We still have him to kick around, after all

"He took everything critical as a personal blast against him," former Nixon speechwriter William Safire has said, and certainly that explains why the feud was so bloody. But what matters more is that Nixon and the press were at odds fundamentally in their understanding of each other. Journalists held themselves directly and exclusively responsible to the American people. Nixon, on the contrary, considered the media a piece of machinery built to connect him with his constituency. Like any contraption, it might need some manipulation, but nothing that couldn't be fixed by professionals such as former advertising man H.R. Haldeman.

Trying as such differences between president and press would have been in ordinary circumstances, they became completely irreconcilable during Watergate, killing any chance of political survival.

To this day, Watergate remains the somber standard against which we measure other scandal-gates, and Nixon's fate still serves as an effective warning to officials inclined to abuse their power. It's no longer so much a shadow as, Greenberg writes, "a bright beacon for the discriminating."

The Nixonian penumbra that darkens our own era is an artifact of the calm before that political storm: his image as an opportunistic "news manager" who pioneered the use of stage sets and even a "full-time PR director." "From that moment on," ABC correspondent Ted Koppel recalls, "we had emerged from the Garden of Eden. We were never able to see candidates or campaigns the same way again."

Their reporting reflected it. In books such as Joe McGinniss's "The Selling of the President, 1968," as well as newspaper reporting, the press went behind the scenes and stayed there, convincing us that, to quote McGinniss playfully misquoting Marshall McLuhan, "the medium is the massage, and the masseur gets the votes."

"Politics has come to be seen as an illusion," Greenberg argues, reflecting on Nixon's legacy, "a superficial contest of images, that, like the pseudo-event, has no intrinsic meaning." By the time those canceled-election rumors stopped circulating, they were already half passé, cynicism from a naive age. Soon, we confronted the paralyzing sense that, after all, nothing in politics matters. Ron Rosenbaum perceived it as early as Nov. 5, 1970, when he wrote in The Village Voice of "a more demoralizing rumor than the RAND report: The '72 elections will be held and ... the candidates will be Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, and George Wallace."

• Jonathon Keats is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.

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