Richard 37th: A Study of Tyranny
Story by Fax Bahr and Phil Ethington
For what shall it profit a man,
if he shall gain the whole world,
and lose his own soul?
--Mark 8:36
Holding aloft the severed head of the Duke of Somerset, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who would later seize the English crown by guile and assassination to become Richard III, addresses that lifeless head, taunting: "Speak thou for me and tell them what I did." (Henry IV, 1.1.16, 3) In Shakespeare's gruesome script, the speechless deed is proof. Richard Nixon left behind a mountain of deeds as he plotted, strategized, campaigned his way to occupy the highest throne on Earth. Like Richard III, Richard Milhaus Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, committed criminal acts in the name of state security, later deemed by the established powers to be criminally threatening to the nation itself. Richard 37th's power outweighed, by a factor of one million at least, that of Richard III.
Shakespeare co-founded, with Cervantes, a critical political art for the modern era, capable of reaching beyond the elite to a literate middle class. Both were regime loyalists and critical satirists at the same time, tunneling into the absolutist states of their day, a subversive package of concepts and vocabularies that have powered critical publics ever since. his Richard III was about a by-gone medieval era without mass publics, to an Early Modern elizabethan society with a widening public sphere. That public sphere would expand by orders of magnitude in the 18th 19th and again in the 20th centuries. Absent from medieval England were the vast, mass-mediated publics that Nixon learned to master. Hollywood provided those.
The essays titled Richard 37th, Acts I-IV, narrate the growth of a tyranny that sprang directly from the centuries-old political culture of Southern California, and from the center of that region, Los Angeles. Richard M. Nixon embodied and historically culminated the region's most destructive features: Militarism, a military-industrial economy, racial ideologies, authoritarian populism, censorship, propaganda, espionage, criminal practices at every scale. These realities about the Nixon presidency sit uneasily with his still-intact reputation as a "liberal" Republican who advocated and signed into law some of the most impressive social welfare, civil rights, and environmentalist legislation (plus his Executive Orders) of the late 20th century. Political scientist Stephen Skowronek compellingly places Nixon in the category of "preemptive" presidents: including Andrew Johnson (War Democrat), Woodrow Wilson (Progressive Democrat) Eisenhower (Modern" Republicanism), and Bill Clinton (New Democrat). Nixon's temperament as an egocentric aspirant to dominate the U.S. political system suited him perfectly to this role. His well-known grudges and resentment at the Establishment, however psychologically-derived, plus his absolute mastery of trans-regional political strategy, resulted in the mature Nixon's gambit to "sidestep preestablished conceptions of the alternatives and to reach out beyond the president's traditional party base to some new and largely inchoate coalition."Note.
The "New Nixon," a marketing slogan meant to negate his hatchet-man sore-loser, Tricky-Dick reputation of the 1946-1962 years, has proven remarkably successful, given the ferocity of his aggressive international militarism, his callous disregard for democracy or human rights at home and abroad, and given his cynical betrayal of Civil Rights whenever it suited his electoral tactics or strategies. Forgotten in the 21st-century respect for Nixon is the profound cynicism of his character and practice. To adjust Skowronek's apt analysis, Nixon most closely resembled Andrew Johnson in the damage and bitterness his short-lived preemption left to posterity, while his success in clearing the ground for the New Right, and the Reagan Revolution in particular, achieved a realignment breakthrough that perhaps no other preemptive president attained.
These essays, called "A Study of Tyranny," are written in the spirit of essais, relatively short reflective treatments of a subject of enormous importance which is still not sufficiently understood. Nixon has been recognized as an intrinsically contradictory, mysterious, and melodramatic character since early in his career in the 1950s. Richard Milhaus Nixon, like all world-historic leaders, is sui generis. Even so, his psychological-political character is already familiar, in Shakespeare's Richard III and Macbeth, and in Herman Melville's Ahab. No less a standard than these timeless character studies is worthy of this Los Angeles-born American who attempted to rule every region of North America and to dominate the globe through warfare, imperial intrigue and internal repression.
