TABLE TALK

Mr Nixon's misfortune

DENIS BROGAN

It is reasonable enough for political scien- tists, journalists, members of Parliament, and Prime Ministers to hold that effective centralisation of power is greater in the office of the British Prime Minister than in the office of the President of the

United States. For although it is con- ceivable that, after losing a general elec- tion (as Mr Wilson still may do), the ex- Prime Minister might be pushed out of the

office of Leader of the Opposition (such ingratitude is more a Conservative way of behaviour than a characteristic of the loyal Labour party), normally speaking the Prime Minister in command of his Cabinet, as Mr Wilson undoubtedly is—especially at this moment when he seems much stronger than his party itself- -is in many ways more potent than an American President.

But the President has one great advantage, or disadvantage: he cannot be displaced. No President has ever resigned, although Woodrow Wilson thought of doing so before the election of 1916 so as to let the Re- publican candidate take over at once at a moment of great crisis. But normally speak- ing a President of the United States is nega- tively potent in a way that no Prime Minister is. He may do nothing, but doing nothing is doing something in this dreadful modern world. He may attempt to do something and fail: that again is doing something which may have grave consequences. And he may alter his plan conspicuously and alarmingly without submitting to the judgment of even a unanimous cabinet. The old story of Lin- coln's having, after a vote on a very im- portant issue, announced the result, 'Noes, six; ayes, one. The ayes have it', is still valid, as Mr Nixon has shown in recent weeks.

But Mr Nixon is no Lincoln. He has none of the tenacity, and apparently not much of the adroitness, which the greatest of Presi- dents displayed. Indeed, Mr Nixon's per- sonality is now part of the American prob- lem, and a more and more important part of it; and, barring accidents which I do not foresee (though assassination is an accident to which American Presidents are probably increasingly prone), he will be President until January 1973, with immense power for nega- tive mischief and some powers for positive good.

In these circumstances, it is necessary to look at Mr Nixon a little more closely and wonder what kind of man he really is. This is no easy matter. All Presidents have good reasons for playing their cards close to their chest, and Mr Nixon plays his closer than most. But he also has the habit, which at the moment is very disturbing indeed, of chang- ing the suit in which he is bidjiing and baffl- ing not only his numerous enemies but his diminishing number of friends. And since the presidency of the United States is a mon- archy, the personality of the monarch is more important than the personality of a mere Prime Minister. No Prime Minister could have been, with impunity, as idle as was President Eisenhower: the idleness was often a form of sagacity as well as a form of evasion; and a good many of the results of that evasion have been paid for by President Kennedy, President Johnson, and, indeed, President Nixon.

So the first thing to say in defence of Mr Nixon (I am partly a Nixon myself, on my mother's side) is that many of his troubles were inherited. (Some of them were inherited from General de Gaulle and his handling of Vietnam in 1946.) But others, as becomes more and more obvious, are part of Mr Nixon's personality. Probably the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy was at least as much in command of any situation as Richard Milhous Nixon. As much as Lincoln, Presi- dent Kennedy could say, 'the ayes have it' when he Was the only 'aye'. But the public image, and the public image is very im- portant, was different. It was a public image of a man who did consult, and in the great crisis of the Cuba missiles the consultation was a reality, although again the final deci- sion and the final triumph were Kennedy's.

President Kennedy notoriously could blow his top when he felt it was a relief or when he felt, as other Presidents have felt— Andrew Jackson, for example—it was of political advantage to do so. But the Ameri- can public, especially the Washington public, has seen enough of President Nixon, as it saw enough of Vice President Nixon and of ex-Vice President Nixon, to suspect that he blows his top more spontaneously, and pos- sibly with more disastrous results, than any of his predecessors in this century. I do not know Mr Nixon, though I have heard him speak from his early days as a Congressman right down to his days as a President. But there has always been something unstable, a little frightening, not only about his public image but his own image of his public image.

People with good memories (not many of them live in Great Britain) remember various breakdowns in Mr Nixon's self-control. There was the time after his defeat in 1962 when he had been bullied into running for Governor of California. He became hysterical in his abuse of the press and on TV: this was in very great contrast with the self-control and irony with which Governor Dewey in 1948, defeated, against all odds, for the second time in his attempt to become President, faced a press corps, nearly all of which rejoiced in his defeat, although its members were, as Governor Dewey said blandly, just as surprised at the result as he was. Governor Adlai Stevenson, twice de- feated in his bid for the presidency, rose to the occasion, not concealing his sense of

defeat but turning it off with a joke that was to the point, and saved from a sense of guilt a great many people who would have liked to vote for him but could not bring them- selves to vote against 'the Hero': that is,

General Eisenhower. There have not been

many notes of this type in President Nixon's career: as a Congressman, as a Senator, as

Vice President, he displayed controversial manners not very superior to those of his Vice President. that eminent Laconian, Vice- President Agnew.

President Nixon's temperament may be a great handicap to him in the remaining years of his term of office, and more of a handicap to the United States. His treatment of the bumping-off of the four young students by the trigger-happy National Guard of Ohio was revealing, not so much perhaps of hardness of heart as of thick-

ness of head (his admirers can choose which was the more effectively revealed). I can think of few episodes in recent American history as surprising as the protest of Mr Secretary Nickel against the way in which the President has ignored the young. And when Mr Hickel is rightly moved to point out how wrong and politically dangerous this is, there is something very badly wrong in the American scene.

If the attempt to liquidate the communist enclaves in Cambodia fails (as it may fail simply because of the weather plus the limited military abilities of the United States Army high command), is it to be followed by an invasion of North Vietnam or even, with a good deal of plausibility, by an open in- vasion of Thailand, which has not been as neutral as one might gather from official American narratives?

It is. of course, possible that there will be a military victory, even if it does not keep, and that in that event a great part of the South Vietnamese working classes plus, naturally, all the white inhabitants of South Vietnam, may rally round President Nixon. Whether this will in fact alter the basic realities of the situation in what used to be called French Indochina. or in the neighbouring countries. is a matter for speculation. But there has been such a steady contrast between the official optimism of the Pentagon and the sad realities revealed by the casualty lists and by the unkind if candid comments of the press (mainly of the American press) that I am not_willing to give more than evens for the ending of the war within a year, or for its ending in anything that can be called victory.

True, Mr Joseph Allsop is on the side of the Pentagon, a fact which I do not comment on. True, a great many Americans genuinely cannot imagine their not winning the war in a complete and decisive way. (They didn't win the war of 1812-1815 in a complete and decisive way.) President Nixon might well consider recasting not only his public rela- tions policy, but his view of the realities in South-East Asia. If things go badly wrong, he has enough enemies, including many in the higher command of his own party, who will be only too eager to pin responsibility for this great national humiliation on him al- though he is only one of the people respon- sible. Indeed, his chief fault may be that he has simply come in late in a war which per- haps could never have been won, which certainly could not be won by the political and military methods used, at any rate from the early days of the Johnson administration. and it may be from a great deal earlier than that. This is no doubt rather hard on Presi- dent Nixon; but President Nixon is not a statesman to whom sympathy flows natur- ally, even from his friends.