Before the Fall.
by William Safire.
Doubleday. 704 pp. $12.50.
William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter and now a columnist for the New York Times, has published a memoir of his White House years that is personal, anecdotal, and episodic, as political memoirs tend to be. What sets Safire’s book apart from many others of its genre is that the author is so highly ambivalent toward the administration and the President he served. The book therefore provides evidence to support whatever opinions a reviewer may hold about Safire, Nixon, and Watergate: that Safire is presenting valuable information about hitherto underreported aspects of the Nixon administration, that his position in it prevented him from seeing its essence, or that he is still serving as its apologist; that Nixon’s fall is not fully explicable, that it stemmed from flaws in the polity as a whole, or that its roots lay in his personal pathologies. The book, like its author’s description of Richard Nixon, is a “layer cake”; it offers at least a little something for every taste.
Yet Safire’s account should not be simply dismissed—though it already has been by some critics—because of his attachment to the administration. And Safire’s memories are not entirely undigested. As for his position in the administration and his stance toward it, he was not an omniscient observer and is not a disinterested one; but he does give the reader more clues than some other political diarists have done about where to make the necessary correction’s. Safire, by his own telling, was a member of Nixon’s “outer inner circle.” On the one hand, he was a Nixon partisan and was trusted as such. He had resolved to work for Nixon as early as the Moscow kitchen debate, and he had been in the Nixon entourage from the beginning of the comeback in the mid-1960’s. He was neither the most liberal nor the most conservative member of the White House staff or its speechwriting team, and so he aroused no systematic ideological suspicion. He was prepared to act as a strong advocate of administration policies and on at least one occasion to engage in shady rumor-mongering on their behalf.
Furthermore, Safire had access to a good deal of inside information. Though his main job was to write speeches rather than give direct policy advice or oversee the details of practical politics he is persuasive in suggesting that President Nixon cared about speeches, that Nixon’s ideas and behavior in crafting them revealed something important about the man, and that the speeches were occasions for significant internal administration debate. Safire also participated in more general discussions of administration policy and strategy, and throughout them all he kept copious notes on what he saw and heard.
But there were limits to what he knew, and there also were limits to his partisanship. He was in the end not a counselor or an administrator but a writer, and one with an ironic cast of mind. More important, he—like some others in the administration, such as Leonard Garment and Daniel P. Moynihan—had temperamental if not ideological ties to the intellectuals, to the press, and to the whole establishment that evoked so much suspicion and distaste in many Nixon loyalists. His associations with this other world finally produced a great and palpable symbol of administration mistrust, a Kissinger-ordered tap on his telephone; but even apart from the tap, both his position and his habits of thought and association barred him from certain kinds of participation and knowledge.
These circumstances of knowledge and posture produce an account of the Nixon White House that tries with some conscientiousness to connect Watergate to the whole of the administration but that is generally at its most vivid when it is not explicitly engaged in that effort. Safire’s White House emerges as a place that was in many ways no better and no worse than its recent predecessors. First of all. Safire’s episodes argue, it was not simply a place run by martinets ordering mediocrities to crush imagined enemies in behall of no recognizable policy goals. The administration did not compare unfavorably with its predecessors in the talent and seriousness of those it recruited to the White House. Mediocrities there were, but people like Burns, Kissinger, Moynihan, and Shultz were not among them. And the men of substance were hardly disposed to surrender easily what they considered to be their proper role in Presidential decision-making. Moreover, as Safire tells it. such men were rewarded for their talents: Nixon took very seriously the views of persons he thought to be “hommes sérieux.”
It policy-making talent found rewards in the Nixon White House, it also seems that policy questions were debated explicitly and on their merits rather than as mere matters of court politics. Such debate look place over the issue of integration, over the New Federalism over the Family Assistance Plan, over wage-and-price controls. H. R. Haldeman. the keeper of the Presidential gate, encouraged it: so did Nixon himself. Moreover, Safire says it is too simple to conceive of the administration as a victim of “groupthink” and its pressures toward conformity; one’s status there did not stand or fall on one’s ability to reinforce the policy views of one’s team-mates.
Finally, the book contends, it is not true that the administration was without policy purpose or entirely without a redeeming sense of irony about itself. Policy seriousness in foreign affairs was overwhelmingly evident; and even in domestic affairs, the administration’s policy initiatives were eclectic but not unconsidered. As for irony, some of the humor Safire reports is a little lame—Spiro Agnew laughing to the point of tears at Bob Hope’s dirty jokes—but Garment’s observation that “Stonewalling doth not misprision make” isn’t bad at all.
