Judging Richard Nixon

Judging Richard Nixon

(c) Copyright (2016) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

We base our politics on what we think we know, but our assumptions are so often partial or prejudiced or ideological or simply wrong. Sometimes we get a surprising look under the hood by keeping an open mind to new presentations of old material. Fourteen years after Richard M. Nixon resigned as president, he visited Newsweek magazine. Ever-prepared by prior research, Nixon commented to Newsweek employee Evan Thomas, "Your grandfather was a great man." This apparently run-of-the-mill compliment actually is rather extraordinary because that grandfather was the American Socialist leader Norman Thomas.

Evan Thomas's new biography of Nixon, Being Nixon:  A Man Divided,  full of similar surprises, fleshes out a man rather than sketches out a caricature. Evenhanded and dispassionate, the book balances Nixon's many accomplishments, personal courage and resolution, and actual good deeds against his failures in the interpersonal realm. These failures led to Nixon's protecting his cronies by covering up their crimes rather than acting like a president and firing them for their misdeeds. Nixon's brilliance about policy and politics did not protect him against his own interpersonal ineptitude that included a dread of confronting cronies and an inability to surmount his hatred of his many enemies.

While Nixon did destroy himself, he had help. Thomas agrees with Nixon that Nixon's critics and the press applied a double standard that demonized Nixon while it exculpated his Democratic opponents, and Thomas asserts that they were out to get Nixon and that Nixon was not paranoid. But, in Thomas's view, Nixon reacted unwisely to the perceived threat.

Shakespearean in its ironies and tragic resolution, the story of this brilliant, intellectual (in spite of his odd comment "I am not educated, but I do read books"), bitter, and very strange man fascinates endlessly, especially Americans who were politically aware in the late Sixties to middle Seventies. Anyone my age or older immediately snaps to attention at the mention of Nixon.  No one, friend or foe, reacts indifferently. His is a galvanizing legacy.

In 1973-1974, I watched the televised Ervin Committee [Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities] hearings and then, in 1974, the Rodino Committee [House of Representatives Judiciary Committee] hearings about Watergate.  I saw Nixon's resignation speech in August 1974, as well as his maudlin goodbye to the assembled White House staff.  In 1977, I watched TV interviewer David Frost's series of four interviews with the former president. 

 

Since these observations of the real Richard Nixon, I have seen Nixon portrayed by several actors.  In "Secret Honor," Robert Altman filmed Philip Baker Hall as a drunken, rambling Nixon defending his honor after his resignation--a liberal/Left interpretation of Nixon's rise and fall, like Oliver Stone's surprisingly sympathetic "Nixon" starring Anthony Hopkins. Hall gets the man's oddity, awkwardness, and unending rage but not anything of his intelligence or political acumen.  In "Frost/Nixon," Frank Langella captures Nixon's social awkwardness, introversion, brilliance, and reflexive combativeness.  

Besides observing real and pretend Nixons (some would dispute any distinction between the two), I have read a great deal about Nixon's life and career.  As an author, he shadowboxes his way through Six Crises, always testing his own toughness and resolution and his capacity for self-exhaustion. The Best Year of their Lives: Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in 1948 by Lance Morrow presents fascinating character analyses of the three future presidents based on their activities in 1948. Stephen Ambrose's biographies cemented in my mind the perception of Nixon as haunted by his early upbringing in a struggling working-class family.

I found most illuminating treatments of the Alger Hiss case that made Congressman Richard Nixon famous and led to his being chosen as a vice presidential running mate in 1952 by Dwight Eisenhower. One was Sam Tanenhaus's excellent biography of Whittaker Chambers, the former Soviet spy who exposed Hiss as another Soviet agent.  Chamber's own memoir, Witness, is an extraordinary autobiography by a man beloved of the Right who yet perceived Joseph McCarthy's reckless witch-hunts as disastrous for anti-communism. I have never read any clearer explanation than in Witness of why some Americans became communists.

Although Nixon often failed to distinguish Americans holding unpopular but constitutionally protected opinions from actual traitors, Nixon was right about Hiss, and Nixon foresaw and helped to create a post-communist world.  With the passing of my generation of baby boomers, judgments of both Johnson and Nixon will become more balanced, despite being weighed down by Vietnam and Watergate.   

Nevertheless, the legacy of Vietnam (and Cambodia) is a heavy one, not least because of South Vietnamese allies left behind after the fall of Saigon.  Last Days in Vietnam, a new documentary directed by Rory Kennedy, concerns the evacuation of US and South Vietnamese personnel and their families as the fall of Saigon neared. This very interesting documentary depicts how several US officers/officials in defiance of orders chose to save many lives. The film points out that the fall of Nixon emboldened the North Vietnamese to break the accord and invade the South, which they otherwise would not have done.

