A Hiss for Horatio Alger

By LANCE MORROW

NIXON AGONISTES, THE CRISIS OF THE SELF-MADE MAN by Garry Wills. 617 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $10.

It is too early to evaluate Richard Nixon's presidency. In this discursive, bewildering and occasionally brilliant exercise, Garry Wills, a classicist-turned-journalist, writes, instead, about the idea of Nixon and the idea of the nation that elected him.

Wills' Nixon is a metaphor for "an older, and in many ways noble, America, made up of much sacrifice and anger." Yet Nixon's ascension to power, says Wills, is precisely a measure of the nation's failure, the bankruptcy of the Horatio Alger virtues and the supply-and-demand marketplace ethics that built this country.

The system of free competition, Wills argues, has crumbled under the weight of the corporate, governmental and moral systems that it created. It is no longer free. "Entry into competition," writes Wills, "becomes a matter of sheer improbable chance. The real market, where a man can amount to something, is disappearing." But with Nixon, "there was one hope left, a glimpse of the old code and toughness, of salvation lubricated in all its pistons by desperate, successful perspiration, a 'local boy who made good'. . .RICHARD NIXON steam-engining down the track, somehow un-derailed by history, cheered by those hoping he could re-establish the copybook maxims he lived by."

Nixon, says Wills, is "the last liberal." That is, he is liberal in the classical tradition: an individual, schooled to success and selfdiscipline, taking his chances in an impartial marketplace of goods and ideas. Wills sees Nixon as both caricature and culmination of the traditional theory that free competition will reward virtue and produce excellence. He is "Plastic Man," a dogged survivor of political enterprise, Whittier College's second-string lineman bathed in a Calvinist sweat of guilt and zeal, the political reincarnation of Uriah Keep.

Unfree Enterprise. It is not difficult to predict the outrage that Wills' book will detonate in Spiro Agnew--to say nothing of Nixon himself. Wills attacks ad hominem and sometimes quite unfairly--even granting the license of political satire. In one unpleasant lapse, for example, he describes Pat and Dick Nixon getting married: "The serious young man, son of a Quaker saint, docilely lines up at the marriage mart, where all the gooiest extras--orange blossoms, 'O Promise Me,' illusion veils --cover the emptiness of the transaction." It is both Wills' method and mistake to insert his aesthetic objections to Nixon into substantive arguments.

Republicans may also notice that it is mostly they who are cartooned, sometimes brilliantly (see box). Still Wills writes with respect and admiration of Dwight Eisenhower, whom he considers "a political genius." He makes fun of John Kennedy for his "stylistic imperialism," a militaristic impulse that, Wills says, was more highly developed than Nixon's.

As theory, Wills' perception of the injustices and frustrations caused by the free-market mystique is useful. And he offers a rather vague vision of an alternative society, pleading for "a period of intense experimentation" with different forms of community. He tends to slight the evolution that the nation --and with it, Richard Nixon--has undergone. He sees the New Deal, for example, as a mere readjustment to include more players in the competitive game. But the shift in money and poitical power of the '30s was profound. The competitive game was qualitatively changed. Workingmen could and did begin earning the money to buy houses --and eventually hard, political hats.

The reportage of Nixon Agonistes is often more interesting than its ideology. Much of the territory has been trod before, but with his stylistic gift--a broad sense of satire wedded to an acute political intelligence--Wills makes even his recapitulations entertaining. Wills goes spelunking into Nixon's Whittier prehistory and there finds Frank Nixon, his father, "gloomy and argumentative, black Irishman moving in cloud, with frequent lightnings out of it." His late mother, Wills reports, displayed a "colored photo-portrait of Richard, which was, when one threw the switch, lit electrically from behind like a hamburger king's." There is some truth but also a certain theatrical silliness in Wills' conclusion: "Nixon is at the mercy of his past, without quite possessing it."

All along, there seems to be revolution hatching in Wills' prose. It is odd, then, after 600 pages, to find him in a mood of mild conciliation. "There are signs that history, having made ours a great nation, may now be in the process of unmaking us--unless we can tap some energies for our own renewal." Having damned the Horatio Alger society from the pulpit, Wills ends by taking up a collection for self-improvement.

Lance Morrow

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