Richard Nixon’s Presence and Presidency in the 1970s

Introduction
While Nixon may not represent or symbolize the height of the Cold War, he does represent an era in American history plagued by government corruption and large-scale public dissatisfaction with the government in general. Nixon came to power on the heels of four politically motivated assassinations: JFK in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and MLK, Jr., and RFK in 1968. Robert Kennedy had been running against Nixon in the 1968 election, and his brother had beaten Nixon in the 1960 election. The deaths of both Kennedys were a reminder that something was not right in the state of Washington, D.C.—and Nixon seemed to be right in the thick of it. His famous words, “I am not a crook,” became lampooned in pop culture, and his presidency came to an early end with his resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Nixon has been the subject of several films, both directly and indirectly: he was the focal point in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, a political follow-up to the director’s previous hit JFK. Nixon was lampooned in the film Dick, a comedy which focused on the Watergate scandal. His relationship with Elvis Presley was described in the film Elvis & Nixon. The 1976 film (based on a book by the same name) All the President’s Men focused on the Watergate reporters trying to break the story on Nixon’s cover-up. It portrayed the reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in a heroic light (and why should it not?—they wrote the book on themselves). Another film, The Post, directed by Spielberg, adopted a similar approach in its characterization of Katherine Graham as a female crusader for the truth. Robert Altman’s Secret Honor in 1984 put Nixon front and center in a stream-of-consciousness yet ultimately unapologetic portrayal of the president coming to terms with his failed presidency. These films vary in their approach to Nixon and the 1970s—and some, like Stone’s and Altman’s, are more sympathetic than others. They are, however, but one approach to the man and the decade. Numerous books and articles have been written on Nixon, all of which tell their own stories. This paper will explore a variety of these works to show how the history of Nixon and the 1970s has been shaped in diverse ways. It will look at Stone and Kuznick’s, Untold History of the United States, John Dean’s The Nixon Defense, Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda, Elliot and Schenck-Hamlin’s “Film, Politics and the Press: The Influence of ‘All the President’s Men’,” Tyler’s A World of Trouble, and several others to show how historians and other writers have depicted Nixon and his time to tell their take on the man.
The Nixon Shock
There are many different places one could start when analyzing the various works that people have produced when covering Nixon. To understand how historians and writers have covered him, however, one has to start somewhere—and the Nixon Shock is as good a place as any. When Nixon shut the window on the gold standard in 1971, it “shocked” the world. Prior to that, foreign nations holding USD could still convert them into gold (though the average American could not—that window had been closed decades earlier). The Nixon Shock as it came to be known has been one of particular interest to writers more focused on the economic effect of Nixon’s presidency in the early 1970s than on the scandals. One writer who has taken a unique perspective on the Nixon Shock is G. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, a book that is highly critical of the Federal Reserve, which was essentially born on Jekyll Island shortly before Nixon himself was born in California in 1913. Griffin viewed Nixon’s move as part of a power play by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to control the global money supply. A dollar that was tied to gold could only be supplied in a limited or finite amount. A dollar that was backed by nothing but full faith and credit could be supplied in seemingly unlimited amounts. As the world’s reserve currency, the USD had to be infinite for the IMF to achieve its aim.[footnoteRef:2] [2: G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island (Westlake Village, CA: American Media, 1995), 91.]
The idea that Nixon was just a pawn in a much bigger game was one that other writers, such as Patrick Tyler, or filmmakers like Oliver Stone, have suggested as well. Tyler in his book A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East from the Cold War to the War on Terror, highlights the issues that Nixon faced in attempting to deal with the problematic issues emanating from the Middle East during his presidency. Tyler puts much of the blame squarely on the shoulders of Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Decolonization in Africa had led to an era of neo-colonization, and alliances were very unsettled and unstable as Egypt sought support from both East and West against Israel, and vice versa. Who was playing whom was a big question, and one that Nixon might have more readily asked. Kissinger, essentially acting like a double agent for Israel, quite often proved that it was Nixon, in the end, who was being played, as Tyler shows in his research.[footnoteRef:3] Tyler’s focus, along with that of Stone and Kuznick in their Untold History is on the meaning of events that typically do not get told in the popular representation of Nixon on the decade. The complex interrelationship of events linking the Shock with Middle East activities and the rise of the petrodollar along with the appeasement of Israel all are explored by Tyler and Griffin as they construct a complex narrative that shines a light on the various aspects of the times. [3: Patrick Tyler, A World of Trouble (NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2010), 24.]
