Nixon with every flaw exposed and excused

A Life in Full

By Conrad Black

Public Affairs. $40

Reviewed by Jack Ayer

For The Inquirer

One quality Richard Nixon shares with his biographer, Conrad Black: Neither has suffered anywhere near as much punishment as his adversaries would have wished. Nixon, for his part, had the pardon power in his corner. Black, though a (former) press baron, hasn't been quite so well protected: In July a jury found him guilty of four charges relating to criminal fraud.

The courtroom tumult hasn't prevented Black from producing a 1,059-page biography entitled

Richard Nixon: A Life in Full

- composed, as he acknowledges, "in very distracting circumstances." As a subject for Black, Nixon is clearly a felicitous choice, and the resonance goes far deeper than mere criminality. Indeed, Black seems finely attuned to all the things that make so many people uncomfortable with Nixon the person: his insecurity, his bitterness, his sense of isolation, his near-manic drive to be treated as a man of gravitas.

Black presents his biography as a work of scholarship. There's no reason to doubt that he believes it is such, and there's no percentage in puncturing a rich and powerful man's vain pretensions. But a quick skim of the footnotes makes it clear that he doesn't really understand what the responsibilities of scholarship entail. At an eyeball guess, I'd say that half, perhaps more, of his citations go to published narrative sources (one curious oversight: I find no reference to Edward Jay Epstein, whose debunking of Woodward/Bernstein offers a durable insight into the Nixon drama). Citations of "original" sources seem to be mostly of published versions.

Still, it has to be conceded that Black touches upon almost everything one could hope for (and a lot more: Black is easily sucker-punched by digression). We get China and Watergate, Checkers and Alger Hiss, Dwight Eisenhower and Rosemary Woods; we get Nixon the statesman and Nixon the isolated loner. Black seems impelled to touch on all (well, most) of the dark episodes in the Nixon chronicle (one noteworthy near-exception: Black blows off the Cambodian bombing - perhaps the most discreditable episode in Nixon's long career - as if it were a case of the presidential motorcade's getting a traffic ticket on the way to National Airport).

And bully for Black. Nixon is indeed a bundle of contradictions. Nixon was a daring, original, imaginative public figure, but also the first American politician to make a success as a populist conservative. Nixon was the first to understand - no doubt because he felt them so strongly himself - how to mobilize our insecurities and resentments. Until Nixon, nobody - well, perhaps nobody since William Henry Harrison - had done so much to coarsen the texture of American political life.

But what is missing from Black's account is so much as the slightest hint of detachment or irony. Black doesn't explain Nixon; he explains him away. None of the apparent contradictions are important: They are all either illusory or excusable. Thus Nixon's style is not paranoia, but "a realistic sense of his limitations and the caprices of electoral life." So too, Nixon was "a cynic, certainly. This came from his defensive and pessimistic nature" - but also "because he was so accustomed to struggle and betrayal and because of his resentment of the falsely pious." Even the vaunted "smoking gun" - the tape recording of July 23, 1972, in which Nixon seems to countenance the obstruction of justice - counts as no more than "very embarrassing," not really an impeachable offense.

Black is also particularly good at the "you're another" argument - Nixon was kept out of an important school position, but so was Franklin Roosevelt. If Nixon's finances were questionable, Eisenhower's were worse. Grant that Nixon made "crude slurs" against Jews; so did Harry S. Truman. So in sum, Nixon may have had his little quirks but they were all imposed on him by knaves and fools. The aggregate is what must rank as one of the oddest summaries for any career: "not a uniquely sleazy president, but was treated as one."

The irony is that there is probably something to a good many of these judgments. But in Black's hands, there is no sense of wonder, no marveling at the glorious inconsistencies, the spectacle of human contradiction. What we have here, rather, is not so much a "work of scholarship" as a lawyer's brief - the kind of thing you put together for a hearing on sentencing after a felony conviction. The result is that Black has achieved the near-impossible: He's succeeded in making Richard Nixon boring.

Black is due back in court for his own sentencing on Friday. His lawyer says he will appeal.