Evidence confounds easy answers and easy judgments.  Say what you will about Nixon, he had the courage to fight for his beliefs and decisions. For, according to Richard Nixon, "A man is not finished when he's defeated; he's finished when he quits."

first published in The Woodstock Independent

Are Cookbooks Literature?

Are Cookbooks Literature?

(c) Copyright (2016) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

People often typecast literature as including only fiction, drama, and poetry, but any piece of excellent writing—whether functional or aesthetic in purpose, whether fictional or nonfictional—qualifies as literature. Functional to a fault, cookbooks nevertheless can aspire to literary excellence. The pleasure of reading cookbooks depends on the imagination and quirkiness of their authors.

Some cookbooks, of course, restrain themselves to giving pleasure only to readers' mouths, noses, and stomachs. On this principle, I acknowledge a cookbook as a valuable acquisition if it gives me a recipe that I make frequently and a few others that I make occasionally. From one collection of New Orleans seafood recipes, I extracted the catfish courtbouillion recipe that I have served on brown rice for 35 years. In another New Orleans collection,  I found a recipe for a divine treatment of crawfish; in yet another, I discovered muffins made with whole-wheat flour, molasses, and nuts, as well as shrimp Diane, which we eat denuded of much of its butter but clothed in all its yummy mushrooms.

           

Even more utilitarian were the Romertopf recipe collections that I searched when I figured out how to cook our Thanksgiving turkey in a clay pot. I needed only to understand the basic technique of braising meat in soaked clay before reinterpreting a turkey recipe in terms of this technique.

Although useful, such cookbooks have no merit as literature and give no pleasure to mind or memory. Very different are cookbooks that possess biographical interest, such as James Beard's autobiography with recipes, "Delights and Prejudices," or the cookbooks that preserve the recipes associated with Truman Capote's childhood in Depression-era rural Alabama.

Beard discusses in minute detail his memories of the food prepared by the chef of his family's hotel, Let, and by his own mother, an Englishwoman unhappily married to Beard's American father, responsible for running hotels in Portland, Oregon, and productive of an enormous baby named James. Three themes punctuate "Delights and Prejudices": Beard's fear, respect, and dislike of his mother; his covert affection for his father; and his remarkable "taste memory" and obsession with the food of the Pacific Northwest of his youth. Besides enjoying Beard's memories, I make Elizabeth Beard's black fruitcake every year. I also laugh when I read Beard's overconfident assertion, "Several years ago 'Life' had a picture story on how to skin an eel…. I trust everyone cut it out and put it in his files."

Truman Capote, for his part, in his stories "A Christmas Memory" and "The Thanksgiving Visitor," memorializes his distant cousin "Sook" Faulk, the elderly companion of Capote's childhood as well as the Faulk family cook. Capote's aunt Marie Rudisill created two cookbooks based on his association with the Faulk household: "Fruitcake" and "Sook's Cookbook." Each very interestingly depicts the Faulk family, small-town Alabama in the Thirties, and Southern foodways. My husband adapted the delicious recipe for chicken Jefferson (chicken sautéed in butter, baked with sherry, and covered with a shrimp and mushroom sauce).

Still other cookbooks transcend biography to attain more general historical or cultural interest. A World War II-era cookbook includes recipes for the intriguingly named nun's cake and for the disgusting-sounding pork cake. A collection from the Southern Italian region of Basilicata unenthusiastically discusses pork blood as an ingredient, along with baking chocolate, orange zest, red wine, and anisette, in pork blood cake.

I was just as interested, and considerably more enthusiastic, about the revelations of New England cookery offered in "Mrs. Appleyard's Kitchen" by Louise Andrews Kent, an author from Massachusetts and Vermont. I have baked Mrs. Appleyard's graham bread with either molasses or maple syrup, and friends of mine for years enjoyed her huckleberry gingerbread, which mysteriously includes neither ginger nor huckleberries. Even more than for her recipes, however, I reread "Mrs. Appleyard's Kitchen" for the sheer joy of Kent's deftly worded prose.

