Steven Brill is no stranger to the news cycle. As co-founder of NewsGuard, which rates the reliability of news and information websites, he has a front-row seat to what he calls “A world where facts — shared truths — have lost their power to hold us together as a nation.”
In The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World — and What We Can Do About It,Brill documents the forces and people who have created and exploited our world of information chaos and political division. He dissects the way our current landscape of misinformation was set into motion in 1996, when Congress amended the nation’s Telecommunications Act, which was first passed in 1934 to accommodate the telephone, telegraph, and radio industries.
Explaining the mood of Congress in 1996, Brill writes, “The goal of the legislation was an overhaul of telecommunications law … spurred by bipartisan recognition that the booming 20-year-old cable television industry was becoming a major force that required sweeping changes to a regulatory scheme that had been put in place 61 years earlier.”
While the telecommunications amendments were in play on the House floor, members added three paragraphs to the draft legislation, known as Section 230, which addressed the exploding Internet. As Brill explains, “the power to communicate has gone from the slingshot age to the nuclear age,” and this accelerating tech helped current Internet providers push us further into the misinformation abyss. Back in the mid-’90s, there were three providers — AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy — with 1 million members collectively drawn from the 14% of American households with dial-up access. Today, Internet users worldwide number 5.44 billion, or 67.1% of the global population, according to the International Telecommunication Union. As of 2024, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the Internet is accessible to nearly 95% of the U.S. population, more than 320 million citizens. The Pew Research Center reports that 9 out of 10 U.S. adults say they use the Internet every day; 41% of those adults say they use the Internet “almost constantly.”
Brill calls for the end of online anonymity.
The purpose of Section 230 was to provide “Good Samaritan” protections to existing Internet companies, allowing them to avoid legal liability for content posted online by users — even if harmful. As is often the case with any legislation, there can be unintended consequences. Reed Hundt, FCC chairman at the time, thought the section “was no big deal.” He later told Brill, “We never dreamed that Section 230 would be a protection mechanism for a new group of manipulators — the social media companies with their algorithms. Those companies didn’t exist then.” For perspective, Brill notes, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was 12 years old when Hundt made his original comment.
“Civil society is unraveling,” Brill writes, sounding the alarm that Internet carriers have been anything but Good Samaritans. Echoing Hundt, he posits that Silicon Valley’s decision — following the 1996Telecommunications Act amendments — to intentionally code algorithms embedded in their social media platforms to maximize profits has resulted in endless divisive content.
Further exacerbating divisiveness and misinformation, Brill writes, was — and is — Big Tech’s intentional feeding of ad dollars to websites. On page 64 of his 317-page book, Brill notes, “I have now mentioned advertising revenue several times as being the driver of so much that we see online.” He goes on to point out a serious consequence: “Approximately 35% of the thousands of news websites in the top 95% of engagement in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Australia, and New Zealand are highly unreliable.”
Brill also blames the individuals, who he calls “bad actors,” who inflame misinformation for their own purposes. First, he cites “charlatans promoting bogus health cures and other phony products, conspiracy theorists, and just plain deranged people who promote disinformation.” Second, there are the disenfranchised, who “for some reason feel left behind, threatened, or otherwise distrustful and vulnerable enough to buy into what the bad actors are selling.”
Against this backdrop of debilitating factors, Brill provides readers with many rich instances of how the Internet’s flourishing misinformation chaos has shaped our thinking — to the point that “The decline of truth — the level of distrust in what should be accepted facts, conveyed by what were once trusted sources of information … is unprecedented.” One prominent example that he stresses: “The measles vaccine works and is safe. It does not cause autism, ADHD, or other illness.” Even so, conspiracy theories about vaccine dangers, he observes, have forced a drop in vaccinations in both the U.S. and Europe.
“Some 20% of orgs have been found to be unreliable.”
Another example is how mass shootings have become knotted up in lies online. Brill cites the October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, which he notes “was not a ‘false flag’ operation staged by pro-gun control groups,” as claimed by a conspiracy website based in Maine. But within 24 hours, the misleading claim had notched 96,900 views on X.
A third instance involves technology, with Brill stating, “5G cell technology doesn’t cause cancer, nor did it cause COVID-19, but those twin myths — which were promoted, beginning in 2019, by Russian disinformation operations because Russia was behind on the technology and wanted to discredit it — spread so virally that technicians in the U.K. working on phone lines were attacked by angry mobs.”
Brill’s assertions continue to play out in real-time. FactCheck.org recently reported that the July 13 attempt to assassinate former president Donald Trump provided yet another occasion for bad actors to disseminate confusing information to the public about what had actually happened. Online posts that were fact-checked and debunked included “unfounded claims that a woman at the rally acted ‘suspicious,’” But the FBI has stated that the “investigation to date indicates the shooter acted alone.” Another false online post about the first Trump assassination attempt changed the name of Italian sportswriter Marco Violi to Mark Violets and then claimed that he was involved in the shooting. Violi told Reuters that he was “in Italy … and I didn’t have the slightest idea what happened.”
“This crisis is not inevitable or irreversible. There are a variety of specific, practical steps … that we can take to reverse this devastating erosion of trust,”Brill writes, including demanding that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission enforce contracts already in place requiring social media giants to audit their posts to ensure they are authentic.
Another solution Brill proposes is to amend Section 230 so that a social media company would lose its immunity from legal liability if, in processing posts, it used “an algorithm, model, or other computational process to rank, order, promote, recommend, amplify, or similarly alter the information.” Another step would be to “condition Section 230 immunity on a platform offering to integrate tools called middleware into its products,” so users would get more information about who is feeding them news.
Notably, Brill calls for the end of online anonymity. He observes that some platforms, such as Facebook, require accounts to be opened with a real name, while most others do not, making verification of facts in user posts nearly impossible, given the sheer volume of postings.
Brill also underscores the need to toughen enforcement of campaign finance laws to require full public disclosure of “pink slime” sites, purported news outlets that are actually fake partisan operations publishing poor-quality news reports that appear to be local news. He states that by the end of 2023, “the number of real news sites in the United States operated by real local daily newspapers has declined, while the number of so-called pink-slime news sites has increased to the point that there were about the same number (about 1,200) of each.” Brill’s contention was backed up by a 2019 Columbia Journalism Review report that found more than 450 pink slime websites in the U.S., which has since hit the 1,200 mark. Most of the sites operate as part of a network owned by larger conglomerates,such as Metric Media, largely with the goal of influencing politics. Such sites, says Brill, should be required to disclose their political mission, and who is financing the operation.
Brill’s last chapter is a hefty outline of what he thinks can be done to restore truthfulnessto our news cycle and weed out mis/disinformation on the Internet in general.
“Some 20% of orgs have been found to be unreliable,” Brill writes, prompting him to call for teaching consumers “online hygiene” to help them identify scams. He notes, “Multiple researchers say K-12 students and the elderly need skills to weed out disinformation.” With AI’s recent emergence, Brill recommends steps that would allow only licensed companies fully committed to the strict regulation of generative AI, based on strict vetting of their software products, to operate online. This reform would mean that online sites creating, wholly or in part, “generative AI” such as text, images, music, audio, and video “would have to have a visible insignia prominently disclosing that it is using a licensed generative AI product.”
KNOPF/Author photo by Michael Lionstar
Another deep change recommended by Brill involves taming the programmatic advertising industry. He would have the “US Securities and Exchange Commission and similar regulatory agencies in other countries … require that all publicly traded companies file an annual report listing the websites on which the company spent more than a negligible amount (say $10,000) on advertising.” This is important, given the confusion created by programmatic advertising, because “We have seen that thousands of advertisers, including the world’s blue chip brands, financially support websites they would seemingly not want their brands associated with.” The end result, he notes, is that “Brands of all kinds advertise on sites promoting … varieties of hoaxes and toxic content….” A 2023 Association of National Advertisers survey revealed that “billions of dollars are supporting these kinds of websites.” That metric leads Brill to argue, “Shareholders have a right to know how their money is being spent.”
Political reform is at the center of Brill’s solutions to our “polarization and sense of government paralysis.” He encourages citizen-driven ballot initiatives to attack the problem through state constitutions. For example, he recommends that states change their method of conducting primary elections to a “top two” system, as used for some elections in California, Nebraska, and Washington, in which anyone seeking state or local office enters the same primary, regardless of their political party. In other words, voters cast ballots for who they think are the best two candidates for the job, as opposed to following party loyalty.
Finally, Brill laments that “legislators in charge choose their own voters” through gerrymandering, the manipulation of geographic boundaries to favor one political party. He envisions a system in whichcitizen-drivenballot referenda eliminate gerrymandering by having voting districts determined by independent nonpartisan commissions, following the lead of Michigan and Colorado. Historically, sitting legislators and political party operatives have controlled the process.
Underpinning Brill’s recommendations is a call for robust public debate leading to actions that create disincentives to Big Tech’s “intentionally coding advertising and content algorithms embedded in their social media platforms to maximize profits but end up promoting endless divisive content.”
Brill concludes, “Those who have been lured to the fringes will start to believe again in democracy, in government, and in other institutions and experts. They will be less likely to believe that the world is full of conspiracies that threaten them. They will start to believe in truth again.” ❖
Frank Pizzoli is a journalist who has been covering politics, queer issues, healthcare, and literary celebrities for the past 25 years.
Americans are already casting their votes for president. The 538 polling site has Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of former president Donald Trump nationally by one to two points, with the seven battleground states even closer, or slightly favoring Trump. This divided electorate is on edge, as key topics such as abortion access, immigration, gun rights, and climate change take center stage.
As November 5 comes barreling down on America, halfway around the world Ukrainians are bracing for the results of an election that could decide the fate of their war-torn country. Over the past two and a half years, President Biden has provided material and moral support for Ukraine as it fights to survive the Russian invasion. Harris has backed Biden’s stance, but only briefly spotlights Ukraine on the campaign trail. In contrast, Trump has stated that he would end the war on day one of his term, although he’s offered no substantive plan. He has, however, said in the past that he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries who fail to meet defense spending criteria.
For Ukrainians, the stakes of the election are high, as it is coming at a time when Moscow’s forces are advancing at the fastest rate in more than two years, despite Ukraine’s recent cross-border incursion into Russia and occupation of parts of the Kursk region. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pleaded with allies to do “everything that can be done” to minimize Russia’s advances on the frontlines, and his administration has deemed the current fight a crucial moment for the country, as both the U.S. election and the winter months draw nearer. Ukraine has been under constant attack over the past few months, and war fatigue permeates the country; many residents simply want the war to end somehow.
“We know that Trump will not support Ukraine. He will cut off all possible support, so it’s obviously only one option.”
On the streets of Kyiv, the capital city, and over the Telegram messaging app from other regions, I asked Ukrainians who had been living in their country over the course of the war, as well as refugees living abroad, who they are hoping will win the election: former president Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. What I found was a division not unlike the one in the U.S. For the most part, those living in Kyiv wanted Harris to win the election, seeing her as the only candidate who would help Ukraine continue the fight for its existence and the mission to liberate all Russian-occupied land in the process. Residents of eastern Ukraine, however, where Russian-backed fighters first attacked in 2014, a conflict that has been subsumed in the larger Russian invasion of 2022, voiced the hope for an end to the war sooner. Some feel that Trump, who has repeatedly stated that he would end the war in the early days of his presidency, is the candidate who can do so.
• • •
The war in Ukraine has carried on for the past two and a half years. Over that time, the U.S. has been a steadfast supporter of Ukraine. Now, the U.S. is preparing for the 2024 presidential election, and the outcome might determine Ukraine’s future. Who do you want to win the election, and why?
Natalia, 86, Kyiv If Kamala Harris will help and support Ukraine, then of course, it’s better for Kamala Harris…. Because Trump, in general, seems to me to be not serious. Well, in general, it’s hard for me to believe that Kamala will win. I don’t believe she will win.
Yevheniia, 27, operations manager from Mariupol, now in Kyiv I’m trying to always be in this political bubble and try to understand at least something about American political elections. I know that is a kind of huge deal, especially for Americans, because it’s two completely different parties, Republicans and Democrats. When I saw that Biden was not stable, I was completely lost. I thought, we’re gonna be gone, because we really need this. We rely on it. And it’s also very nervous for us, too.
L: Damage from Russian attacks in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine; R: Another damaged wing of the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital.ANNA CONKLING
Then, I saw Kamala Harris. I didn’t understand who [she was] exactly. I’m trying to find any information about her, and I don’t understand what she is thinking about our country. This kind of European thing in me really wants Kamala, I guess. She looks younger than Trump, and kind of more normal.
Oksana, 39, psychologist for Voices of Children, Bakhmut We’re observers of the process of election in America, but of course, we understand that it can influence our life and the existence of our country. In case Russia wins, I have to escape, because I work with kids who are brought back from deportation. My husband serves in the army, so we can’t live in this country.
The only way out for us is to win. Emotionally, I like Trump because he’s an extraordinary guy. He’s unpredictable. As a psychologist, he’s interesting. Nobody can predict his next step, but I think that he’s a really strong man. But I’m not sure that he will take our side, and that’s why Kamila [sic] Harris is closer, and more clear, and more understandable.
For me, as a Ukrainian woman, as a mother, as a wife of a soldier, as a psychologist who works with kids, it is important to see someone who will help us.
“Donald Trump, because he will stop the war.”
Eva, 32, graphic designer from Kharkiv, refugee in Dubai Democrats obviously, because their politics toward Ukraine is quite straightforward and supportive, in a way. The other party is unpredictable, and we’d love to expect the same level of solidarity from them, but I hardly believe it could happen.
Natalia, 68, Kyiv Well, honestly, we have a lot of our own problems, but seeing how the current American president, Biden, helps Ukraine in solving many issues, we are for him. [I am] for women. For Harris. I don’t see any changes in American politics or in the American economy which is very much good for the American people. But the main decisive issue is for the people of America because they live there.
