Politics Times Two

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While watch­ing the acclaimed film Frost/Nixon on video, I was struck by how lit­tle of those his­toric events I recalled, even though I had lived through them. I had no mem­ory of the famous inter­views; cer­tainly didn’t watch them on tele­vi­sion at the time. (“The kids were lit­tle,” my wife sug­gested. “We were too busy chang­ing dia­pers.”) I decided to rem­edy my mem­ory lapse by pick­ing up Rick Perlstein’s recent book, Nixonland (Simon & Schuster), and sud­denly I was asail on a sea of nos­tal­gia. The 1960s reap­peared in all their con­fu­sion (I am tempted to say “like an acid flash­back,” but of course I never inhaled): the peace marches, the assas­si­na­tions, the riots, the show tri­als. And, cen­tral to it all, that ghastly man Nixon. Then I under­stood why I did not remem­ber his con­ver­sa­tions with Frost. By the time they aired on tele­vi­sion, in 1977, I had turned away in dis­gust from the world of U.S. pol­i­tics and was doing my best not to pay atten­tion. While Nixonland is full of inci­dent, the reader must wade through a lot of bad prose to find it. Perlstein, a con­trib­u­tor to Newsweek mag­a­zine, suf­fers from a mal­ady com­mon to many jour­nal­ists who write books: he thinks that telling a story is just a mat­ter of lin­ing up the facts in chrono­log­i­cal order. As a result, he is a reli­able chron­i­cler of the era, but a hope­less guide. His book feels like he has just emp­tied his note­books onto the blank page. My attempt to stay inter­ested in spite of this implaca­ble “one damn thing after another” finally failed round about 1970. But Nixonland will remain on the shelf as a use­ful ref­er­ence to the period and a reminder, if I need one, of just how crazy America went in the ’60s.

As a gen­eral rule I avoid read­ing polit­i­cal pam­phlets, but Michael Ignatieff, the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party and our would-be prime min­is­ter, claims that his lat­est book, True Patriot Love (Viking Canada), is noth­ing of the sort and I thought I’d give him the ben­e­fit of the doubt. I shouldn’t have. Ignatieff is an ele­gant writer who has pro­duced sev­eral admirable books, but this time his back­ground as scholar and intel­lec­tual is over­come by his obvi­ous desire to ingra­ti­ate him­self with the vot­ing pub­lic. The title recalls — inad­ver­tently, I assume — Samuel Johnson’s obser­va­tion that patri­o­tism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Ignatieff is no scoundrel, but he does seem to be some­one who is try­ing too hard to be liked. A mix­ture of super­fi­cial fam­ily his­tory and trite hom­i­lies about Canada, True Patriot Love feels like it began life as a seri­ous project that was sub­verted by the author’s need to estab­lish his bona fides as a car­ing Canadian. “I may have spent most of my adult life liv­ing out­side the coun­try,” he seems to be say­ing, “but with such an impres­sive fam­ily tree how can I be any­thing else but 100 per­cent Canuck?” It is an unusual approach to pol­i­tics: if you can’t vote for me, vote for my rel­a­tives. The most enter­tain­ing part of the book is watch­ing Ignatieff turn inside out try­ing to dis­tance him­self from his cur­mud­geonly Uncle George, a.k.a. George Grant, author of the clas­sic Lament for a Nation. Grant’s fatal­is­tic views about the death of a dis­tinct Canadian iden­tity are no longer fash­ion­able, at least in the precincts of the Liberal Party, and so Ignatieff must dis­own them. Grant was wrong, his nephew writes. And who has proved him wrong? Why, the Liberal Party, of course, whose wise poli­cies (bilin­gual­ism, the flag, mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, Expo 67, to name just a few) res­cued Canada from doom­say­ers like his uncle. Eventually the vot­ers will decide for them­selves whether they agree with Ignatieff’s ver­sion of his­tory, or whether, as the Tories would pre­fer, they resent being preached at by some­one whose adult life until recently was spent in the ser­vice of other goals in other places. Meanwhile, I can’t think that his lat­est book will win him many con­verts.