NYT History Book Reviews: Who Got Noticed this Week?

This week we have two books by journalists about Richard Nixon.  One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon by Tim Weiner was reviewed along with a counterpart, Being Nixon: A Man Divided by Evan Thomas. Both were reviewed by David Greenberg, a professor of history and journalism at Rutgers University; the author of Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image and the forthcoming Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency.

Weiner, who wrote for HNN back in 2012, asks dozens of relevant questions in his book, among them:

What compelled him to commit crimes-- secretly collecting campaign cash from foreign dictators and aspiring American ambassadors, wiretapping his loyal aides and distinguished diplomats as if they were foreign spies-- and then conspire to conceal them? Why did he drive the nation deeper into Vietnam, at a cost of tens of thousands of American lives, only to accept a settlement no better than the one he could have signed on his first day in office? Why did he lie about his war plans to his secretary of defense and his secretary of state? What were the Watergate burglars seeking? Why did Nixon tape-record the evidence that proved his complicity in the cover-up? Why did he undertake the unconstitutional actions that led to his resignation?

Now we have answers, straight from the president and his closest aides. The story is richer and stranger than we ever knew. For those who lived under Nixon, it is worse than you may recollect. For those too young to recall, it is worse than you can imagine.

In an interview with NPR, Weiner addressed why Nixon recorded himself during Watergate. "He did it because he planned to write a post-presidential memoir that would make him millions of dollars and that he and only he would have access to the tapes. And, in fact, for 20 years only he had access to all but a handful of these tapes. He also planned to use them as a defense against the inevitable memoirs of Henry Kissinger — no one writes a memoir in which he comes out looking like a fool or anything less than wise man. He thought it would be a unique resource that would be worth millions."

Thomas's take on Nixon could be summed up by a plug in a Politico News Round-Up: "Random House is announcing that Evan Thomas will be writing a new life of Richard Nixon for editor Jon Meacham. ‘Evan is the best,’ said Meacham. ‘He writes with sensitivity and honesty, two indispensable qualities in capturing Richard Nixon.’ The deal was brokered by ICM's Amanda Urban....  Thomas said: ‘Richard Nixon was one of the greatest statesmen and political figures of the 20th century. … He achieved more good government programs (including the EPA and desegregating the public schools of the South) than liberals dreamed of -- while essentially creating the modern Republican party … Yet he labored … to have any kind of normal … interaction with other human beings. And he created a White House that gave us Watergate. My goal is to humanize Nixon, to try to understand his own internal mindset and how he related, or did not relate, to others. How he could sit up at night writing a list of goals on his yellow pad that used words like ‘joy’ and ‘decency’ and yet in the morning make anti-Semitic rants to his staff. My hope is to make the reader care about Nixon -- not necessarily to like him, but to want to understand him.”

Greenberg, the reviewer, has written extensively about the Nixon presidency, remarking that "in the Nixonian view, no trick was considered too dirty, no blow too low, no law too sacrosanct to stand in the way of partisan gain."

Greenberg weighed in:

"These well-researched efforts remind us, fundamentally, that Nixon himself led the criminal conspiracy at the heart of his presidency, the revelation of which forever tarnished the White House in the public mind."

"Weiner makes more fruitful use of primary sources, while Thomas has a surer command of the secondary literature. Whether you prefer the edgier Weiner or the judicious Thomas may depend on whether you like your political history fizzy or still, spicy or mild, extra crispy or original recipe."

Greenberg says we still await a solid biography of Nixon that takes in his life and presidency:

Dozens of splendid works on Nixon already exist, of course. My short list would include Garry Wills’s “Nixon Agonistes,” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “The Final Days” and Stanley I. Kutler’s “The Wars of Watergate” (all still in print). Yet there remains no authoritative cradle-to-grave biography. Stephen E. Ambrose banged out a solid, breezily written trilogy, but his wanton acts of plagiarism and the posthumous revelation that he fabricated interviews with Dwight Eisenhower have rendered his work unusable. Tom Wicker and Herbert S. Parmet each tried to fill the Nixon biography void, but they produced gargantuan tomes without touching key parts of his presidency. Roger Morris wrote a magisterial, if slightly conspiratorial, first installment of a planned multivolume work, but its thousand-plus pages reached only to the end of 1952. The other volumes never appeared.

For fun, and for elaboration, see an opinion piece on the 5 best Nixon biographies.

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The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 by Joseph Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian, tells the unexpected story of why the thirteen colonies, having just fought off the imposition of a distant centralized governing power, would decide to subordinate themselves anew. The leadership exerted by the “quartet” of Washington, Hamilton, Madison and John Jay in overseeing the birth of a United States, Mr. Ellis argues, was “the most creative and consequential act of political leadership in American history.”

In an interview with the Boston Globe, Ellis expressed that: "There are a lot of people who’ve written very successful books about the founding [of the United States] — people like David McCullough, Ron Chernow, and Stacy Schiff — who are very talented writers, but they’re not historians and don’t claim to be. I’m a card-carrying historian, but I have a lot to learn from them about what it means to craft something. My books fit the criteria for scholarly work, but I’m trying to attract readers that are not professional historians . . . People are very smart, but they can’t tell you the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In fact, Reagan didn’t — he used to quote the Declaration and think it was the Constitution, and Boehner does it the other way around. There’s a need for us to reach out to a readership that is interested in American history but is not part of an academic culture."

Michiko Kakutani, the reviewer, weighed in:

"Mr. Ellis does an adroit job here of repurposing earlier material, and uses his easy familiarity with the era to give readers a wonderfully immediate and gripping account of the founders’ efforts to transform the freedom won in the war for independence into an enduring nationhood."

"If Mr. Ellis hops and skips at times over some details, “The Quartet” still offers the lay reader a compelling overview of the walk-up to the Constitutional Convention and its momentous impact for generations to come. This book could not be more timely, given the recent Supreme Court rulings on gay marriage and health care, and debates over the meaning of the Constitution."

Kakutani notes that the book ends with a profound quote by Thomas Jefferson:

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I know that age well; I belonged to it and labored with it. It deserved well of its country ... But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.”

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For those interested in learning more about the Confederacy — its people, its soldiers, its descendants — these five books offer a start.

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Until next time…