memorial, trying desperately to find some common ground and convince them that he, too, wanted peace. The Secret Service was apoplectic. Elsewhere, Farrell details Nixon’s obsessive micro-management of the administration. No revelations of sexual misbehaviour, though; Nixon was deeply uncomfortable among women, which may have explained the savagery of his early campaign against the charismatic Helen Gahagan Douglas, the liberal Democrat opponent in his first senatorial race.

Perhaps inevitably, Farrell’s account becomes disjointed, slightly manic, almost gonzo, when he comes to the Watergate period. It is simply too tempting to transcribe long passages of conversation from the notorious Oval Office tapes. Perhaps the story is too well known, though also too smoothly contoured to the selective narrative of All the President’s Men. Where the book is fascinating is its account, delayed for some 40 pages, of Nixon’s modest, hard-working childhood and adolescence. The loss of two brothers, the influence of an unyielding father and stoical, gritty mother, the ethical prism of a Quaker upbringing shaped him significantly. And yet what emerges is the portrait of a man who, as countless observers and acquaintances confirm, believed in nothing. Which is not quite the same as not believing in anything. In pursuing his dream of personal greatness, Nixon gazed into the abyss. Politics was his only reality, and there was no methodology beyond the pale.

By the time Ike and Nixon stood for re-election in 1956, the vice-president’s character and methods were already notorious. Nixon’s association with McCarthyism (he kept a certain distance from McCarthy himself, though to be accurate he kept a distance from everyone) and anti-liberal obsessions haunted him. When John Kenneth Galbraith drafted a speech for Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson, he imagined the nightmare future of “Nixonland”. It was, Galbraith wrote, “a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win”. Stevenson, ever courtly, wondered if it was too much, but changed his mind: “I suppose we might as well tell the truth about the man”.

The “truth” wasn’t one-dimensional. Nixonland was also dotted with acts of extraordinary kindness, consideration and grace, done privily, with no publicity and no possibility of political gain. Which Nixon was the real one? Was there a real one? Or was Nixon nothing more than a nexus of contradictions?

Twenty years after the Stevenson election, the legal truth was being set out in front of a grand jury. Burglary, wire-tapping, character assassination, much of it ineptly done and with an evidence trail than even a blind dog could have found, became the everyday culture of the White House, though whether they originated in the Oval Office or were even known beforehand by its occupant can only now be guessed at. Probably not. But in his isolation, Nixon had surrounded himself with weird zealots like Charles Colson and manic depressives like Henry Kissinger, though the latter stayed alert enough to avoid any stain when the excrement eventually, inevitably, made contact with the ventilation system.

Even his enemies recognised that Nixon could have been very great indeed had it not been for profound character flaws. He had a good record on race relations and minority rights, on foreign aid (though it was poor, neglected Pat who did the most good by hugging earthquake survivors in Peru) and in pursuit of detente; only Nixon could have gone to China. The man himself knew the source of his failings. He treated the Watergate jurors as if they were psychotherapists or counsellors. “It is one of the weaknesses I have – and it is a strength in another way – I am quite single-minded. Some people play cards and listen to television and have a conversation at one time. I can’t. I do one thing at a time”. The lack of hinterland destroyed him, but he left office still wondering why his master, the American people, insisted on “kiking” him, still acting like the dog who goes back time and again to the source of its own pain.

John Farrell’s book now clearly stands as the best one-volume life of one of the century’s most complex and compelling figures. It is a story that goes from bright promise into dark places, time and again punctures the lie that there are no second acts in American lives, but still exits into tragedy. It is one of the saddest biographies you will ever read.