Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
Anthony Summers' Nixon biography is filled with charges of drug and domestic abuse, but it also sheds light on the final days of the Nixon presidency.
Sep 1, 2000 | Anthony Summers' new Richard Nixon biography "Arrogance of Power" is by no means the first, and certainly won't be the last, to serve up a decidedly unflattering portrait of the 37th president of the United States. Over the course of almost 500 pages, Summers recounts numerous episodes from Nixon's political life -- many familiar, others not. Yet, as is so often the case with hotly hyped works of popular history, attention has focused on three extremely controversial charges to the exclusion of most of the rest of what is contained in the book.
Of course, through no one's fault but his own, rumors and less than fully substantiated reports about Nixon's misdeeds are treated with much less skepticism than those of other occupants of the White House. Just think. Ever hear the one about how Nixon used the IRS to punish his enemies? Or maybe about how Nixon had a crew of goons break into a State Department whistleblower's psychiatrist's office? Or even the one about how Nixon sent a crew of burglars to break into DNC headquarters to spy on the Democrats? Well, you get the idea.
Summers' two most sensational charges are that Nixon beat his wife on at least one occasion in 1962 and during the last years of his presidency took the drug Dilantin (a drug used for a variety of ailments including seizures but subsequently discredited for psychiatric use), which he had not been prescribed by a doctor. But what of the charges? And how will they affect our collective understanding of Nixon and his presidency, if at all? A host of Nixon observers, historians, close friends and other committed critics expressed extreme skepticism about the charges of wife beating and drug abuse. Irwin Gellman, an historian who is writing a generally sympathetic, three-volume biography of Nixon told Salon that "people were giving him stuff all the time. But Jack Dreyfuss [the founder of the Dreyfuss Fund and near-missionary promoter of Dilantin, who now says he provided Nixon with the drug] was a big-time Republican contributor. Nixon wasn't going to embarrass himself by saying he's a flake. I assume he either threw them away or gave them to one of his staff."
Historian Stanley Kutler, who's written his own books on Nixon, finds the charges of wife-beating equally difficult to accept. Summers' evidence for this charge comes from John Sears, a former Nixon aide, who told Summers that Waller Taylor, a Nixon family lawyer, told him that Nixon had punched his wife in the aftermath of his 1962 defeat for the California governor's race. In other words, it's not exactly a firsthand account. "In any seminar in critical methodology, you learn you need evidence. This just doesn't even come close. If you read Haldeman's diaries and the conversations between him and Nixon, the evidence of emotional abuse [of Nixon's wife] is fairly well-documented. But I've never seen any evidence of wife beating."
Leonard Garment, Nixon's friend and former counsel, while not commenting on the specific charges, expressed a similarly low opinion of the book. "Look, politics is a porous profession. But I see stuff like this, this book, as just an example of the congealed hatred which still exists for this man."
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