By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Joe Scarborough doesn’t know much about history

Joe Scarborough

Joe Scarborough

If you’re going to try something as cheeky as letting cable blowhard Joe Scarborough review a serious book about political history, you should at least make sure you’ve got a safety net in place. But the New York Times Book Review doesn’t even bother, letting Scarborough step in it repeatedly in his review of Jeffrey Frank’s “Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage.”

You can hear the mellifluous  strains of Sam Cooke in the very first two sentences:

It may be the closest of political relationships, but it rarely ends well. Vice President Thomas Jefferson challenged President John Adams for the top spot in the vicious campaign of 1800.

There are two possibilities to ponder as we consider this remarkable lead. The first is that Scarborough doesn’t realize the Constitution originally stipulated that the candidate who received the most votes from the Electoral College would become president and that the person who came in second would become vice president. Perhaps that’s too much math for the famously innumerate Scarborough.

The second possibility is that Scarborough knows but doesn’t care, because he thought it sounded good to suggest that, right from the earliest days of the republic, the partnership between the president and his number two was somehow destined to go bad.

The reality, of course, is that Adams and Jefferson were bitter rivals and ran against each other in the 1796 campaign. Adams won and Jefferson came in second, sentencing both of them to a partnership that neither wanted. The possibility of such an outcome was abolished when the 12th Amendment was ratified in 1804.

Scarborough’s more serious lapse comes in the second paragraph:

Frank, a former editor at both The New Yorker and The Washington Post, examines how Ike’s cool nature and detached management style left Richard Nixon insecure and embittered through the remainder of his political career.

Now, I haven’t read Frank’s book, so I’ll accept that Scarborough is simply reporting what Frank wrote — with a fair amount of exaggeration and oversimplification, I suspect. But really. If Frank truly believes that the notoriously neurotic, paranoid Nixon got that way because Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t nice to him, that’s revisionist history with a vengeance. It’s one thing to suggest that Eisenhower played to Nixon’s insecurities; it’s quite another to assert that he was responsible for them. For Scarborough to accept that uncritically is a failure of the first order.

Scarborough even compounds it, writing, “Like Lyndon Johnson’s after him, much of Nixon’s pathos sprang from his painful contemplation of his boss’s public slights.” Seriously? As anyone who’s read Robert Caro’s “The Passage of Power” knows, Johnson, like Nixon, suffered from a world-class case of insecurity long before he ever met John Kennedy. The truth is the opposite of what Scarborough claims: both Nixon and Johnson were uniquely unsuited to suffer the slights that are inherent to the vice presidency long before they assumed the office.

Strike three, and Scarborough is out:

A fascinating subplot in Frank’s story details Nixon’s role in pushing the administration on the issue of civil rights. Long criticized as the author of the Republican Party’s racially tinged “Southern strategy,” Nixon is shown by Frank to be a determined advocate for the Civil Rights Act of 1957, as well as a trusted ally of Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson.

“Long criticized”? Well, yes. Here the reviewer’s obligation is to tell us how Frank traces Nixon’s devolution from a liberal on civil rights in the 1950s to a race-baiting panderer — a cleaned-up version of George Wallace — in his successful campaign for the presidency in 1968. And if Frank fails to document that devolution, Scarborough needs to say that. Instead, Scarborough leaves us with the fantasy that Nixon is a forgotten champion of civil rights who has somehow been unfairly castigated ever since.

Overall, a predictably poor performance. What was the New York Times thinking?

Photo (cc) by Mark Mathosian and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

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14 Comments

  1. I think your headline is two words too long. Scarborough is an embarrassment. He’s now using the electrons of Politico (aka “Tiger Beat on the Potomac”, h/t Pierce) to conduct a feud with Krugman in which he has no ammunition, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. “The world is made for those who aren’t cursed with self-awareness” – Annie Savoy

  2. Adams and Jefferson had a much more nuanced relationship than Ike and Nixon, but yes, it went back much further than their time as President and Vice President.

    I was shocked when I read the review. Is the NYT trying to become Time Magazine?

    • Dan Kennedy

      @Deb, I thought Adams and Jefferson’s relationship only became nuanced toward the end of their lives. When they were active, they hated each other.

      • Deb Nam-Krane

        Well, here is what PBS has to say on the matter: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/adams/sfeature/sf_qa.html#sf_qa_03 But yes, they were more amicable toward the ends of their lives.

        I’ve got to say, the Civil Rights bit that Scarborough highlights disturbs me. I thought the underlying point he was trying to make was that Ike was the RINO… no one is safe.

        • Dan Kennedy

          @Deb: Ike was a RINO — he was courted by both Democrats and Republicans before he decided to run as a Republican, and his opponents at the 1952 convention were members of the hard right, led by “Mr. Republican,” Robert Taft. Personally, I think Eisenhower was the best president of my lifetime.

          • Deb Nam-Krane

            Yes, but the guy who is courted by both sides isn’t logically criticized for that, right? And agreed- he got stuff done, even when he disapproved (school desegregation comes to mind).

      • James Kabala

        The history would be more like this:

        1775 to mid-1790s – Good friends

        Mid-1790s to 1813 – Enemies – but as Ms. Nam-Krane notes, it started as political differences and became more personal as it went along. I don’t think “hated each other” would be accurate until 1798 at the earliest, after the Sedition Act.

        1813 to 1826 – Friends (more or less) again. Adams re-embraced Jefferson with greater fervor than Jefferson re-embraced him.

        • Dan Kennedy

          @James: Correct on all counts. The issue is that they ran against each other in 1796 — that’s what Scarborough seems not to know, although I can’t imagine he’s that much of a bonehead.

  3. I don’t care for Scarborough myself, but all of your points assume he is whitewashing instead of reporting what the book said. You really DO have to read the book to decide if your are criticizing Scarborough or Frank. You’re letting your distaste jerk your knee.

    • Dan Kennedy

      @Cynthia: No. You didn’t read what I wrote. First all of all, Scarborough is on his own with regard to Adams and Jefferson and to Lyndon Johnson. Second, I specifically criticized Scarborough for failing to deal with the extraordinary assertions he claimed Frank was making. This is not a 10th-grade book report. It’s a review for the New York Times. If he was accurately reporting Frank’s claims, his obligation as a reviewer is to deal with those claims, not to pass them along without comment.

    • Deb Nam-Krane

      What Dan said.

  4. Sean Griffin

    Scarborough’s review reminds me of Bill Clinton’s review of Caro’s “Passage to Power.” Very thin gruel for sure.

    Happily, Thomas Mallon’s review of this book in the New Yorker is terrific:
    http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2013/02/04/130204crat_atlarge_mallon?currentPage=4

  5. Mike Benedict

    Is it me, or does this photo of Scarborough sort of resemble Dan Kennedy?

    • Dan Kennedy

      @Mike: It is a fact that Scarborough and I have never been photographed together. Hmmm …

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