Amateur psychology is best avoided in a biography, but in a life of Richard Nixon, an author probably cannot help but indulge in it. In his new book, Richard Nixon: The Life, author John A. Farrell employs armchair diagnosis just enough to capture the flavor of one of the most bizarre men to ever sit in the Oval Office. Along the way, he delivers a nuanced, balanced, and well-researched look at Nixon that should rank among the best one-volume biographies yet of the 37th president of the United States.
Farrell begins at the beginning, with the story of Nixon’s hardscrabble youth in a Quaker family in California. The up-from-poverty story of Nixon’s childhood could have been a real political asset. Nixon himself thought it was inspiring, and the American people liked the versions of it they had heard before from the likes of Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield, and the version they would hear later from Bill Clinton. Part of the tragedy of Nixon is that he never let people love him enough to be inspired. The privations of his humble beginnings and the memory of the two brothers he lost to tuberculous drove the young Nixon to excel, and excel he did. College, law school, marriage, and a stint in the Navy during World War II shaped a man who had earned success but hungered for more. The author notes Nixon’s wartime poker games as an insight into his character: While his comrades played for fun and distraction, Nixon played to win.
Farrell is fairer than many biographers in analyzing Nixon’s congressional campaigns. He recognizes his skill at stump speaking and campaign organization but still he searches for secret reasons for Nixon’s success, including shadowy oil interests and the political machinations of the Los Angeles Times. The more obvious answer could be simply that the voters liked him. Nixon, even as a young up-and-comer, was never beloved, but it is hard to fathom that a smart, ambitious, anti-Communist lawyer and veteran might be a popular choice. In a nation concerned about growing Soviet power and weary of the constant emergency of the New Deal, the World War II, and the emerging Cold War, Nixon represented safety and normalcy.
On Nixon’s congressional career, Farrell is nuanced. He contrasts Nixon’s pursuit of Soviet agent Alger Hiss with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s more haphazard assault on suspected Communists in the American government. Nixon is safe, methodical, the ideal prosecutor. McCarthy had suspicions and hoped the evidence would follow. In searching for that evidence, he was unconcerned with the damage that false accusations would do to the suspects’ reputations (or his own). Nixon was cautious, gathering proof before publicly running down Hiss.
Nixon was right and got his man, but the accuracy of his charges probably made him more enemies than false accusations would have. McCarthy burned hot and flamed out, a cautionary tale and bogeyman to the left. In Nixon, the anti-anti-Communist left had a more serious adversary, a man whom they had to take seriously. The Hiss case was the national media’s introduction to Nixon; in taking down one of their own class, even for legitimate crimes, Nixon made sure the relationship started out poorly. For the next 25 years, the mutual loathing only grew stronger.
That animosity tainted everything that came after. Farrell chronicles Nixon’s rise to the vice presidency, his 1960 and 1962 electoral defeats, the years in the wilderness, and the 1968 comeback as the New Nixon, and does so with admirable evenhandedness. That should not be noteworthy in a work of history, but in a figure who served in office as recently as Nixon did, and who inspired feelings as strong as those felt my Nixon’s friends and enemies, neutrality on the subject is more the exception than the rule.
It is difficult to read this book without hearing echoes of Nixon in our own time. The 2016 campaign saw both major party candidates accused of “Nixonian” behavior. The antagonistic relationship with the press, the opposing party, and even members of his own party, bring to mind our current chief executive. In Nixon’s secret forays into foreign policy while a candidate in 1968, and Lyndon Johnson’s wiretapping of the same, one of the major new disclosures found in this book also echoes in current events. The looming presence of the Vietnam War, on the other hand, is strikingly different from our 21st-century existence. Nixon saw how Johnson’s destiny was tied to the progress of the war. No matter how popular his other policies, Johnson was dragged under by the war; Nixon was determined to avoid that fate.
The efforts to do so, to secure re-election and with it a final victory over his enemies proved his undoing. In the Watergate scandal, we see the final battle in a decades-long struggle between Nixon and the press. Farrell quotes Henry Kissinger on the result: “What happened to President Nixon is a human tragedy,” he says. “It was like one of those Greek things where a man was told his fate … and fulfills it anyway, knowing exactly what was going to happen to him.”
Farrell describes the tragedy and its resolution in terms that are disinterested without being uninteresting. As Nixon and his enemies fade from the newspapers to the history books, we begin to reach the point where biographers can achieve a synthesis, discarding the more extreme claims of Nixon fans and Nixon haters alike. Richard Nixon: The Life is a readable, fair-minded example of this.
