Alone with His Idols Shadowy Emanations of the Nixon Presidency by John Rockwell

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THE BROWSER Alone with His Idols Shadowy emanations of the Nixon presidency by john rockwell

ark feeney’s Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief is so American Scholar and in a lectureship in B well-intentioned, so weirdly ingenious, so full of lively American studies at Brandeis University. O He brings to this book an evident exper- and perceptive tidbits that it’s a pity to proclaim it a tise in the minutiae of Nixon biography, a O failure. Rather like its subject, one might venture. cineaste’s love for and deep understanding of film, and, of course, a working knowl- K The ingenious conceit is this: While other presidents edge of journalism, which lends special S might seem more obviously cinematic (either movie-star expertise to his comments on Watergate and the film version of All the President’s Men. Mhandsome, like John F. Kennedy, or an ac- in a requisite willingness to believe—can His book is laid out as a kind of biogra- tual movie star, like Ronald Reagan, and be regarded as something far more sub- phy manqué. The reader is presumed (too perhaps continuing, a few pesky constitu- stantial: an index of our hopes and fears presumed, in my case) to know the ins tional details aside, with Arnold Schwarz- and national character rendered through and outs of Nixon’s career—his way- enegger), it turns out that Richard Nixon the collision of the glamorous fiction of more-than-six crises. Feeney entitles was an avid, not to say almost desperate, Hollywood and the glum, grinding fact of most of his chapters with the names of cinephile. During his presidency, at his Richard Nixon.” films, and then uses those movies as various residences, he screened 530 films. Feeney has been a reporter, editor, and metaphors to discuss various aspects of They both reflected his idols (George Pat- reviewer at the Boston Globe since 1979, but the president’s career and personality. ton, John Ford, John Wayne) and ambi- has a more academic side, too, as reflected Thus “Dark Victory” is about Nixon’s

tions and provided escape from the often in his writings for the New Republic and the formative years in Yorba Linda and Whit- PHOTOMONTAGE BY STUART BRADFORD, NIXON PHOTOGRAPHY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS self-imposed pressures of his job. Nixon was, ac- cording to Feeney, “the classic watcher, never so happy as when aloof, apart, secluded.” The author summa- rizes his intentions in a single long sentence buried in the middle of a middle chapter. “Like the movies, this book predicates itself on shadowy emanations,” he writes, “emanations that—after the darkened hours sitting before a lit screen, hours grounded

Mark Feeney ’79, Nixon at the Movies (University of Chicago Press, $27.50). Browser.final ads free 10/8/04 5:26 PM Page 21

tier, so near yet so far from Hollywood. CHAPTER & VERSE “Double Indemnity” discusses Nixon A correspondence corner for not-so-famous lost words (“Well, I’m not a crook”) and criminality. “Patton/Mr. Roberts” is about Nixon, Christopher Monson seeks the author loses her on the Ferris wheel; the second Eisenhower, and the military, “Advise and of the truism, “The rectangle is the be- is a sort of science-fiction story involving Consent” about the Congress and the ginning of aesthetics.” an unhappy person who through lack of Senate, “Sweet Smell of Success” about faith misses a trip to a better world.” the press and New York City, “Two Rode Dale Fink would welcome a verifiable Together” about Henry Kissinger, “Ameri- source for words attributed to James “a battered old book, bound in red can Madness” about Nixon’s Capra-esque Joyce at the time he became blind: “I buckram” (September-October). Roger self-image, “All the President’s Men” can see a thousand worlds. I have lost Mills and Mark Stoeckle were the first about Watergate, and “The Conversation” but one of them.” to identify “Midnight Express,” a short about Hollywood’s Silver Age in the late story by English poet and author Alfred 1960s and early ’70s and Nixon as inadver- Je≠rey Williams hopes someone can Noyes. First published in 1935 in This tent inspiration for some of its best films. identify the titles and authors of two Week, the text appears in various an- This organizational model stumbles to- stories used in an anthology that he re- thologies, including August Derleth’s ward the end. There’s a chapter called calls being distributed in the late 1970s 1944 collection Sleep No More. “‘Suspicious Minds,’” which uses an Elvis by U.S. embassies as teaching material Presley single as a springboard to mus- for English teachers abroad. “The first Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter ings about Nixon and youth culture. The involves a father taking his daughter to and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware penultimate chapter, “Nixon at the an outing at an amusement park who Street, Cambridge 02138. Movies,” jettisons the linkage with one or two titles to contemplate what one might have thought, given its title, was the gist This scheme is doubly odd. Feeney —is worth a book of nearly 400 pages, of the entire book. An epilogue, “Nixon in never convinces us that what still seems a with small type and narrow margins. And the Movies,” anticlimactically tabulates rather marginal aperçu—that Nixon liked he never convinces us that his chapter the various films with Nixon or Nixonian movies and that aspects of his life can be structure makes sense. characters. reflected in them or projected onto them What we get instead is a long string of

