WASHINGTON — One of my favorite controversialists is back, Bob
Woodward with his sidekick Carl Bernstein. Sunday in the
Washington Post they wrote that Richard Nixon was more
hideous than we have heretofore known. The 37th President conducted
five wars while in office, according to the boys, and those do not
even include his minor fracases, the Cold War against the Soviet
Union and the Vietnam War.
I say Woodward is a controversialist. You might recall his
controversial “interview” with CIA Director Bill Casey conducted on
Bill’s deathbed when no one was watching. It made it into
Woodward’s book Veil, saving its author from the
embarrassment of admitting that Bill had kept Woodward utterly in
the dark about Iran-Contra and so much else during their more
conventional interviews earlier. This time Woodward somehow
circumvented Bill’s CIA guards, his doctors and nurses, his wife
and daughter — one of whom was in the hospital room at all times
— to get his incomparable interview. Moreover, Bill had completely
lost the power of speech, his face being a mask of terrible
deformity, as his friend Bert Jolis reported within days of the
so-called interview. Woodward overcame every hurdle to extract from
the dying man a confession of involvement in Iran-Contra about
which Woodward knew nothing while writing the book. Possibly, he
had disguised himself in Bill’s hospital room as a cockroach.
So Woodward has returned and on the very same weekend when I was
huffing and puffing my way past page 353 of Robert A. Caro’s new
714-page treatment of Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Passage of
Power. Despite the pious tosh that you hear from the
enthusiasts of dying Liberalism, the book is a shabbily written
monstrosity, but not without its usefulness.
To begin with, Caro’s sentences judder along as though they were
translated — badly translated — from the original German. His
endnotes are so chaotic as to be useless to casual readers or even
to scholars. Many of them are from secondary sources. For instance,
Caro speaks of Camelot as though John F. Kennedy’s White House was
always called Camelot. Actually the administration did not receive
the appellation until after the President’s assassination. Then a
distraught Jacqueline Kennedy arranged an interview with the
journalist Theodore White and therein conjured up Camelot for
future generations. If readers are unaware of this they can be
excused, for Caro includes no citation. What exactly he thinks is
unknown. Later he cites “détente” so vaguely that he might be
referring to a policy of the New Frontier, though it was a policy
of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon — again he gives us no
endnote. I really do not know what Caro knows either about Camelot
or détente.
Richard Nixon, that name again. The reminder of him provokes a
fugitive thought: how would Woodward, or for that matter Caro,
compare Nixon and Johnson. Nixon labored to end the war that John
Kennedy created and Lyndon Johnson bungled at massive expense in
lives and treasure. Nixon was on track to save South Vietnam before
he was driven from office. Nixon did save the state of Israel even
as he was fighting off impeachment. He and Kissinger played the
Soviet Union and China like a Stradivarius, ending the performance
with China as a virtual ally. All and all, it was not a bad
record.
Then there is Johnson. Among Caro’s many infelicities, lazy
research is not one of them. He faithfully records how President
Johnson turned the purchase of a $17,500 radio station into a vast
media fortune through the manipulation of such federal agencies as
the FCC. By middle age he, a lifelong government employee, was a
millionaire. He stole his first election — in high school! — his
Senate seat in 1948, and the state of Texas for his running mate in
1960. That last race being against Nixon, who would not contest the
contest. Then there is his psychological makeup. He was insecure,
unstable, often a wreck. As vice president he was an emotional ruin
from run-ins with the Kennedys until that sad day in Dallas when,
in a car ahead of him, John Kennedy was shot.
Almost eerily within minutes of the President’s death Johnson
underwent a kind of emotional epiphany, rising to his former bluff,
albeit phony, self. Very rudely within a half hour of Bob Kennedy’s
discovery of his brother’s death President Johnson called to
conduct business. The insensitivity is shocking.
Yet ever since Nixon was driven from office we have been led to
believe Nixon was squirrely and a threat to our democratic ways,
and Johnson was… well, what was Johnson? We are on the road to
national bankruptcy because of his poorly funded policies today. I
say, wherever he is, bring back Nixon. Nixon’s the one.