Stone and Kuznick pay particular attention to the effect that Nixon’s legacy had on the latter half of the 1970s. After Nixon’s resignation and the cold water effect of Watergate, the Cold War protestors tried to put a brighter face on things in the person of Jimmy Carter—but Carter’s way of dealing with foreign policy was essentially no different from his Cold War forerunners, and the sobering effect of Watergate was quickly lost, as the deep state got back to business as usual.[footnoteRef:4] Tyler describes a Nixon who was out-maneuvered by Kissinger at every step of the way and who was, ultimately, betrayed by his own Secretary of State: Nixon would give Kissinger one set of instructions for dealing with issues in the Middle East, particularly between Israel, Palestine, Egypt and other countries—and Kissinger would fly off and do exactly what he wanted, oftentimes the exact opposite of what Nixon instructed. Tyler’s take on Nixon and the 1970s is one in which Israel plays a powerful influence and a powerful hand—and Kissinger being Jewish and a Zionist, Tyler’s points appear valid: it was a situation in which the president of the United States thinks he has more power than he actually does and, in reality, is actually being maneuvered by a well-oiled political machine consisting of various players in various departments and agencies, many of which link back to Israel, as Jefferson Morley shows in his biography of head of CIA counter-intelligence James Jesus Angleton.[footnoteRef:5] [4: Stone, Olver and Peter Kuznick, Untold History of United States (NY: Gallery, 2012), 393.] [5: Jefferson Morley, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton (St. Martin’s Press, 2017), 112.]
Such was also Stone and Kuznick’s take on events in the 1970s in their dual-effort work The Untold History of the United States, which Stone also turned into a ten-part mini docu-series for Showtime. Stone had already portrayed Nixon in a sympathetic light in his film on the president: he showed a man who was haunted by his own backroom dealings and paranoia about what Peter Dale Scott would eventually call the inner workings of the “deep state”[footnoteRef:6]—the unelected officials and appointees and agents who worked behind the scenes of the public façade to enact policies on both foreign and domestic matters—policies that benefitted certain groups other than the masses who made up the American public—the masses who would protest the Vietnam War. Stone and Kuznick, Tyler and Scott have all placed emphasis on the inner-workings of the “deep state” and have highlighted the struggles that Nixon faced as a result of those inner-workings. The extent to which Nixon himself was culpable for his actions is debated among them—however, the actions that did define his presidency remain. He helped to secure the petrodollar to prop up USD as the world’s currency.[footnoteRef:7] And he brought the Vietnam War to a close—a moment that Stone depicts in his film Nixon as a heroic action brought about deep, sincere reflection and engagement with voters, whose will the president finally understood and took to heart. [6: Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (University of California Press, 2007), 3.] [7: Stone, Kuznick, Untold History of United States, 304.]
Not all media portrayals of Nixon have been sympathetic, however. Even into the 1990s, the satire comedy show Saturday Night Live was still spoofing Nixon, who had appeared in 1994 on 60 Minutes. Nixon was depicted on SNL as a duplicitous, unapologetic liar, motivated wholly by self-interest. This is the popular representation of Nixon in most pop culture media. It should be no surprise, however, to find that Stone should challenge this representation in his own film and book. Stone challenged the official narrative of the JFK assassination in which the Warren Commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman responsible for killing the president in 1963. Stone’s 1991 film JFK triggered such a reaction in the public that it led to the re-opening of the files on JFK gathered under the Church Committee in 1975. The House Select Committee on Assassinations found, of course, that it could not exclude the possibility of a conspiracy among individuals to assassinate Kennedy.[footnoteRef:8] Thus, Stone has a degree of credibility to stand upon when challenging the popular notions of American history—from the assassination of Kennedy to the idea of Nixon being nothing more than a common crook. Stone emphasizes the fact that Nixon ended the Vietnam War and that he inherited a situation of mission creep that was operated by people within the State Department who did not want Nixon interfering. From this perspective, Watergate itself takes on a whole new meaning and can be interpreted as an attempt to get Nixon out of the way. [8: Stone, Kuznick, Untold History of United States, 472.]