Anton, 40, information technology, Kyiv It’s obviously Kamala Harris. We are supporting her and we know a lot about elections in America. We know that Trump will not support Ukraine. He will cut off all possible support, so it’s obviously only one option. We are standing for democrats as our country is also democratic, so we obviously will support only Kamala Harris. I read a lot of news in the Telegram channels, and people mostly say that they support only Kamala Harris. It’s obvious choice for Ukraine, for Ukrainian citizens.
I heard about how [Speaker of the House] Mike Johnson commented that Trump will cut off the war in the first day. And people jokingly said [Trump] will call Putin, say something like, “Vladimir, please stop this war. You need to calm down.” And he will say, “Please speak Russian. I don’t understand anything.”
Personally, if you ask me, I have a lot of concerns about [at this point, Anton searched for the appropriate English words, then was able to convey to me his concern about Trump’s relationship with Putin]. And I think that he will play the time for Putin. So, he will not stop the war. It’s not possible. They will simply not stop somewhere in Donbas or take some small city, big city. They simply will not stop there. Their specific line is somewhere behind Poland.
L: Oksana, 39, feels that “The only way out for us is to win.” R: Yevheniia, 27, with her daughter, says, “This kind of European thing in me really wants Kamala, I guess.”ANNA CONKLING
Alexandra, 23, language teacher from Dnipro, refugee in France If you look from the point of view of Ukraine, I’m in favor of Trump. Because he will not sponsor this war, and he has a real plan to come to negotiations and a truce.
I listened to his speech, and he said he could press Putin to make peace. Yes, we will lose a lot of territories, but we will be guaranteed that we will be part of the European Union and NATO. This will give us a guarantee that such a terrible war will not happen again.
Everyone is so tired in Ukraine from the corruption. When I read that America or other countries are sending us monetary support, I think, Oh no, please send weapons, but not money. All the people are very tired of the war. They all want to go back to normal life. Unfortunately, it seems to me that without negotiations, this will not end.
Ekaterina, 38, marketing, Kharkiv Donald Trump, because he will stop the war. He expressed his position on this issue, the speedy cessation of hostilities on the territory of Ukraine.
Vladimir, 45, actor, Kharkiv The thing is, neither Trump nor Harris appeals to me right now. This entire thing is a public relations campaign for the election, so no one knows what will happen and how any president will act toward Ukraine, so it’s hard to answer. Trump is old. [Kamala] is always laughing, so it gives the impression that she’s an inadequate person.
Elena, 64, dentist, Sumy Whoever among them supports Ukraine and who will continue to help, what they promise. I’m for that one, in short. I’m not interested in anything at all, except for them helping Ukraine. Kamala is there by some kind of accident. Trump already has experience. He is better for the American people. I’m for the one who supports Ukraine best. I don’t care otherwise. ❖
Anna Conkling is a freelance journalist based in New York City who, since the beginning of the Russian invasion, has been corresponding with and on the ground interviewing Ukrainian soldiers, students, and civilians, and writing about them for the Voice and other publications.
∼ ∼ ∼
This article is part of a series — At 250, Who Will America Be? — reporting on threats to American democracy as we approach the nation’s Semiquincentennial, on July 4, 2026.
The thousands of Democrats filing out of the United Center on Thursday night were exuberant. They had seen their new nominee, Kamala Harris, prove that she can deliver a crisp and stirring primetime speech. Joe Biden was history; the future of the party lay before them, along with the growing likelihood that Donald Trump could be beaten again in November.
Celebrations were everywhere at the Democratic National Convention, the first physical gathering in eight years — parties, afterparties, buffet breakfasts, caucus meetings, and all the other giddy rendezvous. The vice president and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, were the toast of Chicago, and most intraparty dissent had been tamped down, although the Uncommitted Movement had demanded a Palestinian speaker at the convention and the DNC had rebuffed them. Beyond the security perimeter, the pro-Palestinian marches were sizable but not as enormous as billed, and disruptions were minimal. It was not 1968 out there.
The question that the convention did not answer is what a Kamala Harris administration will look like if she wins. Because Biden dropped out and anointed her, Harris never had to compete in an open primary. The last time she was subjected to such pressure — and had to regularly interact with the press — was 2020. That campaign went poorly. Now, Harris is offering herself up as both a callback to Barack Obama and a continuity candidate who would honor, theoretically at least, some of Biden’s policy accomplishments. She has not, so far, openly broken with Biden, and she has echoed his rhetoric on both the war in Ukraine and Israel-Hamas, though she spoke more forcefully at the convention about the civilian suffering in Gaza.
What this all means, though, is unclear. There is no Democratic equivalent of the GOP’s Project 2025 — not yet, anyway. And since Biden dropped out of the race, a month ago, Harris has refused to conduct sitdown interviews or speak with journalists for any extended period of time. It’s a risk-averse strategy, and it’s paid off so far, as Trump has flailed. But the race remains quite close and Harris will eventually be forced to sketch out a policy vision for undecided voters in key swing states.
What do we know? Harris endorses the construction of more housing to alleviate a nationwide affordability crisis. She wants to offer a subsidy to first-time homebuyers. And she wants to combat grocery price gouging through some sort of price controls, and protect the Affordable Care Act. But it is difficult to evaluate any of these serious proposals without further details from her team.
Would Harris continue to crack down on the cryptocurrency industry?
One of the most significant — and underappreciated — shifts of the Biden era was his approach to antitrust. Biden was the first president in decades to take trust-busting seriously and to try to halt the ongoing and anti-competitive conglomeration of big business in America. Biden’s Justice Department successfully sued Google over their search monopoly, and his young Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, has made it her mission to combat monopolization in all walks of life.
Corporate titans revile her. The richest Democratic donors, including media mogul Barry Diller and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, have made it plain that they’d want Harris to dump Khan. Obama was far cozier with business and tech elites than Biden; many of his top aides eventually went to work in Silicon Valley. David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, ended up at Uber and Facebook, and former White House press secretary Jay Carney took lucrative positions at Amazon and Airbnb. Harris’s brother-in-law, Tony West, spoke at the Democratic convention — he is now Uber’s chief legal officer.
There’s the unsettling reality that many business and tech leaders might view Harris as an opportunity. She has not yet shown she has the same affinity for Biden’s left-populism and his administration’s skepticism of corporate power. The Obama administration permitted numerous acquisitions and mergers to take place — Facebook buying Instagram, Google buying Waze, the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger — that Biden might have blocked. In another example that Biden meant business, Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary, scuttled the Spirit Airlines-Frontier merger.
If Harris wins, she would feel emboldened to replace Biden appointees with her own. Bidenworld, after all, mostly shunted her to the side, and it’s only now that she’s becoming a political star. Would Buttigieg survive a Harris presidency? Would Khan? Would Rohit Chopra, the ambitious Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director, who has also, like Khan, challenged corporate power? Would Harris continue to crack down on the cryptocurrency industry? She is still a Democrat, close to Biden, so there would be no full-scale repudiation, no regime-burning, but progressives have cause for worry.
Walz may be the olive branch. Among the top candidates for the ticket, he was the most friendly to progressives, and he had won plaudits in Minnesota for signing into a law a raft of progressive bills, including universal free school lunches and paid and family medical leave. He is not a neoliberal or a triangulator. He exists on the ideological spectrum to the left of Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor who seemed to have the inside track to the Harris ticket, until he didn’t.
Walz, like Harris, has not granted many interviews, and he’s been most visible at rallies and on cable television. His thoughts on corporate power or thorny foreign policy matters are still not fleshed out. That, of course, is the advantage of a primary season — for ideas to be floated and contested in the public.
Instead, we have questions and more questions. The threat of Trump is well understood, as are his designs on the presidency. He wants, at the very minimum, to use the levers of the office to punish his enemies. He may want to further cut taxes on the rich. He will seek to install as many Trump loyalists as possible in the federal bureaucracy, and reward corporate friends with business-friendly policies.
Harris represents normalcy, and that might be enough. What we don’t know is what kind of normalcy. We only have the feeling, the vibe, the sense of what we might be rushing toward. Enough Democrats are content with that for now. They can’t think much past November. ❖
Your family becoming worried about your consumption of InfoWars — that’s probably the first sign. You tell them it’s a scholarly thing, you’re a student of Alex Jones (as opposed to a student of Alex Jones’s), but if that was a joke they don’t seem to get it. You’ve done this before, or more or less, the obsessing over things you find basically repugnant. (Sarah Silverman regards this as a quirk of Jewishness, the need to shove your whole face in and “smell the sour milk.”) You’re only half-Jewish. As a child you consumed anything you could about aliens, and were deathly afraid of aliens. (You’re given to understand that a young Kurt Cobain was also like this, even specifically that the cover of Communion, Whitley Strieber’s alien abduction memoir, had scared the living hell out of him, too.)
But you’d seen some questionable connection, some exploitable thread, linking InfoWars and Alex Jones to George Orwell and 1984 — that is supposed to have been the point. You were supposed to have discussed 1984 on its 75th anniversary, or maybe its 40th. Har har. (You have your doubts about this kind of assignment in general, things pegged to anniversaries, and in any case you’ve blown your deadline by a couple of months; 1984 was published in June 1949.) It’s not that there isn’t any there there, so to speak, that’s not what makes it questionable. Alex talks about Orwell any chance he gets, which is to say he says the same two or three things whenever the opportunity presents. There is a chant he loves to lead, say, when he’s approaching the Capitol on January 6 (“The answer to 1984 is 1776!”), and Alex knows the trivium that Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair. (He pronounces the pen name somewhere in the neighborhood of JARGE ARR-WELL.) That this is, functionally speaking, all he knows was to have powered the original head-fake in your pitch to your editor: that 1984 is just “universal” which is to say vague enough that anyone of any political persuasion can point to it. You were going to pull quotes from the book that a right-winger would be liable to read as prophetic or probative of their position, or whatever. But you were going to then do what Alex never does, contextualize, providing insight into the specificity of Orwell’s historical/political moment — and yes, undercutting what had until then masqueraded as your argument in re: vagueness/universality. This was supposed to have been a very clever moment indeed.
“ … Russia should probably be filed under blue due to its (blue’s) overall cold, clinical gestalt, for example … ”Arch Goldwater collection
You’d had the idea but then couldn’t get down to it (which isn’t like you, you’re a go-getter) and then kept doing your quote-unquote additional research into Alex and InfoWars and that was where the family entered the picture, being all needlessly worried. You would’ve gotten to it soon enough, or eventually — really — but then someone took a potshot at Donald Trump onstage at a rally and everything really came unglued. Certain fine but firm lines began to vibrate and blur. Your own and your friends’ and peer group’s and family members’ and political allies’ (real or imagined) vis-à-vis adversaries’ (same) reactions became hard to distinguish. The way your dreams digested or dissolved this complexity only added to the complexity. (When you’d been sleeping, anyway.) Someone, a friend, pointed out how Trump being saved by having turned his head up and to the right inverted JFK’s back and to the left in a way that couldn’t have been more symbolically perfect. Somewhere, maybe a message board, a joke about “Kentucky windage” got made that then morphed into a joke about wind shear, citing the movie Outbreak from 1995 featuring Dustin Hoffman. The AR-15 emerged as central to more than one conversation or group text or nightmare. Variations on Hi, NSA! or Well if you weren’t on a list already, you are now. It wasn’t hard to imagine (or did it really transpire?) that Alex took to the airwaves and quite literally forced his employees to intone a prayer in words of their own choosing, each in turn, for the live audience. You almost sympathized with whoever had to go first. An exasperated friend texted to say, of Americans and their guns, that the fetishism is so obvious as to hardly merit unearthing, which (d)evolved into a conversation about how, as recounted in Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana,drummer Dave Grohl’s dad, the very first time he heard Nevermind, noticed that the first three songs all mentioned a gun (having or not having one, making sure it was loaded if you did) and told Dave, basically, oh so it’s Kurt’s dick. And that was in 1991.
The Armalite/Colt AR-15™ is kinda the Kleenex or Dumpster (™, ™) of the Guns & Ammo set.
At a certain point you shut off your phone, ignoring several unreturned texts and unanswered calls. Down to business. On Netflix you select a multipart documentary about Russia/the U.S.S.R.-U.S. relationship/nuclear annihilation, thinking even before you hit Play that the relevance is almost downright spooky. Stalin pictured as a young thug was a handsome devil, so to the degree that you can or are encouraged to read Big Brother as a stand-in, all the suggestions about him being hot (while having eyes ever on you) make a lot of sense, suddenly. The thrust of the doc overall seems to be that you can trace a line directly from the nuclear arms race, beginning around the middle of WWII, through to today, the modern security state being both a relic of a Cold War that putatively ended and something that Americans have become slowly inured to, to the point of not even being able to see it. You think of that parable about the fish not knowing what water is. The CIA itself didn’t even exist until after the war, and it was a bumbling failure in its formative outings, which can be forgiven given that it was up against a KGB that had already been an NKVD and a Cheka and God only knows what else. You think of that parable involving the frog and the pot of water brought to a boil. Of the unreturned texts, the most recent had its contents partially visibleon the lock screen of your phone as you powered it down. Of the InfoWars employees who’d had to intone the prayer, you are already familiar with most, if not all: Harrison Smith (out-and-out neo-Nazi), Owen Shroyer (did time for January 6), Chase Geiser (what a name). Alex sometimes refers to what Chase does for him as “beavering.” And wouldn’t that be the way it goes down, the eyes that are ever on you being ones that, well, maybe you don’t mind so much being there?
