Nixon's Back—Again

Although he has been dead for more than a decade, Richard Nixon has not gone away. An endless stream of books about his life and times appears in the bookstores each year. Nixon is also something of a pop culture phenomenon, as he has been the focus of documentaries, movies, plays, and even an opera. Daniel Frick asks "why are we, as a nation, so particularly preoccupied with Richard Nixon?" (p. 13). It is a timely question. In December 2008, the movie Frost/Nixon opened nationwide to mostly strong reviews and earned some box office success. That Americans are willing in a time of economic distress to pay money to see a movie about a disgraced former president's interview with a British journalist is a testament to the endearing obsession the country has with its thirty-seventh president.

Ever since Nixon burst onto the national scene as a young congressman, Americans have grappled with this most complex figure, the man that Adlai Stevenson called the "man of many masks." There has been no shortage of authors who have tried to explain the Nixon phenomenon. Frick is the latest in the list, and he approaches his subject less from a historical perspective than from a cultural prism: "This book deals with representations of Nixon in popular culture, images that inspire some and appall others, yet which seem to fascinate us all—even to the point of obsession" (p. 6). The representations of Nixon are endless. Apart from the books and movies about Nixon, he shows up again and again, at times in the unlikeliest of places. In one amusing nugget, Frick relates the controversy over an episode of the children's television program Shining Time Station, part of the popular British Thomas the Tank Engine series. In the episode, a newcomer to the town, a Mr. Richouse, runs for mayor and tells the village that some of his enemies had questioned why he had entered the race (p. 202). The program aired on April 27, 1994, the day of Nixon's funeral. The PBS affiliates in New York and Washington D.C. issued an apology, but the airing of the program demonstrated that even in death Nixon remained the most controversial of figures.

Why Nixon still generates such passionate debate is a major focus of the work. Frick breaks down the Nixon of history, myth, and culture chapter by chapter. In the first chapter the author explores how Nixon attempted to present himself as the typical American self-made man—a modern "Ragged Dick" of Horatio Alger lore. Here Frick examines the long cherished ideal of upward mobility and shows that Nixon cast himself as a man who supposedly rose from humble origins. Nixon tried to show he was a self-made man in his first autobiography, Six Crises. Published in 1962, more than a year after his narrow defeat in the 1960 presidential election, the work dealt with a series of crises Nixon had faced as a public figure, beginning with the Algier Hiss case in 1948 and running through his loss in 1960. The work was ostensibly an effort by Nixon to show how he handled himself in times of duress, but Frick ably shows that Nixon had other motives. The memoir is littered with passages about Nixon's supposed humble origins, how his parents instilled in him old-fashioned values, and how he was the quintessential American—especially compared to his victorious rival, John F. Kennedy.

Frick continues to deconstruct Nixon's own image-making in chapter two. Frick turns to Nixon's second autobiography, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, and focuses on Nixon's explanation of Watergate. Nixon devoted over 400 pages to the scandal and produced a tortured and highly misleading account of the affair. Since the evidence against Nixon was overwhelming—the White House tapes proved his culpability in the cover-up—Nixon could not claim innocence. Instead Nixon pursued a different track. Watergate...