Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/08/26/tdr_interview_historian_robert_dallek.php
Friday, August 26, 2005
The Dartmouth Review: You've written books on Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Reagan, and now you're working on a book about President Nixon. In the course of your research, what has surprised you the most about the Nixon presidency?
Robert Dallek:M Well, they say the devil is in the details, and I don't think anyone reading my book, which will come out in the fall of 2007 (at least that's the current plan) will be entirely surprised by anything, by the broad material I provide. But the details of what went on, and also, I think, the most striking that I hope will come across to people about the book is the complexity of both men, Nixon and Kissinger, because I plan to call the book: Inside the Nixon-Kissinger White House, and the combination of intelligence, of success, and of short-sightedness. These are not men who were flawless, nor were they by any stretch of the imagination villains. What I feel, is that if by the end of this book, Nixon acolytes and Nixon's fiercest haters are both angry at me for what I've produced, then I've succeeded. We've had so many polemics about Nixon and Kissinger that I really feel it's time for a serious work of scholarship that tries to strike a balance and what drove me to write this book was what usually drives me to write these presidential studies: the fact that the documentary record is largely open. It takes 30, 35, 40 years to get the presidential records open, to make them available to the historian, and that's the case now with the Nixon materials. In particular, Henry Kissinger has 33,000 pages of telephone transcripts, 20,000 of which are from the Nixon period, and these were closed up in the Library of Congress. Kissinger said they're private papers, he owns them, and they should remain closed until five years after his death. Now, there were threatened lawsuits, and he caved in, and a year ago last May they opened his telephone transcripts. I was using them, and they are a gold mine, it's a wonderful source. And of course, the Nixon tapes, there are still 900 hours that don't become open until 2006 or 2007, but there are 3,700 hours, so I'll have about 2,800 hours of tapes. You can't possibly use all of them, so it's selective.
People sometimes say to me, "gosh, these two huge volumes you did on Johnson, this new big book on Kennedy, wow, this is the definitive biography." And I say, nonsense. There is no such thing as a definitive study of one of these presidencies for a couple of reasons. One is that there are still materials that are being opened on Kennedy, on Johnson. There are a great number of Johnson tapes that are going to come available, and as I just said, 900 hours of Nixon tapes, and also, for example, with Nixon there are still 32 boxes of PDBs—Presidential Daily Briefs, and these are all closed. Sometime, down the road, they'll all open up. So there will be a wealth of new material, even after I finish my book and get it published in 2007. But maybe more importantly, down the road, 10, 15, 20, 30 years from now, people will reinterpret that presidency.
There's always a new way of looking at these presidents and their administrations. There's a Dutch historian, Pieter Geyl, who once said "history is an argument without end," and it's a wonderful insight. Why are we still writing about the rise and fall of the Roman empire, about George Washington, about the Civil War, about American entrance into World War I, about the beginnings of the Cold War? We see things as time passes from our own perspective. All historians have a presentist impulse. I have my politics, I have my biases—you try to suspend them as much as you can, but it does always enter into your perspective. And hopefully, it's not going to be so pronounced that you will distort the history. John Quincy Adams said that the historian's only religion should be the truth. Now of course, the truth is a moveable beast, it's hard to pin down, but you try to get as close to it as you can. It's an art, history is a part of the humanities. There is science to it: we have dates, we have hard evidence of when something happened. But why it happens, how it happens, how you explain it, how you interpret it, is always open to discussion.
TDR:: You mentioned your work on Johnson. One of your most surprising findings was that Johnson was engaged in the same dirty politics of Nixon, having tapped Hubert Humphrey's phone. Is no one free from guilt?
RD: I've become pretty cynical, and I think there is a degree of hardball politics that presidents play and it is part of the suit of armor they put on to fight these political campaigns. There's something in some ways ugly about it; the premium is on winning. And I'm pretty cynical because the first objective of politics is to win the election; the second objective is to win re-election. So there is a kind of hardball politics that's played on both sides. This is not exclusive to one or the other. There are, of course, degrees, and with Nixon, there was something so uncalled for about this Watergate episode. He was so far ahead, he had such command of the electorate in 1972. McGovern turned out to be a very weak opponent, and the polls were showing Nixon ahead by nineteen points, twenty points, what did he need to do anything but maintain S.O.P., standard operating procedure? And there was a quality of paranoia to Nixon, although, as Freud said, even paranoids have real enemies. But he had a quality of paranoia about him that drove him into these ugly actions. In some ways, Johnson was shrewder about it, and maybe more restrained. And of course, these presidents hate the press because the press is adversarial, it's the press' job, the fourth estate, to try to get at the truth. We historians are supposed to have an easier time, because 35 or 40 years later it's a much more relaxed atmosphere, we can get much closer to the truth, the documentary record is available. It's amazing what these presidents put into the records. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon—they never thought those tapes would be publicly available to biographers, historians, journalists. You'll never have the same kind of records again for a presidency. I think the Clinton and Bush presidencies may be impoverished.
TDR: Of course, there's always the e-mail record.
RD: That's right, and that's a new dimension. You can also always bank on the egotism of all these presidents, because they want to be remembered as walking on water, as great. How are historians going to write substantially and positively on them if there's not a substantial record?
TDR: In terms of presidents' political shrewdness, you've praised Ronald Reagan's political ability, which I found to be surprising given contemporary caricatures of him as the blundering, ignorant president. What is it about Reagan that defies that perception?
RD: You should really read my son's book; my son has a Ph.D. from Columbia, and he published a book called The Right Moment, and it describes Reagan's early entry into and successes in California politics. And what he shows in there is how instinctively shrewd Reagan was about electoral politics, and about governing. He had an impressive capacity, as Franklin Roosevelt did, as Theodore Roosevelt did, as Kennedy did, to connect with the masses of society. He had an excellent sense of timing and charisma.
