MR NIXON EXPLAINED TWO MEN WHO ARE OFTEN AT WAR WITH EACH OTHER

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31763, 21 August 1968, Page 12

MR NIXON EXPLAINED TWO MEN WHO ARE OFTEN AT WAR WITH EACH OTHER

(Bu

STEWART ALSOP

tn “Newsweek")

(Reprinted by arrangement)

In this television-dominated era of the homogenised politician, Richard M. Nixon may turn out to be the last really hateable politician to be nominated for President by either major party. Hateability is no new thing in Presidential politics—Franklin Roosevelt was hated by millions, and so is Lyndon Johnson today. But except for Nixon, the current crop of Presidential hopefuls has a very low hateability quotient. Nobody really hates good old Hubert, or quietmannered Gene, or Rocky, or even Ron. A lot of people hate Nixon.

A lot of people greatly admire him, of course. But Nixon is uniquely capable of arousing a blind and furious detestation in many breasts—notably the breasts of almost all intellectuals and many journalists. Journalists and intellectuals exercise a political influence out of proportion to their numbers, so Nixon’s hateability is a political factor to be weighed seriously this year. Years'Of Watching This particular journalist is a Nixonologist of long standing, and after years of Nixon-watching I have developed a theory about the man which may help a little to explain his high hateability quotient. Nixon has always been a favourite subject for amateur psychoanalysts—there is- something hidden and mysterious about the man.

He is the most reserved, the most totally self-con-trolled, politician of this generation. He has acknowledged as much himself. “I can’t really let my hair down with anyone,” he once said to me in an on-the-record interview. “It’s something like wearing clothing—if you let your hair down, you feel too naked.”

Except for that one amazing moment before the television cameras after his California defeat in 1962 (“You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more”) he has never let down his guard. And yet one senses churning emotions beneath the wellguarded surface. My theory is that there are two Nixons beneath that surface, and they are often at war with each other—hence the need for iron control. “Black Irish” A man is, or so we were taught in school, a product of

inheritance as well as environment. Nixon’s inheritance is odd and interesting. He is Irish on both sides—both the Nixons and the Milhouses came to this country from Ireland long before the great wave of Irish immigration in the nineteenth century.

You only have to look at him to see that Nixon is Black Irish—the black hair and the heavy black beard are visible evidence of the Iberian bloodlines of the Black Irish. The Black Irish (Joe McCarthy was another) are famous, and rightly so, for their pugnacity. Ask old family friends in California what sort of man Nixon’s father, Frank Nixon, was, and you are certain to hear such words as “pugnacious” and “cantankerous.” Nixon is his father’s son. “If I am attacked," he once remarked to me, “my instinct is to strike back.” He used to strike before he was struck. Nixon has been extremely circumspect for at least 10 years. But there lingers a sort of folk memory of “the old Nixon.” This was the Nixon who liked to use the words “Democrat” and “traitor” in juxtaposition; the Nixon who could resort to the sleazy debater’s trick of the rhetorical question to imply that Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and George Marshall were “taken in by the Communists.” Intellectuals’ Foe The “old Nixon” helps to explain why Nixon is hated by the intellectuals, for the era of the old Nixon was probably the most antiintellectual period in American history. It also explains why Nixon is the only Republican capable of uniting—against himself—the dismally fragmented Democratic Party.

But Nixon is his mother’s son too. His mother, whom I once interviewed for a magazine article, was a charming and gentle old lady, who looked like Whistler’s mother with a ski-jump nose. Hannah Milhouse Nixon brought the Quaker faith into the family, and with it a family atmosphere of extreme piety and morality. Her mother—Nixon’s grandmother —was a founding member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (so was Nelson Rockefeller’s grandmother) and his great-grand-mother and great-great-grand-mother were well-known itinerant lady preachers. During that interview, Nixon’s mother recalled with pride how little Dick, reading about the Teapot Dome scan-

dais in the papers, told her that he wanted to become an honest lawyer, to “clean up all that dishonesty in Washington.” Moral Convictions The Nixon-haters will never believe it, but this part of Nixon, the highly moral part, the preacher part, is just as real as the Black Irish part. Oddly enough, this moral Nixon accounts for his hateability almost as much as the pugnacious, or gut-fighter, Nixon. A lot of people, intellectuals and Democrats especially, regard him as a holier-than-thou hypocrite, an Elmer Gantry. Yet the curious combination of Nixon’s genuinely held moral convictions and his instinct for the jugular have made him a very formidable politician. Politics involves a lot of infighting and a lot of preaching. Nixon can fight when the situation calls for fighting, and he can preach when the situation calls for preaching, and he does both with great earnestness and conviction as he proved in his brilliantly effective acceptance speech. This living with two Nixons in one body must be a strain, all the same, and the strain accounts for Nixon’s total inability to relax. As an old Nixon-watcher it has always seemed to me that, besides much that is admirable in Nixon, and much that is not admirable at all, there is something pathetic about the man. Never Had Fun The word may seem an odd one to use about one of the half-dozen most successful politicians of his generation, and a man who may well be the next President. Yet the word is rightly used if it is true —as I suspect it is true — that Richard Nixon in all his life has never really had any fun.

For the rest, Nixon is unquestionably a man of immense drive, ability and intelligence his astounding feat in presiding over his own political resurrection is proof enough of that And yet there is one reason why Nixon may never grasp the ultimate prize of the Presidency, which he has sought so fiercely and so long. Usually (alas, not always) this country gets the kind of President the times demand. The times now demand—indeed, they fairly scream aloud for —a man who can unite the country. Nixon is not that kind of man, perhaps because he is divided within himself.