Rick Perlstein on the dark side of democracy

As a child of the 1960s, I found Rick Perstein's wonderful Nixonland a compulsive read. On one level it's a moment-by-moment replay of the era's seismic events as they appeared on the street, in newspapers and on TV, in the national party convention centers, in the counsels of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and to a significant extent, in Richard Nixon's head.  But it is not a shapeless panorama; rather, it's relentlessly focused on the question Perlstein poses in the preface: what motivated ""the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason" (p. xiii).  While that voter is his "main character,"Perlstein asserts,  Nixon's "story is the engine of this narrative. Nixon's character--his own overwhelming angers, anxieties and resentments in the face of the 1960s chaos--sparks the combustion" (p. ix).


Perlstein succeeds, page after page, in drawing the connections between riot and rebellion, the spectacles as they played out on TV and in the news, and Nixon's masterful manipulation: his securing of Southern support by slow-walking enforcement of Johnson's civil rights legislation; his training of the cameras on uncouth anti-war protesters as backdrop to his staged counter-spectacles of clean-cut loyal youth;  his combination of phased U.S. troop withdrawal and savage bombing in southeast Asia; and finally, his dirty tricks manipulation of the Democratic nomination process in 1972.


Reading Nixonland recalled me to my earliest political perceptions --rooted in the conviction that the Vietnam War was wrong and couldn't be won -- and led me to meditate on the limitations of my own blogging credo that the electorate is smarter than all of us.  It is true I think only in the broadest sweep of history, in that democracy provides the means of self-correction, so that manifest policy failure is eventually punished at the polls. The blunt instrument of the popular vote (and public debate) keeps societies from going all the way on the road to ruin.  But that doesn't mean that most of us are not fooled much of the time, often for a very long time. Or worse, that we don't collectively will evil -- as Nixonland suggests we did in Vietnam. 

Attn, David Brooks: Where the "culture of exposure" came from

Once again today, Times readers are treated to a bit of sanitized cultural history by David Brooks.  Tracing the progress of American media from a "culture of reticence" about the private lives and off-the-record grousing of public figures to a "culture of exposure," Brooks recounts:

Then, after Vietnam, an ethos of exposure swept the culture. The assumption among many journalists was that the establishment may seem upstanding, but there is a secret corruption deep down. It became the task of journalism to expose the underbelly of public life, to hunt for impurity, assuming that the dark hidden lives of public officials were more important than the official performances.

Gee, I wonder where that assumption of "secret corruption deep down" came from?  Rick Perlstein's Nixonland has answers on almost every page, documenting ten years of relentless government lying about Vietnam as well as the pervasive criminality and war criminality of the Nixon White House.

Take, for example, the response of Nixon's henchman to columnist Jack Anderson's exposure of a memo documenting ITT's swap of a $400,000 campaign donation for a promise that the Nixon Justice Department would lay off on antitrust enforcement:

You can't go home again to the White House

A major-party Presidential nominee who aims to change the trajectory of American politics suddenly becomes enamored of inviting a former White House occupant -- once the candidate's bitter rival for the nomination -- to take the second slot on a dream ticket. The 'dream' is to rapturously unify a divided party -- quelling doubts about a candidate who represents a leap of faith that many of the party faithful may be unwilling to make.

A powerful former high-ranking public servant lurks behind the prospective veep, reportedly demanding almost co-presidential powers on his liege's behalf -- and a strong role for himself. Ultimately the dream evaporates, as the nominee demurs at proposals to cede vast swaths of the President's Constitutional authority to a vice president who will function as "chief operating officer."

This happened in 1980. On the eve of the Republican convention, presumptive nominee Ronald Reagan reached out to offer former President (and former Vice President) Gerald Ford the second spot on the ticket. Three or four top aides on each side met to hash out the details, with Henry Kissinger chief among those in the Ford camp. According to Howell Raine's report in the New York Times (July 18, 1980):

The so-called "dream ticket" fell apart because to have endowed the Vice Presidency with enough power to make the offer attractive to Mr. Ford would have eroded Mr. Reagan's authority as President, one Regan aide said. Mr. Reagan said Mr. Ford also had a persistent and finally insurmountable visceral feeling that it would be wrong for the two to run together.

As reported by the Times, the principals were oddly passive in the negotiating process. The Ford camp, led by Kissinger, "astonished Mr. Reagan's aides in the degree to which they would have watered down Mr. Reagan's powers to run the Government." The proposals included giving Ford veto power over major cabinet appointments and the right to make other appointments. They also seem to have included making Kissinger Secretary of State.

Gerald Ford was no Hillary Clinton. The deal failed as much because of his recognition that what his aides were asking was preposterous as because of Reagan's similar recognition.

Imagine the Obama camp negotiating with the Clintonites. While the Clinton team would be in no position to ask for overt prerogatives of the magnitude demanded by the Ford team for the former President, the principal's will to power would be unchecked.

Obama is no fool. Like Reagan and Ford, he will feel in his gut that a prospective President can't share power with a former White House occupant. This year's 'dream ticket,' like that of 1980, will fade like morning dew.