NIXON AGONISTES, THE CRISIS OF THE SELF-MADE MAN by Garry Wills. 617 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $10.
It is too early to evaluate Richard Nixon's presidency. In this discursive, bewildering and occasionally brilliant exercise, Garry Wills, a classicist-turned-journalist, writes, instead, about the idea of Nixon and the idea of the nation that elected him.
Wills' Nixon is a metaphor for "an older, and in many ways noble, America, made up of much sacrifice and anger." Yet Nixon's ascension to power, says Wills, is precisely a measure of the nation's failure, the bankruptcy of the Horatio Alger virtues and the supply-and-demand marketplace ethics that built this country.
The system of free competition, Wills argues, has crumbled under the weight of the corporate, governmental and moral systems that it created. It is no longer free. "Entry into competition," writes Wills, "becomes a matter of sheer improbable chance. The real market, where a man can amount to something, is disappearing." But with Nixon, "there was one hope left, a glimpse of the old code and toughness, of salvation lubricated in all its pistons by desperate, successful perspiration, a 'local boy who made good'. . .RICHARD NIXON steam-engining down the track, somehow un-derailed by history, cheered by those hoping he could re-establish the copybook maxims he lived by."
Nixon, says Wills, is "the last liberal." That is, he is liberal in the classical tradition: an individual, schooled to success and selfdiscipline, taking his chances in an impartial marketplace of goods and ideas. Wills sees Nixon as both caricature and culmination of the traditional theory that free competition will reward virtue and produce excellence. He is "Plastic Man," a dogged survivor of political enterprise, Whittier College's second-string lineman bathed in a Calvinist sweat of guilt and zeal, the political reincarnation of Uriah Keep.
Unfree Enterprise. It is not difficult to predict the outrage that Wills' book will detonate in Spiro Agnew—to say nothing of Nixon himself. Wills attacks ad hominem and sometimes quite unfairly—even granting the license of political satire. In one unpleasant lapse, for example, he describes Pat and Dick Nixon getting married: "The serious young man, son of a Quaker saint, docilely lines up at the marriage mart, where all the gooiest extras—orange blossoms, 'O Promise Me,' illusion veils —cover the emptiness of the transaction." It is both Wills' method and mistake to insert his aesthetic objections to Nixon into substantive arguments.
Republicans may also notice that it is mostly they who are cartooned, sometimes brilliantly (see box). Still Wills writes with respect and admiration of Dwight Eisenhower, whom he considers "a political genius." He makes fun of John Kennedy for his "stylistic imperialism," a militaristic impulse that, Wills says, was more highly developed than Nixon's.