The Nixon Rorschach.

• Author: Greenfield, Jeff
• Position: Book Review

HE WAS A FIGURE OF NATIONAL controversy as a freshman congressman. He was an embattled vice-presidential nominee before he was 40, a washed-up political loser before he was 50, a president who went from the biggest landslide reelection in history to resignation and disgrace in less than two years. He redefined himself as a (partially) rehabilitated elder-statesman-wise-man whose funeral--nearly half a century after he first set foot on the political stage--was attended respectfully by every one of his five successors.

Measured by its length, and by the passions it stirred, Nixon's shadow stretches across our history more as a shaping event--say, the Civil War--than as an individual. To find something fresh to say about this figure may seem impossible. But David Greenberg, in his first book, pulls it off. By focusing not on what Nixon did, but on what he meant--to friends and foes, journalists and historians--Greenberg has done more than provide us with a new understanding of the 37th president. He has produced a work that consistently challenges much of the received wisdom about how politics works. Indeed, I am hard pressed to think of a book on politics as bracing and original as this one.

Rather than administering yet another flogging to the image-based, focus-grouped, slickly packaged world of American politics, Greenberg takes as his central thesis a more nuanced notion:

"The pictures we hold of politicians are rarely just manufactured and foisted upon us. They emerge from a dialectical or collaborative process between politicians and their audiences. We filter the images that politicians project through our own political, cultural, Intellectual, professional, and psychological lenses." Armed with this insight, Greenberg takes us on an eye-opening flight across the varied terrain of Nixon's images, as understood by a wide range of friends, foes, and observers.

"To his original California boosters, Nixon was more than a political commodity, even if advertising salesman Roy Day, one of the committee of 100 that set out to recruit a congressional candidate, proclaimed, "This man is salable merchandise!" To those California business folk, suspicious of both government bureaucracy and Eastern corporate-media powers, Nixon was the common-man persona of "conservative populism."

"Nixon pioneered the use of populist language and imagery in the service of free-market economics long before the Reagan revolution, before the much celebrated backlash...