Of Politics and Class

1.

A silver (-plated) bowl

This is the story of a silver bowl. It may be one of the ten least significant anecdotes in modern political life, but I’ve been reading a book recently that encourages you relax and enjoy such things: Benjamin C. Bradlee’s CONVERSATIONS WITH KENNEDY (Norton, $7.95).

The bowl was an unprepossessing little object. Not silver, in fact: silver-plated. But it had to perform a delicate chore; it had to serve as an anniversary present from the governor of Rhode Island, John Chafee, the President, John F. Kennedy, and his wife.

On an afternoon in September, 1963, the presidential party landed at Quonset Naval Air Station, where Kennedy was greeted by Chafee. Kennedy’s friend Ben Bradlee was waiting in the helicopter when Kennedy returned, and he remembers that the President “was steaming at Chafee. First, because had given the Kennedy’s a rather tacky, uninscribed, unadorned silver-plated bowl. . . .” The second insult was that the airport ceremony had been prolonged for the benefit of newsmen.

The helicopter lifted off, with the tacky little bowl on board. The President steamed.

What can be going on here? Surely the President couldn’t care about a bowl. He was not a greedy man. The President didn’t want things, he had things. But the bowl offended his sense of occasion. Had it come from a nurse’s aide or an astronaut’s wife, he would have felt differently. But a governor. A governor (particularly the governor of a perfectly proper little state like Rhode Island) is someone too much like oneself. He is supposed to behave as one behaves. The President was not unaware of himself as a man who brought style—“that special grace”—wherever he went. But, Christ, you can’t do it all alone. People have to play their roles. If you couldn’t count on a governor to know what sort of gift is suitable for a President and his wife, then the world itself was a tackier place than one had thought.

The afternoon was besmirched.

The helicopter, after circling over an aircraft carrier whose crew stood at attention in the President’s honor, set down at Hammersmith Farm, home of his in-laws. He embraced his waiting wife. They went toward the vast house. The President still held his little silver bowl.

Now his mood lightened. He knew what to do with the bowl. He would give it to his mother-in-law, Mrs. Hugh Auchincloss, one of the relatively few Americans who looked on the President from somewhere socially above: the President, Leader of the Free World, my sonin-law, this good-looking, new-moneved, dangerous mick that Jackie married. He gave her the bowl in mock seriousness as a “token of his undying affection.” Bradlee was watching: “Mrs. Auchincloss cooed like a Helen Hokinson dove, completely convinced that Kennedy was serious . . . even when she gazed in dismay at the bowl itself.”

Nice. The little bowl had done its work at last, had reassured the President of his social worth.

The point of this tale is not that Kennedy was an unusually fussy or arrogant fellow—though there’s enough evidence in favor of that position to be found in the Bradlee book. The point is simply one that we already know: we’re a nation of arrivistes, and in his heart no one thinks he’s quite arrived. John F. Kennedy wasn’t exempt from the feeling, and one of the pleasures the book affords is its vignettes of presidential social competitiveness. He delights in one-upping Bradlee—apparently because Bradlee was a Boston Brahmin—dotes, for example, on the Bradlees’ meekness in accepting the decision of a Washington dancing class not to enroll their daughter.

It is hard not to enjoy the Bradlee book, which is laden with such small but telling social moments. The “hard news” to be found in this book has already been widely covered. Kennedy allowed Bradlee to know that he was privy to the FBI’s files on members of Congress and that he examined tax returns. Bradlee, as a journalist and a pal, chose to be a pal first and not to explore the propriety of such things. He’s picked an inelegant time to publish this memoir, having just enjoyed the high point of his career as the courageous executive editor of the Washington Post who backed up his reporters in their pursuit of a President who was not in any way his pal, Richard Nixon.

There’s plenty of material here for Kennedy-haters to enjoy. Samples of the President’s “rough language.” Bad behavior: girls jumping on Lincoln’s bed, stumble-down drunks aboard the yacht Sequoia (at a party at which Teddy Kennedy mysteriously is missing a trouser leg). On the other hand it is Bradlee’s reputation, not Kennedy’s, that suffers most. I for one, though, am willing to say that this book is worthwhile: chiefly for its glimpses of the way in which class relationships operate toward the top of our society. Or let’s say the ways in which those relationships operate. In the life of another President, they were at work with a vengeance.