Nixon’s Knowledge
What did Nixon know and to what extent was he culpable? This, too, is debated by the historians and by those who wrote about their own experiences in the 1970s in the Nixon Administration. It is clear from John Dean’s The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It that Nixon was indeed paranoid about information getting out. The idea of “limited hangout” comes from the Nixon Administration’s attempt to control the narrative and the flow of information by allowing just enough information to leak to the press—enough to give them a story but not enough to allow them to paint a negative picture of the political workings behind the curtain. Dean’s book provides a take on Nixon that is both sympathetic and critical. It describes a world of politics in the run-up to the 1970s that was full of conspiring. Nixon wanted to know what his political enemies were doing. The idea to bug the DNC office in D.C. was not Nixon’s, Dean shows, but it was the idea of Liddy, who was in charge of Nixon’s re-election campaign in 1971.[footnoteRef:9] The burglars in the Watergate background were all connected to the CIA, as Jim Hougan showed.[footnoteRef:10] Hougan’s analysis is more critical of the entire Watergate narrative and shows that there was much more going on behind the scenes than the public was led to believe. Hougan criticizes the “All the President’s Men” narrative for not being sufficient enough to explain the entire political goings-on in the 1970s, and connects the dots between the Watergate burglars and the CIA. Hougan argues that the Watergate break-in was sabotaged by the “plumbers” themselves (McCord mainly) and that Nixon was set-up from the beginning by the intelligence agency. Hougan’s take aligns with Dean’s to the extent that neither lays the whole Watergate scandal at the feet of the president—yet pop culture has been far more influenced by the “All the President’s Men” version of the Watergate scandal with its emphasis on the reporter as hero and fighter for the truth—a narrative recently updated to have a more female-centric basis with Spielberg’s The Post. The divergence between the two narratives essentially comes down to Nixon himself. What did he know? [9: John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (NY: Viking, 2014).] [10: Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (NY: Random House, 1984).]
To understand Watergate in the context of who was involved and what their backgrounds were is to understand the larger power struggle that was in play—especially in the light of the fact that RFK was running for president against Nixon in 1968, three years before the Watergate break-in. Following RFK’s assassination, the Democrats mounted another come-back bid in the form of George McGovern. And yet Nixon won in a landslide. As Hougan shows, Liddy along with another CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, who was also linked to the assassination of JFK, were known as Nixon’s plumbers—i.e., the individuals tasked with stopping “leaks” out of the White House—a problem then as now. Hougan’s focus is on the behind the scenes action that explains the whole Watergate scandal in the first place. The problem that arose was that the Cubans arrested with McCord at the DNC offices were Hunt’s assets: he had recruited them as freedom fighters during the anti-Castro movement. Anything connected to Hunt would ultimately lead back to Liddy and therefore the President himself—so the public construed it. This is all explained both by Hougan and Dean in their books on the subject, but is not covered much in the popular culture narrative on the Watergate story.
That is why Nixon’s role was debated: what did he know and what did he not know? For the most part, the popular culture story that emerged was not interested in answering this question. The narrative that emerged was that the better story was of the tireless efforts of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward to chase down “Deep Throat”—a kinky name for a source that leant the rather dull proceedings a more sensational flare. The film starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford showed two Hollywood stars being the Everyman of the 1970s, fighting the good fight against political corruption and serving the interests of the common man, who just wanted the truth. They were right in line with Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which, of course, was just one more embarrassment for Nixon. Yet in spite of all these portrayals, questions remained for those who were interested in the whole story and not just the story that focused on the glamorized reporters who were leaked information by Mark Felt, one of the top men in the FBI, as Weiner has pointed out.[footnoteRef:11] The involvement of so many different intelligence agencies in the Watergate story suggests that the investigations by Hougan and the reporting by Dean do present a more accurate version of the reality—one that is more complex and complicated than the typical pop culture narrative is willing to provide. [11: Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (NY: Penguin, 2012).]
