Editor's Note: There is much here that's interesting, but there's much here that seems to be overlooked. Nixon passed more far left laws than the leftists. Nixon is responsible for EPA, ESA, OSHA and a plethora of federal intrusions that have grown and become a massive millstone on the American public. The cost of federal regulations to the public is now at two trillion dollars a year. Nixon bears a major share of the responsibility for that. It's my personal belief the only thing Richard Milhous Nixon really believed in was Richard Milhous Nixon.
The
President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961
By
Irwin F. Gellman
Yale
University Press, New Haven & London
HB,
791 pages, US $42.77
978-0-300-18105-0
Click here to buy The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961
Having learned from the situation that the unprepared Harry Truman found
himself in when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in office, Eisenhower made
Nixon, the second youngest vice president, an “apprentice,” especially in
foreign affairs and civil rights. Eisenhower continued to govern military
style, “from the top,” and assigned Nixon big duties. Nixon also found himself
taking many on by necessity during the president’s hospitalizations, the most
serious being his heart attack during the first term. One result was that Nixon
was “the most knowledgeable vice president in foreign affairs who ever reached
the White House,” as Gellman deftly shows. He unearths an incredible amount of
evidence to reveal a young Richard Nixon meeting the challenges of his vice
presidency with conscientiousness, fortitude, and bravery.
Gellman clears away the “fables” about Eisenhower’s “ambivalence,
dislike, or even hatred of Nixon” perpetuated by historians, especially Stephen
Ambrose, and then repeated by those like Taylor Branch and Elizabeth Drew. They
include “Eisenhower’s disgusted pencil jab as he watched the Checkers/fund
speech” and “his nonexistent effort to dump Nixon from the 1956 Republican
ticket.”
The animus goes back to Nixon’s successful days as a member of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities and prosecuting Alger Hiss, and then his
effective campaigning. Unlike Eisenhower, the military hero who had not even
voted, Nixon had risen as a regular party member and worked his way from the
House, to the Senate, and then to the Vice Presidency. Although a popular
leader, Eisenhower was not a charismatic speaker and did not meet the GOP’s
need for a national spokesman, so “Nixon filled this space.” Nixon as political
point man willingly received the brunt of the Democrats’ attacks and kept
Eisenhower above the political fray.
One attack that serves as a shorthand slur comes from presidential
candidate Adlai Stevenson’s alarmist foreshadowing of a “Nixonland.” This
became the title of a popular, but scurrilous, book, Nixonland, by Rick
Perlstein.
“Nixonland,” I learned from Gellman’s book, was a term of attack by
Stevenson in the final, desperate days of the 1956 campaign. On October 17, he
called Nixon “shifty,” “rash,” and “inexperienced,” while reminding his
audience that seven presidents had died in office. Nixon had been attacking
Stevenson’s disarmament proposals as risky and stupid. In the final week of
October, Stevenson warned supporters about the potential for a nuclear war, if
Nixon were in command.
At a San Francisco rally, Stevenson drew a scenario of a Nixon
presidency:
“In one direction lies a land of slander and scare, the land of sly
innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing,
shoving, the land of smear and grab and anything to win.
“This is Nixonland. America is something different.”
The president kept Nixon on the ticket for the second term because Nixon
improved his chances and because Nixon had performed the duties of his office
exceptionally well. He had “rallied the GOP faithful from apathy to activism and
came to represent their soul.” By the end of the first year, Nixon had
“expanded the traditional duties of his predecessors.” Eisenhower put Nixon’s
political knowledge and acumen to good use. Nixon provided him with “crucial
data” from the Senate and taught cabinet members how to deal with congressional
committees.
Nixon also served in a critical capacity in foreign diplomacy. In the
first term, Nixon went to Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and Brazil.
Nixon was sent south again in 1957, this time to Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia,
Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. In Venezuela, he was warned by the CIA
and the Secret Service that a communist group had hired a triggerman, but the
Nixons (his wife Pat often accompanied him) continued on. They handled
protestors throwing garbage and spitting at them with stoic grace, and then
with courage when protestors attacked their stalled car with lead pipes and
baseball bats.
Nixon’s trip to the Soviet Union (where high levels of radiation were
discovered in the hotel room) and Poland was his “last and most critical
foreign mission as vice president.”
His accomplishments in Africa have also been overlooked. As these
nations were throwing off colonial rule, and American blacks were demanding
civil rights, Nixon played a crucial role. He was in communication with Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Bunche, and was accompanied on his African trip by
John Johnson, founder of the new influential black publications, Ebony
and Jet.
Nixon shared the credit for Eisenhower’s accomplishments in civil
rights, which vastly outpaced his two Democratic predecessors. Eisenhower used
his executive powers to desegregate the capital, the armed forces, and the
Veterans Administration; made an unprecedented number of black appointments;
and established the President’s Committee on Government Contracts. As chairman
of PCGC, Nixon held meetings to publicize nondiscrimination clauses in federal
government contracts and threatened enforcement.
While Eisenhower and Nixon today are cast as at best indifferent to
civil rights, that was not how they were seen then. Ralph McGill, the crusading
editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, acknowledged after the
reelection that Nixon had emerged as the “civil rights spokesman for the
administration.” Nixon earned the good opinion of such well-known African
American figures as Jackie Robinson and Roy Wilkins.
Wilkins and Thurgood Marshall, in fact, had negative words for then
Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson. While Eisenhower and Nixon pushed for the 1957
Civil Rights Act, the first law of its kind since 1875, Johnson’s “contribution
was to help his southern colleagues eliminate the bill’s strongest provisions
[Parts III and IV], and then to pass a watered-down bill through the Senate.”
The intricate machinations of Southern Democrats, under the leadership of
Lyndon Johnson, in using the filibuster to gut the bill are revealed. The
exposition of how the historical record on civil rights has been twisted and
the contrasts, both politically and privately, between LBJ, and Eisenhower and
Nixon, are worth the price of the book alone.
Gellman captures the human side of Nixon, emotional distress behind the
famous “Checkers” speech as Nixon answered charges of campaign improprieties. He
methodically demolishes rumors about Nixon’s psychiatric care in the chapter
titled “The Hutschnecker Fiction,” but shows the toll of the office as Nixon
sought medication to help with sleep. The last falsehood (perpetuated by Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr. and others) that is addressed is the charge that Eisenhower
and Nixon were responsible for the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in the early
days of the Kennedy administration.
What emerges is a portrait of Nixon bearing challenges of his office not
perfectly but admirably. Politics is a dirty business and one expects that his
opponents will be less than honest. But in the ensuing decades Nixon has
suffered the same treatment from historians. This important book marshals the
evidence to challenge the fables. In fact, there is so much information that
the index could not adequately cite all the names, as I noticed when I came
upon an important black Nixon supporter. But that only shows how much more the
public needs to learn about Nixon. There is such a wealth of history here that
it cannot fit into a 14-page index.
Mary Grabar, Ph.D., has taught college English for
over twenty years. She is the founder of the Dissident Prof Education Project, Inc., an education
reform initiative that offers information and resources for students, parents,
and citizens. The motto, “Resisting the Re-Education of America,” arose in part
from her perspective as a very young immigrant from the former Communist
Yugoslavia (Slovenia specifically). She writes extensively and is the editor of
EXILED. Ms. Grabar
is also a contributor to SFPPR News &
No comments:
Post a Comment