TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110689/p100

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                                                                                BOOKS, Page 100

Martyr or Machiavelli?


By Laurence I. Barrett


    NIXON: THE TRIUMPH OF A POLITICIAN, 1962-1972
    by Stephen E. Ambrose
    Simon & Schuster; 736 pages; $24.95

    RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON: THE RISE OF AN AMERICAN POLITICIAN
    by Roger Morris
    Henry Holt; 1,005 pages; $29.95

    Two obese volumes by heavyweight authors on Richard Nixon
are upon us this fall, each an installment of a trilogy.
Promised for 1990 are two more Nixon books by other serious
writers, columnist Tom Wicker and political scientist Herbert
Parmet. Despite the wide shelf of literature by and about the
37th President, the urge to discover him anew remains strong.
It is not only because Nixon made headlines and history for
three decades or that he was the sole President ejected between
elections. He also continues to fascinate because it is
difficult to come to terms with a leader who debased the
presidency while skillfully, even bravely, steering the U.S.
into the geopolitical waters it still sails.

    Long before Watergate confirmed the worst fears of his
enemies, Nixon was a perfect model for caricature. Foes saw him
as a rootless mutant, sui generis, combining McCarthy's feral
atavism with Machiavelli's cunning intellect. Friends perceived
him as a courageous champion of basic American values. They
remain united in the belief that he suffered a martyr's fate at
the hands of the liberal aristocracy whose reign he challenged.
For years, Watergate gave the bashers the better of the
argument.

    The passage of time permits deeper reflection. These two
books, though treating different phases of Nixon's career and
offering contrasting styles of biography, point toward a fresh
view. All the familiar sins and successes are rehearsed, along
with the inner torment that destroyed Nixon's judgment. But he
also begins to appear as much more a product of his time and
place than many care to admit. If he frequently exploited the
country's most base instincts, he also reflected legitimate
resentments. The silent majority he mobilized survived him,
eventually evolving into the right-wing populist movement that
anointed Ronald Reagan.

    Stephen Ambrose's Nixon, the second of the historian's
three volumes, covers the period between his subject's debacle
in the 1962 California gubernatorial election and vindication
by landslide in the presidential election of 1972. As in his
first installment, Ambrose sets out the chronicle in meticulous
detail, relying more heavily on facts than dicta to lead the
reader's judgment. Fact: Nixon was so habitual a deceiver that
in 1962, 48 hours after saying defeat would at least restore his
family life, he left for the Bahamas without his wife and
daughters. Fact: during 1968 he artfully cultivated Lyndon
Johnson's goodwill for his own benefit and later repaid his
predecessor with small kindnesses. Fact: Viet Nam and other
realities he inherited on Inauguration Day forced him to choke
his own genuine hawkishness and preside over the retreat of
American power.

    One of the best passages in the book recounts the campaign
of 1968, a year of tragedy and stress. Nixon capitalized on the
turmoil, playing to Main Street's abhorrence of disorder. Yet
he also threaded his way between the extremism of George Wallace
and the ambivalence of Hubert Humphrey. Nixon's caution almost
enabled Humphrey to recoup in the final days, but the Republican
knew his constituency well enough to squeeze out a puny
plurality. Over the next four years, he built that slight
advantage into a mighty force despite the agony of Viet Nam.
Ambrose leaves his protagonist in inexplicable melancholy after
the 1972 triumph, the ripples of Watergate just beginning to
grow into a tidal wave.

    Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon, to be published later
this month, tracks the future President from distant ancestry
through the 1952 election. A Harvard-trained political scientist
who worked briefly in Nixon's White House, Morris has written
critical books on two former colleagues, Alexander Haig and
Henry Kissinger. Now he starts a Nixon trilogy that promises
(threatens?) to be more exhaustive than Ambrose's. From Morris
we learn details about Nixon's first political victims, Jerry
Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas (why Voorhis flubbed the
debate with his upstart opponent, why prominent Democrats such
as Joe and Jack Kennedy wanted Douglas defeated).

    With a sure sense of West Coast history, Morris shows how
Nixon's early career grew naturally from a raw strivers'
culture. Just as Nixon fought hereditary barons in campus
politics, he later bucked the genteel Republicanism of Earl
Warren. Morris demolishes the stereotype of Nixon as disembodied
political gypsy. Nixon had roots in the same soil that produced
the sagebrush rebellion. Morris also reconstructs the network
of Nixon's early financial backers, including some of the
millionaires who would later sponsor Reagan. After only six
years in Congress, Nixon connected with a national following.
Ultimately, it would unseat the mandarins who created the
Eisenhower candidacy, those Eastern stalwarts who chose Nixon
for the 1952 ticket because they needed the new sect's strength.

    Neither Ambrose nor Morris provides startling revisionism
on the President whose impact, positive and negative, is still
keenly felt today. Rather, they give an emerging perception,
reminding us that Nixon was an uncommon leader of whom there is
still more to learn.


Litmus Test

By Paul Gray

    FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM
    by Umberto Eco;
    Translated by William Weaver
    Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 641 pages; $22.95

    A man named Casaubon hides after closing time in a Paris
museum called the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. Nearby, an
enormous pendulum swings silently in the gathering darkness,
mute testimony, as a 19th century French scientist named
Foucault first demonstrated, to the rotation of the earth.
Casaubon is here because he suspects something terrible will
happen before dawn. If he is correct, then he and two friends,
playful inventors of a plot to rule the world, do not have long
to live. In their machinations, have he and his coconspirators
accidentally stumbled across some dangerous truth? Or, perhaps
worse, have their own words created forces that will try to
destroy them?

