Jonathan Schell: The Time of Illusion: An Historical and Reflective Account of the Nixon Era. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
Upon being told that an unadmired acquaintance was a self-made man, Oscar Levant asked, “Who else would have helped?” This is the dilemma of Machiavelli’s prince: Having created a world of effectual truth, with yourself as its god, how do you know you didn’t botch the job? And if you did, will your confederates help you to recoup, or leave you to twist in the wind? Jonathan Schell’s book provides an American object lesson on a Machiavellian moment, the self-construction and deconstruction of Richard Nixon.
Given its publication almost immediately after the much-encouraged retirement of our Puritan Alcibiades, The Time of Illusion is remarkably penetrating. But it also bears the marks of the heated political atmosphere of the time, and some of the niaiseries one expects from a staff writer for The New Yorker. The argument can now be strengthened in the revisiting, decades later.
Problem: As Machiavelli sees, you can’t be an executive unless you can execute, in the several senses of that word. In a government with an extensive bureaucracy (in America, the post-New Deal government), how can any chief executive actually govern his own branch of government? The much-remarked Nixonian feelings of impotence, persecution, etc. had a real structural foundation. The even more-remarked Nixonian tactics of evasion and deception have the same foundation—or rather, the foundation lends itself to those tactics, practices them itself and invites their practice in others, as countermeasures. To the maxim ‘Tory men, liberal measures’ Nixon added McLuhanite (or pop-Machiavellian) means. Nixon wanted simultaneously to remedy, and to take advantage of, the statist labyrinth—rein in Leviathan and to retreat into its belly.
As far as I can tell, in extreme cases Nixonian problems are only soluble by the route actually taken: Congressional investigation, threat of impeachment. This is a messy and exhausting process, but that’s self-government for you. The Whigs were right: Democracy and distrust go together. Democrats are supposed to harbor “a mistrust of all politicians” (317). When new, technical means of communication—and therefore of deception—are invented, citizens had better figure out how to abuse them, the better to guard themselves from abuse.
My sermon finished, I turn to a critique of Schell. Generally, I think he wants to center his critique on nuclear-weapons issues, but a better center would be the problem of statism. It’s the elephant, not the duck. Many of my criticisms are trivial and pedantic, but mildly interesting nonetheless.
1. Schell could not have had much practical political experience at the time he wrote this book. Example: his hand-wringing over Nixon staffers’ practice of writing letters-to-the-editor in support of administration policies, and having party loyalists sign them and mail them in. This is a longstanding gimmick on all levels of politics. Back in the days when I was paid to do it in Monmouth County, New Jersey, I often wondered who my counterpart on the other side was. Similarly, in deploring Nixon’s attempt to “load the world itself with events that would induce the Democrats turn against one another,” one can only ask: Did Schell ever hear of the New Deal? As his admiring biographer James Macgregor Burns remarked, FDR was a fox as well as a lion. Maybe more fox than lion.
2. Schell writes eloquently about the Constitution, but he doesn’t understand its basis. He refers casually, and incorrectly, to “the sovereignty of the federal government” (133). Notwithstanding the famous New Yorker ‘view of the world,’ even Manhattan is not an outpost of the European state system. James Monroe had it right in his book title: The People, The Sovereigns. Similarly, Schell mis-teaches his readers that “rights are granted to the people, to protect them against abuse of government powers” (157). The Hell they are. Rights are inherent in the people, individually and collectively, then secured by the grantees (or so they hope) when they institute government. Government contradicts its own purpose when it violates those unalienable rights: thus the Americans’ charge that King George III was ‘revolutionizing’ them. Schell wants to be a good Whig, but he doesn’t know how.
3. Schell can’t quite make up his mind on who ‘the people’ are. Were anti-war demonstrators “the nation” (101)? The majority thereof? A harmless is vocal minority that should never have disturbed Lincoln-bedroom dreams? How unpopular was the Vietnam War when Nixon took office? I understand Schell’s reluctance to sully his prose with polling data, and I know he would regard any such data as compromised by the systematic deceptions of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, but some sort of effort needs to be made.
