scoundrel: _Nixon's Shadow_

[pynchonoid]

A Scoundrel for All Seasons

Richard Nixon still manages to evoke a wide range of
reactions. The strength of Nixon's Shadow by David
Greenberg is that we see exactly why Nixon continues
to arouse such a variety of emotions in people.
Greenberg surveys the perceptions of Nixon, from the
dishonored President to the international statesman
who ushered in the era of détente between East and
West. 

[...] Nixon's career in politics began with his
ultra-conservative smears of opponent Jerry Voorhis,
Democratic Congressman from California. It continued
with his pursuit of State Department official Alger
Hiss when Nixon took Voorhis's seat on the House
Un-American Activities Committee. With Nixon's
progress and the growth of his public profile, his
sights became fixed on a seat in the Senate. His
election to the Senate resulted from his victory over
ardent New Deal Democrat and friend of Eleanor
Roosevelt, Helen Gahagan Douglas. As with Voorhis,
Nixon skillfully misrepresented Douglas as soft on
Communism. From this period dates the liberal anger
and distrust of Nixon which took root and became
firmly entrenched among the intellectual
establishment. This, then, became the dominant
critique of Richard Nixon throughout the 1950s and
early 1960s. Standing as Democratic candidate for
President in 1956, Adlai Stevenson delivered a
hard-hitting speech penned by John Kenneth Galbraith
which described a future of "innuendo, the poison pen,
the anonymous phone call, and the hustling, pushing,
shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to
win" as "Nixonland."

[...] Watergate, however, only served to confirm what
many New Leftists had long suspected about the
intrusion of the state into the lives of its citizens.
[...] In the movie The Parallax View (1974) and
Missing (1982), images of Nixon appear as tokens of
dishonesty and as symbols of the sabotage of
democracy.

[...] The brilliance of Greenberg's book is that he
shows that Nixon has just as wide a recognition among
people of all generations--but that there is no
universally acknowledged view of Nixon.

Even among those who view Nixon with contempt, opinion
varies between those who see him as a dark conspirator
and those who view him as a tragic, almost bumbling
figure out of his depth on so many issues. And yet of
all post-war Presidents, Kennedy and Nixon share their
place in the hall of fame because of the vast cultural
industries that have been built around them. In the
case of Kennedy, an endless supply of books and films
offer different takes on the assassination; in the
case of Nixon, the conspiracy is Watergate. Both
figures often serve to show the broader context in
which stories are taking place, with Kennedy in power
during the early sixties in an era all together more
innocent and full of hope; Nixon's presence, as
Greenberg demonstrates, usually denotes a more cynical
or depressing period. At the outset of his book,
Greenberg makes the point that Nixon plays a key part
in Ang Lee's 1997 movie, The Ice Storm, with
references to Watergate and Nixon's administration
throughout the film.

[...] the crime film Best Seller, starring James Woods
and Brian Dennehy, begins with a robbery in 1972 where
the criminals use a vehicle resembling a Nixon
Presidential campaign van and wear Nixon masks.
Greenberg firmly locates this within the popular image
of the Nixon mask and its various uses, by protestors,
and fictional and real criminals alike. The obvious
irony, as Greenberg points out, is that the mask is of
a man who appears to be wearing a mask already.

These cultural references are many and varied. In a
very bizarre example, Greenberg recounts a scene from
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), set in
the distant future. The Vulcan, Mr. Spock, tries to
convince the human Captain Kirk, commander of the
Starship Enterprise, to make peace with the Klingon
Empire, long-time enemies of the Earth and its allies.
However, Kirk has spent his career fighting the
Klingons. "There is an old Vulcan proverb," Spock
says, "Only Nixon could go to China." [...] 

...read it all: 
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=88871094733494

David Greenberg. Nixon's Shadow: The History of an
Image.  New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. xxxii + 460 pp.
Index, bibliography, illustrations.  $26.95 (cloth),
ISBN 0-393-04896-9 .

Reviewed by: Raj Jethwa, Policy Officer, Youth and
Regional Affairs, Trades Union Congress, London.
Published by: H-USA (August, 2004)



=====
http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"


		
_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Shop for Back-to-School deals on Yahoo! Shopping.
http://shopping.yahoo.com/backtoschool