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often clever footnotes to a missing bio- That’s why the Watergate chapter is the magpie miscellany” of the movies Nixon graphical narrative. Yes, Nixon was a best in the book: not only can the author saw. But it is telling in its psychological complex man, and yes, there was a series comment knowingly on journalism, but portrayal of a president seeking escape of “new Nixons.” But that doesn’t mean Watergate had a story arc that almost not just in the happy-ending ﬁlms he that the reader should be forced to recall everyone remembers. preferred, but in the very act of solitary details or even crucial moments in the “Nixon at the Movies”—the chapter, contemplation—contemplation of al- Nixon career to make sense of the com- not the book—sometimes too closely re- most anything. Nixon as the painful mentary Feeney makes about them. sembles what Feeney calls the “happily loser, the outsider always looking in to

OPEN BOOK

A Bouquet for Nature-Lovers The Rarest of the Rare: Stories behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HarperResource, $22.95) is a delightful armchair tour through the packed museum with an agreeable guide, sta≠ writer Nancy Pick, who points out scores of interesting specimens and tells how they came to be under Harvard’s roof. See George Washington’s pheasants, a mastodon skeleton associated with the notorious Webster-Parkman murder case, a painting that catches Audubon in a lie, a sand dollar scooped up by Darwin when he was voyaging on the Beagle, newly discovered fishes, a plant that might fight AIDS, and, of course, a glass flower (a glass diseased apple, to be precise). Mark Sloan contributes 95 color photographs. Pellegrino University Professor emeritus E.O. Wilson, Ph.D. ’55, Jf ’56, S.D. ’04, provides an introduction. The frog and the gold “horn,” shown here with captions only, have longer tales to tell in the book. Pick’s account of a pet parakeet appears in its entirety as an exemplar.

lexander wilson may lack the in 1794 to the United States. He settled in trator. He traveled thousands of miles, name recognition of John James Philadelphia, and there he wrote his often on foot, collecting specimens and Audubon, but bird experts every- monumental nine-volume American Or- observing birds in the ﬁeld. Pictured where know Wilson as “the fa- nithology, the ﬁrst comprehensive study of here is his lovely hand-colored plate of Ather of American ornithology.” North American birds. the Carolina parakeet, from volume 3 of Born in Scotland, Wilson began his ca- In producing his books, Wilson his opus, published in 1811. With it is reer as a weaver and poet, then emigrated acted as researcher, writer, and illus- the very specimen that Wilson used as