” … but of course not on the level of orange (a dire warning) … ”Arch Goldwater collection
One of the unforeseen consequences of the first atomic test at the Trinity site, in 1945, in the New Mexico desert, was that the sand immediately under the tower that had held the bomb safely aloft had (the sand) fused from the immense, intense heat generated by the blast, into a kind of pocked ore that technically qualified as glass and that the assembled scientists had dubbed “Trinitite.” The fact that your editor happens to be the possessor of a half-dollar-size chunk of the stuff cannot be the kind of thing that quote-unquote just happens. Learning of these things, watching as the correspondences stack up, becomes seductive not just intellectually, you are finding, but because there is an affective chord somewhere being gently stroked; the everyday objects in your apartment sizzle — it’s as if someone tweaked your own personal brightness dial. A frisson settling at the base of the spine. Trinitite just so happened to be green, a green glass, technically. One of the atomic spies — the Soviets had more than one in on the Manhattan Project — was named David Greenglass. Trump’s wannabe assassin (his Princip or his Oswald) had taken his aim from atop a warehouse belonging to AGR: American Glass Research. And an onscreen someone with an unplaceable Eastern Bloc accent opines that Vladimir Putin doesn’t seek a restoration of the U.S.S.R. so much as a return to the perceived glory of the Russian Empire. In which case, you are thinking, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to keep the larder stocked with an extra-beefy CIA.
You are willing to cop to the lack of sleep becoming a problem (also the voice you hear your thoughts in being a little too loud, out of nowhere), but doesn’t Donald Trump offer the ultimate counterexample, or could it be that his partisans really find him pretty? Also, an inchoate but discomfiting idea begins to take hold, the unique frustration of something being always just out of reach or beyond naming, of notions that seem, even feel, great but that aren’t quite resolving in a way you can get your head around. Your editor, Arch, will provide essential guidance, and so to help him out you begin printing off what you are referring to as notes, organizing them according to their various threads, each into a folder of its own color — Orwell in blue, InfoWars in red, Nirvana in yellow, Russia in green, nukes in purple, an orange folder that becomes quickly unwieldy and overflows with printouts relating to various domestic spy agencies. Trump doesn’t get his own folder, because the story of Trump getting shot strikes you as so all-encompassing that to organize those notes would be futile. Arch grew up partly in New Mexico but partly in your old stomping grounds, near the Mason-Dixon Line, one reason you get along so famously. You gather up the folders and your keys and MetroCard and set out for his place in Riverdale.
“ … or red (the system blinks in abject terror).”Arch Goldwater collection
This has been an obvious mistake, though, because clearly anything relating to nukes should be green, both on account of Trinitite and for ironic commentary, maybe, about environmental impacts. Nor can you overlook certain affective valences relating to color: Russia should probably be filed under blue due to its (blue’s) overall cold, clinical gestalt, for example. It begins to upset you on the subway. The AR-15, or what we now know to call an “AR-15 style” rifle — the Armalite/Colt AR-15™ is kinda the Kleenex or Dumpster (™, ™) of the Guns & Ammo set — essentially just refers to a gas-powered semiautomatic of a certain contour that is easily moddable, has negligible recoil, fires at high velocity, and, being largely plastic and aluminum and not so much steel, weighs next to nothing. Baby’s First Lil Murder Machine — there have been mass shooters who had never even fired a gun prior to executing their first victim, and who selected the AR (style) for expressly these reasons. The message on your lock screen had been from your sister and mentioned the name of a doctor whose home office you are none too keen on darkening the door of again. You seize on the idea of filing anything InfoWars in yellow, thinking of how Alex is such a chickenhawk. But then what to do about Nirvana? Yellow indicates some lack of ease but of course not on the level of orange (a dire warning) or red (the system blinks in abject terror). You’d been happy or at least somewhat relieved, in the immediate aftermath of the Trump shooting, not to have been alone in jumping to the unevidenced conclusion that that shit was staged. How Alex avoided a custodial sentence when Owen, who is a charisma vacuum and so had engaged in the same behaviors, just less effectively, on January 6, got two months in prison — how this came to pass is beyond you. Early reports had indicated that it might not have been a round from the shooter’s AR but a fragment of glass from Trump’s own teleprompter that got him; it almost doesn’t matter that you can clearly see an intact teleprompter in the photos, it feels like something that ought to be true, and so it is. Or can be. What Chase does for Alex — beavering — mostly entails printing out headlines and tweets and shaping the results into “stacks” for the InfoWars broadcast. The apparent lack of casualties among rally-goers is another element to be seized on, even if ultimately untrue (someone lay dying as the crowd chanted U-S-A, U-S-A). Green (peaceful, soothing) turns out to be all wrong even at the granular level of the Trinitite, aka “Alamogordo glass,” which after all is nuclear fallout, though its half-life is admittedly less scary than that of other radioisotopes enchained by the test blast (plutonium-239’s is on the order of 24,000 years). You worry a little that Arch has been exposed, irradiated slowly. You might insist that his personal chunk not be in the room when you hand over, Woodward- or Bernstein-like, all your notes. The triumph of feelings over facts is if not something InfoWars invented then something it perfected, has been your operating assumption. A thought, dark like a sudden storm, involving Cobain’s obsession with Lennon and Manson’s obsession with the Beatles and the CIA’s (possible, bruited) involvement with Manson and all it takes is the name of MK-Ultra headshrinker JOLYON WEST flashing across the mnemoptical screen for this road, like all roads, to converge again on JFK. On the stoop of a house in the Bronx it isn’t Arch you are greeted by but his wife, Veronica, who you have decided likes you overall but currently seems … deep orange. Trump needed to redirect attention from the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 and the (latest) Epstein revelations and so, because you could impute this motive, well … After their forced prayer the InfoWarriors had moved into asserting without evidence that Trump’s would-be assassin had been Antifa. Veronica, who unlike you has a cellphone on her person, is dialing a number, and after an almost suspiciously short span of time there will be the silent but strobing approach of an emergency vehicle and a couple of put-upon EMTs will make the mistake of wondering about certain elements of the whole assassination “narrative” as they sedate you, en route, ignoring your protestations in re folder-coloration and -mixing, saying something about the deep state…
… Something about civilizations needing first to destroy themselves from within, before they can be overtaken from without. But mostly, as the chemical warmth overtakes you and the overexposed light in back of the ambulance dims, you are left with a lone image from 1984, a reference to a single swatch of text, eminently cherry-pickable in that Alex Jones way: of an American life drained of curiosity, of enjoyment, of all quote-unquote competing pleasures, without art or literature or science or even sex, “with no distinction between beauty and ugliness” (an especially fatidic line, or so it seems to you at present), and where beside remains only the
intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.
And you, you too can feel the slippage, the happiness in ignorance or slavery or a warm gun … the lobotomized contentment of that end-state. You, too, have won the victory over yourself. You love — but the ocean wave shrugs. Darkness, coming down fast. Yes she is. Do it to her, to Julia. Julia, what a …
Oh, well, whatever. Never mind. ❖
Mike Laws is, in point of fact, only somewhat obsessed with Alex Jones. He is actually far crazier and much more difficult to be around when it comes to his beloved Baltimore Orioles.
“Do you remember your President Nixon?” David Bowie asked the Watergate-gobsmacked denizens of God’s favorite country half a century ago. Starting with the pointed “your,” this was cheeky of him, considering that our President Nixon had vacated the White House on August 9, 1974. That was only two days — two days! — before Bowie recorded the vocal track for what would become the title tune of his 1975 album, Young Americans, at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound studios.
A whole lot was going on in them there days. So let me take you down in the time machine, as John Lennon might say. Let’s call Bowie the anti-Nixon of our most schizophrenic 20th-century decade, not that it lacks for 21st-century competition.
Vying over who owned the Zeitgeist back then was a Bingo game gone anarchist. Nixon, who’d had his own innings of introducing new Nixons to a bemused public, with mixed success — and who might have gone to his grave without any idea who David Bowie was — would have known that in his bones.
Choosing soon-to-be-legendary Philly producers Gamble & Huff’s house venue as his latest musical bivouac signaled the onetime Ziggy Stardust’s transit from space-oddity weirdness and diamond-dog doomsaying, along with whatever other oddball but predictive flights took his fancy — e.g., Pinups, his anticipatory punk-covers album before punk existed — to what the main man himself acutely called “plastic soul.” And it was.
Then, as always, our anti-Nixon was as comfy with his own artificiality as his Potomac doppelgänger was hamstrung by his. But Bowie was dabbling in audibly fake authenticity for once, which seemed to be just what Dr. Rorschach had ordered to make temporary sense of our permanently spread-eagled, 50-state inkblot.
That made Bowie the ideal greeter station-to-stationed just then at America’s eternal revolving door. You know, the one where the only Muzak our muffled ears ever hear is the Beatles’ “Revolution” on repeat as we’re trapped eyeing each other through imprisoning but somehow promisingly spinning glass. We were and still are a bit like those bourgeois dinner guests inexplicably confined in a sumptuous manse in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel — we’d get out faster than Laurel and Hardy if we could figure out how.
So far as revolving-door ch-ch-ch-changes go, it’s no surprise that we (white, naturally) ignorami mistook Bowie’s latest bust-a-move for what it wasn’t. Namely, our introduction to what we’d soon learn to call disco. Try to imagine disco as the soundtrack to the Nixon era and you’ll instantly realize what a short, strange trip it was from the Saturday Night Massacre — when the Department of Justice’s two top officials quit rather than carry out Nixon’s order to fire initial Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox before then solicitor general Robert Bork dutifully bent over to split the clam without even asking for K-Y jelly in October of 1973 — to Saturday Night Fever and Saturday Night Live.
Former White House counsel John Dean still shows up on cable news sometimes, enjoying his late-life promotion to wise man after being Nixon’s legal flunky turned Senate stool pigeon.
Despite some surface noise to the contrary, Bowie never went full-on Bee Gees on us. No You can tell from the way I sing that I’ve got my balls tied in a sling / And you can tell from my tone of fright that the sling on my balls is much too tight for him. Never a true convert to disco, or anything else, he was a man born for flirting with everything under the sun, over the moon, and whatever orbital rubbish happened to float in between. That was why we trusted Ziggy Zeitgeist to identify our next bright-shiny thing 180 in this damn automat restaurant’s door.
Given his quasi-janitorial job in the culture, it’s not to Bowie’s discredit that, aside from the aforesaid title tune and the Lennon-abetted funk collab “Fame,” most of Young Americans hasn’t aged any better than the unrefrigerated Stilton so many English housewives discovered in their kitchens once Swinging London bit the dust. (It was better than biting the Stilton.) Nonetheless, Bowie’s intuition that the times they were a-chord-changing was at its sharpest in the most transformational year of my lifetime. Well, until recently, but we’ll get to invidious comparisons down the road.
If Bowie’s “Do you remember” question about our fallible national memory was mischievous, it also turned out to be prescient. That’s because the difference between 1974 and 1975 was so seismic. Although it wasn’t too big of a hit — “Fame” took the honors there — “Young Americans” caught the cusp of that calendar flip like no other song I know.
Its despairing vignettes of heartland heartbreak (Bowie had been listening a lot to a newbie named Bruce Springsteen) kept being interrupted by a zesty, sweaty, hedonistic chorus, with a jaunty saxophone hook that interlaced the two. The resulting panorama envisioned American life as an endlessly renewable, perpetually hurtling present, with no time for more than an occasional glance at the receding (and sometimes, alarmingly oncoming) rear-view mirror.
In October 1974, Bowie was on the third leg of his “Diamond Dogs” tour, but he was already including songs from his upcoming “Young Americans” album, including the title track.VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, October 24, 1974
Not, as may go without saying — and that’s what they all say, I can hear you groan — that any of us could imagine actually forgetting Richard Nixon. He’d been a churlish constant in our lives since, in my case, early childhood. Considering that my parents’ politics pretty much came down to despising him, it’s a wonder that my first word as I spat out my first taste of Gerber’s in a budding foodie’s first tantrum wasn’t a denunciatory “Nixxum.” For all I know, it may have been.
I still can’t imagine forgetting him, not this side of Alzheimer’s. But my graying demographic’s ranks are starting to lose teeth, the illusory reassurance of 401ks, and much else, which means that this event could be blessedly imminent. To Gen Z kids the same age 18-year-old Tom was the day Nixon resigned, his name can’t conjure up much of anything, if it registers at all.
Otherwise, all the formerly vivid headline names in America’s greatest-ever political soap opera — once again, until recently, but I’m delaying invidious comparisons to our dictator-in-waiting as long as I decently can — have vanished down the memory hole. Aside from we faithful subscribers to Dotage.com, who else remembers bent lawman John Mitchell, wannabe superspy Gordon Liddy, clumsy stonewallers H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, or even Veep Spiro Agnew (forever a poster child for the nolo contendere plea in a court of law), not to mention crusading prosecutor Archibald Cox? We once knew their faces better than the shell-shocked one we saw in the mirror each morning.
Nixon’s one-time speechwriter and later TV panjandrum turned revanchist presidential candidate Pat Buchanan is still around, or so Wikipedia tells me. But he’s in his mid-80s and MIA so far as the cultural conversation goes. Former White House counsel John Dean still shows up on cable news sometimes, enjoying his late-life promotion to wise man after being Nixon’s legal flunky turned Senate stool pigeon. And then there’s evil Henry Kissinger, who perpetuated his obscene role in American history by perpetrating the ultimate obscenity: living to 100, decades after miĺlions of Vietnamese and Cambodians lost their chance to do the same.
But even at the time, however, no matter how unforgettable our Nixon was, the country’s hunger to put the horror show behind us was palpable. By extension, that meant not only Watergate but the whole brackish foofaraw from November 22, 1963, on: assassinations, Vietnam, LSD, civil-rights eruptions, more assassinations, more LSD. And this our incredible country — sometimes that’s a compliment, sometimes it isn’t — triumphantly did. The French are still quarreling over 1940, if not 1870 or even 1789. But we were such cheerful amnesiacs that Watergate didn’t have any long-term consequences even for the Republican Party, despite the drubbing it got in the 1974 midterm elections. Just two years later, Gerald Ford came close enough to defeating Jimmy Carter to put Carter’s smile on semi-permanent hold, and 1980 gave us Ronald Reagan — who went on to be re-elected in a landslide not noticeably smaller than Nixon’s in ’72.
