TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=89TT2881> <title> Nov. 06, 1989: Books </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989 Nov. 06, 1989 The Big Break </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> BOOKS, Page 100 Martyr or Machiavelli? </hdr><body> By Laurence I. Barrett <qt> <l>NIXON: THE TRIUMPH OF A POLITICIAN, 1962-1972</l> <l>by Stephen E. Ambrose</l> <l>Simon & Schuster; 736 pages; $24.95</l> </qt> <qt> <l>RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON: THE RISE OF AN AMERICAN POLITICIAN</l> <l>by Roger Morris</l> <l>Henry Holt; 1,005 pages; $29.95</l> </qt> 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 <qt> <l>FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM</l> <l>by Umberto Eco;</l> <l>Translated by William Weaver</l> <l>Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 641 pages; $22.95</l> </qt> 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 <qt> <l>LIAR'S POKER</l> <l>by Michael Lewis</l> <l>Norton; 249 pages; $18.95</l> </qt> 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. </body></article> </text>