Conrad Black's apologia for Richard Nixon

Conrad Black
RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON
The invincible quest
1152pp. Quercus. £30.
978 1 84724 209 9

While I was working my way through this extremely long book, its author was convicted on multiple fraud charges in a Chicago court. He is appealing, but seems likely to face a lengthy jail sentence. These are unusual circumstances in which to read what purports to be a monumental work of contemporary history. They are even more unusual circumstances in which to write one.

Conrad Black’s task was undertaken, he concedes, “in very distracting circumstances, as I prepared at the same time to deal with serious judicial problems”. His wife, Barbara, had been “a constant and patient encouragement [sic] . . . from the first occasions when we both met with Richard Nixon”. Black’s opening words set the tone for the thousand-plus pages that follow. Misuse of the language in the first paragraph; blue-chip name-dropping (for the author counts his subject and many of his leading characters as friends or colleagues); with the mention of his wife, a major player in his court case, only adding to the difficulty of following his convoluted narrative with much objectivity.

As a follow-up to Black’s hefty biography of his acknowledged hero, F. D. Roosevelt (2003), what other American President would he choose but the only one to have resigned his high office in disgrace? How not to read more than coincidence into the fact that Black – no ordinary biographer, but a press baron with time on his hands since being obliged to resign from his own public position in 2003 – is also disgraced, in the eyes of a world seen by both as malicious, just as his book appears?

The degree of Schadenfreude common to both cases further suggests the notion of one guilty man attempting to rehabilitate another – and so, in the process, himself. Apparently confident of his own acquittal, Lord Black of Crossharbour perhaps intended it to coincide with his impassioned vindication of Nixon as “one of America’s greatest political leaders”, cruelly maligned by his unworthy contemporaries. Unfortunately for the author, he has no successor with the power to grant him, too, a pardon, thus avoiding the public washing of dirty linen attendant upon a lengthy trial – whose details we literary jurors are required by the supreme court of impartiality to attempt to ignore.

It is no easy task, although Black’s skills as a historian are not to be underestimated. He marshals evidence persuasively, tells a story well, is a knowledgeable student of American history. But he keeps undermining these virtues with his self-important use (and misuse) of quirky, overwrought language, too often stooping (like Nixon) to mere abuse when dismissing contemporary judgements in favour of his own, based on a sense of right and wrong as questionable as his subject’s. Throughout the Watergate affair, for instance, the author is constantly urging Nixon to doctor, withhold, or destroy the White House tapes which proved his undoing.

From the outset, Black makes it quite clear whose side he is on. Impartiality may not be a prerequisite of an effective biographer – quite the opposite, in my view – but a sense of balance surely is. As Black rehashes the familiar details of the many crises in Nixon’s long career, he is not merely reinterpreting events with the benign spin of like-minded hindsight; he is saying: this is how I would have handled it myself. He is identifying with his subject – a fellow Machiavel with the same self-righteous hostility to his critics – to the point of indistinguishability.

Is that a word? Are some of Black’s? His exasperating prose style throbs with such phrases as the “boosterish scatology” of Nixon’s school and the “rubesville environment” of his home town. When the Watergate tapes become public, the “shrieks of outrage” that greet the expletives deleted from the President’s tape-recorded conversations amount to “another herniating levitation of pandemic hypocrisy”. The problem with such infelicities transcends mere literary taste; they reek of ugly authorial sneers, as when commentators of whom he disapproves (usually “left-leaning”) are “stentorian in their laudations” of “self-serving claptrap” such as the observance of laws. In his first forty pages alone, like an adolescent reaching beyond his grasp for heightened effect, Black makes questionable use of such words as “collegiate”, “comported”, “canvass”, “proselytizing”, “verdant”, “provenance”, “resistless” and “abrasions”. Later he deploys “exceptionable”, “indefectible”, “integrality” and “disconcertion” (while, I confess, introducing me to such pleasing arcana as “billingsgate”, meaning “foul or profane language”). Musical readers will be as surprised at Nixon’s ability to play “the piano sections of symphonies” as poker-players that this wily cardsharp used to “bid” rather than bet.

All of which makes an already prolix text even heavier going, for all the fascination of its material. Objectively, of course, Nixon’s is a mesmerizing story – a gift to an energetic biographer, partisan or otherwise. For all his verbosity, Black paints his man’s Quaker childhood well, rebutting Henry Kissinger’s theory that Nixon’s ingrained self-doubts were fuelled by lack of parental love. He takes his time over the future President’s “meteoric” political rise, his victories (often by devious means) in electoral races from college via the House of Representatives and the Senate to the vice-presidency at the age of only thirty-nine.

