Nixon's the One

David Greenberg. Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image. New York: Norton, 2003. 384 pp. Notes and index. $26.95.

Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image defies easy description. While not strictly a political history, it masterfully analyzes the major political developments of postwar America. While not a Nixon biography, it offers a fresh perspective on Nixon's career. And while not strictly a cultural history, it provides a variety of insights about important postwar cultural patterns, such as American society's conspiratorial bent, obsession with personality, and transformed media. By combining elements from all three approaches, author David Greenberg builds a convincing case that understanding Nixon's career—or at least the various images that he projected during that career—represents an unequaled opportunity to understand U.S. political culture after World War II.

Nixon's Shadow consists of eight thematically organized chapters, which proceed in a generally chronological fashion and analyze the differing images of Nixon among postwar conservatives, 1950s liberals, New Left radicals, the Washington press corps, Nixon loyalists, psychobiographers, the foreign policy establishment, and historians. Each of these chapters exists as a discrete unit, and several make important historiographical contributions in and of themselves. In his examination of Nixon's image among California conservatives, for instance, Greenberg challenges the conventional wisdom that the marriage between conservatism and right-wing populism dates from George Wallace's presidential bids of 1964 and 1968, or perhaps Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign. ¹ Greenberg notes that Nixon based his first successful campaign, in which he ousted liberal Democratic congressman Jerry Voorhis, less on anti-communism than on an appeal to the "forgotten man," previewing the "Silent Majority" tactic that he would employ as president a quarter century later.

Nixon's Shadow thus contends that while impressive scholarship has occurred on ultra-conservative activists—the sort of figures brilliantly detailed in Rick Perlstein's analysis of the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign—historians of postwar conservatism have failed to devote sufficient attention to other branches of the conservative coalition. ² As a result, insufficient attention has come to "mainstream, middling conservatives"—the businessmen, housewives, realtors, shopkeepers, and bankers that formed the core of Nixon's early supporters (p. 7).

We normally do not recall Nixon as a populist everyman, and for good reason: the book includes a delightful 1960s photograph of Nixon attempting to look Kennedy-esque by walking the beach—but instead appearing foolish with his stiff gait and wing-tipped shoes. Yet Nixon during his early tenure in Congress seemed to personify the generation of young veterans determined to make their way in a postwar, business-friendly, and culturally conservative America. As the Washington Times-Herald noted in 1947, Nixon "looks like the boy who lived down the block from all of us; he's as typically American as Thanksgiving" (p. 28). While Greenberg concedes that first anti-communism and later race strengthened Nixon's populist image, he provides a needed corrective to the debate about the origins of right-wing populism, reminding us that the ideology succeeded at least in part because conservatives utilized it to articulate a positive as well as a negative image. ³

Greenberg also cuts against the historiographical grain in taking on historians such as Joan Hoff, who authored an influential revisionist portrayal of Nixon as a liberal on some domestic issues. ⁴ Few in 1972 ever would have guessed that two decades later a significant component of the academic community would view Nixon as left of center: shortly after Nixon's election, his future attorney general, John Mitchell, rejoiced, "This country is going so far to the right you won't recognize it" (p. 308). Nixon discovered that limits existed to how far right he could move, however, especially before his re-election campaign in 1972. Many federal bureaucrats, whose service began during the Kennedy or Johnson administrations, remained in place, and remained as committed to the activist agenda of the 1960s as they had...