Brown: The Last Discovery of America Read online

  Pity the rich man’s son. The one thing most Americans think they know about the rich is that the rich are somehow deprived. Pity the rich man’s son for never experiencing the keenness of privation. For never being his own man. So I believed when I was young and subscribed to the six crises of Richard Nixon. I knew that defeat was a greater test of character than victory. But there is another truth to America, much nearer to Tuscany. For all our professed admiration of the ascending narrative line, Americans often resent the awkwardness of arrival. When strife and fortitude end at a gaudy address or, worse, a bad lamp shade. Which is why self-made Americans from Pittsburgh and Cleveland in the nineteenth century needed to repair to Europe to learn boredom. Poor Richard, never so unattractive as when he gets to the top and finds everyone at the table silently regarding his demeanor. Look, they nudge one another: He’s still hungry.

  There was a book from some years ago called Making It by Norman Podhoretz. Yes, a notorious book. Podhoretz is not a man whose political pronouncements or whose political vendettas have sustained one’s interest over the years. But on a bookstore shelf, even at the age I was—I was a man in my thirties—my hungry eyes must seize upon a title like Making It. My sort of book altogether, for being so candid about the boy’s desire to advance. This was the story I loved to hear: The high school teacher who took young Podhoretz to a Fifth Avenue department store in order to purchase for our hero, with her own money, a black suit! Even more instructive than the book was its critical reception: “An embarrassment.” The criticism came most fiercely from middle-aged men in New York, now at the top of their game, who had followed the same path; the first in their families to go to college (and the college was so often Harvard or CCNY). The consensus was that the book was unseemly.

  When I published my first book, I wrote about my closet full of expensive suits. I characterized myself as moving with “the monstrous grace of the nouveau riche.” This passage troubled my editor, the most thoroughgoing gentleman of my experience. “I don’t think you want to say that,” he wrote, “but it is up to you.”

  I wanted to say that, all right. I wanted to rid myself forever of the black suit. I would play Disraeli. I would play Edmund Kean. Brummell. But I would not arrive like some neurasthenic academic in a floorwalker’s suit.

  Whereas: Lyndon Johnson came from a past as humble as Nixon’s, as humble as Franklin’s, as humble as Lawrence’s, as humble as my own. Johnson the populist, Johnson the signer of civil rights legislation, Johnson the militarist, Johnson would not have shared my embarrassment. Johnson was not handicapped by a sense of personal mission or divine election, or even lawful election. Though at first glance Johnson seems an American type, I believe he was less so than Nixon or Kennedy. I think Johnson would have been as intelligible within the loggia of the Medici or at Westminster or the Forbidden City. Wherever one goes, Johnson is already there. He was prepared to watch as the dangerous arrogance of the Kennedys played itself out.

  Unlike Charles Dickens, D. H. Lawrence never imagined the happy accident of ascending to the upper classes. Lawrence sought spiritual transcendence among the Indians of New Mexico, away from the mechanical age.

  I was a reader of the American novel. The foreground is where one came from. One puts on the black suit. In the distance lies the city—the Ivy League, the lukewarm cocktail; the good, worn carpet; the unwelcoming rich. I didn’t want to know them, I wanted to be them—to have what they have. To know what they know. (Johnson only needed to know how much they knew.) Nixon believed in the same American novel. There he is in the foreground, dreaming of Kennedy in the distance. Perhaps even the Kennedys believed in the novel, or felt themselves exiled from the novel in which their father had taken such a rich advantage.

  We know that Jack Kennedy and his sister would play the original cast album of Finian’s Rainbow over and over through long afternoons—Ella Logan singing “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” The not-quite-patricians harkening back to some distant dogpatch, yearning for the keenness of privation—a sentimental notion of the rich and the old. So perhaps young Kennedy read the novel backwards, which is history.

  Johnson believed in the power of legislation to change history.

