The Best Year of Their Lives
Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in 1948
by Lance Morrow
Basic, 312 pp., $26
EARLY ON IN The Best Year of Their Lives, Lance Morrow pinpoints "the true end of American innocence" at "just after 8:00 a.m. local time on August 8, 1945, at Hiroshima." Funny, but having been around at the time, I would have sworn it occurred four-and-a-half years earlier, just after 7 a.m. local time on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor.
Of course, to argue that point would be to undercut Morrow's thesis that the cosmic importance of the year 1948 lies in the centrality of its "story of America's attempt to come to terms with its new moral state." Again, you could have fooled me. Granted, I was young at the time, but my vision of the cosmic events of that year was limited to the Berlin airlift, the Hiss-Chambers face-off, Truman vs. Dewey, and the publication of the Kinsey Report; all touched on by Morrow, but only, given the author's penchant for over-the-top metaphor, through a maze, e.g.
The politics of 1948 had an edginess like that of film noir--an amoral air and sense of venturing into new territory where anything can happen. Postwar power played sometimes in that ominous, shadowed lighting--the atmosphere of thingsnot quite seen, of faces unreadable: of secrets. Raymond Borde and tienne Chaumeton, the film historians, applied five adjectives to film noir . . .
Ah, yes, how could I have overlooked Borde and Chaumeton's five adjectives defining film noir, not to mention their connection to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the edgy politics of 1948? "The film noirs," Morrow tells us, "were vicious dreams, just as suspicions are vicious dreams. It was an age of deep suspicion. Nixon was the quintessential film noir politician." I can hear Sam Goldwyn now: "No, Joe McCarthy as the quintessential film noir politician, Nixon as best friend."
But wait, there's more: Did it ever occur to you while watching silver screen oldies on late-night cable that, to quote Morrow, "Humphrey Bogart's snarling self-absorption and five-o-clock shadow, in The Maltese Falcon and other films, had a Nixonesque quality"? Or that the character portrayed by Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice possessed "the enigmatic capacity for betrayal . . . the same chill--an affectless and amoral ambition--as Richard Nixon"?
If your answer to the latter (like mine) is no, then brace yourself for definitive proof that there is more to the cognation between film noir and the politics of 1948 than meets our unknowing eye:
It is a geographical curiosity that The Postman Always Rings Twice was filmed on the stretch of California coast at San Clemente, which is where Pat Nixon accepted Dick's proposal of marriage, and where the Nixons retreated, wounded and disgraced, after his resignation in 1974.
Still unconvinced? Then hear this: Remember that melodramatic chase through the Vienna sewers in the Graham Greene/Carol Reed classic The Third Man? Bet you (as did I) thought it was merely another Viennese chase scene. Wrong again. It was, rather, "the perfect postwar metaphor" for (1) Kennedy's "secret Bay of Pigs design," (2) Johnson's Gulf of Tonkin resolution, and, needless to say, (3) the Watergate break-in and cover-up. Proof in this case being, in Morrow's view, "the secret, invisible, systematic, shadowy rivers of filth" which lay beneath "the crawling hidden amoral life that appeared when an American lifted the rock of normality and morality and looked underneath."
All that, mind you, from a single chapter portentously titled "Brumidi's Frescoes and Film Noir." Heavy stuff. So heavy, in fact, that given space and weight limitations, I will not go into Morrow's take on Constantino Brumidi's frescoes in the U.S. Capitol, except to say that if you're interested in "the mural of Kennedy's mind" or "the lunettes and friezes" of Richard Nixon's, this is the book for you.
Conceded, those of us tone deaf to strained metaphors are given a hint of what's to come by Morrow's primary title, played off The Best Years of Our Lives, the Oscar-winning movie of 1946. Not enough of a hint, however, to gird us for such analogic onslaughts as
In the Western romance with totalitarian communism, there was that strange quality of almost erotic self-surrender. Brute power had a seductive sexual vibration. . . . The impulse lingered through the era of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. . . . In Streetcar, Blanche's sexual past was a secret that chased her from place to place, as Chambers' Communist past pursued him in the period after he quit the party and went into hiding. . . .
That, to reassure those who might think I am quoting out of context, can be found on page 229, five paragraphs removed from the author's florid description of Marlon Brando's being "smolderingly beautiful as Stanley Kowalski." Chacun à son goût: For my part, I preferred Kim Hunter's Stella.
Not that Morrow's fustian style doesn't have its fans. No less an authority on Nixonian film noir than Henry Kissinger says this is "an engrossing book," while the author's former editor at Time, Walter Isaacson, finds it "awesomely insightful" in showing "how 1948 helped define modern America and shaped the character of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon."
As a political junkie of barnacled memory, I'm not about to argue that last point. For Kennedy, it was the year that marked his coming to terms with a diagnosis that told him he would live out his life under the shadow of a potentially fatal disease. For Johnson, it would mean a brutalizing campaign for the U.S. Senate, which, if lost, could end his political career. For Nixon, a mere congressional freshman, a sudden rise to national prominence on being thrust, center-stage, into the biggest spy drama of the century.
All of which Morrow deals with in his own involuted fashion. But after six decades, and a cascade of literature covering three of the most anatomized presidents in modern history, one would hope, in a book sub-subtitled Learning the Secrets of Power, that something new could be brought to the table, other than LBJ's having referred to his favorite appendage as "Jumbo."
No such luck. Strip away the film noir metaphors and tiresome Freudian overlay (Kennedy-and-his-father, Nixon-and-his-mother), and there is, sad to say, little ground Morrow covers that hasn't already been plowed by Robert Dallek, Stephen Ambrose, Richard Reeves, Robert Caro, and, for that matter, the History Channel.
Bottom line for an old political junkie: Garry Wills meets Pauline Kael. Sorry, I pass.
Victor Gold is national correspondent for the Washingtonian, and author, most recently, of Liberwocky: What Liberals Say and What They Really Mean.