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the happier lives of others, has rarely nation. It must have been tough to write though the footnotes suggest a voracious been so well captured. an engaging book with a “glum, grinding reading of and heavy indebtedness to the That said, not everyone shares Feeney’s fact” at its center. many biographies and memoirs and histo- continued fascination with a president And yet there is plenty here that, more ries of its subject. Feeney is smart about who remains, in this telling, as reptilian persuasively organized, would have made a films, too, both individually and in the ag- as we dimly remember him. Feeney calls series of terrific essays. There are all man- gregate, as in his analysis of the Silver Age Nixon “this endlessly fascinating man,” ner of passingly interesting comments from 1967 to 1976 as an uneasy interregnum but doesn’t succeed in evoking that fasci- about Nixon the person and politician, between two di≠erent kinds of philistine hegemony: the studios of yore and the multinational corporations of today. But time and again, the writing reads Here’s how the southern gastric like padding, insights are repeated from brooding frog reproduced. The chapter to chapter, and the gear shifts be- mother shut down her digestive sys- tween political and filmic commentary tem, swallowed up to 25 fertilized seem abrupt or forced. The two halves of eggs, and incubated them in her stomach. After six or seven weeks, Feeney’s conceit sometimes intertwine froglets emerged from her mouth gracefully, providing illumination of both and hopped away. Medical politics and film. But sometimes a chap- researchers thought that the frog’s ter’s ostensible film metaphor recedes ability to suppress the production of stomach acid might lead to treat- merely to a mention, as in the Kissinger ments for people with gastric ulcers. chapter. Mostly the films and the politics But before they could make much travel on parallel tracks, with politics and headway with research, the frog became extinct. fragmented biographical musings receiv- ing more than their share of the attention. pet. The bird, which he had In the end, the two tracks never quite slightly wounded in the wing, converge. Feeney’s subject is Nixon, and became his “sole companion in films do cast some light on that subject. many a lonesome day’s march.” But a wider-ranging consideration of While traveling on horseback, Nixon and culture, or popular culture, Wilson bound the parakeet in a would have been more helpful: the kind of a model for his illustration. silk handkerchief and secured it in his explorations Frank Rich undertakes Wilson had a particular fondness for pocket, liberating it at mealtimes and in every Sunday in the New York Times, or that Carolina parakeets. In American Ornithol- the evening. “When at night I encamped the critic Greil Marcus poetically evokes ogy, he described seeing a great flock of in the woods,” he wrote, “I placed it on in his many books about politics and the them at Big Bone Lick in northern Ken- the baggage beside me, where it usually arts. Nixon loved theater and opera and tucky: sat, with great compo- classical music, too. And the break be- They came screaming sure, dozing and gazing tween the musicals and pop standards he through the woods in the at the fire till morning.” loved and the rock-’n’-roll he abhorred morning, about an hour Wilson would have was as dramatic as that between the es- after sunrise, to drink the been saddened to learn capism he preferred in films and the dark- salt water, of which they, that the Carolina para- er, more rebellious Silver Age films he as well as the Pigeons, are keet has become ex- both hated and provoked. remarkably fond. When they alighted on the tinct. The last one died Feeney calls Nixon at the Movies “a book ground, it appeared at a in its cage at the Cincin- about belief.” Whose belief in what? No distance as if covered with nati Zoo in 1918. The doubt he means Nixon’s belief in the a carpet of the richest flocks that once ranged roseate optimism of the studio-era films, green, orange, and yellow… over much of the eastern or in the power of the flickering images Wilson even kept one United States disap- themselves to dull the pain of a skillful Carolina parakeet— peared as forests gave but stubbornly graceless political career. though not the individ- way to cropland. Farm- But there is precious little actual belief on ual shown here—as a ers shot the birds to display here—either in visionary goals for protect their orchards, a new America or in the true power of Rare and beautiful, this gold “horn,” composed of hunters shot them for film as art. What we’re left with is some- crystallized gold embed- sport, and their feathers thing hollow at its core—not just this ded in milky quartz and were used in hats. They book’s core, but Richard Nixon’s sad, weighing 8.5 ounces, is were the only parrot na- dispiriting soul. said to be “one of the most desirable mineral tive to eastern North specimens in the world.” America. John Rockwell ’62 is the senior cultural correspon- dent of the New York Times.

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