THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 3, 1994 TAG: 9406300596
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BROWN H. CARPENTER
LENGTH: Long : 108 lines
NIXON: A Life
JONATHAN AITKEN
Regnery. 633 pp. $28.
BEYOND PEACE
RICHARD NIXON
Random House. 262 pp. $23.
THE ONGOING REHABILITATION of the late Richard M. Nixon doesn't skip a beat with the publication of these two books, one about the 37th president, the second written by him.
Nixon: A Life, British biographer Jonathan Aitken's fascinating portrait of Nixon, places full emphasis on his positive accomplishments. As for the negative aspects, they were either molehills made into mountains or not entirely Nixon's fault, the author says.
Aitken is, in essence, Nixon's barrister, an effective lawyer pleading his client's case. His advocacy is so skillful that as the narrative plunges through Nixon's long political life, finally reaching the Watergate scandal, you may find yourself saying, ``Burn the tapes, Dick. Burn the tapes.''
Even though its outlook is pro-Nixon, Aitken's biography is enhanced by interviews with the subject himself, as well as by access to his private papers. This one-on-one privilege was even extended to Nixon's old cohorts Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp, who heretofore have not cooperated with writers.
This is no puff job, however. Aitken is well aware of the personality traits - paranoia, inability to make small talk, self-consciousness, etc. - that dogged Nixon throughout his public life and perhaps subconsciously affected his critics.
As portrayed here, Nixon is moderate politically (his own book enhances this perception) and packed with intellectual curiosity. He is religious, though hard to pinpoint theologically, and devoted to his family. In fact, his relationship with his wife, Pat, Aitken says, in no way resembled the sterile marriage depicted by reporters in the dark days before he left the White House.
Aitken met Nixon in London in 1966 and was quickly impressed when the former vice president confidently predicted to a British audience that Japan would become an economic superpower and the war in Vietnam would turn into a quagmire. He also said China should be brought back into the family of nations, a notion, of course, he later engineered as president.
Aitken's point of view is not fazed by Watergate. The scandal may have destroyed Nixon's presidency, he says, but his White House years were cursed from the beginning. Nixon was inaugurated in January 1969 when the country was torn apart by the war in Vietnam. And Congress was spoiling for a fight.
And, perhaps most ominously, ``a new spirit of adversarial reporting became part of the news industry's culture. Long before Nixon entered the White House, too much of the media's coverage of Vietnam had slipped from objectivity to opposition. . . . (t)he Presidency itself was no longer an institution to be revered but a target to be attacked.''
``Not since the Civil War had the times been more tempestuous or the hatreds more divisive than they were between 1968 and 1974. Nixon's temperament compounded these problems. By instinct a fighter, he was unable to play the role of conciliator which the domestic pressures required.'' Some interesting incidents recorded by Aitken put Nixon the man into better focus:
During a fact-finding trip to Europe to gather data for the Marshall Plan, Nixon, later painted as a Red baiter, gained audiences with Communist leaders in France and Italy to find out what they were really like. He wasn't impressed.
As an old political fighter who had taken a few lumps, he always empathized with those who took a bad fall. President Nixon wrote a touching letter to the young son of Sen. Tom Eagleton when the latter was forced off the Democratic presidential ticket in 1972 because of previous mental illness.
Exhibiting remarkable prescience during his run for the House of Representatives in 1946, Navy veteran Nixon told the Kiwanis Club in Pomona, Calif., that the Soviet Union was ``firmly entrenched, but it is weak in the light of history because it has set itself against the surge of mankind towards freedom and democracy.''
Can Nixon still predict? We'll know in a few years. Beyond Peace, his ninth book since he left the White House in 1974, is loaded with Machiavellian (in a benign, pragmatic sense) advice and prognostications. Nixon continued to work on it until a few weeks before he died this spring.
Beyond Peace tackles the post-Cold War era, particularly the U.S. role, which Nixon says should continue to be one of leadership. But he acknowledges that the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union deprived the West ``of the sense of satisfaction it deserved over a job well done.''
Nonetheless, active resistance to Moscow ``ensured that communism would be defeated years, perhaps decades, before it would have collapsed on its own.''
Some more Nixon observations:
``Russia is (still) the only nation in the world with the capability of destroying the United States. For that reason alone, it remains our highest foreign policy priority.''
With the Cold War won, ``our best service to the Cuban people now would be to build pressure from within by actively stimulating Cuba's contacts with the free world.''
On welfare: ``The poor make convenient targets. But if middle-class and even rich Americans want to find someone to blame for the burden the entitlement mentality puts on the federal budget, they should look in the mirror.''
Aitken's biography is a well-argued treatise on Nixon's behalf. Nixon's own essay is a demonstration of his keen intellect. Both will leave you sad about what might have been. Nixon could have avenged himself for all those slights, real or imagined, simply by being a good president. MEMO: Brown H. Carpenter is a staff editor. by CNB