4. Schell frequently claims that this or that Nixonian depredation was unprecedented, extraordinary, remarkable, well-nigh sui generis. I would be interested to know if this is true. I rather suspect that the president’s men perfected techniques not unknown to previous Washington pols. One minor example: After an Australian émigré named Dr. Fred Schwarz established a right-wing organization called the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, New Yorker foreign policy hero Senator J. William Fulbright had the Internal Revenue Service audit the books. (They found no improprieties.) Tsk, tsk, Senator ‘Arrogance of Power.’ I am not sure that Washingtonians had the right to be shocked, simply shocked, that wiretapping was going on in this place. Senator Barry Goldwater—a tolerably honest pol, if no genius—probably spoke the truth about that.
5. Similarly Schell sometimes writes as if ‘public relations’ had been invented by Nixon in collaboration with Pat Buchanan. Walter Lippmann knew otherwise.
6. As for Nixon’s statement, “the press is the enemy” (55)—well, wasn’t it? How many New Yorker staffers joined in chanting “Nixon’s the One”? No Silent Majoritarians in William Shawn’s shop, I’ll wager. A good example of a fairly typical press-politics tactic may be seen on page 185, where Schell calls attention “once again” to “the affinity of the right-wing strategists in the White House with the left-wing fringe on the streets” (emphasis added). This equation puts New Yorker-ites comfortably in the center of the ideological Downs curve. No such luck!
7. Schell is at his weakest when considering foreign and military policy. He makes Henry Wallace look like a hard-nosed realist. The “linkage” doctrine of the Nixon administration (196) is nothing other than Mackiinder’s geopolitics—a commonplace among U. S. policymakers by 1945, as it had been among the Soviets two decades earlier (and ever after), the Germans throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the British, the French, and pretty much everyone else. The world, Mackinder sees, is a single system; the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone. While this has always been true geographically, as of the turn of the twentieth century it had become true politically, as well, thanks to transportation and communication technologies along with modern techniques of political organization.
It is not enough to talk about the motif of nationalism as if it were an alternative to Mackinderian ideas. What is nationalism without foreigners with imperial designs” The world is not a duck. It’s not an elephant. It’s a flying elephant, a vast Dumbo, alternatively soaring awkwardly in the internationalist/globalist empyrean and thudding to the ground of soil and blood. In the event, the Soviets did exploit U. S. disarray in the 1970s, seeing it as providing an opportunity to push ahead in the Third World—where, like the Americans, they appealed to nationalism and their political doctrines. (A lot of good it did them, but that’s another story.)
What is more, ‘communism’ and ‘democracy’ made two competing claims to nationalism. Democrats said: You can’t have national self-determination without representative government that enables the nation to make determinations. Communists said: Bah! bourgeois democracy is nothing but a superstructural con-game; only the proletarian vanguard can express the will of the nation. In Vietnam, too, many of the people mistakenly concurred with the communists’ line. Elsewhere, they didn’t. Generally speaking, “linkage” was right. Johnson and Nixon failed to see how to apply the doctrine intelligently.
8. Schell makes some unfathomable objections to Nixon’s carrot-and-stick tactic against foreign rivals, calling them contradictory (327 and elsewhere). Well, yes, a carrot is a reward and a stick is a punishment. To use both is not to contradict oneself; it is to recognize the variety of human motives.
9. On nuclear-weapons issues, it is nonsense to imagine that Nixon’s policies brought “the entire world… repeatedly… to the verge of war” (343). Americans and Soviets came fairly close to war in 1962, during the Kennedy Administration—de Gaulle rightly refused to be overly impressed by the posturing, during and after the event—and that was about it. The rest in my estimation was nukes-rattling, for foreign and domestic consumption.
One of the peculiarities of the nuclear arms race with respect to issues of deception may be seen rather in the rhetoric concerning arms build-ups throughout that era. Both sides had a stake in deliberately playing to, and augmenting, the fears of the American public. Because the weapons procurement process is long-drawn-out, the ‘Right’ periodically would warn about missile gaps and present dangers—which were really future dangers, when they were dangers. For its part, the ‘Left’ tried to frighten people with the Armageddon which was always just around the corner. Both sides were fighting over their share of scarce resources in the New-Deal state. Once the Cold War gave them no cover, the battle shifted to tax cuts on the Center-Right and politics-of-compassion on the Center-Left. Scare tacticians have shifted their focus to the wallet and the child.
Subtract these errors and misjudgments, and Schell still has an unanswerable case against Nixon. Fewer distractions.
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