A few samples of Kent's wit follow. "When [Mrs. Appleyard] is feeling economical she does not make cake. She prefers a raw carrot stick to any cake that has been constructed from motives of economy." "She can … honestly say that when poured over some rusty nails and left standing for a few days, [commercial vinegar] makes a very fine wart-remover…. Probably Mrs. Appleyard could think of other uses for it, but she would rather talk about cider." "Do not try, Mrs. Appleyard says, to hurry this process. If you do, you will produce a rubber substitute as resilient as a ping-pong ball, but not nearly so edible." "…the cheese was interesting and unique—something like Camembert that had met some Limburger in a bad temper." "She may even learn to cherish tripe—that dishonest dish that looks like a waffle, feels like a raw eel, and tastes like an umbrella."

first published in The Woodstock Independent

Rummaging in the Attic

Rummaging in the Attic

(c) Copyright (2016) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

Seneca Township, McHenry County

Right after every Thanksgiving, I enjoy the ritual of visiting the Christmas Tree Walk at the Woodstock Opera House. Every year, I notice the Seneca Ladies literary Society's Christmas tree and wonder about the nature of the society. The beautifully designed, recently compiled history of the society, "The Seneca Ladies Literary Society: Learning and Laughing Together since 1855," more than meets my curiosity. Assembling numerous documents, letters, photos, recipes, and news clippings, the book puts them into exquisite order. It is as if I had rummaged in the society's attic trunk without getting dusty or feeling confused by messy chronology.

The oldest women's literary group in the United States still in existence, the Seneca Ladies Literary Society was born in Seneca Township, McHenry County, in 1855 in response to a national outcry to save George and Martha Washington's Virginia home, Mount Vernon. With thousands of other women's groups, the society raised the down payment needed for the purchase of the mansion for its eventual restoration and preservation; their collective effort succeeded after three years.

Besides the Mount Vernon fundraising project, the Seneca Ladies Literary Society raised money for Civil War causes, sponsored a French orphan after World War One through The Fatherless Children of France, donated to Armenian Relief Work in response to the Armenian genocide, as well as contributed to local hospitals and historical and literary societies.

The society's women banded together to do good for others. In addition, the society's members pursued the goals of self-education and self-improvement, in fulfillment of the constitutional article that states, "The object of this society shall be the promotion of truth and morality and the intellectual improvement of its members."

In lieu of any available public library, the society's members assembled a private library for members to share. By 1895, the society's library catalog included 560 books, although that total included books that the society had sold to members who wanted to keep them.

Members' meetings focused on educational themes. Whether the theme was strictly literary depended on the hostess's interests, but the focus on self-improvement bound the women together.

“What I didn’t realize is how many different activities they did and what vehicles for creative expression there were,” the book's editor, Pamela A. Gerloff, has explained. “They would write these elaborate and interesting minutes, filling them with humor and commentary. They would give members an assignment to do a creative story or essay, write skits and debate on different topics. It wasn’t just reading. It was this whole array of personal expression. Each meeting is full of lightness, laughter and joy, as well as thoughtful reflection.”

As a voluntary association, the Seneca Ladies Literary Society wove a web of relationship that fostered closeness across families and among former strangers and thereby created a sense of belonging and identity crucial to the cohesion of the larger community.

In 1872, the “One Great Quarrel” threatened that closeness. Social class differences erupted, with some members wanting to include only socially prominent women, while others advocated membership for women of all social classes. The five members who seceded to form a more socially exclusive group abandoned the Seneca Ladies Literary Society to its more egalitarian members.

This crisis in the society's history reflected the strict emphasis on social class differences characteristic of much of the nineteenth-century United States. Without its socially prominent members who demanded exclusivity, the Seneca Ladies Literary Society nevertheless has maintained a certain nineteenth-century aura evoked by the society's name. As longtime member Eleanor Gerloff told a "Chicago Tribune" feature writer in 1998, she enjoyed the club's nineteenth-century  pace and charm. In fact, "The Seneca Ladies Literary Society: Learning and Laughing Together since 1855" supplies ample raw material for a novel of nineteenth-century country life.

Cranford, England

Written in the early 1850s, just before the founding of the Seneca Ladies Literary Society, Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cranford" is a novel of nineteenth-century English country life. Set in a secluded country town in the England of the 1830s, when Victoria's uncle William IV reigned with his Queen Adelaide, "Cranford" is a  deeply appealing and lovely rendering of the commonplace and ordinary transfigured by affection. (The excellent BBC dramatization moved the setting to the early Victorian period, the 1840s, when the Queen was still young and newly married.)

As with the “One Great Quarrel” of the Seneca Ladies Literary Society, the ladies of Cranford experience social class differences that create tensions and even estrangement. But, as with the post-1872 Seneca Ladies Literary Society, long friendship and common purposes eventually outweigh whatever divisions arise.

