Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image (review)

There has been no more controversial U.S. president than Richard M. Nixon. The debate surrounding him, however, is not limited to Watergate or to his participation in the Red Scare of the early 1950s. Rather, the real question surrounding Nixon is who he actually was. In Nixon's Shadow, historian David Greenberg attempts to unravel this mystery by tracing the development of the former president's public image from his days as Member of Congress from California's 12th district to his current incarnation as Yorba Linda specter. Greenberg argues that Nixon was a pioneer in establishing the importance of image craft in the postwar political era. The author manages to successfully avoid entering the polarizing 50-year debate over Nixon's personality, while maintaining that the debate itself influenced Nixon's image construction.

Greenberg's thorough recounting of Nixon's image, or how the president attempted to portray himself, and the image of Nixon, or how he was perceived by the public, is based on hundreds of memos, newspaper articles, letters to the editor, and television broadcasts involving Nixon administration officials, self-described Nixon-haters, and ordinary citizens. Through telling vignettes and reconstructed events, Greenberg is able to illustrate both the image Nixon desired to portray and the divided image received by the American people.

The book's chapters begin as a chronological development of Nixon's image, starting with the populist rhetoric he employed to win his first federal government seat. Greenberg notes that this populist persona also was employed throughout the early 1950s as evidenced by Nixon's Checkers speech. The author then shifts gears somewhat and begins to discuss Nixon's perceived image, relegating his 1960s years to what constitutes a passing mention.

The multiple portraits of Nixon—populist, news manager, conspirator, statesman, victim, and postmortem revisionist liberal—are all well-established in subsequent chapters; however, the weakest effort in the book is the sixth chapter where Greenberg attempts to illustrate Nixon as a madman by analyzing various psychobiographical works on Nixon. This Nixon image could have been more strongly argued if there had been more emphasis placed on evidence from administration testimonials and newspaper articles than on the few voices that are prominently heard from in the chapter.

Nixon's most indelible image, other than that of crook, is as a comeback artist. Greenberg repeatedly notes that every time Nixon appears to be defeated by his opponents he reincarnates himself as a supposedly "New Nixon," and this was true even in death. The author notes, "Nixon's gift for resurrecting himself, for staging comebacks—like a Phoenix, it was said, or Lazarus, or Dracula—was evident throughout his career" (338). At no other time did Nixon enjoy the approval of over 50 percent of the people in his efforts than immediately following his death in 1994, but even that honeymoon period, the author notes, was short-lived. It does illustrate Greenberg's point, though, that Nixon's lasting political legacy was his emphasis on image craft.

As a historian Greenberg is probably unaware of the extensive work done in rhetoric on image reconstruction, but his work on the development of Nixon's image is useful to both historians and rhetoricians. Nixon's ability to recast and reinvent himself so many times, even in death, provides a rich area for image reconstruction scholars to investigate the strategies that enabled Nixon to extend his political career further than many believed he should have. In an era where one electoral loss is extraordinarily difficult to overcome, and two losses are an apparent death knell for a political career, Nixon's ability to resurrect himself through the use of image craft is not simply a matter of historical fascination, but of contemporary importance as well.