We are living in Nixonland

by Jerome Clark

Recently, I read Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008). In it Perlstein argues that the American politics that now define us – a Republican-driven strategy of cynicism, division, manipulation, mendacity, and lawlessness by those in power – is Richard Nixon’s special creation, born of his warped, paranoid personality, his legacy to all of the rest of us. We now live, Perlstein states, in Nixonland. Indeed, the parallels he cites are striking and disturbing. There’s a reason Keith Olbermann mentions it from time to time.

Last night, in the late George V. Higgins’s The Friends of Richard Nixon (1975), I came upon the following words, written more than three decades before Perlstein’s book was published. They may remind you of a certain administration which recently held the highest office in the land and of a party that seeks to rule again.

[Watergate conspirator] Jeb Stuart Magruder’s kind of loyalty … was grounded in a clear-eyed, fresh-faced, well-barbered, naïve and mean assurance that by birth, education, or the whim of the electorate, those who worked for Richard Nixon had been dispensed from all obligations and responsibilities posed by law, ethics or scruples, upon the sole condition precedent that they vow always to act in a higher order of patriotism: loyalty to each other, for the greater honor and glory of Richard M. Nixon.

It was that which made them such devastatingly effective saboteurs of the governmental system: they were not conscious of doing wrong, because, like the corrupt scavengers who succeeded the original Knights of Malta, they thought they had a deed in perpetuity to this country, and an absolutist’s right to do anything they pleased with it. When outrage was the product of their behavior, it was nothing to fuel concern. [Nixon press secretary] Ron Ziegler was calm in receipt of angry, and correct, assertions that he had lied to the press, because he thought he had a right – indeed, an occupational duty – to lie to the press. (Ziegler, encountering a Senator’s press secretary one evening at a reception, remarked [on] the identity of their jobs, which, he said, consisted of “lying to the reporters.” The Senator’s man was both irritated and incredulous, and replied, rather shortly, that he did no such thing. “Oh, come on,” Ziegler said, smiling, “of course you do. We all do.” No point in saying: “No comment,” when you have the option of a deliberate falsehood.)