DEATH OF AN AMERICAN MYTH

Press, 21 August 1976, Page 15

DEATH OF AN AMERICAN MYTH

Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon. By Theodore H. White. Jonathan Cape. 374 pp. N.Z. price $11.90.

(Reviewed by David Gunby) As the 1976 United States Presidential campaign gathers momentum, with both major contenders for the throne known, Theodore White is no doubt deep in the making of "The Making of the President. 1976,” a study of the Presidential election likely to be no less massive an achievement than his studies of four earlier campaigns, and no less acclaimed. Thus much will, for Mr White, be routine. Between his last campaign history and this one, however, he has written a book which is decidedly the antithesis of routine, since it deals in that rarest of American political phenomena, the unmaking of a President.

In November, 1972 Richard M. Nixon (only narrowly elected in 1968) was returned to the White House by a majority greater numerically than that enjoyed by any other President, not excluding Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. Ye_t less than two years later, in August 1974. the man who had been so overwhelmingly the nation’s choice resigned in order to avoid certain impeachment. The circumstances which lay behind this most remarkable of political reversals are the subject of Mr White’s book, "Breach of Faith”. Lest it should be assumed that this is merely an account of Watergate and its aftermath, however. it should al once be added that Mr White takes a very broad view of what constitutes the circumstances lying behind the fall of Richard Nixon. All the dramatic events with which, in outline al least, we are familiar, are there, of course—the bungled attempt to burgle the Democratic Party national headquarters, the White House coverup, the various court and congressional hearings and investigations, the tapes and the revelations, and the eventual capitulation of the President to the inevitable—all related with the unhurried ease and lucidity which is one

of Mr White’s great strengths. But in addition we are also given a comprehensive account, going back to Richard Nixon's childhood and to the distinctively Californian political milieu in which his career began, of ths underlying causes of the President’s downfall.

In filling in this background, and supplementing it with an assessment of Nixon's personal team (Haldeman, Erlichman et al). .Mr White greatly enriches our-understanding both of the President and of the running of the White House during the crucial period from 1972 to 1974. Set in perspectiva against the ups and downs of Mr Nixon's political career and the peculiarities of his personality, the events which led to his downfall seem —though no less stupid or reprehensible —less incredible.

The events leading to . President Nixon’s resignation and the background to those events constitute the bulk of Theodore White’s book. There remains, however, a third part, contained in a final chapter given the same title as the book itself. In this chapter Mr White assesses the significance of Richard Nixon’s actions and concludes that his “true crime . • . was simple: he destroyed the myth that binds America together.”

With the logic that carries Mr White to this conclusion it is impossible not to agree: that “politics in America is the binding secular religion’’ and that the “founding faith” of that religion is the Declaration of Independence, with its attendant political myths; that the “crowning myth” is that of the Presidency, and that there derives from this another myth of immense significance, namely, the capacity of the supreme office to ennoble the holder. With Richard Nixon, says Mr White, that legend died, whether to rise phoenix-like from the ashes being still, as Gerald Ford sits in the White House, uncertain. Perhaps the immense success being enjoyed by the Democratic contender, Jimmy Carter, stems from his capacity for arousing faith in the phoenix.

The final section of Theodore White’s book is as lucid and assured as the rest;

the analysis of Richard Nixon's crime, of its causes and effects, coherent and compelling. Yet for all that there remains, in this reviewer’s mind at least, a point of doubt, even unease. It concerns the reasons why “Richard Nixon, unloved and unlovable as he knew himself to be, had won by the greatest margin of all time.” Rightly, Mr White puts this success mainly down to issues, to Nixon's accurate identification of what was on the public’s mind and to his equally accurate judgment of what the public wanted a President to do about the things that worried them. But Mr White also mentions (in passing) that “enormous manipulative skills . . . had gone into his victory”. Surely this is a point which is too important to pass over so briefly. In 1964 and, signally, in 1968, the American electorate was "sold” a Richard Nixon who, personally, if not ideologically, was an ad man’s image rather than a reality.

Just what the “reality” of so curious and contradictory a personality is, must of course, be open to argument. But it seems clear, at least, that both in 1964 and in 1968 that those, chiefly radical, who attacked Nixon so vehemently (eg. inquiring by poster whether YOU would buy a used car from this man?) were nearer the moral truth about the Presidential candidate than the electorate at large, and the political commentators. Mr White himself admits, both in “Breach of Faith’’ and in “The Making of the President. 1972”, that he had come to admire Richard Nixon. He also admits, generously, that he was in personal terms misled (the admiration for certain Nixonian achievements remaining).

What Mr White doesn’t consider (and it seems he should) is the significance both of the “selling” of Richard Milhous Nixon and of the left’s accurate identification of the falsity of both the image and its utterances about, law and honest government. In a book such as "Breach of Faith”, which goes beyond mere chronicling to meditate upon the consequences of Presidential villainy, such matters ought to be argued through at length.