After Reagan, but Mostly Before

The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Crown Forum, 2014, 400 pages, US$28

Being Nixon: A Man Divided
by Evan Thomas
Random House, 2015, 640 pages, US$35

The Quiet Man: The Indispensable Presidency of George H.W. Bush
by John Sununu
Broadside Books, 2015, 432 pages, US$28.99

The paramount question of the second half of the twentieth century was what to do about communism, and the indispensable man in that confrontation was Ronald Reagan. It is tempting, therefore, to believe that the times could be summed up in a single electric moment, maybe that speech at the Brandenburg Gate when President Reagan’s four-word manifesto—“Tear down this wall!”—showed him to be something larger than an ordinary politician. Shrewder, too: it is remarkable that President Reagan, the Cold Warrior who intended to defeat the Soviet Union rather than contain it, did not contemplate at that moment American action, but Soviet action, giving those bastard grandchildren of Hegel in Moscow a 12-gauge blast of capital-H History. It was, as the newfangled video games of the time had taught us to say, “Game Over”.

That is, of course, simplistic. The program of confronting communism was under way in the minds of Western military and political leaders before the blood had even cooled at Halbe. The foundation was laid by others, from Eisenhower to the strikers at Plzeň, and what came after—the orderly, largely bloodless dissolution of the psychotic Soviet enterprise—was by no means a certainty on President Reagan’s last day in office. To use a football metaphor that Reagan might have appreciated, he took a handoff from Richard Nixon, while George H.W. Bush scored the extra point to secure the victory.

Nixon is the subject of two recent biographies, or partial biographies: Patrick J. Buchanan’s rollicking memoir of his time in the wilderness with Nixon, The Greatest Comeback, and Evan Thomas’s tedious trip to the therapist’s couch, Being Nixon. Reagan’s successor is the subject of an I-was-there memoir, too, The Quiet Man, a respectful (perhaps slightly too respectful) account of the immediate post-Reagan years by John Sununu, who served as Bush’s chief of staff before serving as the seventy-fifth governor of New Hampshire. (Another Bush life, Jon Meacham’s Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, is to be published in November.)

Between the behind-the-scenes reporting of Mr Buchanan and Mr Sununu, we get something like a play-by-play account of the operational diplomacy of the Cold War at work—not so much the grand speeches and giddy election nights, but the endless committee meetings, negotiations, internal debates, and the rest of the chicken-dinner business of how diplomacy actually works. Mr Thomas provides us with a reminder of the liberal consensus in which Nixon and Bush operated, and which they were obliged to overcome in the course of forcing (incomplete) closure upon a reign of murder and oppression that claimed some 100 million lives.

Mr Thomas’s book is profoundly irritating in that it is a testament, without meaning to be, of how unserious our so-called liberals were in the face of communist adventuring, and how shallow is the contemporary progressive understanding for what actually happened in the Cold War. For example, considering Nixon’s plan to reach out to ideologically centrist voters shocked by the violence, disorder and filth of 1968, he writes that Nixon was a natural: “He had practiced the politics of resentment all the way back to his pursuit of Alger Hiss.” Oh, is that what he was up to? Mr Thomas suggests that Nixon was motivated by a sense of social inferiority, along with “ideology … personal ambition, patriotism, and an almost eerily prescient sense of timing”. The possibility that Nixon was motivated by a desire to interfere with espionage being conducted against the United States by an aggressive totalitarian power that had only a few years before intentionally starved to death 7 million people to make a political point does not seem to have occurred to Mr Thomas. On the matter of Hiss’s guilt—which today is beyond dispute—he can only offer that Soviet documents “seemed to prove” that Hiss was a spy. Mr Thomas brings different standards of evidence to other cases; considering Barack Obama, he wrote: “He’s sort of God.”