Because the interlude we now fuzzily call “the Seventies” is universally derided by people who weren’t there at the time, it’s easy to forget that, for millions of Americans, it was a decade infinitely more liberating than its immediate predecessor. Predictably, “the Sixties” gets all the good press, but let’s not forget that its new freedoms were all but monopolized by an oddball archipelago of college campuses, the hippie kingdom Robert Christgau dubbed “mass bohemia,” which wasn’t all that mass (witness Nixon’s abovementioned capture of 520 electoral votes in ’72), and what only rubes (and George Jones and Tammy Wynette) were still calling the jet set.
By the mid-’70s, America’s then still formidable suburban middle class and even some proletarian outposts were joining the fun. Women’s lib, gay lib, self-help books — and disco, kinky promiscuity, and let’s not forget cocaine — were all offering fresh opportunities to be yourself or somebody else with a vengeance. My newly enthused, forever self-renewing compatriots were taking the pursuit of happiness more literally than anyone had since Thomas Jefferson was diddling Sally Hemings. Too bad that, like all her opinions, her opinion of pursuing happiness has gone unrecorded.
No doubt it’s hyperbolic to say so. But all this seemed to flow directly from the country’s relieved goodbye-to-all-that once Nixon was gone. Indeed, I often think “the Seventies” symbolically began the minute his last trip on Air Force One deposited our disgraced president — with, by implication, the whole LSD/Vietnam foofaraw crowding the luggage compartment — in a temporarily sunless California. Or better yet, at the moment in mid-flight when he became a disgraced ex-president and Air Force One stopped being Air Force One, once his hand-picked successor, Gerald Ford, got sworn in back in Washington promptly at noon. Beat symbolism like that, I dare you.
Our whoops-a-daisy switch from five glum years of Nixon’s bum Shakespeare to the Midsummer Night’s Dream giddiness of “the Seventies” was beautifully captured in the final scene of my favorite Watergate movie of all time. Right after Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, as the newly wised-up heroines of writer/director Andrew Fleming’s 1999 comedy Dick, kiss off their tainted former idol by gleefully chanting “You suck, Dick!” as an enraged Nixon (Dan Hedaya, in his best-ever performance) gives them the finger while departing into exile, Fleming cuts to the duo gracefully roller-skating around a pointedly deserted Oval Office as the credits roll to the jubilant pulses of Abba’s “Dancing Queen.”
I still can’t watch that coda without choking up. But, to paraphrase poet Joseph Brodsky, it was my youth, my one and only youth.
Carnival in Rio!
In fact, on the night of the Watergate break-in — June 17, 1972 — I wasn’t much older than the giggly, oblivious teenagers who witness the burglary in Dick. But they had a steeper learning curve.
Once Dunst and Williams are given silly jobs as White House dog-walkers to induce them to forget what they’ve seen, which they didn’t particularly understand anyway, they start out full of starry-eyed patriotic veneration for the presidency. Plus, in Williams’s character’s case, a swooning infatuation with Nixon himself, whom she imagines as a white knight, as he and his steed gallop (Gallup?) toward her on a romantic beach.
As it turns out, she caused the Watergate tapes’ infamous 18-minute gap by switching on the machine to falteringly croon Olivia Newton-John’s “I Honestly Love You” while alone in the Oval Office one day. By the end, she and Dunst have become Deep Throat, feeding a bumbling Bob Woodward (Will Farrell) the info he’ll use to bring Nixon down.
The Capitol is eternally self-important. But this vibe was different — it was almost carnal, as if we were one smoking gun away from turning the joint into our improvised Plato’s Retreat.
Fleming has said he conceived his satire out of rage at Nixon’s elder-statesman 1990s rehabilitation. He wanted us to remember what a gut punch it had been for Americans to learn that their president was a crook and his henchmen were heinous, and believe me, it was. In a way that’s all but inconceivable today, mired as we are in MAGA’s Thunderdome — millions of ordinary citizens, both Democrat and Republican, were genuinely shocked and disillusioned by the desecration of our one and only presidency, as one sordid revelation after another tumbled out.
If you want to get seriously time-warped, with a Linda Blair head rotation thrown in, many of them were also particularly outraged by the news that Nixon had used taxpayer dollars to upgrade and refurbish his San Clemente home. Tell it to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. History Man. Alert readers may notice that this is a certain former real-estate mogul’s first onstage appearance in my little memoir.
During the 1972 election, despite Woodward and Bernstein’s Washington Post gumshoeing and desperate efforts from George McGovern’s flailing campaign to raise the alarm, Watergate was barely on most people’s radar — and Nixon, of course, won in a landslide. But by spring and summer of ’73, everyone knew we were in the shitter for real, and practically every day brought another trust-battering trauma. When Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby that year, dozens of readers wrote to thank Newsweek for putting the front end of a horse on its cover for a change, and that was one of the ordeal’s lighter moments.
To the vast majority of my fellow citizens, it felt like a release from bondage when newly minted, reassuringly anodyne president, Gerald Ford, told us that our long national nightmare was over. But not in my hometown — heck, no. Ever since the break-in, we’d been having the time of our lives. Beltway lifer Chris Matthews probably puzzled most of his fans when he wrote somewhat later that, inside the District, Watergate had been “Carnival in Rio.”
But we knew exactly what he was talking about. If you’ll forgive me for garbling my Wordsworth, to be young in Washington, D.C., in those halcyon days was bliss. Was very heaven, truth to tell.
Admittedly, having been raised as a Nixophobe from cradle onward did help. It wasn’t just that we and our parents’ lifelong nemesis — Nixxum! — was getting his deeply satisfying comeuppance. It was that, for once in our lives — or twice, counting JFK’s Camelot — the whole country was riveted by the happenings in our unloved, except by us, hometown, not only as glumly unavoidable news but as must-see, where-the-action-is entertainment. Unbelievably, we were sexy; we had glamor. The whole world was suddenly talking about our white-chiseled ‘hood, and hey — Fuck you, New York! Up yours, Hollywood!
One of the Nixon White House’s tape recorders.Department of Justice. Watergate Special Prosecution Force. Office of the Deputy Special Prosecutor. National Archives
I didn’t realize how Sexy Beast we’d gotten in the rest of the nation’s eyes until my apolitical Aunt Carol came out from California for a visit during the summer of ’73. As we were driving down Virginia Avenue one day, my mom pointed out the actual Watergate hotel scalloping past us on the left, more or less as idly, as she’d have pointed out the Lincoln Memorial. Excitedly, my sweet aunt asked if we could stop in and watch the hearings.
She meant Senator Sam Ervin’s Watergate committee hearings, and that’s how I came to be quite close to where the literal action was that summer. Pulling the only string she had available, as she’d worked for the senator in question — and he was, we shall discreetly say, devoted to her — Mom had wangled a summer Senate internship for her then 17-year-old son before I scooted off to Princeton.
Seventeen, can you believe it? I was as high as a kite, and about as psychologically sturdy. But in a most un–Senate Office Building manner, the adults I passed in the halls seemed pretty damn cranked too. The actual legislators among them only turned piously solemn when they spotted a TV camera nearby.
Lord knows, the Capitol is eternally self-important. But this vibe was different. So help me, it was almost carnal, as if we were one smoking gun away from turning the joint into our improvised Plato’s Retreat.
Since my intern pass gave me the run of the premises — and frankly, because our invariably trivial tasks left us lots of downtime — I decided one day to amble from my senator’s office in the Old Senate Office Building to catch the Ervin Committee in flagrante. Fortuitously, it turned out to be the day John Dean testified, exposing the cover-up and putting Nixon’s presidency at real risk for the first time.
Right, right. History-in-the making, and all that. But I was way in the back of that big room and his voice was droning on near inaudibly. You-are-there frissons aside, I’d have been better off watching on TV, as Hunter S. Thompson once wrote. His book, Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, was my bus-commuting reading that summer.
Senator Packwood wishes the author well, half a century ago.Courtesy Tom Carson
Then there was July 13, 1973: the day Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of the White House taping system. That was the beginning of Nixon’s endgame, even though he was to stick it out in his Oval Office bunker for just over another year. On I forget which trivial bit of business, I was walking down the basement tunnel that links the Capitol to the old SOB when I spotted a mysteriously familiar figure coming the other way. Damned if it wasn’t George McGovern, the self-same man whose 1972 presidential candidacy the Watergate plotters had done their best to first promote (he was seen as the Dems’ weakest contender) and then undermine.
As we drew abreast of each other, I couldn’t help myself. I started grinning like an idiot. He gave me back a smile as wide as Mount Rushmore. Neither of us had to say a word to understand each other, and that’s my favorite memory of those hazy, crazy Watergate summers: George beaming at me, me beaming at George, on the day we learned about the tapes and both of us knew Nixon was toast.
As it happens, my least favorite memory of that summer also features the Ervin committee in a cameo. After a hard day’s trivia — choosing form-letter answers to constituents’ correspondence, what a gas — I’d gone over to see my girlfriend in McLean, Virginia, and of course she’d been watching the hearings. Sitting on her bed, she had an announcement she couldn’t wait to make.
“I believe John Ehrlichman,” she told me proudly. No, smugly, and Christ, I should have broken up with her right then. I’d figured out long before that she was crazy, but she’d never told me she was a Republican. Besides, she never let me sleep with her, then or ever. The one mercilessly chosen 2 a.m. when she came close, I couldn’t get it up.
There it is: my botched “Summer of ’73” moment, the night before I scooted off to Princeton. Incidentally, she later got into S&M and then became a born-again Christian. Damn you, John Ehrlichman.
All the President’s Movies
I don’t mean Nixon’s own favorites, like Patton, which he famously watched over and over to nerve himself to invade Cambodia. If you’re curious, there’s an interesting book called Nixon At the Movies that analyzes the White House log of every last flick he had screened while in office, especially valuable for telling us which ones he watched at which points of his presidency. It’s practically the Netflix equivalent of an EKG.
I’m thinking instead of the many representations of Nixon over the decades in movies and TV. He’d probably hold the record for POTUSes depicted on film if it wasn’t for his inevitable usurper: John F. Kennedy, so appropriately it makes your head spin. For American actors, Nixon was and sometimes still is the native equivalent of deciding you’re finally ready to tackle King Lear. Or Shylock, Macbeth, Iago, or even Hamlet, since Nixon combined elements of all five.
Of the dramatizations of Watergate in its immediate aftermath, the prestige item, obviously — in which Nixon only plays himself on TV — was 1976’s All the President’s Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the Washington Post’s intrepid sleuths. Talk about glamor! I once spent an afternoon watching them do take after take of a wordless scene of Woodstein turning away from a townhouse in frustration. Trying to juice things up, Hoffman’s pantomimed annoyance kept getting hammier, to no avail. In the finished movie, all that hard work was reduced to a two-second snippet, and I wondered why I’d wasted an afternoon. I wondered why Dustin had, too.
What we ended up with was, of all things, an escapist movie about the McCarthy era.
All the President’s Men was a big hit, of course, and for the most part deservedly so. Yet few even noticed the movie’s great hat trick of selling the audience on a “political” thriller by leaving the politics out. There’s scarcely a glimpse, if that, of the era’s roiling antiwar protests, or any sense of the deep, decades-long animosity to Nixon nursed by the Capitol’s liberal elites — including the patent disdain for the man, plainly cultural as much as political, of WaPo editor Ben Bradlee as lionized by Jason Robards. You’d never guess from his high-toned guff about the Constitution that, when I chanced to visit the real Post’s editorial conference room some years later, the setting plate for the front page screaming NIXON RESIGNS was mounted on the wall like a hunting trophy.
Reducing my Nixxum to a merely postulated villain, the way the movie did, must have struck him — as it did me — as the ultimate insult. The added indignity was that this overdose of newspaper nobility came after years of the real Ben Bradlee suavely applying his Brahmin tongue to various Kennedy buttocks, not exactly his Watergate M.O. That must have left Nixon seething.
Sure, he deserved everything he got, and more. If not for Ford’s pardon of him, actual jail time might have loomed, and Nixon used to mope that a lot of great political writing had been done from prison. His peculiar prime example of such, as I recall, was Mahatma Gandhi, an incongruous pairing if ever there was one.
Again, until — cough — recently, no other president (or, cough-cough, former president) could outdo him as a maestro of self-pity. All the same, Nixon’s resentment at being the victim of a double standard wasn’t wholly misplaced.
At the time, however, All the President’s Men didn’t have any real competition from other Watergate-themed movies, at least not directly. Instead, we thrived on a vogue for paranoid — but fictional — political thrillers: The Parallax View, Redford again in Three Days of the Condor, and so on, which fed on Watergate-era suspicions and fears while cooking up wholly different conspiracies. For head-on, big-screen portrayals of Nixon, we had to wait two decades, for Oliver Stone’s Nixon, released a year after the real one died. We waited even longer than that for my beloved Dick, Ron Howard’s — Ron Howard’s? — Frost/Nixon (2008), and a not-yet-disgraced Kevin Spacey, in Elvis and Nixon (2016). (Spoiler alert: he doesn’t play Elvis.)
It was a different story on the small screen, where the then nascent miniseries format brought us dueling Nixons before decade’s end. The earliest was also the best: Washington: Behind Closed Doors, from 1977, with Jason Robards — him again! Nixon must have chewed nails — as scheming, deceitful President Richard “Monckton,” in a wickedly funny reprise of what we’d just lived through for real. A big part of its impudent thrill was that we could recognize who nearly all of these people were behind their gossamer disguises, from Robert Vaughn’s steely-eyed H.R. Haldeman to Harold Gould’s Kissinger.
