Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers

Dr. Paul Gottfried, currently Raffensburger Professor of Humanities at unpretentious Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, is a naturally ambitious man whose plans for academic eminence and influence with the mighty did not come to fruition. The book’s cover suggests a Horatio Alger story in which the son of a small town fireman grows up to advise presidents; but in the work itself we learn that he made Richard Nixon’s acquaintance only years after he had resigned the presidency. Referring to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story The Celestial Railroad, Dr. Gottfried compares his own earthbound journey to the Strasburg Railroad, a quaint tourist attraction in his own Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which winds through the lovely Amish countryside without ever getting much of anywhere. Many principled conservative scholars in our time could make similar comparisons.

Encounters is not a complete autobiography but a memoir, a series of vignettes featuring some of the more remarkable men with whom Dr. Gottfried has been associated through his long career. They include his father, Herbert Marcuse, Will Herberg, Paul Piccone, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Thomas Molnar, John Lukacs, Pat Buchanan, Richard Nixon, Russell Kirk, Sam Francis, Murray Rothbard, Eugene Genovese, Christopher Lasch, Peter Stanlis, Robert Nisbet, and Mel Bradford.

“I am still embarrassed to admit,” writes the author, ” that I learned true liberal intellectual exchange from a declared Marxist-Leninist.” The Herbert Marcuse with whom Gottfried crossed paths at Yale in 1964 was a “dazzling lecturer” who got his young graduate student reading the reactionary Joseph de Maistre as well as Hegel.

Marcuse was in some ways a bourgeois anachronism. This was evident from the way he dressed to the gallant (but never lecherous) manner in which he spoke to female students. With his extensive humanistic and linguistic erudition, he oozed traditional German Bildung, a quality that contrasted sharply with the careerism and narrow specialization that I encountered among most of my American professors.

A few years later, this “charming Old World academic with a touch of dottiness” was openly advocating violence and identifying himself with the cause of black Communist Party activist Angela Davis. Many find it hard to believe that authentic erudition and personal graciousness could be found in one so completely lacking a moral center. This was perhaps a symptom of an inevitable generational lag in the process of cultural disintegration: those (such as Marcuse) who first betray the scholar’s calling have most often enjoyed the privilege of learning from men who had not. The students they instruct (such as many of today’s humanities professors) typically inherit all of their defects with none of their saving graces.

When National Review published an abrasive obituary of Marcuse in 1979, Prof. Gottfried submitted an impassioned retort, noting his contributions to Hegel studies in Reason and Revolution (1941). NR decided not to publish it: no sense confusing one’s readers with moral complexity, I suppose.

As liberals and neoconservatives joined forces for the Global Democratic Capitalist Revolution, Gottfried discovered that he was able to ally himself with a number of independent-minded leftists. He found in the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer a form of social analysis useful for his own purposes, and associated himself with Telos, a pro-Frankfurt School (but anti-Soviet) journal which sponsored publications like the anthology Toward a New Marxism (1970). When he asked editor Paul Piccone how they could agree on so much, Piccone responded: “because you’re a Marxist but don’t know it.”

For Piccone, “Marxism” meant principally opposition to liberal modernity, including “the kind of managerialization and cultural impoverishment globalism brings about through the market.” Under his direction, the journal shifted toward “the unmasking of bureaucratic structures that stood in the way of renewed, self-governing communities.” Unlike Marcuse, Piccone “spared no venom when he called attention to the evils of communism in practice.” By the late ’80s, he was publishing Gottfried’s work  regularly, spearheading the introduction of Carl Schmitt’s ideas into American intellectual circles and pouring ridicule on the “liberal left academic establishment.” Outraged attacks on the journal’s right-wing deviationism began appearing from former supporters. Even Sam Francis became a fan of Telos when Gottfried shared one of Piccone’s pieces with him. Sam went on to participate in a conference on populism sponsored by the journal.

Eugene Genovese is another extraordinary man of the left with whom Gottfried found more in common than with the leaders of “Conservatism, Inc.” A self-described Stalinist with a taste for tailored suits and sumptuous living, Genovese had been featured in the national press as one of America’s most brilliant historians. Our author was not able to liken him to any other leftist he had ever known, and eventually concluded that he was simply

an antibourgeois elitist trying to fit into American academia . . . . His obligatory references to oppressed black slaves and the Marxist dialectic notwithstanding, his works are essentially tributes to precapitalist societies based on hierarchy and a Christian sense of order. More conventional leftists poured wrath on the master class, but Gene admired the “mind of the slaveholder” and devoted long respectful disquisitions to those Southern Presbyterian theologians who had defended the South’s peculiar institution.

Gottfried recounts how Genovese delivered “a glowing defense of Old Southern virtues and pieties” before an audience of squirming neoconservatives; it went over about as well as “a ringing defense of Hamas.” In 1996, Genovese announced his conversion to Catholicism.

