TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/110689/p100

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 12KB | 231 lines

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.