For political junkies, the Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations were methadone at best and Ovaltine at worst, after Nixon’s daily dose of unadulterated heroin.
On top of that, not only did the Washington locations look a lot more authentically lived-in than in All the President’s Men, but the series was shot so soon after the actual events that its locutions — the clothes, the hairstyles, the attitudes — are blessedly spot-on, a virtue I appreciate more keenly the more time’s winged chariot does its thing. My youth, my one and only youth!
Much less successful was 1979’s Blind Ambition, based on ferrety John Dean’s Watergate memoir and starring a ludicrously miscast Rip Torn — the embodiment of goatish, bawdy lust — as our most sexually, if not humanly, repressed POTUS ever. When it came to asking ourselves “What’s wrong with this picture?” Torn was only outdone by veddy-British, plainly miserable Anthony Hopkins in Stone’s Nixon, proving to posterity’s affronted gaze that Nixon can only be played — that is, understood — by an American. Warts and not much else, he was one of us, as then New York Times op-ed columnist Tom Wicker wrote at the time. To vast consternation, may I add, but Wicker was right.
A partial corrective came in the form of the belated 1989 TV adaptation of Woodstein’s The Final Days. Just like everything else this side of Dolly Parton, it wasn’t as good as it could’ve been, except for Lane Smith’s superb Nixon: wounded, bitter, and oddly vulnerable, in what was clearly the part of a lifetime. Considering how unjustly forgotten Smith is today, he may be forgiven if he occasionally wished it had been the part of somebody else’s lifetime instead.
Nowadays, my increasingly geriatric colleagues and I sometimes bicker agreeably online about our favorite Nixons. As a rule, Smith and Hedaya get the highest marks, with some of us (okay, me) tossing in a vote for Cliff Robertson’s surly proto-Nixon in Gore Vidal’s 1964 The Best Man.
For obvious reasons, Torn and Hopkins barely rate a mention. Neither does John Cusack — whose Nixon in Lee Daniels’s The Butler was perfectly adequate, but too fleeting a performance to linger much in memory. Most of my peers relish Philip Baker Hall in 1984’s Secret Honor more than I do, but I also don’t like the movie much. Few of us were altogether happy with Frank Langella’s much-too-confident, much-too-virile Nixon in Frost/Nixon, even as Michael Sheen’s simpering David Frost left the original Frost looking like Aldo Ray.
Even so, we have an ulterior motive, one we’ll never admit. Pretending we’re only talking about actors and performances is our secret way of reminiscing about the good old days. Or glory days, as Springsteen might say.
Nostalgia?
Depoliticized or not, All the President’s Men was one of Redford’s two movies of the era that helped define the 1970s. Or half of that split-screen decade, anyway. The other half — the “Seventies” half — comes flooding back whenever I rewatch that gooey, gelded, but affecting lump of reverse-engineered sexual chemistry, The Way We Were. I saw that one with my crazy girlfriend too, in Georgetown’s long since defunct Key Theater.
Funnily enough, not unlike All the President’s Men — which, I know, it predated by two years, gumming up my timeline, but so what? — it’s also a movie on a “political” subject, in this case the Hollywood Red Scare of the 1950s, that mostly leaves the politics out in favor of peddling soothing star charisma. Probably to avoid confusing or even alienating 1973 moviegoers by requiring them to get a handle on yesteryear’s ideological intricacies, its key scene — the revelation that Barbra Streisand’s character is about to be named publicly as a Communist, threatening her screenwriter husband’s career and explaining their otherwise bewildering breakup — got left on the cutting-room floor, to Streisand’s dismay.
Of course, La Barbra’s idea of dismay is probably most people’s idea of banshee fury, but never mind. For the record, Redford wasn’t happy, either. Anyhow, what we ended up with was, of all things, an escapist movie about the McCarthy era — one that was suffused with nostalgia but never specified what we were supposed to feel nostalgic about.
Then again, generic (and romanticized) nostalgia has never been a bad recipe for box-office success. And back then, plenty of people were glad to be lulled into embracing Joe McCarthy’s menacing heyday as a happier, simpler time. The movie opened literally the day before the Saturday Night Massacre, so no wonder America flocked to it.
Exhibit from the Watergate hearings: The scene of the crime.U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Was it possible, the Crazy Girlfriend and I wondered before she didn’t sleep with me yet again, that we’d ever feel nostalgic about Richard Nixon? (She’d stopped believing John Ehrlichman by then. She was a Republican and nuts, not necessarily in that order, but nobody’s fool.) True, for political junkies, the Ford and Carter administrations were methadone at best and Ovaltine at worst, after Nixon’s daily dose of unadulterated heroin. This self-evident truth about my tribe’s strange idea of the pursuit of happiness was best expressed by a Doonesbury cartoon that had Megaphone Mark Slackmeyer bemoaning the lack of any news worth reporting, before crazily going into an all-caps recap of Watergate’s Greatest Hits. In the final panel, he mourns, ‘I miss him so.”
That set the pattern. Even if more sober news organizations knew they’d never have it so good — or so they thought, he added ominously — moving on was the nature of the game for them. If such a thing as nostalgia for Nixon existed, it was expressed in jokes: “Tanned, Rested and Ready” Nixon buttons in later presidential campaigns, Randy Cohen’s ultra-droll “When He Reemerges” fantasy in the New Yorker.
By the time Matt Groening introduced a disembodied Nixon as a talking head in a jar on Futurama, the gag was just another somewhat quaint boomer curio. Futurama had much more to do with Groening’s (and my) adolescence than any satiric tomorrow. After all, nobody really wanted him back, dead or alive. Or even babbling in a jar.
But then, decades after the fact, we got hit with an undeniable, unassailable, gobsmacked-and-then-some reason to start thinking of Watergate and Nixon as the good old days. Some months into Trump’s first (?) term, my smart niece, Julie, asked me if he was really worse than Nixon. Seizing my unexpected chance to quote Laurence Olivier in A Bridge Too Far, I told her, “Oh, yes. Much worse.”
True, Nixon was a crook. But he was also a shrewd and knowledgeable chief executive with moments of real statesmanship. He could be venal, but he didn’t openly make millions off the presidency while still in office. (Everybody cashes in afterward, the Obamas rather more flagrantly than many of us expected.) He catered to the same resentments and grievances that would later fuel MAGA — but in a dour way, not a crassly self-exhilarated one.
He was self-serving, but had enough vestigial patriot in him to decide against contesting the 1960 election results, even though his grounds for doing so would have been far more solid than Trump’s nonsensically fabricated ones. He did try to rig the ’72 election in his favor, but — talk about your silver linings — at least he did it before, and not after, election day. When it was time for him to go, he knew it. He didn’t summon an insurrectionist mob to keep him in office.
He wasn’t impeached even once, for Pete’s sake! Let alone twice. He was never an embarrassment to our country on the international stage, except maybe a little toward the end — you know, like when he declared, “It’s a great day for France,” while in Paris to attend Georges Pompidou’s funeral. Realpolitik induced him to accommodate any number of dictators without unease, but he didn’t lick their boots while hoping to emulate their thuggish example someday.
Oh, yes: much worse. Yet the contrast isn’t only between Trump and Nixon. It’s between today’s America and the way we were.
We had our share and then some of Birchers, Klu Kluxxers, and Nazis, among other deplorables. But they were loons, not the Republican Party’s mainstay. Nor did they have Fox News and a whole right-wing media ecosphere egging them on, or a whole flock of senators and congresspeople increasingly happy to flatter and legitimize them without bothering with dog whistles. Can anyone remember when there even was a “quiet part” that ostensibly mainstream politicians were expected not to say aloud?
Once the smoking-gun tape exposing the coverup went public, GOP support for Nixon cratered overnight. Only diehards and crazies still wanted him to hang in there. The Republican Establishment, still in unimaginably robust health back then, thought otherwise, and didn’t mince words. The Senate delegation that went to the White House to tell Nixon the jig was up included not only then minority leader Hugh Scott, but Mr. Conservative himself: Barry Goldwater.
Today, even Mitch McConnell, who loathes Trump unspeakably, and Nikki Haley, who doesn’t have the decency to loathe herself, have dutifully bent to kiss the ring. J.D. Vance, who once compared Trump to Hitler, is on the ticket as his veep. Little did we guess we’d end up saluting Liz Cheney — who went to my high school, by the way; small world — as the lonely conscience of the GOP.
Nixon did manage to semi-rehabilitate himself in the public’s mind in later life, but he and we both knew he was washed-up in politics. Despite never having been impeached, let alone indicted for any crime — thank you, Gerald Ford — he couldn’t have run for dogcatcher in a town without a dog. Today, with 34 plump felony convictions under his expansive belt, Trump was the odds-on favorite to be re-elected come November even before the assassination attempt we all witnessed three weeks ago turned him into the martyr/hero he’d previously only played on social media.
Trump has made it garishly clear that he agrees with Nixon’s once outlandish claim to David Frost: “If the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Trump’s not-always-private version has always been “If Donald Trump does it, that means it is not illegal.”
But unlike Trump, Nixon didn’t have a supine Supreme Court ready to agree that, yup, outlaw presidents were now the law of the land. The Roberts court just did. Instead, Nixon’s SCOTUS smacked him down but good in an 8-0 ruling that included three justices Nixon himself had appointed. The fourth, William Rehnquist, recused himself, something we all know Clarence Thomas will never do.
Never bright, my hopes for Amy Coney Barrett are dimming, and forget Neil Gorsuch. Not to mention unconvicted would-be teenage rapist Brett Cavanaugh. If you wonder why I unhesitatingly believed Christine Blasey Ford, the answer’s simple. I grew up there.
I guess that just about wraps things up. (Whew.) But if you’ve persevered this far, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that my other favorite line from “Young Americans” is another rhetorical question. “We’ve lived for just these 20 years,” Bowie gasps. “Do we have to die for the 50 more?”
I do still google the Crazy Girlfriend’s name sometimes, just not as often as I used to. She’s now a law professor specializing in legal issues involving the mentally ill, and no, I’m not making that up. Nothing true about America is ever made up, and that’s because we know that all of it is.
As for me, I’ve resigned myself to knowing that my life hasn’t been the nonstop thrill ride I used to imagine it might be. If only Susan had let me sleep with her even once. But I did get to live through Watergate; David Bowie, too. And that is the only immortality you and I may share, my Nixxum. ❖
Tom Carson’s first piece in the Village Voice was a review of David Bowie’s Heroes, in late 1977. He is the author of two novels and has written about politics and pop culture for publications ranging from LA Weekly to the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and GQ. A two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for criticism, he lives with his cat in Louisville, Kentucky.
∼ ∼ ∼ This article is part of a series — At 250, Who Will America Be? — reporting on threats to American democracy as we approach the nation’s Semiquincentennial, on July 4, 2026. ∼ ∼ ∼
Originally published:
Originally published:
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Fifty years ago this summer, as the Watergate scandal careened toward its wrenching end, there was much anxiety on Main Street. Sound familiar? It was also a time of deep cultural ferment, and the music ads that appeared in the Voice chronicled the soundtrack for a national nightmare — which began with a botched burglary on Saturday, June 17, 1972, and ended on August 9, 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned from office in the face of near-certain impeachment, due to his self-dealing, corrupt practices, and obstruction of justice.
It was the headiest of times, it was the most accursed of times. The rock was classic — but we didn’t know that yet. And even as some bands were becoming canonical, others were progressing in eccentric directions. Or at least morphing into the technical virtuosity that would characterize prog rock.
We’ll start with a passel of ads from those summer days of 1972, when the scandal that eventually brought Nixon down was just budding, seemingly no more nefarious than the cherry blossoms in our nation’s capital.
Released one month before five men broke into the Democratic National headquarters, in the Watergate Complex, the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street set the musical tone for the coming national nightmare: two discs of warped blues, sandpaper rock, punk gospel, and dirty Americana.
The Stones’ double disk received an A+ from Voice music critic Robert Christgau and included such tracks as “Tumbling Dice,” “Shine a Light,” “Rocks Off,” and “Turd on the Run.”Village Voice archive, June 1, 1972.
In support of Exile, the Stones had embarked on a 50-date American tour that made headlines for all the wrong reasons. The week before the Watergate break-in, 60 Stones fans were arrested outside the band’s San Diego show, while police used tear gas on hundreds more. Two nights after the inept burglars were caught in the act, the Stones were trashing the Playboy Mansion in Chicago.
Although they were not as huge as the Stones, Argent had a major Top 10 hit around the globe with “Hold Your Head Up.” We’re not sure, though, just what those surrealistic objects beyond that particular Door of Perception in their ad might be. Not pillows, at least — Jefferson Airplane took care of that way back in 1967.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, JUNE 22, 1972
Bill Graham’s Fillmore East had a brief but storied history: Located at 105 Second Avenue, it hosted all the legends of the era — Hendrix, the Doors, Miles Davis, the Bonzo Dog Band — before closing its doors, in June 1971. Today, the space is home to a bank.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, JUNE 22, 1972
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, JUNE 29, 1972
Hits don’t get much more massive than “Lean on Me”; the Bill Withers classic topped the charts in June 1972. Just months earlier, Withers had won a Grammy for “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and in July the R&B singer was scheduled to play a weeklong residency at the Bitter End, in the Village.
But if guitar rock was more your speed, you could pick up ZZ Top’s second album at Korvettes for $3.44.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, JUNE 29, 1972
Those with more highbrow tastes could attend a Mozart and Bach fest. (Nixon was a Bach fan, which writer Tom Carson touched on in his brilliant 1994 Voice obituary of the disgraced president: “‘Do you know why Bach is better than Brahms?’ the grizzled, not-a-crook former president demanded of a startled Gary Hart not too many years ago, when they were seated together at a state funeral. ‘Bach is tougher than Brahms.’”)
