May 06, 2008
they chose nixon over the abyss
And yet one doesn’t have to excuse Nixon’s many sins to wonder whether his mix of ruthlessness, self-interest, and low cunning might have been preferable to some of the alternatives on offer. Perlstein depicts a country on the edge of a civil war—a nation in which columnists openly speculated that America might embrace a de Gaulle–style man on horseback, or find a “President Verwoerd” (the architect of South African apartheid) to install in the Oval Office. It was a political moment when the old order could no longer govern, and the new order wasn’t ready. The kids who screamed for Goldwater and McGovern would grow up to be responsible Reaganites and Clintonians, but back then they had only idealism, not experience, and Nixonland is an 800-page testament to the dangers of idealism run amok.In this climate, the voters didn’t choose Nixon over some neoconservative or neoliberal FDR; no such figure was available. They chose Nixon over an exhausted establishment on the one hand—nobody seems more hapless in Nixonland than figures like Hubert Humphrey and Nelson Rockefeller—and the fantasy politics of left and right on the other. They chose Nixon over the abyss.
more from The Atlantic Monthly here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:06 AM | Permalink
Comments
Did they indeed. I was there. Well, not precisely by a long shot yet of voting age and even if I had been, Canadians and Australians can't voter in American elections, though they affect us just as profoundly as they do Americans. But Humphrey was hardly the abyss in 1968: what a crock! It is categorically demonstrated that for once LBJ was a gentleman and declined to allow Nixon's interference in the 1968 peace process to be made public; had he been less of a gentleman Humphrey would assurely have won, and he was himself far too delicate during the election campaign to make clear that Vietnam was history.
And in 1972 McGovern was hardly the abyss. His electability was utterly compromised by the Eagleton fiasco as well, surely, as by Nixon's dirty tricks. Let us hope that this year's contenders for the White House take urgent counsel from that long ago lesson as to Vice Presidential candidates: Bush senior got away with the egregious Dan Quayle, and it really doesn't matter.
Posted by: Mac | May 8, 2008 6:58:34 AM
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