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.

Travel Report: APPT Macau, ACOP Warm-Up, Day 2

It is Tuesday morning in Macau. My post will be dated Monday, and I know it is still Monday for many of my readers back in the U.S. But I also know everyone is thinking about Tuesday, anyway, so perhaps it is appropriate somehow I write you from there.

I’ve just returned from a visit to the breakfast buffet downstairs, a daily ritual as it includes procuring the two cups of strong black coffee required by me to continue further. On the walk down and back up, I glanced at television screens along the way set to one of the American news channels on the line-up here at the Grand Waldo Hotel (pictured above). The scrolling items and other headlines consistently indicate various pronouncements about tomorrow’s presidential election.

I usually find some nourishment to go along with the caffeine, and during the time I spend down there I’ve been carrying my used paperback copy of Garry Wills’s absorbing Nixon Agonistes. Am about halfway through, and was just reading yet another keen passage in which the author describes American culture and its government.

Not to rehearse the entire argument, Wills here speaks of the significant component of chance that influences success or failure for Americans, then characterizes how government more or less operates to oversee or manage how ideals of rewarding merit or skill or work can be maintained in such an environment.

People “luck” into money, resources, or other favorable circumstances all the time. They also earn those things, too. Yet all are playing the same game, so to speak. Characterizing capitalist society as a kind of contest in which the natural gifts of the “player” and the vagaries of chance are both important factors, those who govern (Wills explains) seek ways to “contrive the systematization of luck,” with political or ideological differences often manifesting themselves according to one’s approach to that task.

It all resonates strongly with poker, of course. In fact this very idea -- about American society being like a game in which luck and skill both matter -- has become a kind of a central tenet for me whenever I am called upon to argue for the peculiar “American-ness” of poker. (One of a few tenets, actually.)

Continuing the discussion, Wills addresses the oft-employed card-dealing metaphor suggested by FDR’s “New Deal” from long ago. “The New Deal was this attempt at systematization.... Some people had been dealt out of the game, or given too few cards, or cards from the bottom of the deck. To protect the game, the government would give everyone a new deal, making sure it was a fair deal....”

The problem, Wills goes one to say, is that the perceived need for “new deals” just keep happening over and over again. “Each time the cards have been newly dealt, we must collect and reshuffle them to allow for the new players who have drifted up to the table; we are endlessly ‘dealing,’ never getting to the game.”

I think back to the tournament I’m covering today, the $25,000 (HKD) Asia Championship of Poker Warm-Up event in which 18 players remain, Johnny Chan and Joseph Cheong among them. We’ll play down to a winner tonight, which will likely mean another lengthy day of poker.

That the game involves a lot of luck has been shown over and over already, just as every poker tournament does. That it also involves skill has been demonstrated, too, of course.

But one thing that’s somehow assuring is the way the rules of the game are maintained throughout. Each “new deal” is made according to the same principles as the one that came before. That is to say, these “new deals” aren’t like the ones the U.S. government is making over and over when constantly changing the game. As Wills judges the use of the poker analogy, “the metaphor is a mess.”

I imagine I’ll get to sleep one more time -- again, probably just for a few hours -- before waking up tomorrow (Wednesday) and tuning in to the American news channels here to see how things are playing out on Tuesday night. If the presidential election is close, it’ll probably still be in doubt by the time I go start covering the ACOP Main Event on Wednesday afternoon.

Of course, no matter who wins the election, the future of the “game” will be in doubt, too.