Thus, one could continue to ask: Was this an instance of government operatives working on their own in order to gather intelligence to help them better do their job of preparing their president for the upcoming election? At the time, some felt that, yes, this was the case, while others were certain Nixon had authorized the break-in. The Watergate prosecutor, however, felt that Nixon had not known about the break-in—but that when it came to covering up for those involved Nixon had to share in the blame.[footnoteRef:12] The already skeptical public did not care. As more details came out about Watergate and who had orchestrated it, the gears began to turn against the administration, which is what both Hougan and Dean suggest. Stone and Kuznick also provide support for this account in their Untold History. [12: John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (NY: Viking, 2014); Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (NY: Random House, 1984).]
Nixon managed to win re-election that November (the landslide victory suggests that the public was not interested in the scandal) and it appeared as though Watergate might be behind him. The burglars had been sentenced in January of 1973, but news was still coming out—news that would entangle Nixon directly. Congress was getting wind of perjury accusations and Nixon felt he had to distance himself from his aids and counsel by firing them. This was done in an effort to make it look like he was innocent of anything to do with Watergate. When he fired his White House Counsel John Dean, Dean went on to testify to Congress that he believed everything they wanted to know about Watergate was likely recorded on tapes that the White House secretly used to document everything said in the Oval Office. This testimony sparked a wild fire that quickly got out of control. Then (as now) a special counsel was appointed to investigate the scandal and then (as now) the President quickly began to resent the special counsel appointed and wish him to be fired. Nixon began losing control of the narrative as he become more and more isolated and public opinion grew increasingly irate towards the unseemliness of the scandal.[footnoteRef:13] Indeed, much of it was innuendo and nothing really out of the ordinary for American politics: the public was continuously being bombarded, however, by media representations of a Nixon administration that was totalitarian in the extreme—hell-bent on spying and knocking over opponents and anyone who got in its way—the popular image, as shown in films like Dick, starring Kirsten Dunst. The image that the media developed of Nixon was one of a vengeful, suspicious, paranoid, power-hunger president who recorded every conversation in the White House out of his deep paranoia and suspicion of everyone. The reality is that the White House tapes were more likely something that Nixon had been ordered to make by his own handlers—as it would be naïve to suspect that presidents obtain power all on their own, without the aid of some group in the Establishment that wishes to remain abreast of all issues coming in and going out of the White House. [13: John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (NY: Viking, 2014).]
Nonetheless, the Nixon tapes became a big deal for the media, the public and for Congress. Nixon’s aids and closest advisors were indicted for conspiracy to cover-up the Watergate investigation. Nixon in an attempt to be transparent released an edited transcript of the White House tapes regarding the Watergate issue: this came in April of 1974—two years since the initial break-in of the Watergate building. The scandal had been on-going for that whole time (then as now with the Trump “Russiagate” scandal which is still going on two years into his presidency). The public’s frustration was coming to a head and the release of the transcripts momentarily helped to alleviate that frustration as it was seen as a moment of transparency in an otherwise sordid tale of conspiracy and cover-up.[footnoteRef:14] [14: John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (NY: Viking, 2014).]
However, as Dean emphasizes, the transcripts themselves helped turn even more people against Nixon. The character of the man (then as now with the character of Trump) was more the target of their anger than the content of the transcripts. Nixon was seen as vulgar, mean, inhumane, humorless, ambitious, vindictive and nasty. Basically, it was a look behind the door at the man in private—the public veneer gone. Nixon had gambled in showing this side of himself, but the political reality was that he imagined it would be better to show that he had nothing to hide. The reality for the public was that they viewed this side of Nixon as an embarrassment.