TDR: One of your other criteria for a great president, which you identified in Reagan, was that they be a consensus-builder. Do you really see Reagan as a consensus builder, given the deep divisions in American politics during the 1980s?
RD: In many ways he was. The public was tired of the Democrats, they saw Jimmy Carter as a largely failed president, as inept in dealing with the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet Union. Reagan was opposed of course, by lots of people, liberal Democrats, who saw him as much too conservative. But Reagan, it turns out, was much more flexible than the current Bush is about the social agenda. Reagan didn't push that nearly as hard as he pushed more of economic agenda, the tax cuts. And he didn't really create the degree of alienation—there's a lot of anger towards Bush. He's so evangelical, so stubborn.
TDR: But many of the characteristics you highlight in Reagan: being personally charismatic, being politically shrewd, a lot of people would say they see the same things in the current president.
RD: Yes and no. No in the sense that it's nowhere near the degree that Reagan carried it off. Everyone who makes it to the White House, to one degree or another, has elements of what I describe as a great president. You can't become president without some kind of vision, whether it's rolling back government programs, or being against nation-building. And also, you have to be a good politician. You don't get there by being utterly inept, and the ones who are inept, like a McGovern or Gore or Kerry, they don't make it. So I think he has elements of it, but two questions: what degree do they have it, and how do they sustain it? I don't think Bush, at this juncture, can be seen as measuring up to Reagan.
TDR: To compare Bush again to the past, there are also a lot of similarities between his vision of US foreign policy and that of President Wilson.
RD: Absolutely. Bush, it's really striking: this is part of a long tradition in American foreign policy, running back to the nineteenth century: missionary diplomacy, manifest destiny, ideas about projecting American democratic values around the globe. What held us back so much in earlier years was our tradition of isolationism, and the fact that there was a powerful feeling that America had free security: that we did not have to engage politically, militarily, in overseas affairs because we enjoyed free security. We had the oceans, we had weak neighbors to the north and south, and we didn't have to worry about making alliances to defend the nation. This changes, of course, with Pearl Harbor and the advent of the Cold War, and it makes for a huge difference in the conduct of the presidency
TDR: It also strikes me that you've already largely made up your mind on Bush, despite, as you noted in your lecture, that it's hard for a historian to even make a judgment on Reagan since so little of the documentary evidence is available. How do you reconcile your personal opinions with your role as a historian?
RD: I might change my mind. What's awfully important is what comes next. If the next presidency really falls on it face, economically and politically, Bush may look that much better. If you have a presidency that is gangbusters, that is so successful that it makes Bush look comparatively even worse.
TDR: So presidents are in large part judged by what happens to their successors?
RD: To some degree, it's important. Franklin Roosevelt enjoys a terrific historical reputation in part because compared to Herbert Hoover, his predecessor; Reagan, compared to Jimmy Carter; initially people thought Carter compared to Ford and Nixon, but it didn't work out that way. Carter stumbled and proved to be a rather ineffective president. So it partly does, but it also makes the way they play themselves out.
TDR: For 2008, I know you're averse to giving any sort prediction, but you did mention in your lecture that you don't think religion is an issue any more in presidential elections.
RD: Well, I don't think in a formal sense: religion is a very complicated matter in the political life of this country. And it's always there, and it's important. The evangelical impulse as we see with Woodrow Wilson, as we see with Bush and the Middle East, this is a significant component of what drives the Bush foreign policy. And that's not to suggest there aren't elements of this in other presidencies: like Eisenhower with John Foster Dulles and rollback, liberation; Jimmy Carter and protecting human rights. There's an evangelical impulse behind them, we are in some ways a country that is a Protestant, evangelical society. Now, of course, under the Constitution we have no established religion, and there are so many competing religions and sects so that we don't get one religion dominating the others.
TDR: But do you think the nation would be ready for a Mormon president, a Mitt Romney?
RD: Sure, but it'll depend on the circumstances. And that's what the country is about: it's a conservative country. I don't mean the neo-cons, I'm talking about in terms of the rule of law, our Constitution, our separation of church and state, our regard for investment in individual rights, in equality of opportunity. But we've struggled over those things for many years. For decades and decades, blacks didn't have equality of opportunity, but it's changed now. Part of the debate over affirmative action has to deal with this tradition of equality of opportunity. So it's a conservative country, but I would say in the best sense of that term.
Now, I'm an old-fashioned liberal New Deal Democrat, but you know, I'm also so conservative because I also believe in traditional mores and political standards. And I believe that the president should build consensus, not drag people apart. This is one of the things that bothers me so much about Bush, that there is a divide in the country. Maybe retrospectively, people will see it differently, but for the time being, that's how I see it. Also, I think with this nomination of John Roberts, I think it's very shrewd politics. Bush has stumbled on Social Security and he's stumbled on the Schiavo matter.
TDR: Although people would argue over recent weeks that he's had a shift of momentum, with victories on the Central American Free Trade Agreement, the Roberts nomination, the highway bill, and the energy bill.
RD: I think it's partly a response to the fact that his poll numbers have gone down, and he has stumbled and now there's a certain surge. But it's also very shrewd politics on his part. There's been so much acrimony, especially over judicial appointments, so the impulse to put forward someone who's seen as a sensible, reasonable, honest conservative makes it very hard to believe this man will be resisted.
TDR: One last question—can this divisiveness be overcome? Maybe with someone like John McCain?
RD: I think McCain would be a very interesting proposition, but there's such a polarization in the parties, that a McCain couldn't win the nomination. Could somebody who is like a Casey from Pennsylvania, who is a moderate Democrat, could he win the nomination? Parties have been so polarized, and I don't think people like it. I think there's a lot of alienation from party politics today.