The Arrogance of Power: the secret world of Richard Nixon
Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swan Victor Gollancz, 640pp, £20
ISBN 0575062436
No one can fairly accuse the American news media of not knowing how to forgive. For all the years of his political life, Richard Nixon hated the media. His private conversation boiled with anger towards journalists, and these savage resentments would erupt into his public discourse. When he lost the election for governor of California, he told the assembled reporters: "Well, gentlemen, you won't have Nixon to kick around any more." Privately, he exulted that "I gave it to them right in the ass".
Twelve years later, he was forced to resign after narrowly avoiding criminal indictment for obstruction of justice and impeachment. Yet, when he died in 1994, both press and politicians hailed him in tones at once portentous and reverential. President Clinton ordered a day of national mourning. Dr Henry Kissinger, who suffered as much as anyone from Nixon's bizarre behaviour, called his former boss - with characteristic ambiguity - "a man, take him for all in all". Time magazine, like many other editorial judges, acclaimed him as the greatest American statesman of the century.
Of Nixon's intelligence and political ability, there can be no doubt. There are those, however, who are determined that the Nixon rehabilitation must not pass unchallenged. Anthony Summers, in a narrative buttressed with 120 pages of detailed source notes and 250 interviews, has succeeded in exposing the Nixon myth for the self-interested rodomontade it always was. Nixon, according to Summers, was from the beginning the creature of a clique of moneyed Californian businessmen. At every critical moment of his career, he was sustained by the active financial support of organised crime bosses, including Mickey Cohen, the Los Angeles gambling capo, and the great Meyer Lansky himself. He received financial help from foreign interests, including the Greek fascist colonels.
Summers links Nixon's close but inexplicable friendship with the financier Bebe Rebozo to the Mob. He has found a document suggesting that Nixon, who claimed to be poor, shared a secret Swiss bank account with Rebozo that had millions in it. He believes that Nixon and Rebozo were the owners of the bridge that linked the Mafia-controlled casino on Paradise Island to nearby Grand Bahama.
Summers energetically marshals evidence that Nixon was not only financially dishonest and politically unscrupulous, but psychologically unstable. Journalists meekly accepted assurances by Nixon's aides that "the Boss" toyed with an occasional "light white wine". In fact, according to Summers, Nixon drank heavily. A mere couple of drinks could turn him nasty, even violent. Under the influence, the author alleges, he roughed up aides, security men and even his wife. He habitually used violent language, too, urging staff to "tear" opponents "in pieces". Of senators and congressmen who opposed his Vietnam war policy, he once said: "One day . . . we'll get them on the ground where we want them. And we'll stick our heels in, step on them hard and twist."
There have long been reports that Nixon was incapably drunk during the Middle East crisis of 1973. Summers shows that this was no exception. On more than one occasion, Nixon is reported to have urged bombing, including nuclear strikes, when in his cups. Once, in 1969, he is said to have ordered a nuclear strike on North Korea. Aides, including Kissinger, became used to ignoring or evading presidential orders delivered when Nixon was drunk. One of Summers's more startling revelations is that the defence secretary James Schlesinger took measures, including removing the nuclear command codes and alerting elite military units, to forestall Nixon resisting his removal from office, in the event that he had been impeached.
Nixon seems to have been aware, at some level, that he was crazy. He took elaborate precautions to conceal that, for many years, he had consulted a psychotherapist, Dr Arnold Hutschnecker, who denied that Nixon was "psychotic", but confirmed he had neurotic symptoms. Nixon consumed, unprescribed and often laced with whiskey, thousands of capsules of an anti-epileptic drug, Dilantin, which he used as a tranquilliser.
Summers's research has been voluminous. In some instances, I felt he had not conclusively proved his point, but the overall effect of this book is incontrovertible. The question now is not whether Richard Nixon was unstable and dishonest, or a man who never understood the spirit of democratic institutions, but how the American people put up with him for so long.
If he had never taken a dime from a gambler or drunk a single whiskey, the achievements on which his reputation rests are either disgraceful - as in his treatment of Chile - or essentially insubstantial, as with the opening to China that, 28 years later, has left a communist dictatorship in power. Rather than a statesman, it seems, Richard Nixon was the nimble but undeserving beneficiary of exaggerated American fears of domestic communism and Republican cravings for hegemony. The mystery is why the US media persist in treating him like a statesman.
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