  I think of Jack Kennedy, in the midst of family advisers—the brothers, the speechwriters, the lawyers, bluely, boozily, soberly scheming on the porch of a Cape Cod afternoon, deciding, I suppose, something like “the best direction for America.” Such thought, such terms always seem to me more sinister than Nixon’s solitary self-regard. The one thing rich Americans think they know about the poor is what the poor most urgently need (which never turns out to be money).

  In the first televised presidential debate, Nixon thought he was upholding some puritan gravitas by refusing makeup; by choosing the citizen’s black suit; choosing the poor man’s version of natural aristocracy. Nixon was easily the more able in his grasp of history and the workings of government. John F. Kennedy, gold-dusted and ghostwritten, appeared completely natural. Nixon perspired.

  In an instant, I saw what many other Americans saw that night: Harvard College will always beat Whittier College in America. The game is fixed and there is nothing to be done about it.

  Then there were nights when the mood of the crowd changed at the wrestling matches. The barometer of the moment unaccountably plunged, as in a Dostoyevsky novel. Then the Okies and the Mexicans transferred allegiance away from the Joe Palooka hero—his golden curls and half-meloned chest. We were a fickle kind of Greek chorus. In that instant it was revealed to us that he was the liar, this so-called scientific wrestler, for he affected virtue in a game that was fixed. He was too elaborate in his inattention. He invented reasons to turn his back—feigned not to understand (his hand to his ear) the chorus’s clear warning that the villain was sneaking up on him. (Ben Franklin: “Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.”) Boo! The crowd began to appreciate the naturalness of the villain’s response.

  I am speaking of those years before the middle class took professional wrestling away from the working class and made of our morality play a mockery of ambition. I am speaking of those years when Gorgeous George intuited that spectators who knew so much disappointment might be inclined to laugh with the villain. Gorgeous George was immodest—hah, good for him!—he transformed the trappings of virtue to irony. His narcissism made it plain he was a bad’un. Thus he told the truth in a riddle of comic villainy.

  For generations, Americans have been taught by teachers with straight faces and straitened incomes that anyone can do anything in America, can become anything they want to be.

  After the grueling campaign of 1960, Nixon went down by the slimmest of margins. Had some deal been worked out between Old Man Kennedy and Mayor Daley? To his credit, Nixon accepted his fate and did not challenge the outcome. With his wife and two daughters, Nixon flew back to Washington. On the midnight of his return, Nixon built a fire in the library of his Washington house (thus realigning himself with the American myth of the midnight oil, with Franklin, with Lincoln), and counseled himself to think only of the future. “I knew that defeat was a greater test of character than victory.”

  Nixon’s firelight reverie in Six Crises might be Franklin’s, so plain is the regard of vicissitude: “In each of the crises of my political career, one lesson stood out: the period of greatest danger is not in preparing to meet a crisis or in fighting the battle itself but rather in that time immediately afterward, when the body, mind, and spirit are totally exhausted and there are still problems to deal with.”

  In 1962, Nixon was humbled enough by national defeat to lower his sights to California, where he ran for governor. At that time, I saw the man without his book. In Sacramento I watched a motorcade—NIXON FOR GOVERNOR—slowly advance along L Street. I stood close enough to the passing convertible to sustain Nixon’s nervous glance for a moment, close enough to hear a curious patter that accompanied his dumb show recognition of the crowd; it was rhythmically akin to the
catcher’s taunt of here batter batter.

  Later that year, Nixon played the villainous wrestler, losing sorely. He sneered at the gang of reporters assembled in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Mrs. Nixon’s face contorted to genuine grief, something Nixon could not manage. He could never portray himself, which is to say he could never conceal himself. His attempts at triumphal gesture were cruciform. His attempts to represent humility were triumphal. His uncontrolled facial muscles betrayed the passage of petty emotion—inappropriate simpers, pouts of chagrin. A sour-milk baby. Mr. Five O’Clock Shadow. I believe his pettiness showed that he cared, never more so than when he attempted to preempt the triumph of his critics: No Nixon to kick around anymore.