Or maybe you were looking for an evening of avant-garde inspiration; if so, the New School’s celebration of John Cage’s 60th birthday certainly fit the bill.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, JUNE 22, 1972
The Grateful Dead were also in town (well actually, across the Hudson, at Roosevelt Stadium). Nixon was gearing up for a final, typically dirty political campaign spearheaded by the minions of the CRP — Committee to Re-Elect the President — which became more popularly known as CREEP.
Jerry Garcia and the rest of the Dead wanted the youth of America to use their newly acquired right to vote, which had come about in large part because many Americans were upset with the fact that you could be drafted to fight in Vietnam at age 18 but couldn’t vote against the politicians who sent you there until you turned 21. The 26th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on July 1, 1971:
The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.
Despite the Dead’s urging, it turned out that many of that newly empowered youth contingent voted just like their parents, and Nixon, a buttoned-down Quaker who was the antithesis of the counterculture that much of the era’s music celebrated, would win in a landslide in November.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, JUNE 29, 1972
Cheech & Chong were concerned with some very different numbers when they released their second album, Big Bambú, which reached No. 2 on the charts.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, JUNE 22, 1972
The biggest acts’ labels paid for full-page ads in the Voice — and mostly right-hand pages at that, because advertisers pay a premium to snag eyeballs on the side of a spread that readers see for a few extra nanoseconds as they flip through a periodical.
And we have to admit, almost half a century on, that we had forgotten some of this music, even though the record companies back in the day believed these albums were worth an expensive ad buy. So we’ve plunged down various streaming service rabbit holes to bring ourselves up to speed on some of this flea-market vinyl. Much of the archive-scanning work here was done while listening to the Latin-infused rock of Macondo, who, according to various record-collecting sites, was an East L.A. group discovered by Sergio Mendes in the early ’70s. Any album with a T-Rex in the ad deserves a listen, and we were not disappointed by Albert Hernandez’s fire-breathing guitar licks and Fred Ramirez’s roller-coaster organ riffs, especially on “Cayuco.”
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, SEPTEMBER 7, 1972
One band you might not know the name of off the top of your head, Looking Glass, gave the world “Brandy” — “a fine girl” who served whiskey and wine and whose eyes “could steal a sailor from the sea.” Not, however, the one seaman she really wanted, because, “Lord, he was an honest man / and Brandy does her best to understand” when he — most probably in a pillow-talk whisper — informs her, “my life, my love and my lady is the sea / It is, yes it is.”
At Sam Goody: 8-Track, $4.49.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, JULY 27, 1972
Jack Nitzsche worked with everyone from Phil Spector to Neil Young to the Stones. He also did the soundtrack to the film Performance, which featured Mick Jagger and James Fox as, respectively, a rocker and a gangster, who eventually meet on a higher plane. Perhaps writing the choral arrangement for “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” prepared Nitzsche for his collaboration with another breed of “long-haired friends,” when he recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra in an ancient London church with the sonorous name St. Giles Cripplegate.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, SEPTEMBER 14, 1972
Tina Turner leaps across the ad for Feel Good, and, with the exception of a cover of Lennon and McCartney’s “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window, Turner also wrote all of the songs for her and then husband Ike’s 17th (!) studio album.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, JULY 27, 1972
The Hollies had a Top 10 hit with “Long Cool Woman,” which pulled their album Distant Light to No. 21 on Billboard magazine’s charts. For fans of the Hipgnosis design studio, the gatefold album cover — featuring Boschlike grotesqueries in the depths of a bucolic pond — made the $3.77 tab go down easier.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, JULY 20, 1972
According to Billboard, covering the 1972 release of Phoenix, “Grand Funk have by now attained an almost permanent place in rock’s hierarchy. They have legions of devoted, ready followers at every performance and lining up to buy their every album.” However, as the website superseventies.com notes, Lester Bangs, reviewing the album in Rolling Stone, was having none of it: “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with mediocrity or cliché — could you or I have written ‘Sugar, Sugar’? — but when mediocrity loses all its flair, all its panache, becomes this bland and this pompous at the same time … it’s time for some Chuck Berry.”
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, SEPT 21, 1972
Down in Memphis, Herbie Mann’s flute (and David “Fathead” Newman’s sax) covered much musical terrain, beginning with the traditional spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and concluding with a rock standard for the ages, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The ad’s illustration reinforces aspirations both high and low.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, JULY 6, 1972
Prog rock was ascendant in the early ’70s, and it doesn’t get much more proggy than Curved Air’s synthesizer solos accompanying the Renaissance-festival-like vocals of lead singer Sonja Kristina on Phatasmagoria’s “Marie Antoinette.” The ad copy beneath the undulating logo reads “The one group that might be too good for America.” Indeed, these folky Brits hit No. 20 in the U.K., but Phantasmagoria didn’t chart in the States.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, JULY 20, 1972
And speaking of the prog gods, Emerson, Lake & Palmer was promoting their third studio album, Trilogy, which featured, among other virtuosic instrumentals, the British trio’s take on an American classic, Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown.” The album hit No. 5 on the Billboard charts, though Voice music critic Robert Christgau bluntly disagreed: “The pomposities of Tarkus and the monstrosities of the Moussorgsky homage clinch it — these guys are as stupid as their most pretentious fans. Really, anybody who buys a record that divides a … composition called ‘The Endless Enigma’ into two discrete parts deserves it. C-”
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, AUGUST 10, 1972
Spokane, Washington, native Danny O’Keefe, on the other hand, hit it big with his single “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues,” which pulled his LP, O’Keefe, up to No. 87 on the album charts. The single has long since been etched into the pop pantheon, having been covered by artists from Waylon Jennings to Mel Torme to the King himself, Elvis Presley. The world-weariness of one particular verse has resonated with different singers; the original “Ya know my heart keeps tellin’ me / ‘You’re not a kid at thirty-three’ / Ya play around, ya lose your wife / Ya play too long, you lose your life’” gains a decade in Charlie Rich’s telling, the country maestro figuring he’s finally grown up at age 43.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, SEPTEMBER 21, 1972
Mixing glam, decadence, and vaudeville-level schtick, Alice Cooper had the drawing power to headline a show at Roosevelt Stadium, in Jersey City. The concert was a big deal — Cooper flaunted his sexuality in a solo ad as the big day drew near — but the venue’s greatest claim to fame might actually have come decades earlier, on April 18, 1946, when the home team, the Jersey City Giants, a farm club of the New York Giants across the river, hosted the Montreal Royals. The Royals trounced the Giants 14 to 1, but anyone who was there was undoubtedly impressed with the debut of the Brooklyn Dodger’s farm team’s second baseman, Jackie Robinson, who had four hits in five trips to the plate, including a three-run homer.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, JULY 13, 1972
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, AUGUST 10, 1972
Another megastar coming to town was less abrasive than Alice Cooper: John Denver was promoting his album (and single) Rocky Mountain High. Carnegie Hall had probably never felt vaster.
VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVE, SEPTEMBER 28, 1972
And while all the above was happening, David Bowie was on his way to becoming the Man Who Fell to Earth. Released on the eve of the Watergate break-in, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars found Bowie — who’d reached No. 5 in the U.K. but only 124 on Billboard’s U.S. charts, with the 1969 single “Space Oddity” — on the verge of superstardom. As always, Bowie was ahead of everyone else’s curves, and one of the most compelling songs — “Five Years” — on that scintillating Ziggy album predicted our climate dilemma now:
News had just come over We had five years left to cry in (Cry in) News guy wept and told us Earth was really dying (dying) Cried so much his face was wet Then I knew he was not lying (lying)
Well, the world’s made it a bit longer than that.
So far.
But the always prescient Bowie had Nixon’s number: Despite reelection in 1972, scandal would cut Tricky Dick’s second term short, reducing his White House reign down to only a little more than five years. ❖
A little after 5:00 p.m. this evening, Donald J. Trump became the first former president of the United States to be found guilty of a felony. Within a few minutes, 33 more guilty verdicts were pronounced, on charges of falsifying business records — a clean sweep for the prosecution. The jurors deliberated for less than 12 hours, in a case that hinged on secret payments made to a porn star in 2016 to prevent her from telling her story about a sexual liaison with the then Republican presidential candidate years earlier.
I heard the news today, oh boy.Applied Quixotics
Both sides now.Applied Quixotics
News trucks, reporters, cops, and citizens of all stripes were outside the courthouse in downtown Manhattan as the verdicts were read.
Exercising their First Amendment rights. Applied Quixotics
Both supporters and opponents of the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential candidate exercised their free speech rights after the verdict was handed down. One crowd member shouted at Trump supporters, “Now you know what it feels like to be a Mets fan!” Another, wearing a “Fuck Biden” shirt, bellowed, “Donald Trump just won the 2024 election!”
Church and state.Applied Quixotics
Some won’t stand for Trump’s crimes; others stand up for what’s right.Applied Quixotics
The crowd continued trading barbs long after the former president’s motorcade had begun a slow crawl up the FDR drive (an AP helicopter camera zoomed in on one of the slow-moving black SUVs, bringing memories of the O.J. Simpson “chase” in 1994).
But, as is often the case with New York street theater, the pigeons were the most abiding witnesses. ❖
New Yorkers all.Applied Quixotics
❖ ❖ ❖
∼ ∼ ∼
This article is part of a series — At 250, Who Will America Be? — reporting on threats to American democracy as we approach the nation’s Semiquincentennial, on July 4, 2026. ∼ ∼ ∼
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Nixon and the King in the Oval Office in 1970: They both heard trains in the night.National Archives/White House Photo Office Collection/Nixon White House Photographs
1. Nixon is Everywhere
I’m going to put on an old record, if you don’t mind. Let’s see if I remember how this damned hi-fi works. The needle’s kind of scratchy, but — ah, there we go. You’ll recognize those gliding saxophones, nonchalant and sprightly. The voice, which has a vintage Buick’s lazy swagger — bourbon-mahoganied; Camel-catarrhed — belongs to an approximate contemporary of Richard Nixon’s. I’m playing an alternate take of Frank Sinatra doing “Witchcraft,” of which, as it doesn’t exist, I own the only copy.
Those wiggling fingertips Dartin’ eyes that never quit, ah That sweaty upper lip … lt’s —
Saturday, September 20, 1952; Eugene, Oregon. The Republican nominee for vice president chuffed into town aboard his campaign train, the Nixon Special. Two days earlier, the New York Post had revealed that the junior California senator had had a secret fund set up for his benefit by his Orange County backers. The following Tuesday, he would appear on TV, haggardly protesting not so much his innocence as his virtue, his wife’s virtue, his little daughters’ dog’s virtue — the Checkers speech. But on Saturday, in liberal, collegiate Eugene, the depot crowd included hecklers with picket signs. According to Roger Morris in his magisterial Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, “Two junior college students carried one reading ‘WILL THE VEEP’S SALARY BE ENOUGH, DICK?’”
I’m a great admirer of the Morris book, but I’ve always been miffed about that “junior college” crack. At the time, my father, who was holding up the right end of the sign — in the photo in our family album my mom’s face at the other end is obscured — was regarded as one of the University of Oregon’s most promising graduate students in American history. He was there on the GI Bill, having, like Nixon, been in the Navy during the second World War.
Nearly 20 years later, my father, by then in the Foreign Service, got sent over to the White House to brief President Nixon on some bit of diplomatic twaddle. At least as Dad reported it to us that night, back in the D.C. suburbs — we’d lived like kings abroad, only to learn on coming home that we were middle-class: bummer — he’d spent the whole interview being disconcerted at how Nixon, whose well-drilled memory for faces was famously prodigious, kept looking at him with the strangest smile. Bracing himself for the presidential question that never came — “Where have I seen you before?” — my father glumly pondered the effect of his answer: “Probably on one end of a 15-foot sign.”
We all laughed. We’d been raised as second-generation Nixon-haters. Our cat, a tangle of Siamese nerves that Dad had named Checkers, was probably around somewhere, looking panicked.
Vaulting into the bridge, Sinatra’s confidence breasts the pumping horns like whitecaps:
And al-though-my-kids-are-reading Ca-MUS — When you de-stabilize Chile My heart says “Yes, indeed, Tricky — Pro-ceed with what you’re making us do,” yes — it’s Nixon …
On November 8, 1972 — the day after Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection victory over George McGovern — my father was in Bethesda Naval Hospital, dying. I went to his bed in the intensive care unit, telling myself that he ought to know about the results. He’d raised me to believe that such things were important, and I suppose that, for reassurance’s sake, I needed to hear that he still thought so.
“Well, Dad, it’s all over,” I said. “Nixon won.”
My poor father! He was zonked on a smorgasbord of painkillers. Hopelessly confused, his yellowed vague eyes wandered around. But somehow he knew that he ought to respond, and finally he beseeched his brain into remembering how. Here’s what he muttered to placate me:
“Awful man.”
It would probably please him to know that those were the last words I ever heard him speak.
But many years later, in Los Angeles, I was telling an editor that I thought a certain obstreperous celebrity’s behavior was Nixon-esque. Judith looked at me fondly, for which I’m grateful to her. And then she laughed: “Oh, Tom — everyone reminds you of Nixon …”
2. Yorba Linda
The Roger Morris biography is the best Nixon book, surpassing even Garry Wills’s great Nixon Agonistes, because Morris is the only writer to recognize Nixon’s story as fundamentally Californian; that’s to say, a tale of the West. It’s true that Garry Wills can write rings around nearly everybody, but the problem is that Wills can also write rings around himself.
California is where beginnings end. To get there, we devastated a continent, butchering its inhabitants as we went. We’d used Africa as a human meat locker. Incredibly, we now spend our time fretting over just where we lost our innocence.