Still, the transcripts did not show that Nixon had colluded or conspired but rather that his private views revealed a deep bitterness towards America’s “sacred” institutions. This caused offense among those in Congress, who to some degree represented those same “sacred” institutions. The media continued to hammer on the collusion theme—similar to what it is doing today in 2019. Nixon’s attitudes and private language were viewed as unacceptable—as evidence of his corrupt nature. He was threatened with impeachment, and rather than face that, he determined to resign from office. Dean himself was on the tapes discussing paying the burglars the hush money that they demanded. Nixon wanted to pay it—further evidence of his willingness to cover-up the mess, which his political opponents represented as collusion. However, the tapes revealed no evidence of prior foreknowledge of the break-in. Dean and Hougan both provide a view on the entire Watergate saga that is different from the pop culture version that shows Nixon as a plotting, conniving, twisted and tyrannical overlord who was a supreme mastermind who somehow bungled his way through the Watergate mess. In the comedy film Dick, Nixon is shown to be such a maniacal fool, and every pop culture representation of him—from the 1994 SNL skit to his cartoon appearance in The Simpsons reminding everyone once again that he “is not a crook”—depicts him in a similar manner. Few are the artists, writers and historians who take a sympathetic approach to Nixon in their attempt to understand the world of the 1970s.
Nixon and the Movies
The 1976 film All the President’s Men certainly impacted the elections of that year, just as the mayor of Boston predicted when the film was released.[footnoteRef:15] Elliot and Schenck-Hamlin made a number of observations on the effect the film had on the public’s consciousness in the wake of Nixon’s presidency: “Seeing ‘All the President’s Men’ had more influence on attitudes toward the press than on political attitudes, but party affiliation was related to effect,” they concluded.[footnoteRef:16] They explained this effect by stating that “the idea that film may exert social influence is certainly not new. Thirty years ago Fearing saw film as a creative and dynamic medium whose audiences used it to confirm their beliefs, to find alternative solutions to problems, and to experience environments beyond their own limited range.”[footnoteRef:17] In other words, Elliot and Schenck-Hamlin were stating what Adorno and Horkheimer had stated decades earlier—that the masses look to the culture industry for information on how to think, feel, behave and live their lives. [15: William Elliott and William Schenck-Hamlin, “Film, Politics and the Press: The Influenceof ‘All the President’s Men’.” Journalism Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 3 (Fall 1979), 546.] [16: William Elliott and William Schenck-Hamlin, “Film, Politics and the Press: The Influenceof ‘All the President’s Men’.” Journalism Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 3 (Fall 1979), 546.] [17: William Elliott and William Schenck-Hamlin, “Film, Politics and the Press: The Influenceof ‘All the President’s Men’.” Journalism Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 3 (Fall 1979), 546.]
For this reason, it is important to consider the angle of the historian—how himself has been shaped by the popular cultural representations of the various decades, how he himself may have witnessed or shaped that culture. Stone, for instance, enlisted in the Vietnam War, returned home and wrote and directed Platoon in the 1980s to express his feelings about the war. He thus shaped the public consciousness with regard to looking back on the 1970s. Yet he himself was also shaped by the popular culture. He had resented the protests that were booming around the nation as a young man, and by enlisting and experiencing the war directly he thought that he could silence those critics. The experiences changed his view completely. He would make several films critical of the U.S. government and American media culture, including JFK, Salvador, Natural Born Killers, Talk Radio, and Born on the Fourth of July. His films support the words of Elliot and Schenck-Hamlin: “Even current research indicating that film is used primarily for entertainment functions does not preclude the influence of film along the lines suggested by Fearing. Film today, as film of 30 years ago, does more than just entertain. For many it provides the only contact with particular situations and groups.”[footnoteRef:18] In terms of how film impacted Nixon’s legacy, the case of All the President’s Men is particularly telling: the film pulled the curtain back on the processes and procedures of the press behind the scenes of the Deep Throat story. The film showed the tireless efforts of Woodward and Bernstein, digging for the truth. It was like a police procedural but focusing on the press instead of the police. At the same time, it was released when Ford was running for election against Carter. Carter was viewed as the anti-Nixon candidate: wholesome, honest, and trustworthy—but as Stone and Kuznick would show, Carter was not without his flaws. The point that Stone and Kuznick make is that history has to be comprehended wholly—not compartmentalized and viewed through the colored-glasses of popular media only, because pop media only tells half of the story. The historian has to engage with the facts. Yet, the point that Elliot and Schenck-Hamlin make is like that of Adorno and Horkheimer: the facts are still going to be viewed through the eyes of the researcher or historian, who will be also affected by the culture industry in some way, which will thus color his perception. For this reason perhaps more than any other, however, politics and cinema go together like hand and glove, as Professor Funderburk noted in 1978.[footnoteRef:19] [18: William Elliott and William Schenck-Hamlin, “Film, Politics and the Press: The Influenceof ‘All the President’s Men’.” Journalism Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 3 (Fall 1979), 546.] [19: Funderburk, Charles. “Politics and the Movie.” Teaching Political Science, vol. 6, no. 1(1978): 111.]
