On the Presence of the Past

This past Sunday I received a review in the Washington Post by Elizabeth Drew [1] which, while kind and thoughtful, contained at least one empirical falsehood (actually, at least two empirical falsehoods: Richard Nixon did buy a townhouse on Fifth Avenue, not 65th Street, after his forced retirement).

I wrote, in "Nixonland," "Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not." Drew found this passage "peculiar," and responded, "Well, I, for one, don't find it so hard." Between the time she wrote those words and the time they were published, Senator Edward M. Kennedy's brain tumor was announced. Shortly after that, the exceptionally popular Pittsburgh sports talk radio host Mark Madden said, "I'm very disappointed to hear that Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts is near death because of a brain tumor. I always hoped Senator Kennedy would live long enough to be assassinated." (He also wondered whether the Kopechnes—the family of the young woman who died while a passenger in Ted Kenendy's car at Chappaquiddick in 1969—sent a get-well card.)

I observe this out not to score cheap points off Elizabeth Drew, but to make some broader points. Elite opinion consistently downplays the level of deep-seated structural tension in American life, in the service of an ideology of "consensus" that is not, in the end, healthy for the country. It's one of the most crucial themes of NIXONLAND, and one I find consistent across American political history—in fact, one of the crucial, and under-explored, themes of American history itself.

As America has heading toward a sectional crisis in the 1850s over the subject of slavery that culminated in a civil war in which over 600,000 Americans slaughtered each other, Congress's solution to the rising tensions was not to talk about them: a "gag rule" was passed banning the discussion of slavery on the floor of the House and Senate. Maybe if we look the other way, all the bad stuff will somehow just go away: that was the response, 100 years later, of the opening shot of America's next civil war, the 1965 riot in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. While the violence was still ongoing, an L.A. radio station fired its most popular call-in host. He insisted on talking about Watts. His bosses wanted him talking about anything but. In this way consensus was institutionalized.

Thus do I hypothesize in my book, "It is not to much to suggest that the rages that accompanied the crumbling of this myth of consensus, as the furies of the 1960s advanced, would not have been so rageful—would not have been so literally murderous—had the false rhetoric of American unity had not been so glibly enforced in the years that preceded it: that some of the 1960s anger and violence was a return of what America repressed."

You don't transcend conflict by ignoring it. You transcend conflict by bravely facing it, and working through it.

Republicans hate Democrats. And Democrats, yes, hate Republicans. I'd even warrant that there are those on the left who hate conservatives enough to fantasize about killing them. But at least our grudges are fresh. Republicans have to keep dredging up ones from 40 years ago like they just happened yesterday to keep their souls in the proper state of un-settlement.

One day two weeks ago I was having a pleasant chat about the book with a right-wing radio host in Orlando. We were rapping about the Vietnam War and its role in the divisions of the 1960s. He said it was extraordinary to him that America began its retreat from Vietnam after the Tet Offensive of 1968, when—"do you know who General Giap is?" he asked me—the North Vietnamese commander had written in his own memoir that they were about to surrender until a broadcast by Walter Cronkite about America's setbacks in Vietnam inspired them to continue fighting on.

I didn't handle the joust very effectively. I jumped down his throat, immediately insisting he should be ashamed of repeating an entirely made-up story about General Giap. [2] I should have been more patient, kept my powder dry, and asked him if it's Giap's 1985 memoir he was referring to—a book frequently cited on the subject by the right which is, yes, a perfectly imaginary object. [2] (I could have kept calm and concluded with something conciliatory and in keeping with the broader themes of the book: so obsessed are we with keeping alive dead controversies from the 1960s that we're willing to let down our intellectual guard and accept any story that buttresses our side of the argument without bothering to check out its accuracy. Instead, I sounded like just another frothing liberal. No-Drama Obama would have handled himself more coolly.)

It was deja vu all over again when I talked to a right-wing host from Orlando. He seemed to really like the book, or at least the press release (most radio hosts never read the book). I casually mentioned how meaningful it is to me that I, a liberal, could write something conservatives found useful. Perhaps he hadn't read the part of the press release that says I'm a liberal—for my ideological admission unleashed hell's own fury. He was frothing that "Ted Kennedy and the Democrats" had surrendered America's honor in Vietnam.

As I've explained earlier, I did pretty well in that exchange. On about his fifth spittle-enhanced oath against the "Democrat Party" and how it surrendered in Vietnam, I asked him if he knew who Mark Hatfield was. (He was the Republican cosponsor, with George McGovern, of a no-exceptions-admitted bill in the middle of 1970 to pull out of Vietnam lock, stock, and barrel by 1971; my host hadn't heart of him.) I asked him if he knew who George Aiken was. (He was the Republican senator who said regarding Vietnam, in 1966, that we ought just to "declare victory and go home"; my host hadn't heard of him.)

On and on he ranted, about how the Democrats had refused the stalwart South Vietnam Army the money they needed in 1974 to hold off the Communist marauders and establish their own freedom; I replied that his argument wasn't with me, or the "Democrat Party," but with Barry Goldwater, who thought further funding idiotic [3] ("You can scratch South Vietnam," he said in becoming one of the 61 senators, including neocon hero Scoop Jackson, to vote against it. "It is imminent that South Vietnam is going to fall into the hands of Vietnam.")

He concluded our cut-and-thrust with one more insult against the not-yet-stricken Ted Kennedy. It was, you see, all his fault.

Here's a question I've been getting a lot lately, one I'm a little uncomfortable with: I'm a historian, and hate being called upon to predict the future. People want to know if the cultural condition I describe as "Nixonland"— the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans, each believing that were the other to prevail, America as they understand it might end—will endure for yet another generation.

Ted Kennedy's tragic illness suggests, however, a possible answer. It is just how astonishingly threadbare and exhausted the arguments on the conservative side of this engagement have become.

A letter to Time magazine from 1969: "How tragic, too, Kennedy's professed concern with the loss of lives in Vietnam when he was so negligent about saving the one young life over which he had direct control at Chappaquiddick."

A talk radio host almost 40 years later, in 2008: "I wonder if he got a card from the Kopechnes." [4]

A hale and healthy ideological tendency wouldn't be so hard up for reasons to hate that they have to have to recycle ones from 40 years ago. Some day—and after the senator's successful surgery this week I hope we can say this day will come many decades in the future—Edward M. Kennedy will no longer be with us. Isn't it remarkable to think what a sad day that will be for not only those who love him, but for those who so irrationally hate, him, too? For that will be the day when roughly 5 percent of the right's "arguments" against the left—the Teddy-centric ones—will perish from the earth as well.

How did Nixonland end? It has not ended...yet. Give it time, give it time.