Know Your Enemy6 Nov 2022

Nixon Agonistes

"What is best and weakest in America goes out to reciprocating strength and deficiencies in Richard Nixon." It's difficult to think of a more electric meeting of author and subject than Garry Wills and Richard Nixon, a meeting that produced what might be the best book ever written about American politics, Wills's Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man. What begins as reporting from the campaign trail during the 1968 presidential contest—where Wills introduces us to Nixon, George Wallace, Nelson Rockefeller, and more—eventually becomes a profound meditation on the fate of liberalism in the United States. Wills found in Nixon the key to unlocking the reigning—but by then faltering—myths of their country's history and self-understanding, and what they reveal about each other.

Along the way he discusses the complex psychological dance between Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower; takes us on a tour of Nixon's hometown, Whittier, California; describes the Republicans' "southern strategy"; examines the roiling anger and protests over the Vietnam War; and offers on-the-ground reportage from the 1968 conventions (the GOP's in Miami, the Democrats', infamously, in Chicago). Matt and Sam try to make sense of it all and ponder what Nixon Agonistes might say about how we got here and where we're going.

Sources:

Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970)

Confessions of a Conservative (1979)

Outsider Looking In: Adventures of an Observer (2010)

Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (1968)

Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism (1973)

KYE, "Joan Didion, Conservative, (w/ Sam Tanenhaus)" Jan 13, 2022

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