(3 of 4)
House beautiful: splashes of riches in pleasing, nondisruptive, conventional taste. Yet Nixon dissociates himself from the American upper class. He loathes that class, not for its money or education (he has both), but for something more painful. The loathing erupts like granite outcroppings in his conversation and in his new book. It emerges in contemptuous references to "America's leadership class," the "negativists in our great universities" and, most frequently, "the brightest and the best," for some reason always applying the word order of the hymn and inverting David Halberstam's book title, with ten times the scorn. With those "damn kids" in Harlem, he seems to feel a remote but genuine kinship -- not to be sentimental about it. But at the mere thought of the Harrimans, the Bundys, the Kennedys, an excruciating anger enters his voice, reaching as deep into Richard Nixon as any feeling can reach, a fist in the entrails.
"Dukakis has to avoid being Mondale-ized. ((Rimshot.)) He can do it, and I'll tell you why. You see, McGovern believed all that ((liberal)) stuff. Dukakis does not. He is simply reflecting the Massachusetts, the M.I.T., the Harvard, the Kennedy School line, and all those people, and so forth."
What is the crime committed by all those people, and so forth? It is not as simple as their having looked down their nose at Richard Nixon. Those people do not understand Richard Nixon: "How I could be both a liberal internationalist and a conservative. You see my point?" A moment to be relished. "I remember when we went to China. Henry ((Kissinger)) says, 'They ((liberals)) are dying because you did it.' " Followed by a canny aside: "Of course, Henry is sort of an expert at that. He plays that crowd pretty well."
Even now, how that crowd gets under Nixon's skin! Much of the reason is classic American: the man who all his life had to claw and struggle to the top, seething in the presence of, under the scrutiny of, those whose prominence and power came as easily as slipping on a coat. But there is something else here. The brightest and the best also had a kind of grace that Nixon never knew. A grace of attitude, manner, form, social badinage, perhaps created out of generations of privilege, perhaps not; the unprivileged are also often born with grace. Grace did not descend on Nixon. "I was never much of an athlete, but I follow sports, you know." He of the contorted poses, the puckered face, the hunched-shoulder walk; he of the inability to lie and not get caught. Graceful people don't get caught. "Everybody tapped phones, you know. It's going on right now."