Lew, Evan Thomas’s micro portrait of Nixon’s adversarial relationship with the Georgetown Set is indeed fascinating reading. One must never forget that Thomas, grandson of six time Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas, has earned his distinguished career as court hagiographer and chronicler of the internecine battles of the power elite in such widely acclaimed works as The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made; The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA; The Man to See; Robert Kennedy: His Life; and the soon to be released Being Nixon: A Man Divided. Those of us who engage in Establishment Studies or Power Elite Analysis find his work invaluable. Yet one always must be aware and on guard that what he writes comes with its particular bias or je ne sais quoi. In The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, Thomas and his co-author Walter Isaacson practically genuflect upon every page in paying homage to those overlords who once reigned supreme in the American presidium of power and privilege. They were the malevolent creators of the National Security State during the Truman regime, that satanic incubus we now describe as the Deep State. Nixon, from the beginning of his political career, had shrewdly placed his cloven feet securely planted in both realms of the power elite: the Sunbelt Cowboys and the Northeastern seaboard Yankees. He was close to such “Yankee” power brokers as the Dulles brothers and Prescott Bush, as well as “Cowboy” denizens of organized crime stretching from California to Florida. After his resounding defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial race, he left for New York to become enmeshed ever deeper and deferential within the world of the Rockefellers and their nexus of power and influence. While he was intensely envious and disdainful of them, he knew how the ascendancy of power worked. He was the true GOP elephant who never forgot. But as Thomas pointed out in his article, neither did his blood enemies in Georgetown.

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