With a hubris perhaps to match its subject, these essays attempt to map the local, regional, national, and international rise, defeat, resurrection and triumph, the tyranny and the ruin, of the single most powerful and dangerous man on Earth, possibly the most powerful man who ever lived. The task is daunting and humbling, but all biographies, like all maps, are reductions and redactions, selections of the features of greatest interest to the writer and cartographer. No map is comprehensive. Mine draws together several narrative strands that I have developed throughout Ghost Metropolis: Regional political cultures and institutions; Military-industrial political economies; Mass media; the geographic footprints of social inequality and power; mass publics.
The story of Richard Nixon's rise to the pinnacle of world power from his humble origins as the son of a gas station and grocery proprietor in Whittier, California, cannot be fully understood without a thick study of the metropolitan-institutional milieu that shaped him. Among the essays of Ghost Metropolis Ab Urbe Condita traces the deep regional backstory to this four-act tragicomic historical melodrama: Act I traces the rise of a politician who was distinctive product of the autocratic political culture of the Otis-Chandler regime of the 1920s-40s, through his double presidential-gubernatorial defeats of 1960 and 1962 respectively. Act II tells the story of Nixon's self-resurrection as the leader of a newly militant Republican party that he organized under the banners of aggressive warfare, Law-and-Order repression, backlashing traditional morals, and a preemptive, albeit cynical, platform of liberal-Republican domestic policies. Act III recounts the Nixon presidency of 1969-1974 as a Thermidorian reaction, an orchestration of fear to mobilize the American middle classes in support of military aggression abroad, the his iron fist. Nixon's tyranny was, like that of Richard III, self-destructive. Unhorsed, he also found himself alone, too outrageous for leaders needing to retain their own integrity to support. The modern Richard faced a Constitution that worked on cue and Nixon was justly and peacefully driven from power. In Act IV, we see that the movement that Nixon consolidated never stopped its forward march, led next by the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan. Act IV ends with the Los Angeles Uprising of 1992.
Holding aloft the severed head of the Duke of Somerset, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who would later seize the English crown by guile and assassination to become Richard III, addresses that lifeless head, taunting: "Speak thou for me and tell them what I did." (Henry IV, 1.1.16, 3) In Shakespeare's gruesome script, the speechless deed is proof. Richard Nixon left behind a mountain of deeds as he plotted, strategized, campaigned his way to occupy the highest throne on Earth. Like Richard III, Richard Milhaus Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, committed criminal acts in the name of state security, later deemed by the established powers to be criminally threatening to the nation itself. Richard 37th's power outweighed, by a factor of one million at least, that of Richard III.
Shakespeare co-founded, with Cervantes, a critical political art for the modern era, capable of reaching beyond the elite to a literate middle class. Both were regime loyalists and critical satirists at the same time, tunneling into the absolutist states of their day, a subversive package of concepts and vocabularies that have powered critical publics ever since. his Richard III was about a by-gone medieval era without mass publics, to an Early Modern elizabethan society with a widening public sphere. That public sphere would expand by orders of magnitude in the 18th 19th and again in the 20th centuries. Absent from medieval England were the vast, mass-mediated publics that Nixon learned to master. Hollywood provided those.
The essays titled Richard 37th, Acts I-IV, narrate the growth of a tyranny that sprang directly from the centuries-old political culture of Southern California, and from the center of that region, Los Angeles. Richard M. Nixon embodied and historically culminated the region's most destructive features: Militarism, a military-industrial economy, racial ideologies, authoritarian populism, censorship, propaganda, espionage, criminal practices at every scale. These realities about the Nixon presidency sit uneasily with his still-intact reputation as a "liberal" Republican who advocated and signed into law some of the most impressive social welfare, civil rights, and environmentalist legislation (plus his Executive Orders) of the late 20th century. Political scientist Stephen Skowronek compellingly places Nixon in the category of "preemptive" presidents: including Andrew Johnson (War Democrat), Woodrow Wilson (Progressive Democrat) Eisenhower (Modern" Republicanism), and Bill Clinton (New Democrat). Nixon's temperament as an egocentric aspirant to dominate the U.S. political system suited him perfectly to this role. His well-known grudges and resentment at the Establishment, however psychologically-derived, plus his absolute mastery of trans-regional political strategy, resulted in the mature Nixon's gambit to "sidestep preestablished conceptions of the alternatives and to reach out beyond the president's traditional party base to some new and largely inchoate coalition."Note.
