I am not a crook! Oh, hang on a minute, yes I am (The Arrogance of Power - Anthony Summers)

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	The Arrogance of Power - Anthony Summers
Date:	29/09/03 (74 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Meticulously , researched account of the crimes, of Richard Nixon

Disadvantages: Perhaps it could have , had more detail about life, after Watergate

So it occurred to me one day that I didn't really know all that much about Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States. Obviously I knew the famous stuff, enough to get all the jokes in that episode of Futurama where he runs for president, but I felt a sudden urge to know more. And by more I really only meant the good stuff. While I'm sure Nixon's domestic and (especially) foreign policies are all very interesting to people with a less flippant view of history, all I really wanted to know about were the scandals. And my goodness but there were a lot of them.

So this is the book I picked up. It's a nice chunky tome, but it's not a political biography; it really only mentions Nixon's official acts as President and Vice-President in passing, unless they have some relevance to a wider scandal. In his introduction, Anthony Summers explains that one of his motives for writing the book was that he was rather surprised by the way Nixon was hailed as a great statesman when he died, with all the living Presidents turning up at the funeral, even the Democrats. I should hope that after reading this book no one would be in any doubts about just how bad Richard Nixon was, and that his important diplomatic work can in no way be allowed to overshadow Watergate and all the rest.

Beginning at the beginning, the book covers Nixon's childhood (mainly, I suspect, to expose as lies various things that Nixon later claimed about his family), his courtship of and marriage to the long-suffering Pat and his unexciting military career during the Second World War. When the war ends it starts to get interesting, as Nixon seems to have been dodgy as soon as he entered politics. The campaign that got him elected to the House of Representatives seems to have been partially funded by organised crime (which would funnel a lot more money his way in the coming decades). As a member of HUAC he was at the centre of the controversial Alger Hiss pro
secution, and for a while gleefully supported the unpleasant Joe McCarthy. He almost had to resign as Eisenhower's running mate due to allegations of financial corruption and bribery (he famously got out of that one by making a tearful speech about his daughters' puppy). Late in his vice-presidency it seems that he was heavily involved in the CIA's dodgy (and often very silly) attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.

When he lost the 1960 presidential election (mainly, it has been suggested, because the mafia backed JFK and not him), and then the election for governor of California in 1962, it looked like he was finished, but he somehow clawed his way back. He probably had a hand in squashing Vietnam peace talks during the run up to the '68 elections (so that the Democrats couldn't claim it as a triumph on the eve of the election- to prolong a war just to win votes is a pretty despicable thing to do by any standards). As president he famously bugged and burgled his perceived enemies, bombed Cambodia, helped bring Pinochet to power in Chile and all kinds of other nefarious deeds. He really was a catastrophe as a president, and as a human being. The book ends with Nixon's resignation, which is a shame, as it might have been interesting to read about his partial rehabilitation over the next two decades.

This is a great book. Anthony Summers (and Robbyn Swan, his co-researcher) have done a cracking job. No matter how unlikely some of its claims about Nixon might seem, they are always backed up with meticulous sources, and even where they are occasionally based on speculation, they seem incredibly convincing. And it's very entertaining. At times it reads like the plot of a James Ellroy novel. Nixon himself was an unbelievably strange guy. He seems to have not been mentally stable for most of his adult life, secretly visiting a psychiatrist and taking a variety of pills while he was president. Many of the people who knew Nixon re
alised there was something strange about him. Eisenhower couldn't stand him, neither could Kennedy. He really seems to have had no interests at all outside politics, which is just weird - even Hitler had a lively interest in the arts to sustain him.

Sometimes he seems thoroughly repulsive - such as when he is alleged to have beaten up his wife - but more usually his antics are absolutely hilarious. He was a foul-mouthed little wretch - his response to a local newspaper's request for an interview was "I wouldn't give them the sweat off my balls." As president he got weirder and weirder, devising silly uniforms for White House security guards, physically attacking one of his press officers in public, wandering around deserted government buildings late at night, and, rather stupidly as it turned out, having everything he said recorded on tape. He would get drunk every night, and everyone apparently knew not to listen to anything he said after about 8pm. He would frequently respond to international crises by ordering Henry Kissinger to deploy nuclear weapons. He reportedly slept through a serious diplomatic incident with the Soviets that brought the world closer to mutually assured destruction than anything since the Bay of Pigs. All this could be rather alarming, or maybe even faintly tragic, but I'm afraid I just found it funny.

This is a pretty long book (the footnotes alone take up more than a hundred pages), but easy to read and very entertaining. There are several pages of illustrations. I'd heartily recommend it. The UK currently has a terrifying moral vacuum at the heart of its government, and it's always a good thing to be reminded of how bad a democratically elected government can be if its leaders decide they're not accountable to the electorate. Nixon's was one of the worst, and this book describes it brilliantly.

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