Safire’s White House was also full of pathologies, large and small. Yet a good number of them are depressingly familiar to students of the modern American Presidency. There was indeed a court politics—Haldeman versus Rose Mary Woods, Haldeman versus Charles Colson, Kissinger versus almost everyone. There came to be a prima facie assumption that the motives of bureaucrats were at worst evil and at best nonexistent. There was the mistrust of the press and the growing penchant for secrecy, as it became clear how those on the outside who called for an “open administration” would actually reward one. There was the pervasive interest in the administration’s place in history, a place that seemed all the more important because Nixon’s place among his contemporaries was so unsatisfying. There was the denigration of political party as a vehicle for governing. And more generally, there was the practice of what Josiah Lee Auspitz has called “strategic politics,” of treating one’s political environment merely as something to be manipulated in behalf of one’s goals rather than as the locus of legitimate interests that have a right to be represented. At one point, Safire summarizes the principles that governed Nixon’s policy decisions:
- When circumstances change, change your policy.
- When the moment comes to jump—leapfrog over the position immediately ahead.
- Resolve impasses on narrow issues by raising the level to a comprehensive approach so that dickering can take place along a broad front.
- Never apologize or look back.
Such habits of policy-making, as well as many of the principles governing the Nixon political calculations, are those of the “strategic” politician; but Nixon was not the first to apply them.
_____________
These features of the Nixon White House had been a long time coming, and they cast perhaps less light on that particular administration than they do on the conditions of American political leadership in general. But there remains, of course, the central question of why the Nixon White House exaggerated these tendencies to the point of self-destruction; and Safire seems to find the answer—or the nearest he comes to an answer—in the Presidential character and the political circumstances that helped form it.
Nixon, as Safire describes him, showed in his ideas and his actions a powerful desire to avoid and transcend conventional politics. He had been well schooled in the techniques of both the old politics and the new: he knew about doing and calling in favors, about the mechanics of campaigning, about the nature and uses of news media. And he had a deep aversion to all of them—not only to the press but to campaigning and even to the party politics that he was capable of enjoying on isolated occasions. He could analyze all these phenomena shrewdly, but this analysis was singularly impersonal; he was capable of writing campaign memos in which he referred to himself in the third person, and he could dismiss public praise by pointing out that it was praise not of him but of the type of action he just happened to be taking.
Safire’s Nixon found his satisfaction in the things that seemed higher than conventional politics—in ideas, in the conduct of foreign affairs, in the judgment of history, in building a “new majority” based on what he saw to be consensual values rather than bloc or party interests. The political arena, by contrast, was for him a field of recurrent defeats at the hands of those who consistently refused him his due. It was a field in which the honest expression of self would result in further unjust wounds, in which the expression of one’s better instincts would only provide enemies with dangerous ammunition, in which a kind of loyalty to those who protected one against these dangers was a value to be upheld even at an exceptionally high price. Nixon was singularly drawn to the things he thought higher than practical politics and singularly struck by the low quality of practical politics. If he could be so unforgiving to his opponents in the fray, perhaps it was because he took so little satisfaction from the fray itself.
What Safire describes is a complex personality in many ways at odds with the current requirements for American political leadership. But he speaks of this personality not only as cause but as effect. If Nixon was easily wounded and incapable of making full recovery, it was also true that in his career he had been wounded more often and more severely than anyone else who finally attained the modern American Presidency. As Machiavelli would have it, Nixon’s enemies indeed incurred responsibility for the behavior of his Presidency when they committed the blunder of injuring such a man so deeply without killing him altogether.
And what of Safire’s own attitude toward what he has seen? It is not one likely to be pleasing to those who think that the main purpose of a Nixon administration memoir is to account for Water-gate. Safire talks about Watergate, denounces Watergate, and tells of the fears and hatreds that helped create it; but the effect of these chapters and passages is softened because they are surrounded by masses of other memories, memories of people and events that were pleasant and honorable rather than pathological and corrupt. The episodic character of many political memoirs is testimony to nothing other than the inherent limitations of their authors and the genre, but in this case the form serves an advocatory function: it suggests that Nixon and his administration cannot be judged simply and in light only of their worst acts.
One can of course respond to this suggestion by concluding that it is a deliberate distortion. Safire was after all a Nixon partisan, and he confesses that he was fully enough beguiled by his White House prerogatives. Or one can conclude that Satire’s distortion, though real, is not deliberate: his position limited what he knew, as a writer he took too seriously the sense of high purpose that the administration’s speeches sometimes expressed; and he was not only a significant repository of the decency that existed in the White House but perhaps misinterpreted others’ motives in light of his own. Or, finally, one can conclude that Safire is right—that in thinking about Nixon’s administration one is obliged to take into account not only Watergate but things unconnected and contradictory to it. Under ordinary circumstances, this minimal assertion might not sound much like partisan advocacy on. Satire’s part. In the case of Richard Nixon, its acceptance would already be a kind of partisan victory.
_____________
