Nixon Agonistes
The liberal Nixon nobody saw
Description
In 1968, Garry Wills went out to cover Richard Nixon for a magazine and came back with something much stranger than a campaign piece. Wills was a young writer trained by the Jesuits and by the classicist scholarship of the ancient world, and he watched Nixon the way you'd watch a text that keeps refusing to mean what everyone says it means. The result, published in 1970 as Nixon Agonistes, is one of the odd masterpieces of American political writing—part reportage, part intellectual history, part character study of a man Wills found almost impossible to like and even harder to dismiss.
The title borrows from Milton's Samson Agonistes—Samson in agony, the strong man blinded and grinding in the mill of his enemies. Wills saw Nixon as an agonist in exactly that sense: a man in perpetual struggle, most of all with himself, forever proving a worth that never felt settled. And then Wills does the thing nobody expected. He argues that this Republican, this scourge of the New Deal, this man the left had spent twenty years hating, was at bottom a liberal—not despite his politics but because of the deepest assumptions underneath them.
That claim only makes sense once you follow Wills down into what he means by liberalism, which is not a party label but a whole American faith about markets, effort, and the self. Reading Nixon this way, Wills turns a book about one uneasy president into an autopsy of the belief system the whole country was quietly living by—and, by 1970, quietly outgrowing.
The question we’re asking : How could the man liberals despised most turn out to be, in Wills's reading, the purest liberal of them all?What we’ll see : A portrait of Nixon as the last true believer in an American creed that was already coming apart underneath him.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The self-made man who never stopped making himself
Wills starts where Nixon himself always started: with the story of the boy who had nothing and earned everything. The grocery store in Whittier, the early mornings, the brother lost to illness, the scholarship to Duke, the borrowed suits, the sense of being permanently outside the room where the comfortable people sat. Nixon told this story constantly, in speeches and in private, and Wills takes it seriously rather than mocking it. He treats it as the master key to the man—the thing Nixon believed about himself and never stopped needing to prove.
What fascinates Wills is that the striving never resolved. Most self-made men, once made, relax into the fact of their success. Nixon couldn't. Each victory was provisional, each win the setup for the next test, because the worth being demonstrated was never bankable. This is the agony in the title: a man condemned to earn, over and over, a status that refuses to hold still. The 1962 concession—"you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore"—reads, in Wills's hands, less as bitterness than as the cry of someone who genuinely could not understand why the ledger never balanced.
02Chapter 2 — The market ran the whole show
To get to the liberal Nixon, Wills first has to widen the lens onto the creed itself, and his name for it is the market. Not just the economic market, though that's the root of it, but a whole way of imagining how good outcomes arise: from free competition among rivals, with no authority deciding in advance who deserves what. Let the players compete, and the best result emerges on its own. Wills traces this idea back through American history and finds it everywhere, quietly organizing how the country thought.
The genius of the model, in Wills's account, is that it recurs at every level. There is the market of goods, where sellers compete and the buyer benefits. There is the market of ideas, John Stuart Mill's marketplace, where truth is supposed to win a fair fight against error. And there is the market of selves—the open contest of individuals for status and reward, the arena the self-made man is born to. Each market runs on the same faith: competition disciplines, and the outcome, precisely because nobody imposed it, carries the stamp of justice.
03Chapter 3 — A liberal by the definition that counts
Here is the provocation the book is built around. If liberalism is the market creed—competition, self-reliance, earned outcomes, suspicion of imposed authority—then Nixon is not its enemy. He is its purest surviving believer. Everything the self-made man lived by is the market faith in personal form: prove yourself in open contest, distrust the inherited advantages of the comfortable, treat success as the just reward of effort. Nixon didn't oppose the American creed. He embodied it more literally than the intellectuals who thought they owned it.
Wills sharpens the irony by looking at who Nixon actually resented. It wasn't the poor. It was the Eastern establishment—the Kennedys, the Ivy League liberals, the people who inherited their ease and then presumed to lecture the striver about virtue. To Nixon, that class had betrayed the market creed. They had won without competing, cashed the prizes of privilege while preaching about the disadvantaged. His hostility to them was not anti-liberal. It was the fury of a true believer at people he saw as hypocrites who mouthed the doctrine while living off inheritance.
04Chapter 4 — The dying creed and the man who embodied it
Step back from Nixon the individual and the book opens onto something larger: the exhaustion of the whole liberal consensus that had organized American life. Wills is writing in 1970, with the country mired in a war it couldn't win or explain, its young turning against its institutions, its confidence in earned outcomes cracking. What was cracking, in his analysis, was faith in the market itself—in all three of its forms. And Nixon mattered because he was the creed's last full believer at the moment it broke.
Consider each market failing at once. The economic market had produced abundance and also a rage against abundance among the young who inherited it. The market of ideas—Mill's confident arena where truth defeats error—looked increasingly like a place where the loudest and best-funded won, not the truest. And the market of selves, the striving contest, felt to a whole generation less like justice than like a rigged machine that produced Vietnam and asked them to die in it. The creed was losing its power to make outcomes feel legitimate.
05Conclusion
Wills set out to write about a single uneasy president and ended up performing an autopsy on the American faith itself. His Nixon is not the villain of liberal memory nor the champion of conservative myth. He is the last man to believe, fully and without irony, in the striving creed the whole country had run on—and the misfortune of arriving with that belief at the moment it stopped holding. The self-made man, endlessly proving a worth that would never bank, turns out to be the perfect emblem of a nation that could no longer say why its own outcomes were just.