Garry Wills' response to this most recent of the seven volumes Richard Nixon has penned since being pushed out of the White House sixteen years ago is moral outrage. For Wills, Nixon Agonistes has become Nixon Thersites. He has emerged, finally, as an analogue to the ignoble warrior in the Iliad, the "shameless person par excellence." Wills writes of Thersites that since nothing could shut hum up in council, Odysseus finally had to punch him into silence. "So here," Wills continues, "like Thersites, comes Richard Nixon to complain about his enemies' too wristy pummeling.”
But for all of Wills indignation, by again invoking comparisons to classics he elevates not only the book he decries but also, inevitably, the man who authored it. In fact, Wills reflects (as he fuels) the American proclivity toward imaging Nixon as a prince of darkness who repeatedly commits evil and in consequently banished, but who then through wile and will reenters the realm of American politics - only to begin the cycle again.
But Nixon's In the Arena suggests a different kind of truth, one that conjures not ancient warriors from tragic tales but rather late twentieth century contemporaries who, for whatever constellation of reasons, are crippled by their own neuroses. In other words, the man who wrote this memoir brings to my mind not Homer but Freud.
Nixon implies that this may be his last book - the final selection, a rumination on old age, is titled "Twilight" - which makes it the more remarkable that In the Arena should be so odd a construction and amalgam. For this volume is nothing if not strange, a disjointed collection of no fewer than forty essays (to call them chapters would be to suggest a collective logic that is not in evidence) that seems to leave only the sexual stone unturned (money and death are covered), ricocheting back and forth between rage and regret on the one hand and love and longing on the other.
For all its queerness, however - in fact, because of it - this is Nixon's most heartfelt testimony. It reveals the weltanschauung of a man who, at nearly four score years, is as close as the will ever come to enjoying what his Quaker grandmother would have called "peace at the center." To be sure, Nixon uses In the Arena to expound yet again on Watergate (in ways that have driven reviewers nuts), and we are treated one more time to his views on East-West relations (essentially unchanged in spite of the changes). What is novel here, and what evokes a peculiar fascination, are the ramblings on everything else - on religion and wealth, purpose and struggle, reading and conversation, thinking and memory, time and purpose, tension and illness, power and risk, privacy and silence friends and enemies, Babe and Pat.
All of this certainly instructs on Richard Nixon. But here is the real point: it also speaks to us about ourselves. For as we witness this senior citizen of dubious repute making yet another comeback, we are obliged finally to face a truth that many of us have preferred to avoid: We are longtime collaborators. For more than forty years Nixon-in-the-Box has kept popping back up because we have permitted it. No matter the crisis, scandal, or defeat, after a time in hiding Nixon on tries to rejoin the group. And sooner or later he does, his respectability slowly but certainly restored by the tube.
This raises two key
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