Book Reviews
Nixon Reconsidered. By Joan Hoff. (New York: Basic Books, 1994.
Pp. xviii, 475. Notes, bibliography, index. $30.00.)
This deeply researched book, the principal revisionist account
of the Richard M. Nixon administration, is divided into three parts.
The first discusses Nixon’s domestic political agenda. The second
treats Nixon’s foreign policy, and the third evaluates Watergate.
Joan Hoff, who had unprecedented access to Nixon, consciously
turns on their head all of the customary evaluations of Nixon’s
activities while president. Earlier observers praised his foreign policy, condemned his domestic policy as mean and angry, and claimed
that Nixon always would be remembered for disgracing the presidency during Watergate, a major constitutional crisis. Hoff, however, argues that Nixon’s greatest achievements were in the field of
domestic policy. She considers his foreign policy largely a failure,
based on a n u n h e a l t h y personal relationship with Henry A.
Kissinger. As for Watergate, she believes it was a relatively minor
scandal. Future generations, she predicts, will probably remember
Watergate much as current historians think about Teapot Dome.
What is one to make of all this combative revisionism? Hoff
stands on the firmest ground in her criticism of Nixon’s foreign policy, precisely the area in which her analysis is the least unconventional. Here her quarrel is not so much with historians as with the
mass media who glorified Nixon’s foreign policy while he was president and who argued that it was his one worthy achievement. It
was in foreign policy, however, that the bad Nixon-the secretive,
suspicious, manipulative man of the cartoons and the standard version-stood out. In Nixon’s account, assinger’s recollections, and
the mass media of the day, the president’s long daily meetings and
endless telephone calls with Kwsinger demonstrated a keen intelligence searching out the best minds of the establishment for solutions t o t h e vexing problems of t h e Cold War. Hoff, however,
believes that the two men spent too much time together for their
own good. Theirs was a n unhealthy relationship. Isolated from the
voices of people who had more sense about foreign policy, Nixon and
Kissinger created a policy that could not stand the test of time. Far
from creating a structure of peace, a s they claimed a t the time,
their foreign policy was based on sleight of hand. Dktente seemed to
fail, Vietnam policy was a bloody debacle, Iran soon succumbed to
revolution. Only the opening to China led to lasting achievements.
Even here, Nixon and a s s i n g e r were never able to square the circle
of opening relations with Beijing and maintaining them with Taiwan. Only Jimmy Carter was willing to take the opening to China
to its logical conclusion and establish diplomatic relations with Beijing and end them with Taiwan.
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Indiana Magazine of History
Hoff s account of Nixon’s domestic political achievements is
fresher and is likely t o be more enduring. Historians and public
affairs analysts have long puzzled over the fact that Nixon ran on a
more liberal domestic platform in 1972 than did any Republican or
any Democratic presidential nominee from 1976 until 1992. Hoff
goes through enormous, even tedious, detail to demonstrate that
Nixon’s domestic policies helped protect the environment, enhanced
the status of women, and advanced the position of Native Americans in American society. In that sense Hoffs Nixon is indeed the
man whom Garry Wills characterized as “the last liberal.” Wills
was being ironic, and he also placed Nixon squarely in the context
of nineteenth-century marketplace liberalism. Hoff, however,
argues t h a t Nixon was really a twentieth-century progressive
Republican.
There is a n explanation for Nixon’s expansion of the federal
government’s programs to assist previously excluded groups. Public
opinion did not turn on a dime and reject the reforms of the Great
Society in 1968. Even the white backlash, exploited successfully by
both George C. Wallace’s presidential campaign and Nixon’s southern strategy, did not reject government programs in the way conservatives and libertarians of the 1980s and 1990s would do. White
working class voters might have believed in the late 1960s t h a t
Lyndon B. Johnson had gone too f a r i n diverting government
resources from them, but they welcomed government programs
that they believed would benefit them. Tom Wicker characterized
Nixon a s “one of us,))meaning t h a t he gripped t h e pulse of the
American electorate a s did no other national leader in the forty
years after 1945. He expressed the hopes and also the fears, anxieties, and anger of two generations of Americans. In the late 1960s
and early 1970s most people had not given up on the federal government as a positive force. Neither had Nixon. More and more voters wanted harsher government actions against crime, and many
had lost patience with the claims of the poor. Nixon fed this anger
too.
Hoff s discussion of Nixon’s domestic policy is the strongest part
of her book. Ironically, it is also the hardest to read. Every government agency has a n acronym, and the letters strewn across the
page make for some heavy reading. In that regard, Hoff s account of
Nixon’s domestic policy resembles nothing so much as Margaret
Thatcher’s description in her memoirs of what she accomplished in
the domestic field. Unlike Nixon who wanted to modify and occasionally expand the welfare state, Thatcher was a conservative,
committed t o dismantling the social programs constructed by
British governments since the Second World War. But both Hoff
and Thatcher love to write in acronyms.
At one point Hoff considered writing about “Nixon without
Watergate,’’ but friends told her she had t o deal with the scandal
Book Reviews
345
that eventually brought the president down. Thc section on Watergate is the weakest in the book. Hoff clearly is uncomfortable writing about it, and her account really is not all t h a t different from
Nixon’s: he was not that deeply involved; others in the administration did the really bad things; previous presidents had done
much worse; it was not a constitutional crisis; the reforms created
in the wake of Watergate have not worked that well; and in fifty
years people will not remember it anyway. None of these assertions, with perhaps the sad exception of the last, rings true. Hoff
has not successfully rebutted Stanley I. Kutler’s richly detailed
account, The Wars of Watergate (1990). Moreover, the publication of
H. R. Haldeman’s diary weeks after Nixon’s death in 1994 revived
public memories of the spiteful conniving Nixon.
ROBERTD. SCHIJLZINCER
is professor of history, University of Colorado, Boulder.
Among his many books is Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy (1989).
William Fortune (1863-19421: A Hoosier Biography. By Charles
Latham, jr. (Indianapolis: Guild Press of Indiana, Inc., 1994.
Pp. ix, 205. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, index. $18.95.)
Studies of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Indianapolis have largely ignored William Fortune, focusing instead on
the city’s most prominent industrialists (the Lillys, James Allison),
automotive pioneers (Carl Fisher, Harry Stutz), major retailers (the
Ayres family), and leading literary lights (James Whitcomb Riley,
Booth Tarkington). Yet Fortune played a prominent role in the
community’s development for half a century, especially in the “golden” years from 1890 to 1920. Charles Latham’s short, engagingly
written biography, based on thorough research in primary materials, is thus a welcome addition to the canon of Indiana biographies
as well as to the historiography of the Hoosier capital.
Fortune was born in Boonville, Indiana. Work on the Boonville
Standard beginning in his early teens, as well as extensive personal
reading, provided much of his education. In 1882 he moved t o the
state capital, where he initially pursued a newspaper career-first
on the Journal, then with the News. He subsequently published a
trade magazine, Municipal Engineering; headed several local telephone companies (he placed the first dial call in the city); and served
on the board of the pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly and Company.
Beginning about 1890 Fortune sought ways, in Latham’s words,
“to be a n agent of civic improvement” (p. 36). He worked closely
with Colonel Eli Lilly in founding the Commercial Club (later the
Chamber of Commerce) and thereafter coordinated several of the
organization’s very important initiatives for municipal progress.
During the First World War he was one of the founders of the Indianapolis chapter of the Red Cross; he continued to lead the local