| Review of: | Nixon's shadow: the history of an image by David Greenberg |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Godfrey Hodgson |
| Reviewed in: | International Affairs |
| Date accepted online: | 27/07/2004 |
| Published in print: | Volume 80, Issue 2, Pages 367-414 |
History
Brushing aside the claims of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, there are those who see the second half of the twentieth century, at least in America, as the 'Age of Nixon'. It is a thought-provoking, if disturbing, thought. For Nixon was nothing if not a Manichean figure, a man who embodied deep divisions in a political society that in his lifetime trended steadily from uneasy consensus to the present extreme ideological and political polarization.
Judgements of Nixon reflected that division, even dualism. Nixon entered politics as the epitome of the wholesome young naval officer, the embodiment of clean-cut all-Americanism. It was not long before his part in the assault on the American left, a part important enough that it would not have been too much to speak of 'Nixonism' as people spoke of McCarthyism, caused Nixon to be demonized by liberals. Nixon lived to be the hate figure of the New Left, his name routinely spelled with a swastika for an 'x'. Then, in the 20 years between his disgrace and his death, he made not one but two comebacks, first as a Bismarckian 'master' of foreign policy, then as a well-concealed but significant liberal.
David Greenberg, in this fair-minded and conspicuously intelligent study, has not sought to add to the vast biographical literature. Rather he has looked very broadly at the image of Richard Nixon and what it tells us about American culture in his age. His eight chapters deal with seven Nixons, reminiscent of Kurosawa's 1950 film
Incessant media roughing-up bred an odd tribe of Nixon loyalists, like Rabbi Baruch Korff, who-often with more than a little help from Nixon's White House-portrayed the sophisticated and vindictive politician as an innocent victim. Finally Nixon fell into the hands of the psychobiographers, who deployed pseudo-science with remarkable ruthlessness to portray the man as mad, and the historians, led by Joan Hoff and the late Stephen Ambrose, many of whom surprised their readers, and perhaps surprised themselves, by the extent to which they rehabilitated him.
Greenberg does not buy the revisionist case any more than he is convinced by the liberal caricatures or radical invective. He makes the fair point that 'if history can help us to understand Nixon better, it will do so not by stripping away and discarding' his various images, but by gathering them 'into a strange, irregular mosaic'. With patient fingers, Greenberg has himself brilliantly begun that desirable assembly.
Even more important, he has illustrated the strange, elusive power of the image in modern political culture. 'Through their experiences with Nixon', he says, 'Americans came to believe that politics revolves around the construction and manipulation of images'. It is true, though Nixon was scarcely alone in manipulating protean images of himself for political advantage. Through his rich analysis of the vehemently contradictory images of this particular man, Greenberg has held up a mirror to the increasingly angry polarities of American political society.