John Aloysius Farrell is the author of biographies of House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill Jr. and attorney Clarence Darrow, as well as a forthcoming book on the life of Richard Nixon.

“People react to fear, not love,” Richard Nixon once told his aide, William Safire. Buttressing the concept, the Trickster added: “They don’t teach you that in Sunday School—but it’s true.”

It is the elemental nature of politics that Chris Christie was describing when, in a press conference Thursday (which just happened to fall on Nixon’s 101st birthday) the governor of New Jersey defended his somewhat pugnacious operating style by citing the Chicago axiom: “Politics ain’t beanbag.”


Put aside, for a moment, the question of whether blocking access to the George Washington Bridge to spread misery in an enemy’s constituency was a) dumb or b) gratuitous or c) legal, there is a case to be made for actions that inspire fear in politics. The art of politics is the governing of passions. And sometimes the governing of passions requires a kick in the ass.

Too cynical? Too flip? Too … Nixonian?

Trundle down to your basement, where you keep the books from college that they made you buy for PolSci101; maybe you read them, maybe you didn’t. Open The Prince to Chapter XVII, where the great Italian diplomat Niccolo Machiavelli took up the question of whether it’s better to be loved or feared. “It may be answered that one should wish to be both,” he wrote, “but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved.”

History tells us that this Machiavelli fellow was on to something. It’s been 500 years since he wrote The Prince, and we still employ him as an adjective for clever machination. But since Nixon crashed and burned 40 years ago, the creative use of fear and fury has fallen on hard times. Watergate gave muscle a bad name.

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Oh, sure, from time to time some presidential aide will blow the cover of a willowy blonde CIA agent because her husband wrote an offending op-ed. The White House will find itself encircled by a snarling pack of partisans, sententious scribes and zealous prosecutors, all claiming to be defending the purity of our politics. If it ends well, the abandoned subaltern will only wind up fined, disbarred and the heavy in a Hollywood script—not behind bars.

But mostly, these days, fear plays an important role in special interest pleadings, where private individuals and groups are routinely granted license that elected leaders are denied. The prospect of having the Club for Growth or some kindred entity dump shadowy millions into a challenger’s war chest does surely motivate the members of Congress. It is a bizarre morality that sanctions the use of political blackmail by anonymous billionaires and secretive corporations, but comes down like hell’s own fire on an elected leader who dangles, or rescinds, a political favor to induce cooperation.

It wasn’t always so. Back-scratching, log-rolling and arm-twisting once greased the legislative process. Back in the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a young Democratic lawyer named James Eastland won a seat in the U.S. Senate from Mississippi by running against the liberal New Deal. When he arrived in Washington, Eastland would later recall, he was ushered to the White House.

“Son, you think you played hell with me down there in that primary, don’t you?” the president demanded.

“No, sir, Mr. President, not really,” Eastland stammered. Roosevelt gave him the facts of life.

“We’re both good Democrats. If you want something for your state from me, come in that door over there and I’ll give you two minutes to tell me what you want and I’ll see that you get it,” said the president. “But then I’m going to spend 15 minutes telling you what I want from you and you are going to do it. Understood?”

Eastland understood. They got along just fine.

American political history is full of broken legs and bloodied noses—as well as payback, bugging, blackmail, break-ins and other dirty tricks.

The founding fathers, almost immediately, split into two factions and scrapped like wolverines over the direction of their new republic. The epitomic moment occurred when future president James Monroe (allied with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison) blackmailed Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton (a leader of the rival Federalist faction and a preeminent member of Washington’s cabinet) with proof of Hamilton’s adultery. It might have cost Hamilton the presidency.

Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Spielberg have offered revealing looks at Abraham Lincoln’s political arm-twisting recently; in the crisis of the Civil War he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, censored the mail, maintained surveillance of “suspicious” persons and jailed 13,000 American citizens for criticizing the conduct of the war. In the Roosevelt years, the FBI refined its use of electronic eavesdropping and “black bag” break-ins. Harry Truman privately vowed to hang obstinate union leaders, and nationalized the steel industry. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson bugged civil rights leaders and used the instruments of government to torment their foes.

There’s no easy verdict. The greatest novel of American politics— All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren—turns on the issue of means and ends. It’s the thinly disguised tale of the Kingfish of Louisiana, the demagogue Huey Long, a country lawyer who bribes and blackmails and brawls his way to power, in part so he can help his people. “Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good,” the narrator suggests.

For a political realist, what grates in the Christie episode is not so much that the governor’s allies and aides used their power to payback a foe—it’s how stupidly they did so. As the wicked witch said in The Wizard of Oz, these things must be done del-i-cat-ley, or you break the spell.

The late Rep. J. Joseph Moakley of South Boston once gave me instruction on the fine art of wielding the shiv. He was the ranking member on the House Rules Committee when he learned that Boston College was dismantling an exhibit that honored his longtime friend, former Speaker Tip O’Neill.

O’Neill had worked, over the years, to earmark many millions of dollars in congressional appropriations for B.C., and Moakley now found the college guilty of that most grave of Boston political sins: disloyalty. “A year later there is a bill going through Congress, greased, for $6 million” for Boston College, Moakley recalled. “So I did my thing.” He quietly, but assiduously, blocked any appropriations for the college until it built a new, better O’Neill exhibit. And at the dedication ceremony, Moakley was the featured speaker.

From afar, and if Christie is to be believed, it appears he may have fallen victim to the Thomas Becket syndrome—a recurring danger in the political employment of fear or force. Archbishop Becket, in the course of a battle between church and state, spurred an angry English King Henry II to shout, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” An assassin, seeking the royal favor, did just that—to King Henry’s personal dismay and subsequent political pain. It’s not hard to see an underling in New Jersey, subsumed in Christie’s somewhat truculent operating style, thinking that some big Fort Lee traffic jams were just the thing the governor would like.

The Becket syndrome, or something akin to it, may be the best explanation for Nixon’s downfall as well. Nixon had seen other Cold War presidencies burgle and wiretap, overthrow foreign governments and assassinate foreign leaders. He didn’t recognize that changing times and the trauma over the Vietnam War were rewriting the rules. His White House tape recordings capture him venting anger at his enemies—often—and ordering aides to perform a range of illicit or underhanded acts in service of “national security” and/or his own political interests. In many cases, Nixon’s orders were not carried out, or were later rescinded, but he created a climate in his administration that ultimately led to the Watergate scandals.

“Play it tough,” he told his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman. “That’s the way they play it and that’s the way we are going to play it.”

Nixon, of course, ventured too far. He resigned his office to avoid impeachment, and in a teary, unforgettable farewell to the White House staff he warned them of the seductive temptation for revenge—something the elected officials, contemplating hardball, need to keep in mind.

Be strong. Fight on. Dare the arena, Nixon said. Yet “always remember others may hate you—but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

Delicately, like the wicked witch said.