A Weird Contrast in Books, Part II

Richard Nixon the Man Behind the Mask by Gary Allen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In reading Gary Allen’s “Richard Nixon: The Man Behind the Mask,” we get a peek at the right-wing nastiness that’s now in the fore.

Let me say I don’t believe the right-wing has a corner on nastiness, as there’s plenty of that to go around in the extreme fringes of any political party. It is telling, however, to see the paranoia, the disdain for the media, and the veiled and unveiled racism inherent in right-wing Republicans of the 1960s and ‘70s, which we recognize today in the right-wing we’re seeing in power.

In reading about this author, I see an irony. He mocks Nixon as an opportunistic politician, willing to bow to whatever winds blew to get him elected. Yet Allen was a speechwriter for George Wallace, a politician who started out as a Democrat on a crusade for race reconciliation in the South and who ended as a right-wing Republican who sang the graces of segregation because he saw in it supporters enough political power to get him into office. We all have our blinders, I suppose, but for most of us, we don’t get the chance to have them displayed so prominently.

Allen and his supporters lament a party that slipped slowly to the left. Not that the party ever would become eponymous with the Democrats. What one perceives as a shift to the left can really be a shift to the center, where more and more voters find themselves due to the ugliness of the party purists on either end of the American political spectrum. Ronald Reagan would also probably be labeled as a squishy liberal by Allen et al’s standards, and might find it hard to fit into the Republican Party of today, which is slipping now to the right.

Allen is somewhat schizophrenic – lionizing conservative firebrand Barry Goldwater for his unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1964 and then, in the same chapter, lambasting him for being a tool of the grassroots wave that took him through the nomination and to the election, but without the fire to do anything more than put his shoulder to the wheel after it was all over:

[Goldwater] was propelled into candidacy by the zeal of the grass-roots to capitalize on the great depth and exuberance and loyalty felt by his hard-core supporters all over the country. Instead of continuing the crusade Goldwater went back to his ham radio. The ’64 election was water over the dam – Goldwater over the dam.

No wonder Allen then fled to the firebrand race-baiter Wallace – here was a man who would follow through! Blinders fully on, of course. The desire to win – no matter the moral quality of the bedfellows – is what the right-wing seems to want, then and now. The ilk of Trump and Moore may have questionable morals and standards, but by golly they whistle the right tune!

Allen is consistent in his schizophrenia. In the chapter entitled “The Pachyderms Return,” he laments that Nixon avoided patronage of many who helped get him elected, and then concludes by castigating Nixon for appointing several long-time friends and aides to his cabinet. Patronage only works for Allen, it seems, if those getting the plum jobs are conservative Republicans.

And see, you get this on the left too. Nobody’s immune.


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