Short Review of Pat Buchanan's New Nixon Book
I did an Amazon review of Pat Buchanan's new whitewash of Richard Nixon's political comeback The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority. Because it's aimed at the right, at the moment only one person out of 26 found the review helpful. If you like the review and want to give it positive feedback, go here. Here is the review:
A Pathetic Whitewash of a Traitor and a Criminal
It's rather fitting that a book about Nixon's political comeback written by a Nixon apologist would be published a few days after the publication of Consortium News' Robert Parry's infuriating article about the real Nixon, "An Insider's View of Nixon's `Treason.'" Parry's article details how Nixon campaign operatives sabotaged Vietnam peace talks right before the 1968 election. As a result, Nixon won in a squeaker and another 20,000 Americans died in an Asian hellhole. The activities of Nixon's old nemesis Alger Hiss were child's play compared to Nixon's treachery.
This treason, of course, was of little personal consequence to Nixon or Buchanan; their hawkish friends in the corporate and political elite who profited handsomely from the Vietnam War were able to keep their offspring out of harm's way by 1) pulling strings to get their pampered progeny into champagne units (e.g., George W. Bush and Dan Quayle); 2) using their pull to keep those student deferments piling up; or 3) finding other inventive ways to avoid having their loved ones die in a war they supported and profited from (e.g., John Engler literally ate himself out of the war by becoming too fat for his draft board). As a consequence, the slack was taken up by Appalachians and working class minorities. Yuck.
The real story of the 20-year majority created by Nixon (and Reagan) is that the right had an arsenal of ruthless and amoral operatives who would resort to treason to accomplish their political goals (e.g., Reagan's 1980 campaign operatives who thwarted the release of the Iranian hostages to win the election and the Reagan administration operatives who sold arms to the Iranian regime). What is particularly infuriating is that they engaged in this criminal and traitorous behavior while calling for law and order and while wrapping themselves in the flag (e.g., Reagan, possibly at the urging of Roger Ailes, once referred to the Republicans as "America's party"
. It's also all too soon forgotten that the Nixon/Reagan "new majority" created the hypocritical and disastrous war on drugs: smoke a joint and go to prison; commit treason and become president.
The book is a whitewashing of Nixon's criminal ascent to power. One thing that Buchanan fails to note is how Nixon's own demons were a help in bringing together the "new majority." Nixon was a brooding paranoiac but that allowed him to tap into the dark recesses of the minds of white working class voters. Like his previous ally Joe McCarthy, Nixon was adept at appealing to the fight-or-flight reptile brain of many insecure white voters. Similarly, Reagan appealed to working-class bigots with his fanciful tales of the "strapping young buck" buying t-bone steaks with food stamps (for a comprehensive look at Reagan's racist pandering, read the web site "Ronald Reagan: Racism and Racial Politics" . Is this a legacy to be proud of?
In addition to ignoring the Nixon campaign's treason, Buchanan whitewashes the pervasive criminality of the Nixon regime. Watergate was far from an anomaly; criminality was the rule, not the exception to the extent that Woodward and Bernstein recently referred to the Nixon presidency as "a criminal enterprise" of which criminal activity was "an organizing principle." In the book, Buchanan lamely calls the investigations into Nixon's criminality that led to his resignation, "the first successful coup d'état in U.S. history." Also, in the book, Buchanan makes the unintentionally humorous observation that Nixon "was not without his faults."
Fortunately, largely due to demography, that majority is long gone; Buchanan acknowledged this in his recent book Suicide of a Superpower. The Archie Bunker types that Nixon and Agnew appealed to are either dead or in their nineties. The once mighty GOP majority is a sad rump full of flat-earth fundamentalists, neo-Confederates (e.g., former RNC chair Haley Barbour recently waxed nostalgic about the old White Citizens' Councils), and Oathkeepers. It's sad that the once proud Party of Lincoln is a freak show but it's good for America that Buchanan and his ilk painted themselves into a corner. Let's party!
= new reply since forum marked as read
just because we are politically aligned.
I thought your review was more of a rebuttal than a review. 
