More on Tricky Dick

I was talking about Garry Wills’s excellent Nixon Agonistes last month, a book written and published during Nixon’s first term as president (i.e., prior to Watergate). The book is about a lot more than Nixon, actually, providing a comprehensive examination of American history and politics as well as other aspects of the culture. It’s a dense, scholarly book, and I recommend it highly to anyone with an interest in the subject and/or era.

Have since picked up a few other Nixon-related titles, including a couple at a used bookstore this week. While I was there I saw taped to a bookcase that picture above featuring a creative use of a Nixon postage stamp (no shinola). Also have spent a few hours here and there listening to some of the Nixon tapes online and marveling at the wealth of other resources available regarding his presidency.

I’m not quite old enough to remember him as president, and so didn’t form any impressions of him until well after his fall. Such a complicated figure, endlessly fascinating yet almost never sympathetic (at least not to me).

In my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class we do discuss Nixon, primarily focusing on the much-repeated tale of his having been a successful poker player while serving in the Navy during World War II. James McManus frontloads his history of poker, Cowboys Full, with a catalogue of stories of U.S. presidents playing poker, and since we use McManus’s book as kind of a core text for the first part of the course, we focus a lot of energy early on thinking about some of those stories, a few of which come up again later on in the semester, too.

Earlier this week Bob Pajich pulled together a nice piece for Card Player in which he goes over the story of Nixon’s poker playing, titled “Men of Action -- Richard ‘The Big Bluffer’ Nixon.” Pajich draws on various sources including a 1983 interview in which Nixon addressed the idea that being a skillful poker player might be of special use to a president. Such is an argument advanced by McManus, too, at the start of Cowboys Full, and thus is one we consider as a class when we read and discuss that first chapter.

As Pajich points out, the place of poker in Nixon’s story is primarily confined to that early period prior to having begun his long, arduous ascent to the White House. It’s interesting, though, to overlay various poker-related strategies to his later political career, including the various ways he misplayed his “big stack” once he became president.

It was John Mitchell, Nixon’s first Attorney General who became part of the notorious Committee to Re-Elect the President (and who’d eventually serve prison time for his role in the Watergate cover-up), who characterized the many abuses of power during Nixon’s presidency as “the White House horrors.” And really, the more one reads and learns about all that was happening during that period, the more horrific it all seems. Talk about putting one’s “stamp” on the presidency (pun intended). It is amazing (and I guess, kind of heartening) to think how the U.S. government was able to survive a Nixon administration.

Like I say, though, the man himself is uncannily captivating. In his book, Wills characterizes Nixon as “the least ‘authentic’ man alive,” a “plastic man” who “does not exist outside his role, apart from politics.” “He lives in a cleared circle, an emotional DMZ, space razed and defoliated, so he cannot be ‘got to’ unexpectedly.” Referring to the ubiquitous Nixon masks that were already beginning to appear at the time of Nixon’s first inauguration (and would become especially popular during Watergate as a countercultural symbol), Wills describes the new president’s uneasy relationship with the youth of his day.

“At the 1969 inauguration,” Wills writes, “the streets were full of ashen Nixons. Kids in town to cause trouble wore crinkly white masks with that undeniable nose. But Nixon’s car sped past their jeering ranks, and, up on the reviewing stand, his face bunched in its instant toothed smile, so circumspect, so vulnerable.”

Then comes the devastating punchline: “He had this in common with the kids; he wears a Nixon mask.”

From the perspective of a poker player, being able to interact with others while existing within an “emotional DMZ” might seem favorable. Always being “circumspect” with regard to how others view you -- i.e., being cognizant of one’s own “image” and how others are responding to it -- is a much-needed ability at the tables, too. I’ve even heard poker players sometimes talk about playing as though they were wearing a “mask,” that is, kind of employing a bit of self-delusion as part of a strategy to prevent revealing too much to others.

But Nixon was “vulnerable,” too (surmises Wills), and while he may have consistently won in those stud games with fellow Naval officers -- and later on, as well, in the other “games” he played within the GOP establishment and the American voters -- there was a lot of uncertainty and self-doubt in his play, too, especially after he took office as president.

I was saying before how I might like to write some sort of short monograph about “Tricky Dick” that focused on his poker playing and perhaps tried to discuss some of these later episodes through the lens of poker. I may still do something along these lines, although now I’m thinking I’ll more likely try to create a kind of textbook for my class that looks at poker in American culture more broadly, perhaps with a Nixon chapter along the way. (Such a book would certainly attract a wider audience, I think.)

