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A review by rienthril
Richard Nixon: The Life by John A. Farrell
4.0
Once at a conference in Anaheim, I killed some hours by renting a car and driving to Yorba Linda to see the Nixon Presidential Library. I joked that I was going to stare into the face of evil.
Well, it was true.
There was the relocated boyhood home of Nixon, plucked away from the failed lemon farm, the Army One helicopter standing in for the chopper that plucked Nixon away from Washington after he resigned, and the graves of Dick and Pat, shells of life plucked away from the earth. In the library, amidst the accouterments of victory, like moonstones brought back on Apollo, there are also the tapes: the Oval Office recordings meant as memoir fodder, but ultimately also the proof of rabid, profane insecurity, reactionary hate, and the shallow blubberings of a supreme intellect supremely unassured. What's more evil than a cynic bent on greatness? A tragic figure, sure, but is he more tragic than all the figures in the trail of dead behind him? Farrell, in this book, is the first to connect the dots of Nixon's intrigue to stymie a peace agreement in the Vietnam War in the final days of the 1968 Presidential election. Killing peace was a political move (like all war), leaving hundreds of thousands of dead Americans, Vietnamese and Laotians on an altar to award Nixon the Presidency. Watergate was just another symptom of Nixon's by-any-means-necessary approach. Farrell unfolds it all fairly, convincingly, respectably; Nixon's now well-known contradictions, flaws and talents. When his sins finally find him out, he rails against a double standard - that JFK and LBJ did the same or worse. Fine, let's call them evil, too. But standing in his tiny farm house, standing on Army One beholding the souvenir pack of cigarettes, reading about his grievances against circumstance (turning down the Ivy League because his family needed him at the grocery store, etc.), I see too much of myself for comfort, too much like looking in a mirror. Don't we all have a chip on our shoulder? Didn't we all miss something somewhere? The evil is there, the hurt is there. But which of us live it out? Which of us gaslit our way to power? Which of us baked a grudge into the heart of the American Dream?
Well, it was true.
There was the relocated boyhood home of Nixon, plucked away from the failed lemon farm, the Army One helicopter standing in for the chopper that plucked Nixon away from Washington after he resigned, and the graves of Dick and Pat, shells of life plucked away from the earth. In the library, amidst the accouterments of victory, like moonstones brought back on Apollo, there are also the tapes: the Oval Office recordings meant as memoir fodder, but ultimately also the proof of rabid, profane insecurity, reactionary hate, and the shallow blubberings of a supreme intellect supremely unassured. What's more evil than a cynic bent on greatness? A tragic figure, sure, but is he more tragic than all the figures in the trail of dead behind him? Farrell, in this book, is the first to connect the dots of Nixon's intrigue to stymie a peace agreement in the Vietnam War in the final days of the 1968 Presidential election. Killing peace was a political move (like all war), leaving hundreds of thousands of dead Americans, Vietnamese and Laotians on an altar to award Nixon the Presidency. Watergate was just another symptom of Nixon's by-any-means-necessary approach. Farrell unfolds it all fairly, convincingly, respectably; Nixon's now well-known contradictions, flaws and talents. When his sins finally find him out, he rails against a double standard - that JFK and LBJ did the same or worse. Fine, let's call them evil, too. But standing in his tiny farm house, standing on Army One beholding the souvenir pack of cigarettes, reading about his grievances against circumstance (turning down the Ivy League because his family needed him at the grocery store, etc.), I see too much of myself for comfort, too much like looking in a mirror. Don't we all have a chip on our shoulder? Didn't we all miss something somewhere? The evil is there, the hurt is there. But which of us live it out? Which of us gaslit our way to power? Which of us baked a grudge into the heart of the American Dream?