Gottfried voted for Richard Nixon in 1968, vainly hoping he would “turn out to be the authoritarian right-winger and stand-in for Joe McCarthy” the left feared. Eighteen years later, Nixon became aware of Gottfried through his book The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. Nixon praised the work in the American Spectator and cited it in his own 1999: Victory Without War (1988). Gottfried thereupon dropped Nixon a short note, which resulted in an invitation.

The president was remarkably knowledgeable about political theory; he spoke to me about Hegel and Hobbes with genuine enthusiasm and a wealth of facts. There was nothing in [his] demeanor that suggested the stiffness of his public persona; the private Nixon was effusive, eloquent and entirely affable.

Gottfried corresponded with the president for about four years, and was twice his guest for dinner. “What struck me on both occasions was how deeply Nixon continued to think about international relations after his retirement from public life.” Gottfried also came to appreciate his host’s rarely-noted sense of humor and stunningly potent gin cocktails.

One of the president’s favorite anecdotes concerned an occasion when he stumbled upon Joe McCarthy putting a headlock on liberal columnist Drew Pearson in the men’s room of a DC hotel. Nixon attempted to mediate the dispute, whereupon Pearson “ran away like a rat that had been cornered but was able to escape.” The very next day, Pearson’s column was dishing dirt on Nixon. “I should have let Joe knock the hell out of him.”

Sam Francis is the youngest figure who features in Gottfried’s memoirs. I note that the dates given for his birth and death are the correct dates for the abstract expressionist painter Sam Francis: no doubt the unfortunate result of a hasty check on Wikipedia. A characteristic vignette shows Sam energetically remonstrating with the aged Russell Kirk. “I am not a conservative but a man of the Right, perhaps of the far Right,” thundered Sam as he explained to the proverbially sweet-tempered father of postwar conservatism the necessity for an antimanagerial mass movement based on the propagation of a Sorelian redemptive myth. Kirk was happy to leave to his wife the task of defending his own views.

Gottfried has himself been strongly influenced by Francis’s ideas, but was never able to swallow his “middle American” populism.

An unfathomable mystery from my perspective is how right wing populists who often stress the doctrine of original sin forget their grim theory when they turn to politics. If one truly believes that human nature is fallen, why do sinners suddenly become angelic when they make electoral decisions? Like Russell, who preached “authority” and “degrees and hierarchy,” I grimaced when the others talked positively about the “people.” When I was recently invited to discuss with libertarians from the Cato Institute whether the people have the government they deserve, I responded that “the government is far better than the masses actually merit.” I doubt that Russell would have come to a different conclusion.

Gottfried also shares with his readers the insufficiently known story of how, following his firing from the Washington Times for impermissible candor, Sam was enabled to stay in the Capital area and continue his writing.

The last years of Sam’s abbreviated life were spent amid his myriad books on the third floor of Robert E. Lee’s childhood home in Alexandria, Virginia. The ample working space and a salary that allowed [him] to continue turning out his syndicated column were the gifts of a marvelous patroness, Sylvia Crutchfield. Sylvia, who had perceived in her otherwise professionally abandoned beneficiary the marks of genius, went about the country raising money on his behalf.

Encounters is not a confessional memoir: it focuses on the author’s relations with others. But Gottfried does allow the reader a few glimpses of his own character along the way. He acknowledges the accuracy of Will Herberg’s observation that he possesses a paradigmatic “jecke” (German-Jewish) personality: “Teutonic pedantry and Jewish moral righteousness seemed equally distributed in my approach to political and cultural issues.” “In the war between the exponents of Nature and History,” he observes, “I generally side with those who stress historical contexts and power relations.”

Gottfried spent his undergraduate years at Yeshiva University, where he felt “a massive cultural barrier” separating him from his clannish and socially graceless East-European Jewish classmates from Brooklyn and Queens. He felt himself becoming religiously more distant from them as well.

I profoundly revered the Old Testament Deity, the God of thunder and judgment, [but] not the proliferating medieval Rabbinic glosses that His Jewish worshippers had produced on His behalf . . . . By the time I was in my third year of college I had come close to accepting, without knowing it, Spinoza’s scheme of human spiritual progress, from the Mosaic code through the visions of universalist prophets like Isaiah, to the teachings of Jesus. It is a cultural predisposition that allows me to appreciate the theological reasonings of Aquinas or Luther more than it does certain other forms of religious exposition–for example, the legal exegesis of third-century Babylonian Jews interpreting the sequence of rituals for carrying out animal sacrifices.

The author relates his decision, in his early fifties, no longer to seek academic advancement.

Besides tending to my domestic obligations, I quietly taught my classes at Elizabethtown College, which as far as I could tell was the only college that would have me. John Lukacs once said to me “If you and I were teaching history at Harvard, it is we who would have to worry about our integrity.” My response was that “happily, we don’t have to worry about that.”