  Nixon believed his own legend. He was the only one who did. Sentimentality is fatal for a politician, especially for a ruthless politician. Whereas I do not imagine Kennedy ever studied his own stride.

  John Kennedy was slain in Dallas in 1963, a national tragedy that has since been downgraded to a back-street murder. His heroic body was laid to rest beneath an eternal flame. And the American novel, heretofore so comprehensible, momentarily took on unaccustomed themes. Was the novel to be about golden youth cut down? No, that wasn’t a theme we recognized. Were there dark currents in America—factions that conspired against our light? We put on our black suits and we rehearsed our national pieties against such suspicions: America the novel—necessarily the child’s story to write. Necessarily the truest sons and daughters of America are those born without, not the entitled sons with golden skins. You can be anything you want to be. Pity the rich man’s son.

  At the height of national mourning, Lyndon Johnson stepped forward, the man of no hour. Johnson was a natural man, no better than he should be. Johnson was a scientific wrestler—he marked his opponent’s weaknesses and then waited for them. And Johnson rescued the American novel.

  The Negro Civil Rights movement became, during Johnson’s administration, the great American novel. Americans had to admit the game had been rigged for millions of its own citizens. What good were the plucky aphorisms of Poor Richard against the reality of racial exclusion? If America were to persist as a novel, then the opening chapter had to be repaired, at least to the extent that a black child could imagine Harvard in the distance. The revised opening chapter would henceforward be titled “Affirmative Action.”

  I remember that speech Johnson delivered at Howard University, in which he compared America to a footrace (a good Nixonian metaphor). “Freedom is not enough. . . . You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. . . . We seek not just freedom but opportunity . . . not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

  One Sunday afternoon in my sophomore year at Stanford, I was walking from the bus station to the campus. As I waited for the light to change, a student in a red Corvette asked if I wanted a lift. He wore dark glasses, he was blond, everything about him was blond. You cannot imagine anyone less confident than I was in college. But I did have some conversation. I could be quick-witted and curious. That afternoon, I silently watched with a raptor’s eye the moving tendons of that golden arm. First gear. Second. Third. Radio dial. Jazz softly playing. I must have named my dorm. The only thing I remember saying was thank you as I climbed out. It wasn’t anything. It was just the glamour of his easy generosity and his pity.

  Privately, I redirected the object of education from learning how to be a scholarship boy to learning how not to be a scholarship boy. I wanted the grace of appearing not to want so much. What I did not know was how much they wanted. Like Nottingham. . . .

  I knew who he was. Everyone knew who he was. Something to do with a fever. I read it in the school paper. He was dying. (Could I have read such a thing in the student newspaper?) He had been a champion swimmer—the young man with the improbable name. A fever he contracted where? But then, weeks after the febrile revelation, I saw him at the campus post office, calling for his mail. “Nottingham,” he said to the clerk. He wasn’t easily beautiful but one might train one’s eye to prefer what he was. He was possessed of such grace.

  What I didn’t know about young men like Nottingham, men who had grown up in Woodside or Greenwich or Urbino, is that they had to train to become champion swimmers. There are probably thousands of young people in thousands of American high schools who do not realize this. We grow up thinking that the beautiful and the talented have been born that way, because they are born rich. The boys in the college gym with fine, muscular bodies—I thought they were athletes because of their bodies, not that their bodies were muscular because they were athletes. I thought I was the only one in the world who had to try so hard to become. Not someone like Nottingham. I saw in an instant he would not die.

  The best advice I got at college was from a roommate who told me I should lose the black suit. He was an American who had grown up in Europe, so he was accustomed to studying what people wore. I certainly did not hear his advice as cruel. Black is for funerals, he said. You should try blue.

  As well as taking up the Civil Rights movement, Lyndon Johnson took up Kennedy’s war in Vietnam, a war he had no taste for; no imagination to know how to end. Johnson became a hated man in America.