The Cold War was the time period following the end of World War II, when the world was basically divided between Communism on the one hand and Capitalism on the other. The West favored Capitalism and the East favored Communism. The James Bond films, the espionage films, the films about social revolution at home were all part of this story. The U.S. was the main power in the West and Soviet Russia was the main power in the East and in the first half of the 1970s, Nixon was right in the middle of that. He was in power when the shootings at Kent State occurred. The movies were a way to shape public opinion, just like music and the hippie counter-culture was. Nixon became viewed as a relic—a representation of the past political order that the people of the 1970s wanted to reject, just as they wanted to reject everything else. This is the main idea that Elliot and Schenck-Hamlin make.
Unrest and the Culture Industry
The 1970s were a time of immense unrest, as the administration under Nixon closed in on itself and refused to comply with federal regulators and oversight committees. The result was a political upheaval that ushered in a new era of political leaders. American society may now be witnessing another such moment in history. The issue of public administration is not, after all, one that is above the interests of the public—rather, it is precisely about the interests of the public—and when the public feels that its interests are not being represented or that it is in everyone’s best interest to vote out of office those administrators who operate according to club rule principles rather than to the rule of law, the future of that same administration is dubious. That is why the popular culture narrative is so important. When historians, writers, filmmakers, and others engage in creating a narrative for mass consumption or to be part of the “culture industry” as Horkheimer and Adorno called it,[footnoteRef:20] they take part in that educative process, which shapes the feelings and ideas of the public. Bell hooks notes that “popular culture is where the pedagogy is, is where the learning is.”[footnoteRef:21] Bell hooks has a very good point that a lot of what goes on in America is based in this desire among the ruling elite to control the masses by giving them the illusion of freedom and equality while actually oppressing them and denying them these things in real life. The masses are amused by their popular entertainments but these do not offer them much in the way of actual learning and so the masses are not well educated and do not see how philosophy or integrity applies to their lives. [20: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry (Routledge, 1944).] [21: Bell hooks,” Cultural criticism and transformation,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQUuHFKP-9s]
Mass media does a little of both promotion of equality and promotion of inequality. Especially today because everything has become so fragmented and fractured that there is basically an audience for everyone and everything. So if one wants to find media that promote equality and racial, ethnic and gender equality they can do so. If one wants to find media that promote inequality, they can do so. It is all out there and ready to be found. However, on the whole the politically correct culture of today does seem to promote equality more than inequality, with a few non-politically correct shows like South Park that still delight fans by going counter-culture.
Mass media does, however, reinforce the viewpoints of white, male, corporate culture overall, because everything in media is oriented towards profit—advertising, hawking products, profiting off the sale of data, and so on.[footnoteRef:22] No media is produced for free because producers simply love to have everyone entertained. On the one hand they are indoctrinating the public and duping people into believing that everyone is free and equal just like the Founding Fathers did when they wrote the Declaration of Independence even though they were all owning slaves at the time. On the other hand, they are making money off people who consumer their entertainments and so it is actually a big business that doubles as the supreme education camp.[footnoteRef:23] Today, the popular culture is even more focused on brand. Few things exist in today’s culture that can be defined as authentic. Everyone is out to build his brand; everything is all about image; people want to be YouTubers and enjoy the shrine that they build to themselves. It is a very narcissistic culture and it is not a very healthy one. At least in the 1970s, America was trying to find its way amidst the revolutionary changes that came about in the latter half of the 1960s. When rock ‘n’ roll, for instance, morphed into the hippie movement, the youths who still wanted to express their anger, rage and aggression took rock ‘n’ roll in the direction of the punk movement: groups like the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and others emerged to provide a mouthpiece for a public that wished to vent. [22: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry (Routledge, 1944).] [23: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry (Routledge, 1944).]
