Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man by Garry Wills
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This may well be the ultimate book on Nixon and his rise to power. However, I shan't pass judgment until I've read his autobiographical, Six Crises. While Perlstein's Nixonland is an insightful overview of the historical milieu that gave rise to Nixon, Wills' book explores not only the historical events that landed this self-made man in the White House, but the waves of American philosophical thought that lead to his rise. To put it more succinctly, Perlstein's book is an appetizer to Wills' main course. I highly recommend that the books be read in succession.

Per Wills, the long march to Nixon began at the turn of the 20th century as Woodrow Wilson and a succession of free market thinkers ratcheted up the liberal -- yes, I said liberal -- philosophy of individualism that gave rise to the robber barons of the previous century. It was a mode of thought that guided not only the economic life of the country, but its spiritual as well, making work and enterprise a religious endeavor. Morality could be measured by material success. Virtue lead to hard work which lead to success which lead to material wealth, rendering a man's inner morality visible. It was a very simple mantra, as Wills points out many times, straight out of Horatio Alger. Indeed, the rise of Nixon may well have been the last gasp of that mantra before its collapse into a coma where it has remained for some 40 years, twitching from time to time (Reagan, Gingrich, Tea Party), but never truly awakening before being knocked cold again by another damn recession.

The lid came off the middle class in the '60s, and Nixon was the silent majority's answer to putting it back on. We all know where that lid wound up, even though Wills, while writing the book, did not. Formerly invisible factions - blacks, women, college students -- were now visible, and the white working class were appalled at having their mores challenged in the streets by "non-earners." In 1968, George Wallace came along, and had his rather vocal following (is it me or is Ron Paul our modern day George Wallace?), scaring the bejesus out the GOP establishment who were afraid the Democrat/3rd Party man could swipe a good chunk of their base. Nixon, despite having a loser label on his head, having lost the 1960 Presidential race and the California Governor's race 2 years later ("You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more," he told a flock of reporters who had dogged him throughout the latter campaign), Nixon swooped-in to take the nomination in Miami from Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, and George Romney.

He and Agnew went to DC promising law and order, uh, for everyone else anyway. How could such a straight and narrow Quaker (he formed a club at Whittier College called the Orthogonian, or Right Angles), go off the rails the way he did. Wills gives some pretty strong clues in this book. Hint- it was not just Nixon that got us that point, but the nation as a whole.

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