Coastal Maine

The American "Cranford," Sarah Orne Jewett's "The Country of the Pointed Firs" depicts life in a Maine coastal town in the nineteenth century. Like "Cranford," it is narrated by an outsider. A summer visitor to a seaside country town in Maine slowly becomes absorbed into the web of small-town coastal life. Written and set in the 1890s, the novel possesses the charm of a sepia photograph suddenly come to life.

As Helen, the narrator of Jewett's "Deephaven," comments, "It is wonderful, the romance and tragedy and adventure which one may find in a quiet old-fashioned country town, though to heartily enjoy the every-day life one must care to study life and character, and must find pleasure in thought and observation of simple things, and have an instinctive, delicious interest in what to other eyes is unflavored dullness." Discerning appreciation transfigures the apparently commonplace, as with Cranford and with the Seneca Ladies Literary Society.

 first published in The  Woodstock Independent

Readers can buy "The Seneca Ladies Literary Society" from Read Between the Lynes Bookstore in Woodstock, Illinois, or email slls1855@gmail.com.

Thoreau and the Sibyl

A Sibyl and a Sage

(c) Copyright (2016) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

Among my most special travel experiences, I include the enchanting, tiny, fake temple to the god Aesculapius in Rome's Villa Borghese—an 18th-century temple sitting mid-pond and patrolled by swans, geese, and ducks. Other memorable visits were to the Sibyl of Cumae in her cave near Naples and to the American sage Henry David Thoreau in his cabin near Concord and Boston. Neither oracle prophesied in my hearing, but both sibyl and sage intrigued and touched me.

Many other visitors to the Sibyl had preceded my husband and me. Roberto Rossellini's film "Journey to Italy" has Ingrid Bergman visit the cave of the Sibyl of Cumae and the ruined temples above her cave. Tony Soprano also goes to the Sibyl's cave. In the novel and TV series "I, Claudius," the Sibyl of Cumae appears early on when the future emperor seeks to learn his destiny. Most importantly, the Trojan refugee Aeneas visits the Sibyl to find his father in the underworld of Hades, entered nearby at Lake Averno, and to discover his own fate as father of the Romans.

Her visitors sought insight from the famous oracle. As Philip Coppens wrote on his website, "The Antrum of the Sibyl is a long, straight tunnel, with side chambers. At the end, there is a cave on the left hand side, where the Sibyl made her prophecies. It was apparently here that Apollo took possession of her, resulting in her ranting and raving, but equally able to see the future. Virgil worded it as such: 'the Sibyl sang her fearful riddling prophecies, her voice booming in the cave as she wrapped the truth in darkness, while Apollo shook the reins upon her in her frenzy and dug the spurs into her flanks. The madness passed.' "

Sadly, the Sibyl was not at home when we visited her. But, hand-in-hand and alone (in late autumn, no other tourists were there), we walked together into the elongated tunnel that leads to her cave. Startled pigeons strafed us, adding to the tension. We so enjoyed the slightly macabre atmosphere that we immediately repeated our exploration, walking hand-in-hand down the tunnel again. Then we climbed dangerously uneven steps to gain access to the ruined Temple of Jupiter and Temple of Apollo above the Sibyl's cave. There I unexpectedly sensed the numinous presence of past spirituality and reverence.

Although not a frenzied sibyl, Henry David Thoreau spoke, or rather wrote, as an oracle—indeed, almost as a god. I have heard, and read, complaints of Thoreau's arrogance. Only 30 years old when he left his hut at Walden Pond, Thoreau enunciated his beliefs with great, if unexplained, authority. Indeed, Thoreau's "Walden" consists of one long bout of needling:  "I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need to be provoked—goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot."  This disturbs some readers, but it does not bother me. What others judge as arrogant, I see as thought-provoking, challenging, powerful, robust. My husband and I have always shared a passion for "Walden," which each of us has read many times.

Within his self-built cabin at Walden Pond, Thoreau embarked on one of humanity's greatest spiritual journeys. Determined to test all maxims for himself, to take nothing on credit, Thoreau noted, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." He challenged his neighbors' constant sacrifice of their time and energy to values that he saw as illusory:  "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor." He elevated the spiritual above the material:  "The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?"

He prodded us out of our spiritual slumber. I admire Thoreau's mastery of prose style—such gorgeous sentences—and robust perspective. When I visited the foundation of his cabin, and I saw the beautiful Walden Pond, tears came. Again, I sensed a numinous presence. In Concord itself,  I saw Henry David's touchingly simple gravestone in the Thoreau family plot: only a small buff headstone with "Henry" chiseled on it—a humble memorial to a most unhumble sage.

first appeared in The Woodstock Independent