But the Nixons missed the epic; missed the, shall we say, glamour. The Nixons came over after the Mayflower, on boats whose names no one remembers. The Nixons followed the wagon trains out West, looking for a good spot to put a grocery. The Nixons looked upon the vista that left stout Cortez agape, and thought, Now here’s a place for the grocery; vistas are nice, but we’re too poor to enjoy them. There have always been more Nixons among us than pioneers.
Yorba Linda, California, the birthplace of Richard Nixon, is one of the bleakest, butt-ugly places I ever care to see. In hot weather, it smells seared, as if whatever was really there burned long ago, and this is a substitute. The people are very nice in a wan way, sort of like they worry what you’ll do if they aren’t.
At 10, writing to his mother — the family having moved to Whittier by then — Nixon produced his first contribution to the Nixon legend: the Good Dog Letter.
Dear Master,
The two boys that you left me with are very bad to me. Their dog, Jim, is very old and he will never talk or play with me.
On Saturday the boys went hunting. Jim and myself went with them. While going through the woods one of the boys triped and fell on me. I lost my temper and bit him. He kiked me in the side and we started on. While we were walking I saw a black round thing in a tree. I hit it with my paw. A swarm of black thing came out of it. I felt pain all over. I started to run and as both of my eys were swelled shut I fell into a pond. When I got home I was very sore, I wish you would come home right now.
Your good dog, Richard
Whatever else this is, it’s certainly what Morris calls it: “the pitiable cry and fantasy of a lonely boy.” By adolescence, though, nothing shows but determination — a determination that often seems to precede any purpose, even as it precludes any satisfaction. At Duke, where he studied law in the ’30s, Nixon was known as “Iron Butt” for his punishing study habits. For the rest of his life, he treated intellectual diligence as a form of toughness. It was the credo of a man who staked more on his will than his gifts, considerable as those gifts were; he was, after all, the brainiest president of this century. (Only his hero, Woodrow Wilson, comes close.)
When Nixon, as a young lawyer, started wooing Patricia Ryan, he would chauffeur her to Los Angeles for her dates with other beaus, and then grimly return to collect her afterward. There is no record of whatever self-immolating thoughts he may have had in the interims.
Like her husband, Pat Nixon came from near penury — worse in her case than his, actually. In a rare slip of self-discipline, she once bridled at Gloria Steinem — “I never had it easy, I’m not at all like you” — having incorrectly but revealingly assumed that Steinem was born privileged. During Nixon’s presidency, she was, like him, widely derided. But she must have been a woman of considerable forbearance and courage. One fact that never came out until her death last year from lung cancer was that she’d been a furious closet chain-smoker — as, for that matter, was (is) Jacqueline Kennedy.
During World War II, Nixon served as a supply officer in the South Pacific. You sort of want to picture him standing on shore, watching as swank Jack Kennedy’s PT boat flashes by. But for what it’s worth, Nixon’s unglamorous labors were undoubtedly more help to the war effort. This also seems to have been the only period of his life when he was relaxed and socially at ease: being Lieutenant Nixon took the chore of being Nixon out of his. hands.
Like most idylls, it couldn’t last. Today, no one thinks of the late ’40s as years of revolutionary ferment, but in many ways they were. Spawned by the wartime economic boom, armed with the GI Bill, America’s modern middle class had reached the scene; before settling down to enjoy their hard-won tract homes and TV sets, the newcomers conducted their own reign of terror. While postwar politics are usually described exclusively in terms of Cold War paranoia, most of the red-baiting and witchhunting was underway well before the Russians ever got the bomb, in the overlooked interlude when the United States enjoyed a nuclear monopoly. Something else was going on, or also going on — the dislodging of an old order, in this case of the patrician gentleman’s club that had assumed that running the country was its preserve, with the traditional cry of “Treason!” as the pretext. In Nixon — “the ultimate self-made man,” as Garry Wills called him — the newly assertive postwar middle class found its churlish cynosure, a Robespierre of the raw new suburbs.
Back in Whittier, some well-heeled local Republicans, the self-styled Committee of 100, recruited the returned vet to run for Congress against the local squire, amiable, pipe-smoking Jerry Voorhis — who’s gone stumbling off into history’s footnote-hills without ever having known what hit him. As he always would, Nixon ran hard and ran dirty. But to him, smearing Voorhis as a fellow traveler probably didn’t even seem vindictive — just diligent. Campaigning, which he hated, was a test of his mettle, and he would always rather get caught sinning than relenting.
The Hiss case came in ’48. Like all Nixon’s subsequent crises — his favored term for situations involving himself — it took shape as both a morality play and an oddly inverted class struggle, with psychological underpinnings that were all out of whack with its surface dynamics. I might as well admit that if anybody can get me rooting for Nixon, it’s Alger Hiss. Elegant, well-connected, and supercilious, the accused Soviet agent was a New Deal golden boy, an iron of the Establishment. Yet what Nixon the glowering bourgeois avenger had against him wasn’t his betrayal of his class, but his class. The outsider was saving the Establishment from the insider: Nixon’s social resentment fostered not radicalism but militant conventionality, because he saw going against convention as being itself one of privilege’s hoity-toity prerogatives.
Once again, Nixon cut corners, diddling the evidence even where the unriddled truth might have won the day for him. The congressional prosecutor, not the defendant, was the one who behaved throughout as if the pack was breathing down his neck, and desperate remedies were in order to compensate. Even as president, Nixon would cling to nailing Hiss as what a later generation would call his defining moment, in self-apostrophizing language that the same generation might also recognize as less appropriate to a political vendetta than to a therapeutic breakthrough.
1950: the Senate race. He ran against Helen Gahagan Douglas — another upper crust darling to be given her comeuppance, attacked as the “Pink Lady,” sent reeling. Even if the charge wasn’t true, she, like Voorhis and Hiss, deserved to be brought down for having made him feel small.
Just two years later came the vice-presidential nomination, the slush fund, Checkers. After the success of Nixon’s speech had cornered a furious Eisenhower into keeping him on the ticket, Ike patronized him even as he welcomed him: “You’re my boy.”
He stayed that way for the next eight years, doing the partisan chores Ike disdained, feeding the faithful the partisan red meat Ike despised. His reward was the 1960 presidential nomination, and Ike was grudging about giving him even that. After Nixon lost that November, Jack Kennedy is said to have delivered a famously cutting dismissal: “No class.”
In 1962, Nixon ran for governor of California and lost, disastrously. Nobody believed he had any interest in governing California. (They were right.) After his defeat, he lost control. He met the press, and saw a swarm of black thing. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” he told it.
3. Hate
How wrong he was, and still is. We’ll never get done kicking him around.
Oh, how we hated him! New Frontier parents and their New Left kids can agree: nobody was ever hated with the zest we brought to hating Nixon. Joe McCarthy aroused too much fear for hate to gain ascendancy; Ronald Reagan mostly inspired an Invasion of the Body Snatchers dread that one day we’d relax our vigilance and end up liking him, as lulled as everybody else.
But hating Nixon was lovely. You felt good about life when you hated him. There are still millions of people in their forties and older whose political self-esteem is founded on their hatred of Nixon. (I hated him first. Well, I hated him more.)
Yet it had a special emotional timbre, this hate. It meant a lot to us. It was savagely contemptuous, without managing to sound dismissive. It insisted on finding him not only wicked but ridiculous, not only evil but absurd. It was strident and obsessively rancorous, but we’d have been baffled had anyone suggested that there was, or could be, anything excessive about it. It was strangely reassuring, because so long as we could hate him, we had no doubts about ourselves. It was appealingly familiar — he’d always been right there in our faces, as graspable as the morning toothbrush. It was —
Intimate.
The obituaries are calling Nixon’s psychology a riddle and a mystery, paradoxical and baffling. That’s a laugh. He lived exposed to us. We knew him like the backs of our hands. Maybe we hated him, but most Americans had a hard time pretending that they didn’t understand him. Then again, we also had a good time pretending that we didn’t understand him — but well, whatever, never mind.
That callow, censorious tyro in ’50s newsreels, making his voice empty to make it sound big, whose ghastliness was that he was behaving like a gangster in hopes of winning America’s approval and knew no other way of winning it: Savonarola as a go-getter. The self-consciousness, lashed by invisible whips, that made him seem most hypocritical when he was trying to act human, eyes flickering with a baffled suspicion that these atrocious shenanigans were what some sadist had devised as the native clog dance of congeniality. That awful, grimacing discomfort with himself — holding his body, as Greil Marcus once described Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, as if it were an enormous clubfoot. The wonderful actor Lane Smith, who played Nixon with beauty in an otherwise dithering miniseries The Final Days, remarked that mimicking Nixon’s body language left him with back and muscle cramps for months. And geez — don’t you wonder what it did to Nixon?
Until this country learns how to say “great” and “awful” in the same breath, it won’t ever understand its history worth a damn.
He was our ugliness; we knew it all along. “Sir, there’s a cancer on the Presidency,” said John Dean in the Oval Office one day, doing his lickspittle best to ignore the heaving, purple-fisted mass of malignancy that sprawled across the desk from him, forcing itself to blink out an ingratiating smile through its ooze.
He was what we’re like when we’re alone; he was always alone. Nixon went through life clutching his brain like a pistol — only a pistol, when everyone else had been given brand-new machine guns! How unfair! That must be why he refused a respirator at the end. He wouldn’t have wanted to face the world weaponless.
“Who could love Duddy Kravitz?” asks Duddy Kravitz, scathingly. Who could love Nixon? (His daughters did. And Pat, I suspect, understood him — which is a form of love.) He seemed to like playing the piano. Otherwise, the record of his life includes not a single instance of public warmth, ease, enjoyment, pleasure, humor. (He couldn’t laugh at himself — too many others had.) Only the resentment was authentic. Those who saw him in private recall gestures of awkward kindness that usually, touchingly, took the form of consolation. Alexis de Tocqueville, so often nudged awake by quote mongers like me that he has yet to get a decent night’s sleep in the grave, said that he’d seen more unexplained personal unhappiness in the United States than anywhere else in the world.
Nixon had devotees: William Safire played Bernstein to his Charles Foster Kane. He had peers, who accorded him a grudging professional respect. Did he have any friends?
Garry Wills once confessed his puzzlement that Nixon, a certified intellectual, chose to surround himself with thugs. (Sheesh — didn’t Wills go to high school? I know why.) As president, his idea of relaxation was to hang with Bebe Rebozo, whose brains were in his tan: a good-time dullard, pure Miami — a bit like Brezhnev. I often wonder what they talked about when they plodded the beach at Key Biscayne, Nixon in sand-filled wingtips. Was it like Of Mice and Men: “Tell me again about the Democrats, Dick.” Or perhaps more wistful: “Tell me what it’s like to have fun, Bebe.” Tell me what it’s like to be stupid.
What was Nixon to his fellow WASPs? Why, don’t you know? He was our Jew — our Wandering Jew. Of course, we had to revile him, in his stubborn industry, his bleak and somehow sinister tenacity, his loneliness. That could, incidentally, account for Nixon’s own coarse and somehow overacted, overcompensatory anti-Semitism; it would have been just like him to recognize the affinity and, not needing any more estrangements, shrink from it. If anti-Semitism is the socialism of the ignorant, as Sartre once said (Farrakhan should really bone up on his Sartre: loads of good stuff there, I imagine), then hatred of Nixon, in its virulence, often ended up looking and sounding uncannily like the good liberal’s substitute for a pogrom.
It served the same purpose, anyway — that of redefining the troubling self one so inchoately despises as Other. Consider how determined we were to deny Nixon not only dignity but humanity: Plastic man! Hollow man! (Self-manufactured man!) We needed to see him as a golem, because only that would absolutely prove that he was no kin to us. If nothing else, we gave him the bitter right to ask, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? … And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” And to warn — skipping down to the next entry in my Bartlett’s — “The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”
The Shakespeare character to whom Nixon was most often compared used to be Richard III, but that was just liberal lazy-mindedness taking a cheap shot: same first name, they’re both wicked, yar har har. He’s Shylock, isn’t he?
Here’s dignity at last. Shakespeare had set out to write a crowd-pleasing anti-Semitic caricature. But then, carried away by the humanity of this genius, he created literature’s first great antihero instead. Maybe we, in our inadvertent 40-year collaboration with Nixon, did the same; what dark grandeur. What drama he gave us. (They were crises.) He never let us down: he was our Nixon every minute, the poor man. He never stopped working at it, no matter the circumstances. “Do you know why Bach is better than Brahms?” the grizzled, not-a-crook former president demanded of a startled Gary Hart not too many years ago, when they were seated together at a state funeral. “Bach is tougher than Brahms.”
How we needed him. When Nixon resigned, longtime liberal shill Richard Goodwin made the perfect comment. “Now I know how all those kids felt when the Beatles broke up,” he said.
4. The Nixon Presidency, 1969-74
Driving home the afternoon of the day Richard Nixon died, I heard the truculent, slurring voice of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant on a D.C. oldies station. “No, Wa-tergate it does not bother me,” Van Zant, who’s dead as a doornail himself, was sneering. “Does your conscience bother you — tell me true … Sweet Home Alabama …”
Granted, in northern Virginia, where I now reside once again — I last lived here the year Nixon resigned — you can hear “Sweet Home Alabama” on the radio pretty near every day of the week. We have no songs of regional pride of our own, having no regional pride. (We’re about to prove this with our Senate race.) But last Friday, I couldn’t help wondering if some DJ was offering up a tribute.
Remember the Silent Majority? You probably do: they haven’t shut up since. Gore Vidal was the first to note that Nixon’s coinage had been Homer’s term for the dead.
Truculent was the word for them. Nixon diehards often seemed moved to support him out of pure spite, relishing how he stuck in liberal America’s craw. They didn’t really act as if they liked him any better than we did; they just enjoyed the perversity of rooting for him anyway, because they knew that liberal America scorned them as much as it scorned him. How sad for Nixon that his admirers held the same opinion of him as his enemies. Having internalized the elite’s contempt — liberal America’s great sin in the ’60s, as stalwart Ronnie Van Zant well knew — their only available substitute for the pride they’d been denied was to say that they liked being trash, and give the finger. Nixon was the finger.