Nixon was no god, though he was from time to time tormented by the Prince of Darkness, as the columnist Robert Novak was known at the time. He might have been a little bit of a Julius Caesar: not history’s Caesar, but William Shakespeare’s. Some years ago, witnessing the spectacle of a great and greatly troubled actor performing the title role in a staged reading of Julius Caesar, I remarked that it was a lucky thing that Caesar plays a minor role in the play named for him: the actor was visibly drunk, and at one point fell asleep. Mr Buchanan’s book is in theory about Richard Nixon, but Nixon is in fact a secondary character. This is a book about his aide, Patrick J. Buchanan. Mr Buchanan is a man whose lust for life is plain: he enjoys being Pat Buchanan enormously, much more than I think I would.

His anecdotes are full of verve and wit, and his prose remains, as always, lucid, playful and deft. He is such a fine writer and so clearly a man of culture and intellectual as to render even more inexplicable his occasional feverish perversion in relation to Israel and the Jews, the tendency that so troubled William F. Buckley Jr. (“I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge,” was his famous judgment in In Search of Antisemitism) and eventually led to Mr Buchanan’s estrangement from the mainstream of the conservative movement.

Mr Buchanan is here partly concerned with defending Nixon against charges of bigotry, both anti-Semitic and anti-black. On the former he does not have much convincing to say, only that Nixon admired Golda Meir (the “some of my best friends are Jewish heads of government” defence) and used language that was typical of the time; on the latter, Mr Buchanan offers an important corrective to the myth of the so-called Southern Strategy—which has been grossly distorted—noting that at the very moment when Nixon was supposedly courting white racists in the Democratic South, he was in fact arguing in the pages of the Washington Post:

The Democratic Party in the South has ridden to power for a century on an annual ride of racist oratory. The Democratic Party is the part that rides with the hounds in the North and the hares in the South. The Republicans, as the South’s party of the future, should reject this hypocritical policy of the past.

In contemporaneous speeches, he took to characterising the Democrats as the “party of Maddox, Mahoney, and Wallace”. He did not mean that as praise.

Whereas Mr Thomas’s book, in its dreary conventionality, is something like a work of theatre criticism—another meditation upon the fictitious psyche of Hamlet—Mr Buchanan’s book is drama itself: the riots, the conclusion of the Vietnam War, the opening of China—all related with élan. But it is Mr Buchanan’s account of Nixon pre-presidency that is most moving; indeed, one almost—almost—wishes that the two men had set up shop as political consultants and spared themselves and the republic a great deal of trauma.

But Mr Buchanan is the star of the second act, too, a smooth and mischievous political operator well-suited to his role as Nixon henchman. He describes a minor kerfuffle in which Novak reported that Nixon had, in an off-the-record conversation with reporters, opined that Bill Buckley, at that time a candidate for mayor of New York City, and his conservative allies were “a threat to the Republican Party even more menacing than the Birchers”. Letters from National Review publisher William Rusher were forthcoming, demanding an explanation. Nixon ignored them until National Review made the squabble public in an editorial, at which point Mr Buchanan was dispatched to paper over the rift. He sent a letter explaining that Buckley’s repudiation of the John Birch Society, his founding of National Review, and the success of his syndicated column had elevated his reputation to such an extent that he was a much greater threat to the Republican mayoral candidate, Representative John Lindsay. Buckley was assuaged with an appeal to his formidable ego. Mr Buchanan, who does not suffer from excessive modesty, concludes: “Rusher would describe the Buchanan letter as ‘a masterpiece of broken-field running.’ The Jesuits at Gonzaga would have called it a violation of the Eighth Commandment.” Third-person self-reference in the original, if you were wondering.

We meet a rather different Mr Buchanan in Mr Thomas’s account, mainly an afterthought: one “nut-cutter” among the crowd, generic aide, typist. He hardly figures in Nixon’s world at all, which is strange, and no doubt galling to Mr Buchanan.