While many will question Conrad Black’s re-evaluation of the Hiss–Chambers case and Nixon’s role in McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunt, the author is good on the Californian upstart’s awkward relations with the gruff, uncharitable President Eisenhower. There follows the narrow defeat by Kennedy in 1960 and the disastrous 1962 race for the Governorship of California, followed by the famous press conference (“You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more”) which seemed to signal the end of his political career. All these familiar episodes are retold in exhaustively revisionist detail, with the author constantly offering Nixon advice as to how he could have handled things better, while not overlooking his character flaws, even the “dirty tricks” which became his trademark.

Black is not the first to point out that Nixon’s unlikely comeback in 1968 could not have happened but for the assassination of JFK and Lyndon Johnson’s subsequent refusal to run for re-election. Whatever the state of the world at the time, not least in Vietnam, the greatest irony of Nixon’s career is that his landslide re-election in 1972 did not need the covert help – with or without his knowledge – of petty criminals hired by the unscrupulous apparatchiks deployed in high places by a President at his most contra mundum when he least needed to be.

To the dismay of such admirers as Black, Watergate stubbornly remains the red meat of the Nixon story, obscuring the worthier of his foreign-policy initiatives, not least the opening of relations with China. The whole complex episode comes down to Nixon’s complicity or otherwise in the payment of “hush money” to the “plumbers”, and the use of the CIA to obstruct the investigations of the FBI. His involvement in incriminating conversations on these subjects was confirmed by the tapes subpoenaed by investigators. Hence Black’s repeated advice to dispose of them.

One could not wish this book any longer, but such evasions as Black’s brief denial of any American role in the downfall of Chile’s President Allende contrast starkly with his constant repetitions of how Nixon could (and, in his view, should) have saved himself during Watergate. I lost count, for instance, of the number of times he points out that the impeachment (rather than resignation) of Nixon’s corrupt Vice President, Spiro Agnew, could have conveniently delayed his own day of reckoning – perhaps beyond the next election. Even more revealing, however, is his brutal portrayal of Kissinger, whom (he does not tell us) Black co-opted to the board of his own Hollinger empire, and who deserted the author in his own hour of greatest need. “When Watergate was at its worst”, he quotes Nixon’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig, as telling him, “Henry could never be found.” It is impossible not to believe that Black’s parentheses refer to himself when he speaks of Kissinger as a colleague whose “propensity to run for cover when a friend was under attack was an irrepressible reflex (of which he never cured himself)”.

Black’s most original claim is that, once recovered from the physical collapse that followed his resignation, Nixon spent the rest of his life thoroughly restoring his good name via a long series of weighty books and quasi-presidential foreign visits. By the time of the death of the Shah of Iran in 1980, for instance, all of fourteen years before Nixon’s own, even the “censorious condescensions” of the New York Times had ceased as Nixon “completely shattered the bonds of his former exile to perdition”. As the US editor of the Observer at that time, based in Washington DC, my own recollections cannot support this argument, let alone the relentless Carter-bashing it represents. I would further venture to suggest that Nixon’s reputation has yet, even posthumously, to recover from the self-inflicted wounds of Watergate.

For all Black’s tireless eye for detail, and his extraordinary authorial energy at a time of such crisis in his own life, his highly personalized agenda cumulatively converts a soi-disant work of history into a prolonged partisan plea on behalf of a man as misunderstood, underestimated and wronged as the author evidently considers himself to be.

At the time of writing, Black has vowed to clear his own name. But he cannot, for all his 1,100 pages of trying, clear Richard Nixon’s. Writing as his own trial loomed, Black must surely have anticipated the irony now attaching to the words he quotes Nixon as saying to Haig at the height of Watergate: “Some of the best writing in history has been done from prison. Think of Lenin and Gandhi”. Not to mention Nixon’s last biographer with a name familiar in Britain for extra-literary reasons, the former Tory Minister Jonathan Aitken, who himself turned born-again author in jail soon after befriending the former President and publishing an apologia pro vita sua. Wherever Conrad Black may rate himself on the scale between Aitken and Gandhi, we can but hope that his prison diaries may be an improvement on Jeffrey Archer’s. It’s a safe bet they’ll be longer.
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Anthony Holden has written biographies of, among others, Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier, Leigh Hunt and Lorenzo Da Ponte. His most recent book is Bigger Deal: A year inside the poker boom, published earlier this year.