So I’ll add working that project to the growing list of goals for the new year. Sort of feeling like Nixon a little bit, who also tended to study and plan a lot before acting. Such was how he learned poker, working diligently away from the table to devise strategies he would then later employ. And as a politician, too, he studied and developed a complicated theory of leadership he then carried to his duties.

But there was a pretty severe disconnect between theory and practice in the latter case for Nixon, I think, wherein the application of his ideas failed. Hopefully I’ll avoid that misstep in the execution of my plans.

On Poker Mags

I like Gary Wise’s podcast, Wise Hand Poker. Took me awhile to decide, but I realize I’ve come to look forward to listening to the shows whenever they turn up in the feed.

(Of course, Rounder’s Radio could upload them suckers more regularly. And more quickly. As I have mentioned before, I don’t generally sit around the computer waiting to hear live shows, so if it ain’t available as a download, I probably will miss it.)

Wise writes for Bluff Magazine, ESPN, and some other outlets, and so has a lot of connections in the poker biz. His two-hour shows generally consist of a couple of lengthy interviews with fairly well-known guests. The long format suits Wise -- he does like to talk . . . a lot. But he gives his interviewees a lot of room, too, to respond to his usually thoughtful questions. And ultimately I almost always feel like I get something out of the interviews.

On the February 6th episode of Wise Hand Poker, Wise had recent Women’s Poker Hall of Fame inductee Linda Johnson on as a guest. Johnson is another highly likable and thoughtful person (I recommend the interview, which takes up the second half of the episode). She is sometimes called the “First Lady of Poker” thanks to her important contributions to the industry, as well as her accomplishments as a player. Besides helping establish the Tournament Directors Association and being the publisher and owner of CardPlayer from 1993-2000, Johnson also has over a quarter million in tourney winnings to her credit, including a WSOP bracelet in the 1997 $1,500 Razz event.

About a half-hour into the conversation, Wise asked Johnson some questions about her prior experience overseeing CardPlayer. I was particularly interested in his question “Was CardPlayer intended to be a journalistic magazine, or was it intended to be . . . more entertaining?”

Without hesitating, Johnson answered that the magazine was not intended to be “journalistic.” “At least when I ran it,” explains Johnson, “we never made the pretense that were [producing journalism].” Rather, the primary purpose of the magazine “was to support the poker industry.”

Johnson then immediately brought up how this orientation affected the way CardPlayer would address, say, a scandalous story that might reflect poorly on the industry. (Her example was of a tourney director who was stealing from the rebuy pool in his tourneys.) Johnson explained how CardPlayer wouldn’t necessarily publicize such stories, “because I felt like we were sort of a ‘good will’ part of the industry.” Besides, if they did report such stories, “the advertisers would not support us, and unfortunately you have to have advertisers’ support to make it go.”

Makes sense, frankly. And such is most certainly still the case today, with advertisers having an even greater influence (I’d argue) over the editorial content of industry mags like CardPlayer, Bluff, All-In, and the like.

I mention all of this because I noticed the latest issue of CardPlayer (Vol. 21, No. 3) does, in fact, include an article on the Kahnawake Gaming Commission’s January report of the Gaming Associates’ audit of Absolute Poker. And yes, the article comes just ten pages after a two-page spread featuring Serinda Swan (in a Wicked Chops-esque get-up) encouraging us all to sign up over at Absolute (when we’re done lookin’).

The article (by Bob Pajich) is a straightforward summary of the report of the audit, with no editorial reflections on what the report says (or -- more importantly -- fails to say). Nor is there any attempt to address the relationship between the KGC and AP, or how that relationship perhaps makes that paltry $500,000 fine even less meaningful that it would be otherwise.

I suppose I appreciate CardPlayer’s having at least acknowledged the story. Still, rhetorically-speaking, a simple report might be read as implicitly arguing that all is A-OK at AP and we needn’t worry ever again about entrusting our moneys over there.

Which is fine, if we all understand how the relationship between CardPlayer and its advertisers means it cannot be a reliable source for unfettered, “journalistic” treatments of the poker industry. There’s great stuff in there -- the strategy columns, book reviews, and many of the other features all make it a worthwhile magazine, as far as I’m concerned. But for actual news about the industry, we still need to look somewhere other than in CardPlayer -- even if it does refer to itself as “The Poker Authority.”