Yet however enthusiastically his followers adopted his sense of rankling injury as their own, Nixon — as he well knew — remained a supremely unlikely, discomfited vessel for Jacksonian populism, even of this revanchist, mutually debasing sort. His vision of governance, after all, was loftier. The last American president to unqualifiedly endorse the Great Man theory of history, he believed in mighty captains, like the primarily European statesmen he took as his benchmarks: De Gaulle, Pitt. He dreamed of a wise and splendid equanimity, nobly steering the nation.
Instead, Nixon brought the idea of leadership into possibly permanent disrepute in this country. The loss may be accounted more his tragedy than ours because he was the one who revered it. As we fumble toward alternatives (First Actor? Chief Clerk?), everyone since has seemed to be impersonating a president, with variable assurance and conviction. Whatever else you think of Nixon — or of the notion of mighty captains, for that matter — he’d have had no trouble conversing as an equal with Richelieu or Disraeli; that can’t be said of his successors. “The last of the titans,” a friend who’d always despised him surprised us both by blurting one afternoon a couple of summers ago. We laughed ruefully.
In our inadvertent 40-year collaboration with Nixon we created America’s great political antihero: In 1972, en route to China on Air Force One (then nicknamed “Spirit of ’76” in anticipation of the Bicentennial, which Nixon would have presided over if he hadn’t resigned). National Archives/White House Photo Office Collection/Nixon White House Photographs
In office, Nixon had one moment when he was able to realize himself as the hero he’d always dreamed of playing on the world-historical stage. That was the opening to China. Elsewhere, for all his skill, the foreign-policy record is too grim to be grand. Chile was a crime; Europe, by and large, a blunder (declaring a “Year of Europe,” as Nixon and Kissinger did, is a dead giveaway that slights were the norm). And then there was Vietnam.
One interpretation of Nixon’s conduct of the war has it that he staunchly undertook the ignominious chore of extricating us from the unpopular commitment his predecessors had made. The other sees him as a monster, awash to his hips in blood. But what if they’re both true? The invasion of Cambodia, the mining of Haiphong harbor, the Christmas bombing of Hanoi — or “the bombing in the second half of December 1972,” as Kissinger delicately puts it in his Diplomacy — all these were defended as necessary pressures to force the enemy to negotiate. But Nixon, with his fetishistic phobia about being called a quitter, would not have been Nixon if he hadn’t secretly nursed a wild, mad hope that the next throw of the dice would achieve the impossible instead, and win the war outright. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Asian, paid with their lives for his iffy self-esteem.
Domestically, the policies he tried to pursue cut just as harshly against his private grain. Having squeaked into office largely through pandering to racial backlash, he sought to govern according to a perceived consensus that had, in hindsight, an unexpectedly liberal hue. From our post-Reagan vantage point, it’s astonishing how much of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Nixon left intact — and not just from caution, but on principle. Meanwhile, in the basement, his men were drawing up the wiretapping orders and the enemies lists.
All right, then: Watergate. Listen, kids. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that Nixon was unjustly hounded from office — that’s a bunch of horseshit. But don’t ever let anyone tell you that it wasn’t done with glee, because that’s a bunch of horseshit, too. That pious guff in the history books about dark days, anxious conclaves, somber pomp? Nonsense! We were euphoric. It was a two-year joyride. Ding-dong, the witch is dead!
But —
“But you said she was dead,” Dorothy blubbers.
“That was the Wicked Witch of the East,” says Glinda, in the dulcet simper of the ineffable Billie Burke. “This is the Wicked Witch of the West …”
(I bet you think I just mean Reagan. You’re wrong.)
Still, for Nixon’s sake, two questions need to be asked. First off: was he great?
I could take the easy way out, but … Swallowing hard, I will say that I often suspect he was. But then, I also think that until this country learns how to say “great” and “awful” in the same breath, it won’t ever understand its history worth a damn. (Until, that is, we admit that Dorothy Gale of Kansas, who is all of us, has a thing for dressing up as the Wicked Witch of the West. Now you know.)
The second question: was he crazy?
In America? Compared to whom? Michael Jackson? Stonewall Jackson? Cotton Mather? Henry Batshit Adams? Ernest Hemingway? Good old Bill Faulkner, who once snapped at his tearful daughter that nobody remembered Shakespeare’s children? Abraham Lincoln, one of Nixon’s more maudlin attempted self-identifications, who if he were alive today would be getting Prozac slammed into him by the bucket load? Death-loving, pill-popping JFK?
Elvis?
5. Jesse Milhous Presley
I have the photograph on a T-shirt I bought at the Nixon Library, where it’s sold with this rubric: “The President and the King.”
As they shake hands, Elvis looks pretty zonked. Greasy eyelids, puffy jowls. That stupid championship belt. Nixon looks uncomfortable, and what else is new?
They could be brothers.
Elvis, of course, never knew his twin, Jesse, who died at birth. Nixon’s fun-loving big brother Harold, the family darling, died of TB at 24. Both Elvis and Nixon doted on their mothers, calling them saints. But they both heard trains in the night.
Good boys gone bad. One was best when he was bad, but never believed it. One was bad even when he was good.
I often used to think that Sam Shepard should have written this play back in his prime. When he did, it was his prime: True West. Two brothers fight it out over which of them is the other.
Elvis, despite being Nixon’s junior by a good many years, is clearly the older brother: been there, done that. The younger brother has had to build a personality from negation, out of the bits and scraps of empty space the older one left free. It constricts him. By now, he often mistakes the constriction for skin.
But if they’re brothers, then they must be sons. It’s obvious Elvis is the Prodigal Son. For him, they killed the fatted calf. Judging from his waistline, he’d already eaten it, all by himself. Slurp! Yum!
Though forced to embrace him, the younger son feels scalded. But I’m the Good Son, he thinks. I’m the one who stayed. I did all they asked, terrible though it was. Where’s my fatted calf?
Tonight, alone, his floodlit brain will screech: What more do they want from me! But they never wanted him.
For that, how they will pay.
There was one other big difference between these men.
Never thinking twice about it, the King believed in the American Dream.
The President, to his despair, could not.
6. I Am Nixon
Really, it’s the funniest thing. Turn on the CBS Evening News. Doesn’t Dan Rather look and act just like his old nemesis, Richard Nixon?
But then, a couple of days a week I can’t be any too sure I’d buy a used car from myself, either.
Last Sunday, I called my mom, and her husband answered. Don is a cheerful Republican; he and my Democrat mom constantly spar. (They still argue about FDR at Yalta. They’re nuts.)
“So are you in mourning?” I teased him.
He chortled. “No. But your mother’s all broken up.”
What’s to become of us, now that Nixon’s gone? (My wife just came by: “I’ve got to check the papers. It’s been three days and maybe he’s risen. If anyone could do it …”)
I wonder what music they’ll be playing for him Wednesday afternoon, on that seared lawn in Yorba Linda. Something tougher than Brahms. I somehow doubt it will be this — though we could all sing along, to the tune of “Joe Hill”:
I dreamed I saw the Wicked Witch Alive as you or me “But Witch ” I said, “you’re 10 years dead” “I never died,” says she “I never die,” says she
But what’s going to be on your headstone, old artificer — old Scratch? HERE LIES A SWARM OF BLACK THING. LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD. I think that I would nominate the words Nabokov used to end The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: “I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we are both someone whom neither of us knows.” ❖
Richard Milhous Nixon, January 9, 1913 – April 22, 1994
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This article is part of a series — At 250, Who Will America Be? — reporting on threats to American democracy as we approach the nation’s Semiquincentennial, on July 4, 2026. ∼ ∼ ∼
This article from the Village Voice Archive was posted on April 19, 2024
Don’t worry – she’s originally from France, but she’s long represented the best of American citizenry.Statue of Liberty photo by Reno Laithienne; vote sticker photo by Element5 Digital, both via Unsplash. RCB collage
This article is part of a series — At 250, Who Will America Be? — reporting on threats to American democracy as we approach the nation’s Semiquincentennial, on July 4, 2026.
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As the 2024 national election on November 5 takes shape, political pros of all stripes see New York’s congressional delegation as the key to flipping the House of Representatives to the Democrats.
With millions of members nationwide, the progressive grassroots organization MoveOn is mounting an ambitious two-phase campaign to get out the vote. “The effort will continue following Democrats’ huge flip in NY-3 and forge forth until the November 5 national general election,” MoveOn press secretary Britt Jacovich tells the Voice, referring to the ouster of the scandal-plagued Republican George Santos by Democrat Tom Suozzi in a special election this past February.
Here’s the layout of the political jigsaw puzzle in New York state that could turn the U.S. House over to Democrats: After losing one congressional seat by 89 residents in the 2020 Census, New York now has 26 House members consisting of 15 Democrats, 10 Republicans, and 1 vacancy to be filled by an April 30 special election winner.
The push began with Suozzi winning the February 13 special election in NY District 3 to replace the spectacular fabulist Santos, who was expelled by the House on December 1, 2023. A Long Island political fixture, Suozzi relinquished the NY District 3 seat in 2022 when he unsuccessfully mounted a primary challenge to Governor Kathy Hochul; Santos, a relative unknown who escaped close media scrutiny, won in a district that had toggled between parties in the 2000s. Suozzi must run again in November to hold his special election seat, which he won in large part because of voters’ displeasure with Santos. “We didn’t have to add much to what our volunteer members were already doing on their own in support of Suozzi’s campaign,” MoveOn’s field director, Amanda DeStefano, explains.
The next piece of the puzzle arrives in the April 30 special election for the NY-26 congressional seat. This district includes parts of Erie and Niagara counties and the cities of Buffalo and Niagara Falls. Democrat Brian Higgins had represented the district since 2005 before his February resignation, due in part to his frustration with a legislative body in which “it’s everyone demonizing one another,” as he told the Buffalo News. With Higgins’s departure, Erie County Democrats have tapped New York state senator Tim Kennedy as their designated candidate for the special election. He has held the 63rd state legislative seat since 2011.
MoveOn hopes “to successfully make the case to voters that these Republicans are failing to address their constituents’ real needs, and flip these seats to the Democrat side of the aisle.”
“With so many crucial seats in the House up for grabs and such narrow margins, we have to be strategic about where we invest our resources. This is a relatively safe seat, so we’re not putting a lot of our energy into that race at this time. We think it’s solid blue,” Jacovich tells the Voice.
West Seneca supervisor Gary Dickson is the endorsed candidate of Buffalo area Republicans for the special election. Should Kennedy prevail on April 30, and again on November 5 — as must Suozzi — that will leave 24 otherseats on the ballot. If Democrats hold and then flip enough of those seats, that could position New York to give the U.S. House a Democrat majority. With Suozzi’s pick up of the seat, House membership stands at 218 Republicans, 213 Democrats, and four vacancies, further narrowing the GOP edge.
Adding more unknowns to the political jigsaw puzzle in the House is the coming departure of GOP stalwart Mike Gallagher, of Wisconsin, meaning four out of five of the vacancies were held by Republicans. Even so, Newsweek reports, “all these races are expected to go back to a Republican candidate.” Those races play out in Colorado for the seat Buck is resigning on April 19;in California, where a special election in May will replace former house speaker Kevin McCarthy, who resigned late last year after being deposed by his party’s most radically right members; and in Ohio, where voters will select a replacement for Representative Bill Johnson.
Working through the grassroots.Courtesy MoveOn
That said, MoveOn is looking at districts in New York held by the GOP but — in their current configuration after redistricting — had cast more votes for Biden than Trump in 2020. “Right now we’re targeting [New York] Districts 4, 17, 22, 19,” Jacovich says, adding that the organization hopes “to successfully make the case to voters that these Republicans are failing to address their constituents’ real needs, and flip these seats to the Democrat side of the aisle.”
Regarding the NY District 3 race, in which Suozzi replaced Santos, Jacovich says, “In that race, and in general, we see a trend indicating that voters favor local issues and protecting abortion rights, not MAGA-led political distractions or congressional gridlock. Voters want their elected officials to actually govern, and that’s what Democrats will do.” Against this political backdrop, field director DeStefano is poised to begin a two-phase effort. Phase one begins in early May, and is intended to persuade Democrats to turn out. “We will start by focusing on ‘surge voters,’ who we’ve identified as voters who support Democrats but may need an extra nudge to come out and vote,” DeStefano explains, adding that such voters “did not vote frequently before 2016 but have voted in at least one election since. We need to listen to voters’ concerns and bring them out for the upcoming election cycle.” She describes this effort as “a data-driven persuasion campaign with the goal of contacting potential voters across channels that will include phone calls, postcards, digital ads, and door knocking.”
The second phase, which begins in September, is a get-out-the-vote effort, encouraging volunteers to contact people in their own networks and provide information on how to vote. New York volunteers will focus on the crucial 4, 17, 19, and 22 districts. “We’ve found tremendous energy and enthusiasm for the ‘persuasion’ phase of the effort thus far,” says DeStefano.
Discussing the April 30 special election upstate, Jeremy Zellner, Erie County Democratic Committee chair, says, “We’re feeling good but definitely not taking anything for granted. Even though the 26th is a Democrat district, we’re not overlooking anything.”
Neither is State Senator Kennedy, who began early with TV ads, multiple mailings, attention to absentee voters, and phone banks. “We’re also knocking on doors, as all of this activity converges at the same time,” explains Zellner.
Regarding the mood of the electorate right now, Zellner says, “It’s simple. People want results from elected officials in the form of providing resources to local communities … Voters do not want candidates who hold extreme views on either the left or the right.” ❖
Frank Pizzoli is a journalist who has been covering politics, queer issues, healthcare, and literary celebrities for the past 25 years.
