Theory Brief #1: Zachary Jonathan Jacobson (2023), On Nixon’s Madness: An Emotional History
Taking a closer look at Nixon's presidency and the "madman theory."
Zachary Jonathan Jacobson (2023). On Nixon's Madness: An Emotional History. Johns Hopkins University Press.
In a global system of (supposedly) rational international actors, could an irrational feint—pretending to mercuriality, slouching towards unpredictability—constitute a higher form of rationality than “pure reason” alone? In On Nixon’s Madness, the historian Zachary Jonathan Jacobson takes a closer look at the famed “madman theory,” and its apparent progenitor, President Richard Milhous Nixon.
Observers of Donald Trump’s presidency will recall similarities between DJT and Nixon’s apparent policy posture: Keep your enemies on their toes by faking a kind of absolute volatility. In Trump’s case, threatening to derail the special relationship with South Korea, or pull out of NATO (to extract concessions in defense spending from European member states), have been chalked up to the madman theory in action: Trump wouldn’t really have pulled the plug, so the conventional wisdom goes—or would he? This “X factor,” this uncertainty about the genuineness of the feint—in essence a question about authenticity, representation, and stagecraft—is what is supposed to make the madman theory’s corollaries such a powerful foreign policy instrument.
Jacobson portrays Nixon as a famously studied, and studious, statesman, described memorably by journalist Hunter S. Thompson as a “plastic man in a plastic bag,” who was, lest one forget, tragically, responsible for the deaths of millions in Southeast Asia at the height of the Vietnam War, with the ferocious bombings of Cambodia and Laos.
With Nixon, the threat of extreme violence—in effect, going nuclear in or around North Vietnam—was designed, it is said, to keep the USSR and China at bay.
But as Jacobson shows, the madman theory was probably not as clever, from a pure bargaining standpoint, as Nixon and some in his inner circle might have thought: If anything, “Nixon’s nuclear saber-rattling sufficiently scared the Soviets and Chinese into enlarging their nuclear arsenals,” Jacobson writes, possibly on the theory that when a mad dog is on the prowl, it is eminently reasonable to go in search of a bigger stick. Affecting volatility isn’t the four-dimensional chess move that leaders like Trump and Nixon have thought; it can just as likely push international relations into a more parlous state.
In an entertaining series of passages, Jacobson also shows how Nixon’s nuclear posturing vis-à-vis North Vietnam was if anything too global, too sophisticated, even subtle, assuming a “Big Other” to observe and record all the US’ careful military stage manipulations that simply did not exist.
Jacobson’s book veers away from this tight focus on foreign policy into a psychohistorical account of Nixon’s emotional life, as well as a lengthy chapter on the, decidedly “un-mad” 1972 trip to China, which found Nixon playing the somewhat unlikely role of peacemaker and bridge-builder between East and West; contemporary policymakers would do well to study how Nixon and his team stage-managed the courting of Mao and Zhou Enlai. Readers of more conventional Nixon biographies will probably learn little new here, but these accounts are deftly composed. Jacobson convincingly shows how Nixon was fueled by resentment toward higher-class elites, Kennedy and the Ivy League types, that both embittered and propelled him forward. His work ethic was fierce; classmates from his school recalled a loner type rushing down the school’s corridors with huge stacks of books; even later in life, Nixon relished “homework,” and after the Watergate scandal, he claimed to lunch on an ascetic lunch of rye crackers and canned tuna. He was a loner, perhaps even a lone wolf. “Despite constantly reaching out, he thought of himself as a loner. ‘I believe you should keep your troubles to yourself,’ he said. ‘I never wanted to be buddy-buddy . . . I don’t believe in letting your hair down, confiding this and that and the other thing.’”
And he was beaten by his father, Jacobson notes in passing, without truly mining the effects this original violence may have had on his future political decisions: “Only on rare retellings would Nixon reveal that most secret of knowledge within the Milhous Nixon home. Only rarely did he say it simply: ‘Yeah, we got the strap.’” Were the fleets of B-52s bound for Indochina a kind of psychohistorical return of the repressed or revenge for “the strap” he suffered under in his childhood?
Such texture, of course, should not distract from the only fact about Nixon that finally matters, looming impossibly large over his legacy, vastly larger than the Watergate break-in that ultimately toppled his presidency: The deaths of millions of South-East Asian civilians, whether the result of “rational irrationality” or not, remain a terrible stain on humanity’s history, and the history of the United States in particular. In the wake of half a million tons of munitions dropped on Cambodia and Laos, according to scholars Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, the true act of madness was the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award one of its co-architects, Henry Kissinger, the Nobel Peace Prize only a handful of years later, in 1973. And with war crimes such as these to explain, have we really arrived at a sufficient account of Richard M. Nixon the man and destroyer of worlds?