This is what makes Dallek’s book so timely. The Nixon administration, it turns out, was never properly buried, and lives on as a revenant in today’s Bush administration. Its identifying marks are all too familiar: the approach to governing as permanent electoral campaign, the inflated descriptions of foreign threats, the use of national security to trump considerations of law and ethics, the shunting aside of government departments in favour of White House loyalists, the claims of unfettered presidential power. Indeed, the resemblance is more than philosophical and methodological, it is physical. Junior members of Nixon’s administration became key players in Bush’s, including Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and John Negroponte — with Kissinger himself soldiering on as a regular if unofficial foreign policy adviser to the White House, hyperbole still intact: US failure in Iraq, he told CNN in 2005, would be ‘a catastrophe for the whole world’.
The crucial difference, though, is that where Nixon and Kissinger managed through pragmatic idealism to win victories that partially mitigated the political and human wreckage caused by the rest of their foreign policy, the Bush administration’s inflexibility has foreclosed the possibility of similarly mitigating victories. So here in Nixon’s strange unending afterlife, it’s wreckage as far as the eye can see.
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