The Last of the Dominoes

ONE CAN ONLY SPECULATE on the nature of Richard Nixon's dreams.

A long column of refugees is being herded along a dusty, withered road. Gruff, snarling guards, with uniforms emblazoned by hammers and sickles, eye us suspiciously. Behind me are the smoldering ruins of New York City, now in grubby Soviet hands.

I meet up with an unshaven, long-haired radical of the type that used to hound me when I was President. He wears a peace sign on his tattered denim jacket. Arms shackled around his back--like the rest of us--he speaks softly after recognizing me with a double-take.

"You were right, Mr. Nixon, you were right," he says sadly, shaking his head. "We blew it. Let me speak for my whole generation and apologize for hindering your efforts to seek a just peace in Indo-China and indeed the world. If only...if only we had stuck to football and surfing and let you do your job like loyal Americans...will you ever forgive us?"

I nod wearily. "Only history can forgive you now, son. But I am not bitter. 'Those who hate you can't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.' Teddy Roosevelt said that. As I said to Mao at the Great Wall-- and it is indeed a great wall--"

A guard cut our conversation short. But, despite the circumstances, I could not but feel a certain satisfaction. I had known all along. I told them so. I was right...right...right....

THE ONGOING STRUGGLE of the West to defeat Soviet designs for worldwide hegemony is the "real war" referred to in the title of Mr. Nixon's latest epic thriller. Evidently, Vietnam didn't qualify. That conflict, which cost the lives of approximately 1.5 million Vietnamese and Americans, was mere imagery, one must assume, not the real thing. Richard M. Nixon, once president, now resident, of the United States, posesses the rare ability to offend his readers even before they have opened his book. A man of real distinction.

It is hard to write objectively of Mr. Nixon. He is a ghost come back to haunt us, a reminder of a period of American history whose buried horrors are still in the process of being exhumed. To those who opposed him and the policies and mindset he represented, Nixon personified the banality of evil. He inspired a visceral contempt among students, who counted on him to supply a symbol of arrogance and decadence. The distaste was mutual. "When dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy," Nixon said, equating protest with murder, on the day four students were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State.

Scattered through The Real War are references to the evil wrought by protesting students--"Unfortunately, America is still suffering from the legacy of the 1960's. A rabid anti-intellectualism swept the nation's campuses then, and fantasy reigned supreme." (Ohhh, so that's what The Movement really was--"rabid anti-intellectualism," let me get that down.)

But Nixon, a self-certified geopolitician--wonder where he got that from?--has set himself too lofty a task to dwell on past squabbles. He is warning us against ourselves, hoping against hope that we will slough off our guilt, indecision and blithe good nature and gear ourselves for the ultimate showdown at the OK Corral. After all, we are told,

We are at war. We are engaged in a titanic struggle in which the fates of nations are being decided. In war the fact that a surrounded garrison surrenders without any shots being fired makes its capture no less a military victory for one side and a defeat for the other. When the Soviet Union advances by using proxy troops, its conquests are still Soviet victories and Western defeats.

Nixon's world is a very simple one. There are Soviets and there is the West. The Third World does not exist, it is merely a set of Monopoly for the two superpowers. ("Trade you Park Place for Atlantic and Ventnor." "Nyet. Maybe ve trade Baltic and Mediterranean for Boardwalk.") Nixon rattles off lists of "Soviet conquests" as if they were playing cards or, dare one say, dominoes--"Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, South Yemen, Mozambique, Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam." Ambiguities, complexities, individual circumstances--irrelevant; nationalism, reaction against imperialism?--mere facades.

Oh, he will admit that some countries are more communist than others. (He sees the People's Republic of China as perhaps the best hope for thwarting the Soviets.) It matters not. '"Radish communists,"' he reminds us, "red on the outside but white on the inside, taste as good to the Soviets as red tomatoes." This from the man who once described South America as a "Red sandwich"--Cuba and Chile (then under Allende) the slices of bread and one need not wonder who is waiting to gobble up the rest.

The arguments are familiar; this book, a compendium of renovated Cold War polemics, will change no minds. Those who have looked with favor on Nixon and his brand of geopolitics in the past will not be disappointed; those who have not will find it a paranoid and self-justifying comic book, tediously rehashing old arguments and hair-raising tales of the Red Menace circa 1980, weighed down by an endless--and pretentious--string of quotes from Karl Marx to Richard Pipes.

IN THE TIME OF ILLUSION, Jonathan Schell '65 describes the system Nixon used for assigning speeches to his staff of writers. There was a "Good Nixon" speechwriter who was known for flowery prose and concilliatory pronouncements calculated to please the left; and a "Bad Nixon" speechwriter who would formulate hard-hitting, no-holds-barred vitrioles for the good ol' boys on the right. Although produced with the "editorial assistance" of "Good Nixon" writer Ray Price, The Real War shows Nixon restrained only by his still-fervent desire for acceptance and respectability, fangs barely capped. Ultimately, the book most closely resembles a 327-page Richard Nixon speech. Despite the obvious nostalgia value, this, to many is a truly terrifying thought. The only relief comes from the secure--breathe deeply--knowledge that it is not coming to us live from the Oval Office.