2.

How King Timahoe Got His Name

Of Richard Nixon, in the 1960 campaign, Kennedy remarked succinctly, “No class.” Not what you’d call a classy remark, but Nixon can’t be expected to have shrugged it off that way, because it struck to the heart of his self-doubt.

It is one of the attractions of William Safire’s memoir of his Nixon years, BEFORE THE FALL (Doubleday, $12.50), that he continually reveals the deep social unease, a pervasive resentment against most of their countrymen, that characterized Nixon and his staff. A great deal went wrong with this book. Time caught up with it, for one thing: it was mostly written before Watergate, and Safire’s reflections on later events seem to have been pasted on. Nor can he often rise to a serious comprehension of what his leader did. But the book is full of interesting data on the theme that Safire identifies as crucial to the Nixon Administration: its sense of the world as “us” against “them.”

It might amuse Safire, who spent many years as a PR man before he became a speech writer (and a PR man) for Nixon, to be called “guileless”—yet there is something of that quality in this book, particularly when it comes to his style of selfpresentation. Safire, always a fast man with an irreverent quip, was a relative hipster in the Nixon court, but you see in him the peculiar qualities of outlook it took to serve a man for whom “intellectuals” meant the enemy. Even as he describes their shared sense of being déclassé, he participates, indeed luxuriates, in it. Consider his description of the “Washington Establishment”: “The dolls are chic hostesses and smart writers, the guys are dynamic lawyers and reporters, the food is delicious, the wine the right temperature at the Georgetown dinner parties (more dens of inequity than iniquity) . . . Nixonian newcomers had the impression they were regarded as hard-to-tolerate transients.”

One gets a sense of the social pain that seems to have inhabited the most trivial of Nixon’s actions. He could do nothing with—hated word—style. Consider the case of poor King Timahoe, the Irish setter whose real name was simply King. Safire explains: “Timahoe was added . . . because it would be inappropriate for a President of a democratic nation to have a dog with a regal name. . . .” I find something ineffably melancholy about that: I think of Nixon, changing the name of his dog for “PR” reasons and at the same time no doubt recognizing the dispiriting, banal truth about himself, that he’s really just a guy who would call his dog “King.” And remembering the Kennedys’ wittily named pony. Macaroni?

Trivia, as everyone knows, gave way to major feelings of resentment, major transgressions. Enemy lists, break-ins, wiretapping, attacks on the press. Familiar as this story is, it is continually surprising to see in Before the Fall reminders of the homely emotions at the bottom of the acts, reminders that these acts were in fact not sheer arrogance, but the work of men who at the height of their power felt dispossessed.

It is odd that “the most powerful man in the world” can speak bitterly of something called “The Establishment,” can sneer with undisguised injury at “the fashionable set.” And at the same time that Nixon hates his “betters” with the passion of a man who knows he’s never going to get a corner office, he has a commensurate contempt for all presumed to comprise the under class. Safire cites—by way of demonstrating that Nixon was a closet intellectual—a moment that seems to presage the former President’s famous remarks about the American people as children. He’s speaking about the need for short speeches: “We sophisticates can listen to a speech for a half hour, but after ten minutes, the average guy wants a beer.”

Blind at one moment, he can turn virulent the next. The worst of such episodes are, of course, not included in Before the Fall, and it’s necessary to turn to a less favorable document. In Jimmy Breslin’s account of the summer of Nixon’s decline, HOW THE GOOD GUYS FINALLY WON (Viking, $6.95), there is this memorable exchange from a tape subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee and not previously published:

“The Italians. We mustn’t forget the Italians. Must do something for them. The, ah, we forget them. They’re not. we ah. they’re not like us. Difference is, the . . . they smell different, they look different, act different. After all, you can’t blame them. Oh, no. Can’t do that. They’ve never had the things we’ve had.”

“That’s right.”Ehrlichman said.

Nixon’s voice dropped. “Of course, the trouble is . . .”Now his voice went even lower. “The trouble is, you can’t find one that’s honest.”

