When Esquire magazine commissioned an article from Garry Wills about Richard Nixon and the New Hampshire primary—the opening salvo of the 1968 presidential election campaign— the assumption was that this would be a requiem for a has-been who had dictated his own political obituary to reporters six years earlier, at the close of his failed attempt to win the California governorship.
Yet less than one year later, when Nixon stood on the steps of the Capitol to take the oath of office, there was a sense of inevitability that he should become president at that fraught moment in U. S. history.
One of the points Wills stresses in Nixon Agonistes is that it’s a fallacy to believe that the lumbering, flawed American political process churns out, every four years, the best man (and it has always been a man so far). It would be more accurate, Wills maintains, to say that it serves up the most appropriate for a given moment. And this was never so true, in his view, as in 1968. As he writes in his Preface, “What is best and weakest in America goes out to reciprocating strengths and deficiencies in Richard Nixon.”
A second inevitability, in retrospect, is that one article assignment would lead to more, and these, in turn—given that Wills’s expertise extends to a deep-rooted knowledge of the origins of American political philosophy—would result in this book.
Nixon Agonistes stands out in the genre of books that report on political campaigns—a genre that blossomed in the wake of the success of T. H. White’s Making of the President 1960. Less than a third of its six hundred pages are devoted to that. And although Wills is an insightful, observant reporter, it is not this that gives this book its continued relevance.
Instead, the importance of this book lies in the interpretive framework Wills constructs for his deeper analysis. Much of what he writes in these chapters remains true of American society.
This framework views the American political experiment as a market, or rather an interplay of four markets—moral (personified by Ralph Waldo Emerson), economic (Adam Smith), intellectual (John Stuart Mill), and political (Woodrow Wilson). The underlying philosophy of these intersecting markets is, Wills writes, classic liberalism. For all the surface conflict between left and right in the American political spectrum, the debates are framed in terms that originate here, assumptions often unexamined.
Yet classic liberalism, which Wills explains as a combination of the political philosophy of John Locke and the economic views of Adam Smith, has broken into two branches, with those who continue to uphold Smith finding themselves on the right, where their strange bedfellows tend to authoritarian views, while students of Locke tend to cluster on the left. The last intellectual to fully unite both strands was John Stuart Mill. Even Woodrow Wilson was, in his time, an anachronism.
Yet it was Wilson who was Nixon’s model—something Nixon never hid and which Wills takes seriously. But if Wilson was already, in his time, a throwback to an earlier political philosophy, what does that make Nixon? For Wills, “Nixon’s victory was the nation’s concession of defeat, an admission that we have no politics left but the old individualism, a web of myths that have lost their magic.” Wills asks in the title of the book’s final chapter whether Nixon is not the last liberal. By the way, it’s important to recognize that, in addition to writing of “classic liberalism,” at times, Wills uses the term “liberal” in the way it’s commonly used in American political discourse, for instance, in his criticism of Arthur Schlesinger and other academics.
For all the strength of Wills’s analysis, suggesting that Nixon is the last liberal demonstrates the limits of punditry. Like Nixon’s election, this book is a product of its historical moment. Mired in an unwinnable war, riven by domestic turbulence, it truly seemed that—in the memorable phrase of Yeats that Wills used for the title of his second chapter—the center could not hold.
For Wills, classic liberalism, for all its accomplishments, was in terminal decline. The emphasis on individual achievement, inextricably wedded to emulation; the dream of getting ahead balanced by the fear of falling behind had created what he at one point calls “moral monsters.”The crisis of the self-made man Wills diagnoses in the subtitle of his book is not only Nixon but the mainstream American formed by Horatio Alger, Emerson, and Peale. He laments that “[t]here is, in our legends, no heroism of the office clerk, no stable industrial ‘peasantry’ of the men who actually make the system work.” His prescription is that the “facts of community life” be integrated into America’s political theory.
A half-century later, any faltering step in this direction is still decried as “collectivist,” and our political system seems even more in need of an overhaul than it did in 1968, placed in office in 2016, a caricature of Nixon’s worst traits and impulses. The American myth is nothing if not resilient. ( )

This is one of the most searing analyses I have read of Richard Nixon. An equal assessment might be when Hunter S. Thompson said in 1994 that Nixon was the death of the American Dream and that his body should be burned in a trash bin. This coarse yet logical analysis of the 'most artificial character in politics' also serves as a greater indictment of the contradictions of classical liberalism, as well as a view of the state of American society in the late 1960s, and how a Richard Nixon could come to power at all.

The first part of the book is a more biographical analysis. His Quaker upbringing. His saintly mother, temperamental father, his brothers dying young. Early senatorial career and elections, uniquely vicious. His resentment of the entrenched Northeastern power structures, later blossoming into conspiracies of the liberal elite, soldiers in the university system. His early struggles for power against Eisenhower, whom he resented, and later outmaneuvered in that brilliant display of political whoring known as the 'Checkers speech'.

The summa of Nixon's arguments includes not only resentment, but also the idea of classical liberalism - not to be confused with modern social liberalism. In today's world, the free hand of the market as seen in classical liberalism can be a strong and powerful force, but it does not know what it does, nor can it foresee what harm is causes. We see free exchange of moral ideas, with began with Ralph Waldo Emerson and confused contradiction of the university system then and the 'free media' now. Economic classical liberalism which began with John Stuart Mill and presently exists through the profane incarnations of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand. And finally, the political and moral liberalism of Woodrow Wilson, Nixon's idol of foreign policy. Although the author then did not know of Nixon's secret peaces, bombings, and reconciliations with Mao, he could, strangely enough, be characterized as both a brutal realist and a woolly idealist.

Yet it was not necessarily these elements which led to the primary cause of his downfall. Nixon was the one with his hand caught in the cookie jar, spying on too many people. His paranoia might have got the better of him then. But executive privilege has existed long before him, and long after. And the contradictory elements of his policy, and those who helped him carry it out, continued to exist long after, in Reagan's movie-star presidency, the deranged crusades of Bush administration, in Fox News, in Romney and the Tea Party as a pale, geriatric, age-spotted imitation of the previous. This pernicious blend of characteristics continues because there is a large segment of the population which thirsts for them. It still believes in the primacy of the market, of economic social Darwinism, of resentment against a previous ruling elite.

We have seen the enemy, and he is us. ( )

Wills convincingly argues for the view that Nixon was really a liberal in the modern political sense. His approach to Nixon, based on this premise, is both enlightening and intelligent. Richard Nixon was certainly a national enigma, our president of polarization--I personally saw that happen in my family. Considering the policies initiated by Nixon; for example, going off the gold standard, expanding major government programs like the EPA, and opening ties to Red China, the view of Nixon as a liberal is not unreasonable. Wills absolutely nailed Nixon's character, and not unsympathetically. He noted, for instance, that Nixon revered Woodrow Wilson, the only Democrat whose picture hung in Nixon's oval office. Although Nixon was "not a convincing moralist," Wills explained, he was nonetheless (like Wilson) a moralist by conviction: "He does not woo the Forgotten American cynically; he agrees with the silent majority." The result is an unbiased portrait that has the virtue of avoiding some of the excesses of Nixon's many detractors. Combined with his always excellent prose this book is one of Wills' best and in my experience one of the best analyses of Richard Nixon. ( )

This is a reissuing of Will's pioneering work of political psychology, the examination of perhaps the most interesting figure (in a host of different ways) of late 20th century American politics. But Nixon really requires the talents of a Euripides or a Shakespeare.

2/12/23