Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image

"There was a lot that was shadowy about Nixon. For one, he was known for his five o’clock shadow. Some argue that his dark stubble was one reason he lost the 1960 televised debates to John F. Kennedy when he was first running for president. Nixon’s Shadow is about the man and what he meant to different groups of Americans—from his Southern California boosters to the liberal intellectuals who hated him. And it’s about how different groups have reinterpreted and reconceptualized Nixon. You could say it’s as much historiography as biography. Nixon was, even more than most politicians, obsessed with his image. There’s a great story about how he wanted to bring in a television advisor to tell him whether he should hold the phone with his left or right hand when photographed. Nixon emerged in an era when politicians were learning to master television and the politics of image, and when the public was coming to see politicians in terms of image. There was interesting interplay between his own obsession with image and the media’s focus on optics. Now, a great deal of our political discourse is about image, message and talking points. It feels hollow because we’re not really engaging with underlying concerns. But image is not just a distraction, it is an expression of something fundamental. Image reflects the way values surface and express themselves to the public. So, Nixon’s Shadow is both a study of Nixon, but also a study of how image has come to dominate our thinking about politics. For many decades after Nixon, people would compare contemporary scandals to those of the Nixon years. Does the Iran-Contra scandal rival Watergate? What about Bill Clinton’s relationship with a White House intern? John Dean, who was Nixon’s White House counsel, wrote a book about the George W. Bush years called Worse Than Watergate , but he later said the title was hyperbolic. Watergate was the benchmark. No scandal came close to it until Trump. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Although we should await the verdict of history on the Trump years, it’s safe to say that the scandals and corruption of contemporary democracy during the Trump administration match or outstrip what we call Watergate. There are certainly some similarities between the Nixon and Trump administrations, which both tried to chip away at the constitutional constraints of the presidency. After Watergate, there was some legislation that tried to reign in what was being called the “imperial presidency” in the 1970s. Fears remained of what a single individual with extreme will to power might do in the Oval Office. The echoes of Nixon’s presidency during Donald Trump’s were not a shock. I wrote a few pieces, over the Trump years, drawing on parallels between America’s 37th and 45th presidents. When Trump talked about firing his attorney general and firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was investigating him, people thought about the so-called ‘Saturday Night Massacre,’ when Nixon fired the special prosecutor investigating Watergate and his attorney general quit. These echoes suggest there are recurring dangers emanating from the structure of American government which allow abuses of executive power. Although television still has an important role in presidential politics, social media using internet mobile devices has become a more dominant form of media. A lot of politicking is still image-based; but it’s also meme-based and tweet-based, as you say. So future analyses of image in our current politics will have a different starting point. Twitter was around throughout the Obama presidency, but because Obama wasn’t a Twitter kind-of-thinker he didn’t harness it much. The Twittersphere is about brevity and impulsivity. So, naturally, Donald Trump was drawn to that domain. It wasn’t so much that Trump cracked the code of Twitter, but that Trump was the type to use the unique properties of Twitter to amplify his political image. It doesn’t mean every president thereafter is going to be a Twitter president. Joe Biden isn’t. But having an intrinsic knack or affinity for a newly dominant medium does serve a president or a candidate for the presidency."