It’s unclear whether Safire ever saw Nixon in this mood. Nixon was plainly capable of highly various behavior, and Safire points out that to an unusual degree he took on the characteristics of the people he was with.

In Safire’s long memoir there are many occasions when he reports himself as being moved by the President, but there is only one that might be called a tender moment. Fittingly, it turns again on the perception of his omnipresent enemies. He has just given his acceptance speech at the 1968 convention, is mellow, possibly mildly drunk. (“‘You see, Billyboy . . .’”) He is congratulating himself and Safire, who wrote much of it, on the speech. “ ‘Polities is poetry. Not prose, no matter how good. Mood. Emotion. Oh, you can’t do it often, but once in a while, at a historic moment, you need the poetry . . . They won’t like the speech, will they, the New York Times and those boys,’ he said, shrugging as if he didn’t care. ‘— ‘em’.” Safire omits the four-letter word, as if to emphasize the softness of this fond good-night. What a distance between the mild sentimentality of that evening and the turbulent emotions that were to come.

3.

Searchlight is on the lawn!

The question plays about the edges of all that is written about Nixon now: was he ... had he . . . how crazy was he?

Theodore H. White says, toward the start of his new book, BREACH OF FAITH (Atheneum-Reader’s Digest Press, $10.95): “What the men in the White House were involved in, without ever admitting it to themselves, was the management of an unstable personality.”But he often takes refuge in unrevealing metaphor: “Haig, gently but firmly, was adjusting the controls for the final descent, careful not to jog, push or pressure the uncertain pilot of state, not to provoke the explosion of personality he feared. The President was on downslope.”

James Schlesinger during the final days informed Pentagon officials that no command by the President was to be executed without Schlesinger’s confirmation.

Another much-told story, first reported by Jimmy Breslin, doesn’t seem to carry much weight: Nixon disconcerts a meeting of congressional leadership, conferring on the Arab-Israeli war, by making light remarks about Henry Kissinger’s sexual life. “Ah . . . we had trouble finding Henry. He was in bed with a broad . . . Henry, which girl was it that you were with? . . . It’s terrible when you have a girl and the Secret Service has to break in on you.” In the telling, this anecdote gains its force from the phrases that come, it seems, from Breslin, not from direct observation. Nixon is described as “giggling and rolling his head around.” He is said to have “leered and winked.” Who knows?

And there is The Shoving of Ron Ziegler, and the increasingly mechanical gestures, and the meticulous attention to minutiae.

The longest glimpse we have of a distressed and distracted Nixon conies, not at the time of Watergate, but in 1970 during the Cambodian incursion. It is the night of his strange visit to demonstrators outside the White House.

He had delivered a television speech earlier in the evening and was restive. At 10:35 he returned some calls that had come in following the speech, and then, during the next few hours, apparently began to call various people compulsively— seven calls to Haldeman, a call at 1:22 A.M. to Helen Thomas of the UPI and another one at 3:50 A.M., calls to Nelson Rockefeller, Bebe Rebozo, Daniel P. Moynihan, Billy Graham, three calls to Rose Mary Woods, eight calls to Henry Kissinger. He appears to have slept for no more than an hour. Sometime after three he was listening to a record, Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto, when his valet, Manolo Sanchez, looked in on him. The President asked Sanchez to come with him, they were going to visit the Lincoln Memorial. They left; word went from Secret Service post to post: “Searchlight [Nixon’s code name] is on the lawm . . . Searchlight has asked for a car.”

Nixon’s encounter with the demonstrators seems to have been badly reported. According to Safire, whose account of this episode is the most elaborate, Nixon rambled on about foreign capitals and the Cambodian situation and the environment, his travels and black white relations. (The impression one had at the time was that he’d talked only about football.)

As dawn breaks, the episode becomes more bizarre. Nixon asks Sanchez to accompany him to the Capitol Building, where he sits in the House, in his old chair. He tells Sanchez to step up to the Speaker’s rostrum. Bids him to make a speech. The presumably embarrassed valet complies. He talks of being proud to be an American. On the way out, Nixon confronts a cleaning woman and blurts out, “You know, my mother was a saint. She died two years ago. She was a saint. . . . You be a saint too.” By now, Nixon has been joined by a protective posse of aides, and they go to the Mayflower Hotel for breakfast.

