Crazy Rhythm. - book reviews

Progressive, The, Jan, 1998 by Kate Clinton

I moved to Washington, D.C., this year, and found myself immersed in stories of political corruption and scandal. For background, I read books about Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and the late Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa.

Anyone interested in a primer on Presidential corruption should consult Stanley Kutler's Abuse of Power (Free Press)--an edited and indexed guide to the new Nixon tapes. Kutler, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, joined Ralph Nader's Public Citizen in a long legal battle and won the release of the tapes from the Nixon estate and the National Archives. The result is a powerful document, conveniently arranged with explanatory introductions to each chapter.

Here are Nixon and the Watergate conspirators plotting not only the cover-up that ultimately led to the President's downfall, but all their other astonishingly brazen dirty tricks: spying on George McGovern and Ted Kennedy, paying off the Watergate burglars, and siccing the IRS on various private citizens, including, in Nixon's words, "the Jews . . . please get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors to the Democrats. . . . Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?"

A good companion to Kutler's book is Crazy Rhythm (Times Books) by Leonard Garment, Richard Nixon's attorney during Watergate, and one of his trusted advisers throughout his Presidency. Garment, a self-described "liberal Jewish jazz musician from Brooklyn," attempts to explain how he got to the Nixon White House and why he stayed.

The explanation is less satisfying than the story-telling. After reaching what seemed to be the high point of his life playing tenor saxophone with the Woody Herman band, Garment found financial success boredom, and depression working at a Wail Street law firm. He befriended Richard Nixon, who joined the firm in 1963 as a rainmaker, determined to boost his public image and launch a new Presidential run. Garment helped Nixon argue a fascinating Supreme Court case--Hill v. Time, Inc.--and, as the Nixon campaign machine got cranking, seized his chance to escape the dull, gray world of Wall Street for a front-row seat in the Nixon Administration.

Garment plays a minor role in a vast array of political events--from negotiations with the Soviet Union and Israel, through the major school-desegregation efforts of 1969 and 1970, to diffusing the conflict between police and the protesters who took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to Watergate. Through it all, he served as a liberal counterweight to conservatives in the Administration like Pat Buchanan.

When Buchanan wrote a speech for Vice President Spiro Agnew supporting segregation in the South, Garment intervened. "Pat and I had a civil enough relationship during the Nixon years," writes Garment. "Technically, I outranked him on the White House staff, so he had to put up with my tactics that night, which were to argue the law, correct his facts, offer line-by-line redrafts, tell stories, jokes, anything to keep him from producing a coherent text. Pat was clear about his objective. `This speech,' he declared in a moment of chilling indiscretion at around 3 A.M., `will tear the scab off the issue of race in this country.'"

Garment prevailed, and Agnew's speech was killed. Instead, Nixon gave a speech supporting the Supreme Court's desegregation order, and helped Southern schools desegregate peacefully. More school desegregation took place during Nixon's first term, Garment points out, than in all the preceding years following Brown v. Board of Education.

On the issue of Nixon's anti-Semitism, Garment offers a tempered defense. He brings up a 1973 New York Times story by Seymour Hersh, which quoted Nixon calling investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission "a couple of Jew boys." Garment was sick about the story, he says. Nixon called him into his office and denied the quote. "I know my language," Nixon told Garment. "I never in my whole life used the term `Jew boy.'" Garment says he listened to the tapes the next morning and "Nixon was correct. The phrase `Jewish boys' was there, and it was John Dean, not Nixon, who used it. The prosecutor's transcript had put the words, in a more virulent form, in Nixon's mouth."

While Garment's loyalty is sometimes hard to swallow, he paints a fascinating portrait of his complex, intelligent boss. And his account makes clear that on civil rights, the minimum wage, welfare, affirmative action, and race relations, Nixon was much more progressive than President Clinton. Despite Nixon's foul mouth, he responded to the civil-rights movement's demands that he take concrete steps to fight institutional racism. That record stands in sharp contrast to Clinton's oily "conversation about race," and his refusal to do anything substantive about the entrenched problems of poverty and lack of opportunity. In many ways, Garment has less explaining to do than his liberal counterparts in the Clinton Administration.

Although it was published in 1995, I want to recommend David Maraniss's biography of Bill Clinton, First in His Class (Simon & Schuster). The Progressive didn't review the book, nor did I read it until I came to Washington. Like many people who have observed the President from afar, I was puzzled about him. How can one politician take so many contradictory positions? What really motivates Clinton? Did he ever have any ideals?