HOME

LIVES

Although Michael Beschloss is a published historian, he is also one of the most prominent 'talking heads' on any American television show which requires a historical commentary. Like his colleague at Newshour Haynes Johnson, Beschloss displays a tendency for simplification, hyperbole, and evocative anecdotes about Richard Nixon's life in order to appeal to his mass audience: "Nixon had come so far from a proletarian childhood and two smashing defeats that he was horrified by the prospect of the oblivion that awaits most ex-presidents."

Beschloss is also occasionally prone to psychologising his subject, writing as if he were inside Nixon's head, "he remembered what it was like in 1961, only three months after losing the closest presidential election in history, to be heating TV dinners alone in a furnished bachelor apartment". (According to Nixon's own memoirs, "I preferred to be alone, so I rented a small bachelor apartment on Wilshire Boulevard not far from the office. I learned to fix my own meals. Fortunately, I have never been fussy about food and I actually learned to enjoy heating a TV dinner and eating it alone while reading a book or magazine.") [1]

But Beschloss is also capable of analysing the populist rhetoric he is part of. He describes the interesting phenomenon in America of a kind of "historical stock exchange", where presidents are compared and 'rated' against each other to create some kind of order of successful chief executives: "Before Watergate, Nixon had planned to drive up his stock on the historical exchange to enhance his post-presidential career. After he resigned the presidency, he strove to rebuild his political standing in the ultimate hope that the good opinion of his contemporaries would impress later historians as well."

Beschloss includes in his obituary the hidden mechanisms which Nixon employed to boost his "stock" in American history, a conscious process that is overlooked by much of the funeral oratory which simply describes Nixon as a fighter throughout his life. 

As Beschloss notes, "This was one reason he had his Oval Office and Cabinet Room, as well as other chambers and telephone lines, wired for sound. As his first chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, has written, the White House tapes were conceived to be 'invaluable as an aid to Nixon in writing his memoirs.' During the Nixon post-presidency, they could be carefully edited and disseminated to the public to demonstrate Nixon's mastery of statesmanship."

For the ex-president, "the Nixon Presidential Library would be not a passive respository of papers, but the roaring engine room of Nixon's post-presidential career, sponsoring books, lecturers and television films that conveyed the Nixon message on current issues." This was an effort that could continue regardless of Nixon's death, a phenomenon effectively captured by Beschloss, which continues to this day.
 

[1] Richard Nixon, Memoirs of Richard Nixon, MacMillan, Melbourne, 1978, 232
 

COMMENTATORS

OBITUARIES