Richard Byrne: The Selling of the President 1968 remains a vital cultural and historical document
[Richard Byrne is a journalist who lives in Washington, D.C. He blogs at Balkans via Bohemia.]
The original dust jacket of Joe McGinniss' The Selling of the President 1968 has Richard Nixon's face emblazoned on a package of cigarettes.
To value that image at a thousand words is parsimonious. It elicits a multiplicity of responses to Nixon and to his 1968 campaign: clever, slick, amoral, dangerous, familiar, branded, and addictive. (Yes, addictive. How long was Nixon in American political life?)
In sum, Richard Nixon was very, very bad for America -- and some very skilled men persuaded voters to buy him anyway.
As an eight-year-old caught up in Watergate in the summer of 1974, that dust jacket induced me to pluck The Selling of the President 1968 from my parents' bookshelf. I didn't understand everything McGinniss was peddling on that first read, of course, but his brisk, energetic prose did let me get at some of what the book was about even then.
It has become fashionable to dismiss The Selling of the President 1968 as a shallow and cynical book written in the breezy New Journalism of its moment. In the November 2006 issue of Smithsonian magazine, Jonathan Yardley took just this tack, arguing that the book's pivotal role in stoking American political cynicism "helps explain why the book remains in print today, for the truth is that otherwise it doesn't hold up very well."
Yardley's right about one thing. The book's strengths do not lie in its analysis. The book's second chapter -- which functions as the literary equivalent of the journalistic "nut graf" -- is rife with glib formulations. Politics is a "con." The voter is a "willing victim" of advertising persuasion.
Yet there's much that's incorrect and ungenerous in Yardley's assessment. It seems almost absurd to assert that the work of a 26-year-old journalist, written in a few months directly after the 1968 election, had as much of a catalytic effect on public cynicism as the events of that tumultuous year and the campaigns themselves.
More ungenerous, however, is to assert that the book's continued longevity is rooted largely in that cynicism. Whatever its deficiencies, The Selling of the President 1968 remains a vital cultural and historical document -- and a playbook of sorts with lessons for our current presidential campaigns...
Read entire article at American Prospect
The original dust jacket of Joe McGinniss' The Selling of the President 1968 has Richard Nixon's face emblazoned on a package of cigarettes.
To value that image at a thousand words is parsimonious. It elicits a multiplicity of responses to Nixon and to his 1968 campaign: clever, slick, amoral, dangerous, familiar, branded, and addictive. (Yes, addictive. How long was Nixon in American political life?)
In sum, Richard Nixon was very, very bad for America -- and some very skilled men persuaded voters to buy him anyway.
As an eight-year-old caught up in Watergate in the summer of 1974, that dust jacket induced me to pluck The Selling of the President 1968 from my parents' bookshelf. I didn't understand everything McGinniss was peddling on that first read, of course, but his brisk, energetic prose did let me get at some of what the book was about even then.
It has become fashionable to dismiss The Selling of the President 1968 as a shallow and cynical book written in the breezy New Journalism of its moment. In the November 2006 issue of Smithsonian magazine, Jonathan Yardley took just this tack, arguing that the book's pivotal role in stoking American political cynicism "helps explain why the book remains in print today, for the truth is that otherwise it doesn't hold up very well."
Yardley's right about one thing. The book's strengths do not lie in its analysis. The book's second chapter -- which functions as the literary equivalent of the journalistic "nut graf" -- is rife with glib formulations. Politics is a "con." The voter is a "willing victim" of advertising persuasion.
Yet there's much that's incorrect and ungenerous in Yardley's assessment. It seems almost absurd to assert that the work of a 26-year-old journalist, written in a few months directly after the 1968 election, had as much of a catalytic effect on public cynicism as the events of that tumultuous year and the campaigns themselves.
More ungenerous, however, is to assert that the book's continued longevity is rooted largely in that cynicism. Whatever its deficiencies, The Selling of the President 1968 remains a vital cultural and historical document -- and a playbook of sorts with lessons for our current presidential campaigns...