Nixon, in many ways, was the target of that frustration for many people. He represented for them the corruption of government. They had been sensing this corruption for a decade—ever since JFK’s assassination. All the President’s Men represented that corruption in such a popular way that voters threw their weight behind Carter instead of Ford (the man who pardoned Nixon—though, if Altman’s film Secret Honor suggests anything, it suggests that Nixon did not want that pardon as he did not believe he ever did anything wrong). Today’s contemporary world is a lot like Plato’s Cave in the sense that many people are watching TV and films, streaming shows on the Internet and sharing news on social media. They are like the people in the cave watching the shadows on the wall, believing the things they see on their screens to be real life, believing the information they consume to be true, and believing the friends they have on social media to be actually real and meaningful. However, the constant desire to be entertained by what is programmed for one on the TV or Internet represents a lack of curiosity about the way the world actually works. These TV shows and Netflix films are not naturally produced like the fruit of an apple tree: they are manufactured entertainments and the manufacturers are like the puppeteers in Plato’s Cave—the viewers are like the captives—though they may seem to be willing captives. They learn their history from TV, from pop culture, from SNL and spoofs like Dick.
Should the viewers of today’s TVs and films stop to think about what they are viewing and where the flickering lights are coming from, who is putting them together and why, and what the news that they are reading on Facebook and Twitter is telling them, they may begin to get a sense of the big show that they are seeing and how that big show is being orchestrated by puppeteers. They could begin to ask questions about why so much energy is put into creating these entertainments—what Horkheimer and Adorno called “the culture industry”—and why that industry is so pervasive.
The person who sets aside the entertainments of the culture industry and stops to consider why that industry is there in the first place, as Horkheimer and Adorno did, now put themselves in a position to begin to ask philosophical questions about their world, their place in the world, and what they are doing with their life. They can begin to wonder what the purpose of life is, whereas before they were not wondering anything other than what is new to watch on Netflix. They were like the prisoner in the cave, just flipping through channels of flickering light, not minding what was causing it or why, but just simply being amused and happy and satisfied to be amused. Yet upon turning off the TV and getting outside and looking at the world and reflecting in silence, one begins to have a sense that one is meant to do more than just watch TV—that there is something one should know about oneself. Is there a point to all this?—one might ask. This is why Plato ahs the line about making the upward journey in the Allegory. As Plato says in the Allegory of the Cave: “The visible realm should be likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the fire inside it to the power of the sun. And if you interpret the upward journey and the study of things above as the upward journey of the soul to the intelligible realm, you’ll grasp what I hope to convey…”[footnoteRef:24] What this means is that the person has to make an upward journey by thinking about the reality of things and not just the presentations of reality produced by the culture industry—the mainstream media, the streaming networks, the social media sites—they have to think about the actual real reality. If they do so they will begin to think about other things, such as what is the meaning of this life—who put this life here? Who put this life in us? What are we to do with this life? Where does it come from? How does it exist? What happens when we die? These are questions that can be very uncomfortable to ask, to face, to struggle with and to seek answers to—but Plato says that seeking those answers is the true purpose of life—and one who never turns off the TV to stop and think and attempt to answer them is one who is just wasting his life. [24: Cahn, S. Classics of Western Philosophy (Indianapolis, IN: Hacket, 2012), 176.]
Conclusion
To understand the role that Nixon played in the 1970s and how historians have shaped that role into narratives that reflect some aspect of the culture conflicts, one has to look at the whole picture. One has to see the culture industry from the standpoint of Adorno and Horkheimer, Elliot and Schenck-Hamlin. One has to consider how the stories told by Woodward and Bernstein or by Dean and Hougan offer different perspectives that shape and are shaped by that same culture industry. Whether a historian or writer or filmmaker is put off by the culture industry and thus focuses more on the conspiracies behind the scenes, which even the House Select Committee and Church Committee both acknowledged likely played a role in the events leading up to Nixon’s presidency, or whether the historian, writer or filmmaker wants to promote the pop culture stereotype and depict Nixon as the “crook” so many took him for—it all needs to be considered because it all goes into how history is told from this point on.




Bibliography
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