Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends
and Teachers
By Paul E.
Gottfried
(ISI Books, 275 pages, $28)
It was an October 1992 dinner at Richard Nixon’s home in
Saddle River, New Jersey, and the room was spinning. The
conservative writer and academic Paul Gottfried was over a half
hour late to the gathering, due to heavy traffic on the Jersey
Turnpike and his own perennial tardiness. The 37th president of
the United States was unperturbed and graciously mixed his guest
a cocktail he said was a favorite of world leaders.
After swallowing nearly half the drink “in one great gulp,”
Gottfried recalls, “[u]ntil the time we were called to dinner
about twenty minutes later, I could barely rise from my chair.”
Only hours later, he continues, “did I feel sufficiently
confident to handle my car.” Richard Nixon had gotten Paul
Gottfried drunk.
Paul Gottfried has been at the center of some of the most bitter
and contentious battles within the conservative movement, often
on the losing side. Not that he considers those who have beaten
him winners in any meaningful sense — in his caustic assessments
of modern American conservatism, he has questioned whether the
mainstream movement has ever accomplished, much less conserved,
anything at all.
Yet for all his literary pugilism, Gottfried is a pleasant and
charming dinner companion very much at odds with the dour
stereotype of a “paleoconservative,” a term he coined himself.
While most of the standard paleocon versus neocon grudge matches
— Mel Bradford being passed over for a job at the National
Endowment of the Humanities, the Beltway right’s lack of
enthusiasm for Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns, Sam
Francis’ firing from the Washington Times — make an
appearance, this is the Paul Gottfried on display in his latest
book.
Encounters is partly a memoir, affectionately recalling
Gottfried’s upbringing and early life, and partly a remembrance
of the major intellectual and political figures with whom the
author was acquainted. Thus we read of Gottfried’s father, an
assimilated German-speaking Jewish furrier who was born in
Budapest and immigrated to the United States to escape the Nazis
in the 1930s. An FDR Democrat who “would have given his shirt
away in a fit of generosity,” the elder Gottfried “had nothing in
common with today’s feminized and media-acceptable males.”
“Needless to say,” Gottfried writes of his father, “he suffered
in no way from the politics of guilt. He refused to work with the
Fire Commission when he learned that it had established lower
standards for black applicants.” The father may have voted for
Roosevelt while the son preferred Robert Taft, but in this regard
the apple did not fall far from the tree.
Gottfried also profiles a remarkably diverse set of intellectuals
he has known: the social critic Christopher Lasch, the historian
John Lukacs, the radical libertarian economist Murray Rothbard,
and the conservative godfather Russell Kirk. Some of them are not
just friends but, despite disagreements, ideological
comrades-in-arms: Lukacs, Rothbard, and Kirk fit into this
category. Others were friends across a vast political and
philosophical divide: Herbert Marcuse of the infamous Frankfurt
School and Eugene Genovese, the self-described
Marxist-turned-Catholic neoconservative.
Marcuse was a professor of Gottfried’s at Yale and the author
acknowledges, with caveats, certain intellectual debts. “In
provocative reviews of my last two books the analytic philosopher
David Gordon has portrayed me as a right-wing exponent of the
Frankfurt School,” Gottfried writes. “I am what Adorno or Marcuse
would have been if they had been bourgeois conservatives,
applying their critical method to leftist targets.”
But Gottfried has practically nothing in common with the
Marcuse’s politics. Of left-wing academics he writes, “I found
their denials or whitewashing of the most gruesome tyranny in
modern history, equaled only by the crimes of the Third Reich, to
be inexplicably repulsive.”
In the chapter “Two Pugnacious Republicans,” we meet Gottfried’s
two most famous subjects: Nixon and his former speechwriter
Patrick Buchanan. He recalls his correspondence with the former
president and his aides:
At Nixon’s home, a lovely young lady then studying at Columbia,
Monica Crowley, and a writing assistant, John Taylor, were
usually on hand. Both corresponded with me, and Monica was
particularly kind in indicating how much she had learned from
my books and articles. Fortunately for her future career as a
Fox News commentator, Monica seems to have been unaffected by
anything I sent her boss.
Was Crowley’s boss a conservative? Gottfried answers yes and no:
“It was Nixon who started the ball rolling for affirmative
action… the size and reach of the American welfare state grew
more than it would under any of his presidential successors…
Nixon opened the door to relations with Maoist China, a monstrous
tyranny led by a mass murderer.”
Gottfried nevertheless detected in Nixon a conservative
understanding of human nature. In Gottfried’s telling, Nixon
“belonged to a tradition of pessimistic realism” that made him
“more conservative than the global democratic crusaders, whom the
anticommunist wing of his party happily embraced and often
misunderstood.” But in due course Nixon’s pupil Buchanan would
understand the liberalism of those crusaders, becoming a serious
“presidential candidate of the Old Right.”
Despite his obvious admiration for the
wordsmith-turned-candidate, Gottfried takes polite exception to
Buchanan’s position on Israel and some of his chosen
controversies. Gottfried gently describes “Pat’s tendency to move
from boldness into rashness, a quality of character that is one
of Aristotle’s vices.” And while an admirer of paleo fellow
travelers Kirk, Rothbard, and even Francis, he acknowledges they
may not have been an ideal set of advisers for Buchanan. What was
instead required, Gottfried writes, “was advice from someone who
would be able to get Pat lots of votes on Election Day.”
None of this is to say that Paul Gottfried is mellowing out. His
political advice isn’t likely to win lots of votes on Election
Day either. But Encounters is a valuable introduction to
the first self-described paleoconservative even for readers with
little interest in paleoconservatism.