    From this spooky, arresting premise, Umberto Eco has
launched a novel that is even more intricate and absorbing than
his international best seller The Name of the Rose (1983).
Unlike its predecessor, Foucault's Pendulum does not restrict
its range of interests to monastic, medieval arcana. This time
Eco's framework is vast -- capacious enough to embrace reams of
ancient, abstruse writings and a host of contemporary references
or allusions. The latter include the Yellow Submarine,
Casablanca, Tom and Jerry, Lina Wertmuller, Barbara Cartland,
Stephen King, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Flash Gordon,
the Pink Panther, Minnie Mouse and Hellzapoppin. What do all of
these things have to do with one another? Eco's teasing answer:
maybe everything, maybe nothing at all.

    Readers will have to take sides here, or struggle to find
a compromise some where in the middle ground. For beneath its
endlessly diverting surface, Eco's novel constitutes a litmus
test for ways of looking at history and the world. Casaubon,
the narrator, recalls himself as a younger man, when he was
willing to take facts at face value, to be what he calls
incredulous. He recognizes and scorns another manner of
thinking: "If two things don't fit, but you believe both of
them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third
thing that connects them, that's credulity." But then, as a
graduate student in Milan, he writes a doctoral thesis on the
Knights of the Temple, a medieval order of warrior-monks formed
in the 12th century and suppressed by the Pope in the 14th, who
have vanished into a spiraling legend. Francis Bacon was a
secret Templar, according to some spuriously authoritative
sources; so, according to others, were Columbus, Mozart and
Hitler.

    At first, Casaubon laughs at such lunacies. His merriment
is shared by Belbo and Diotallevi, editors at a Milanese
publishing house. Given his expertise, Casaubon is hired as a
consultant to advise on the endless stream of Templar
manuscripts that flood the editorial offices. Eventually, these
three scoffers find an amusing way to waste their time. Using
Belbo's new word processor, they concoct "the Plan," a plausible
scenario revealing a Templar plot to unleash unimaginable powers
from the center of the earth in order to rule the world.

    Of course, this expeiment gets out of hand. Casaubon, no
longer incredulous, finds himself questioning all facets of
reality, "asking them to tell me not their superficial story but
another, deeper story." At this point, the narrator is hooked,
as will be anyone who has heeded him thus far. True believers,
skeptics, those waffling in between: all are in for a scarifying
shock of recognition.


Street Smart

By Stan Kefer

    LIAR'S POKER
    by Michael Lewis
    Norton; 249 pages; $18.95

     In 1984 a recent Princeton University graduate chatted up a
well-connected dinner partner and found himself a job at Salomon
Brothers, a prominent New York City investment house. Upon
entry, Michael Lewis was presented with a choice of two career
tracks. A commercial banker took deposits and made loans. He
was not, Lewis learned, "any more trouble than Dagwood Bumstead.
He had a wife, a station wagon, 2.2 children and a dog that
brought him his slippers." An investment banker, on the other
hand, was a "member of a master race of deal makers" who
"possessed vast, almost unimaginable talent and ambition. If he
had a dog, it snarled. He had two little red sports cars yet
wanted four." The trainee opted for avarice.

    In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe caricatured the
voracious men who work 16-hour days, earn outrageous salaries
that never keep pace with their desires, and consider
themselves "Masters of the Universe." But Wolfe was a tourist;
Lewis issues his catcalls from deep inside the jungle. At the
top of the food chain is Salomon's CEO, who presides with a
smooth amalgam of drive and hypocrisy, speaking loftily of
social issues and encouraging his staff to bilk the clients.
Below him are ranks of predators, among them a man so dedicated
to consumption that he is labeled "the Human Piranha"; a Briton
so chilly to his colleagues that he is called "Sir Sangfroid";
an irritable trader who throws a phone at his clerk every time
he passes; and a bond trader who thrives on global catastrophe.
Minutes after the Chernobyl disaster, this fellow advises, "Buy
potatoes." Lewis suddenly understands: "Of course. A cloud of
fallout would threaten European food and water supplies . . .
placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes."

    The most vulnerable species of all is the customer,
victimized by salesmen whose bonuses depend on how many
questionable securities they can unload. Retribution is the
rarest commodity on Wall Street, but in Liar's Poker it makes
several appearances. In 1986 the financial action begins to
leave Salomon Brothers for other concerns -- and so do many of
the best employees. The house that has thrived on hostile
takeovers itself becomes a target. Then comes the Crash of '87,
when "investors froze like deer in headlights" and hardened
professionals were "helpless as they watched their beloved
market die."

    Worst of all for Salomon Brothers, Michael Lewis, who was
earning $225,000 a year at the age of 27, overdosed on greed
and quit the firm to empty his journals into this brief, knowing
and hilarious volume. Alas, its disclosures are not likely to
be heeded. The Street provokes a book of revelations nearly
every year, but the con men, the customers and the crashes go
on. Aside from Lewis, hardly anyone seems to notice that Wall
Street has always been a thoroughfare with a river at one end
and a cemetery at the other.