National Review’s conservatism and Mr Buchanan’s slightly too-grand sense of his place in the national order would, some years later, conspire to help end the presidency of George H.W. Bush, heir (whether he liked it or not!) to the Reagan legacy, war hero, diplomat, CIA chief, and, in the run-up to his defeat, master strategist who welded together a formidable international alliance against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, a Beethoven symphony of international derring-do. In 1991, a National Review editorial fired a warning shot at the Republican president: “Unless President Bush makes a major, explicit and convincing turn to the right, therefore, we can no longer support his Administration,” the editors wrote. (National Review, I should note, is my journalistic home.) The magazine also pointedly refused to encourage Mr Buchanan, which Rusher later explained in his syndicated column: concerns about his Jewish obsessions. But Mr Buchanan got into the race and stayed there until Nixon advised him to get out, explaining that he could not win and was accomplishing nothing other than hurting President Bush. This seems to have been a rare political lacuna for the wily Nixon: hurting Bush was the point.

This perplexes—and hurts—Mr Sununu, who even all these years later cannot write about the revolt against Bush without taking on a wounded tone. He catalogues Bush’s accomplishments at home and abroad:

He had masterfully managed the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. He had fixed a collapsing savings and loan system and propelled the movements toward democracy and free markets in Latin America. Both of his nominees to the Supreme Court were confirmed. He had organized an international coalition, led by the United States, to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, and rid the Western Hemisphere of a drug-dealing dictator in Panama. He signed START, a major nuclear weapons reduction treaty, with the Soviet Union, and succeeded in getting major domestic legislation passed by an overwhelmingly Democratic-controlled Congress. Those successes included the Clean Air Act of 1990, a five-year deficit-reducing budget agreement, the 1990 Civil Rights Bill, the Americans with Disabilities Act, energy deregulation legislation, a major crimes bill, and child care legislation. He also energized a partnership with the nation’s governors to establish significant achievement standards for our K-12 education system.

Mr Sununu is a friend of National Review, and so I have had the privilege of spending some time with him. He is a conservative, to be sure, but he isn’t a conservatives’ conservative; he is a realist and a pragmatist with very little time for ideologues. There are many excellent and admirable qualities to a mind of that sort, but it does tend to blind him to the fact that many of the accomplishments he lists are regarded as anti-accomplishments by a very large part of the political constituency that brought Reagan, and hence Bush, to power. Add to that three little words that form the title of one of his chapters—“Read My Lips”—and the primary challenge by Mr Buchanan, to say nothing of the general-election challenge by the preening paranoid billionaire buffoon (why does that sound familiar?) Ross Perot, was practically inevitable.

By his own account, Mr Sununu was excellent at reading the politics on the other side: he predicted that Bill Clinton would win the Democratic nomination long before that was a popular opinion. He gently mocks Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett for being budget-warriors in rhetoric and budget-weiners in reality: “I wish I had a video­tape of my two favorite conservatives whining for bigger spending,” he writes.

The politics will be of some interest to those of us engaged in ideological combat, though not categorically interesting; there are a few more titled subsections—“Child Care”, “Health Care Reform, Welfare Reform, and Agriculture”—than there need to be. What is probably most valuable from a historical point of view is his account—so detailed as to resist easy summary—of Bush’s involvement in the final days of the Soviet empire. Bush early on identified a singular opportunity in Gorbachev, initiated a relationship, and managed the delicate diplomatic waltz—now public, now private—between the United States and the Soviet Union that substituted a fizzle for the thermonuclear bang both sides had been expecting for a generation. It is an economical account, and a fascinating one.

Statesmanship has its moments of high drama, but it is in the main a slow-going business. Mr Sununu describes in some detail a diplomatic and political career undertaken over decades, its corpus constituted of countless personal notes, telephone calls, conversations, lunches, coffees, with only the rare moment of high drama. Mr Buchanan’s story may be told with a bit more verve, but it is a substantially similar one: conversations, negotiations, compromises, a world remade by inches. And Mr Thomas’s book? An illustration that while politics is a slow and incremental business, conventional wisdom, once sufficiently congealed, is practically immobile.