An odd evening. What to make of it? Despite the grotesque comedy, I find it affecting: this desperate reaching out on Nixon’s part—as if he could, if he tried, make his life whole by daybreak—reaching out not just to friends but to supposed enemies, to the under class, to his past, to otherness itself.

4.

Poverty soiled him

“He was never able to accept the fact that he was President of the United States,” said Elliot Richardson. “If you’re President, there isn’t any ‘they’; the President has to be first among ‘us.’ ” Richardson made this remark to Theodore White, whose Breach of Faith, it should be said, is the best general account of the Watergate scandals yet to be written. Its central virtue is its clear, compelling narrative, in which firsthand reportorial detail mingles with a long historical view. Fhe long view now and then tempts White into some rolling epical cadences that don’t always serve him well. This is true however you come down on the issues—in his insufficiently specific description of Nixon as peacemaker. But White is never unaware of the complications of the man at the center of his story.

This book represents something of a comeback for White, who was roundly and justly criticized for his romanticization of Richard Nixon in The Making of the President 1972. The interest, for a reader-betweenthe-lines, lies in watching White try to come to terms with a man whom he has plainly liked and admired, who has turned out to be capable of what White speaks of without embarrassment as “evil” and “outrage.” He insists on placing Nixon in historical perspective and sees him as the agent of an ideological and cultural counterrevolution, defender of mythical old values. But White is clear about the fact that Watergate could not have happened if Nixon had not been an embodiment of those cultural forces, and “an unstable personality” to boot. In a short sketch of Nixon’s childhood, White says: “Poverty curdles character as well as strengthening it. It crumples some men. It makes others hard. Poverty soiled Nixon; he grew up to be hard—and vulnerable. And as in all those who grow up so vulnerable, the instinct for control, control of one’s circumstances and perimeters of dignity, would grow.”

There is a curious passage in Breach of Faith, in which White tries to reveal the Nixon he had known over years of “covering” him, and tries to say what it was about Nixon’s mind that appealed to him. He fixes on Nixon’s curiosity about “how things work,” recalls their conversations about “the most trivial to the most vital” things—how airlines train their stewardesses, how suburbia votes, how the presidency works. It is odd and somehow unconvincing, not the impression of Nixon one gets elsewhere. I don’t mean that White is fabricating, but I think what we’re hearing is a description less of Nixon’s than of White’s mind, and that Nixon was shrewd enough, as apparently he was on many other disparate occasions, to imitate the habits of his companion. Here and in other passages of Breach of Faith, White is struggling to say something quite simple: Nixon is an interesting man.

Neither White nor anyone else has persuaded me that Nixon has ever said an interesting thing—ever revealed an individual taste, a moral sense, a psychological acuity that one could learn from. And yet he is a profoundly interesting man. Not to think so is to turn away from his instructive suffering.

5.

Clyde

White says of Nixon’s life that “the story has elements of an American tragedy.” That’s possibly too grand a claim for what can after be seen as a sordid tale—but I don’t think so. I think the sentence is accurate, even to its literary echoes, and I wonder if they were deliberate.

If you were a publisher seeking to commission a biography of Richard Nixon, and if you had supernatural powers, you’d do the obvious thing and get on the phone to Theodore Dreiser. He is the writer who would have understood the price Nixon paid for “upward mobility,” the loss of belief in both his present and his past selves. In a way Dreiser did write about him—Nixon resembles no character in literature more than the hapless Clyde Griffiths, hero of An American Tragedy. Coming upon the title in Theodore White’s book,

I thought of those long descriptions of the utter loneliness of a man on the rise, those passages in which young Clyde on a Sunday afternoon walked around the streets of the little city in upstate New York where he’d come to make his fortune, before he committed the crime that would undo him. I expect that Nixon was every bit as alone in his passage upward toward disgrace, that he too must have asked himself:

“. . . who was he anyway? And what did he really amount to? What could he hope for from such a great world as this really, once they knew why he troubled to come here?”