The "New Nixon," a marketing slogan meant to negate his hatchet-man sore-loser, Tricky-Dick reputation of the 1946-1962 years, has proven remarkably successful, given the ferocity of his aggressive international militarism, his callous disregard for democracy or human rights at home and abroad, and given his cynical betrayal of Civil Rights whenever it suited his electoral tactics or strategies. Forgotten in the 21st-century respect for Nixon is the profound cynicism of his character and practice. To adjust Skowronek's apt analysis, Nixon most closely resembled Andrew Johnson in the damage and bitterness his short-lived preemption left to posterity, while his success in clearing the ground for the New Right, and the Reagan Revolution in particular, achieved a realignment breakthrough that perhaps no other preemptive president attained.
These essays, called "A Study of Tyranny," are written in the spirit of essais, relatively short reflective treatments of a subject of enormous importance which is still not sufficiently understood. Nixon has been recognized as an intrinsically contradictory, mysterious, and melodramatic character since early in his career in the 1950s. Richard Milhaus Nixon, like all world-historic leaders, is sui generis. Even so, his psychological-political character is already familiar, in Shakespeare's Richard III and Macbeth, and in Herman Melville's Ahab. No less a standard than these timeless character studies is worthy of this Los Angeles-born American who attempted to rule every region of North America and to dominate the globe through warfare, imperial intrigue and internal repression.
With a hubris perhaps to match its subject, these essays attempt to map the local, regional, national, and international rise, defeat, resurrection and triumph, the tyranny and the ruin, of the single most powerful and dangerous man on Earth, possibly the most powerful man who ever lived. The task is daunting and humbling, but all biographies, like all maps, are reductions and redactions, selections of the features of greatest interest to the writer and cartographer. No map is comprehensive. Mine draws together several narrative strands that I have developed throughout Ghost Metropolis: Regional political cultures and institutions; Military-industrial political economies; Mass media; the geographic footprints of social inequality and power; mass publics.
The story of Richard Nixon's rise to the pinnacle of world power from his humble origins as the son of a gas station and grocery proprietor in Whittier, California, cannot be fully understood without a thick study of the metropolitan-institutional milieu that shaped him. Among the essays of Ghost Metropolis Ab Urbe Condita traces the deep regional backstory to this four-act tragicomic historical melodrama: Act I traces the rise of a politician who was distinctive product of the autocratic political culture of the Otis-Chandler regime of the 1920s-40s, through his double presidential-gubernatorial defeats of 1960 and 1962 respectively. Act II tells the story of Nixon's self-resurrection as the leader of a newly militant Republican party that he organized under the banners of aggressive warfare, Law-and-Order repression, backlashing traditional morals, and a preemptive, albeit cynical, platform of liberal-Republican domestic policies. Act III recounts the Nixon presidency of 1969-1974 as a Thermidorian reaction, an orchestration of fear to mobilize the American middle classes in support of military aggression abroad, the his iron fist. Nixon's tyranny was, like that of Richard III, self-destructive. Unhorsed, he also found himself alone, too outrageous for leaders needing to retain their own integrity to support. The modern Richard faced a Constitution that worked on cue and Nixon was justly and peacefully driven from power. In Act IV, we see that the movement that Nixon consolidated never stopped its forward march, led next by the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan. Act IV ends with the Los Angeles Uprising of 1992.
This page has paths:
- Narrative Paths Phil Ethington
- Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000, a Global History Curtis Fletcher
- Networks Phil Ethington
