Reinventing Richard Nixon: A Cultural History of an American Obsession (review)

Whatever they may achieve in office, presidents are powerful symbols. Theodore Roosevelt once observed that crowds turned out to hear him because they believed that "the president was their man and symbolized their government, and that they had a proprietary interest in him."¹ No president has surpassed Richard Nixon in the hold that he has maintained on the public psyche. A master of concealment, Nixon in his long career offered up a procession of façades to the public, a series of masks. But the relentlessness of his image craft only renewed the speculation about his true self. As a result, Nixon became a site of contest, a battleground, in which Americans played out grand themes about truth, trust, and democracy—from the Alger Hiss case to the White House and beyond.

In Reinventing Richard Nixon, Frick tries to probe deeper than the familiar empirical questions about what Nixon did in office and gain some insight into his enduring meaning. Examining a few political and journalistic sources, but many more artistic depictions—the president in film, literature, television, song, and so on—Frick concludes that Nixon represented nothing less than the American Dream, in both its idealized and corrupted forms. He ties Nixon's political success to the tendency among his supporters to view him, not inaccurately, as a classic American middle-class striver, who through hard work and perseverance, rose from obscurity to the pinnacle of politics. He ascribes the phenomenon of Nixon hatred—never has a president been more reviled by such a large and influential swath of the public—to the deep (and again, not inaccurate) suspicion that Nixon was a fraudulent avatar of the values that he purported to embody. The inevitable tension between these divergent interpretations of Nixon—organized around a set of issues central to Americans' sense of national identity—has ensured that Nixon, as Frick writes, "gets reinvented to explore key ideological pressure points in the American myth of self-reliant individualism" (102).

The trove of cultural products—high and low, famous and obscure—that feature Nixon is so rich that even a book devoted to the president's cultural meanings is unable to treat them all adequately. (Thomas Monsell, an admirably monomaniacal bibliographer, assembled a mind-bogglingly thorough, if not exhaustive, list of Nixon's cultural appearances; that book, weighing in at 239 pages, is already eleven years out of date.) Frick tames this monstrous haul of Nixoniana by having it both ways: Each chapter centers on just three or four major works of literature, film, or other art form, using them to spotlight a recurrent and important question that pervades other writings about Nixon as well. These readings are largely successful, offering insights into such works as Gore Vidal's Best Man (Boston, 1960) and Oliver Stone's 1989 film Born on the Fourth of July, based on Ron Kovic's autobiography of the same title (New York, 1976). Frick cannot resist salting his pages with short, sometimes sentence-long references to Nixon's appearance in children's cartoons, sitcoms, obscure poems, potboilers, and pop songs. If these mentions sometimes feel a tad excessive, Nixon buffs will delight in them. Indeed, Reinventing Richard Nixon is valuable merely for the cartoons, photographs, movie posters, and other visual depictions of Nixon that Frick includes—as well as for the bibliography, in which the section "Nixon on Television" runs to more than eight hilarious pages.

More literary than political or historical in its approach, Reinventing Richard Nixon has a loose chronological structure, ending with brief readings of how Nixon figured in debates about President Clinton's impeachment and the civil-liberties controversies of George W. Bush's administration. Pointing to baby gear for sale at the Nixon Library (now an official part of the National Archives), Frick predicts that the battle over Nixon will continue. Although Nixon probably will never rehabilitate his image—his poll numbers are about as low now as they...