  In 1968, my parents bought our first color TV. Memory in America would henceforward be colored. Johnson turned gaunt, gray; changed from a vigorous opportunist to a man of sorrow. Richard Nixon—oddly, because everything about him was black; oddly, because he made a career of forbidding pink—Nixon was destined to be our first colorized president, elected because he promised to put an end to the lime and magenta war that burned day and night on TV screens. After Vietnam, telephones turned red, refrigerators green, ovens yellow.

  Throughout the Johnson administration, domestic consideration of race remained black and white. Baptist hymns were converted to statistics. And since race, not social class, was the nation’s most important metaphor for social division, Americans of every description were advancing their claims to government redress by analogy to Negro disadvantage.

  Statistics were transposed back into hues and distributed along a black and white spectrum. In college, because of Lyndon Johnson, I became a “minority student.” But it was not until Richard Nixon’s administration that I became brown. A government document of dulling prose, Statistical Directive 15, would redefine America as an idea in five colors: White. Black. Yellow. Red. Brown.

  To a generation of Americans—the first generation of affirmative action—these five categories became alternatives for any more subjective self-description. Cloaked in my official objective description—the black suit—I pursued the subjective.

  Before Richard Nixon moved to the White House, I saw him, one very cold morning, departing his Fifth Avenue co-op (where the Rockefellers were also in residence); his head down, his mind on matters far from the shops and restaurants of Madison Avenue, his coat, his suit perfectly black, but I wish to put the emphasis on “perfectly” black, as black and as rich as a pelt. He looked a rich man that day. He seemed a lonely man. His body moved like a shadow, rather fantastically. Poor Richard, scrupulous Richard, pausing to look both ways before he crossed the one-way street, easily dismissed now as a petty criminal and thug, the dastardly black-caped villain of the penny melodrama, which he resembled—his finger to his lips as Americans hissed.

  The dirty rassler.

  In Six Crises, Nixon recalls that his mother, Hannah, prayed he might become a Quaker missionary to Central America. In a secular transposition of that vocation, Nixon ended up my godfather. Because of Nixon, several million Americans were baptized Hispanic.

  After all that Richard Nixon had written about how hard work wins the day in America, finally it was Nixon who arranged for me to bypass the old rules. Through the agency of affirmative action, akin to t
hose pivotal narrative devices in Victorian fictions, I had, suddenly, a powerful father in America, like Old Man Kennedy. I had, in short, found a way to cheat.

  The saddest part of the story is that Nixon was willing to disown his own myth for political expediency. It would be the working-class white kid—the sort he had been—who would end up paying the price of affirmative action, not Kennedys. Affirmative action defined a “minority” in a numerical rather than a cultural sense. And since white males were already numerically “represented” in the boardroom, as at Harvard, the Appalachian white kid could not qualify as a minority. And since brown and black faces were “underrepresented,” those least disadvantaged brown and black Americans, like me, were able to claim the prize of admission and no one questioned our progress.

  Having betrayed his own memory of himself, it was at least dramatically appropriate that Nixon should betray his public annals. He taped himself for posterity; he taped every slander and bark.

  You can overhear the unguarded Nixon, through earphones, through dense aural atmospheres, at “the Richard Nixon Birthplace and Library” in Yorba Linda, California. The tapes seem to me the least authentic version of Nixon extant. Is it my disappointment? From expressions Nixon used in public, like “all that love stuff ” (describing rhetoric he shunned), one doesn’t expect a fine conversation in the Nixon Oval Office. Still, from his books, I am convinced Nixon was not a coarse-grained man. Perhaps he was even delicate. Hannah Nixon used to joke that she had wanted a daughter. And she said about Nixon, her famous son, long after he had boarded the train and made something of himself in the world, “He was no child prodigy.” But Hannah also remembered the way young Nixon needed her, as none of her other children did: “As a schoolboy, he used to like to have me sit with him when he studied. . . .”

  Poor Richard. It is as though the Nixon on the tapes is talking the way he thinks “they” talk.