B6 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20 , 2022prose, but one line does rise to the top drawer
of Watergate writing: “Fighting to stay out of
prison is an expensive way to not make a
living.”
Now 81, Chapin has lived the majority of his
life post-Nixon and post-prison. His memoir
discreetly addresses a divorce and a battle with
drinking, along with his later employment by
the insurance industry billionaire (and Nixon
contributor) W. Clement Stone.
Even when working for Nixon, Chapin was
aware of his own desire to serve a man more
than a cause. To a great extent he remained
someone who reveled in being bossed. His
parents and grandparents taught him “to
respect older people and follow instructions.”
He first learned of Norman Vincent Peale’s
“The Power of Positive Thinking” at age 6, and
within several years of that, he writes, “the
themes that would govern my life were devel-
oping: Suck it up. Smile and do what you’re
told. Work hard. People will like you.”related to the burglary or coverup. Chapin
served nine months in California’s Lompoc
federal prison for lying to a grand jury. Halde-
man, before going to Lompoc himself, visited
Chapin there, and when the younger man was
released he actually signed a letter to him with
“Love.”
Chapin makes a handful of fair revisionist
points against the now-MSNBC-revered for-
mer White House counsel John Dean, and he
rightly accuses the press of exploiting the
obvious alcoholism of Martha Mitchell, wife of
the attorney general, for its own purposes. But
when in his acknowledgments he starts climb-
ing onto the grassy-knoll version of Watergate
that is Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin’s “Si-
lent Coup” (1992), a reader can only sigh.
Before this, Chapin offers some bits of Water-
gate trivia that may be news to readers; he says
that Dean plagiarized his remark about a
“cancer” on the presidency from White House
aide Richard Moore.
“The President’s Man” is an amiable if
sometimes lurching and repetitive reminis-
cence. There is no real spark to most of thepresident kept it going because it was political-
ly useful.” In a half-century of arguing about —
and often for — Richard Nixon, I have never
heard anyone advance this explanation.
Chapin’s biggest achievement involved set-
ting up Nixon’s trips, in 1972, to China and the
Soviet Union. Understandably, given all the
lows that would follow, he oversells the former
as “indisputably one of the most dramatic,
unprecedented, unchartered, risky, conse-
quential diplomatic missions ever conceived.”
Nonetheless, the logistical work he did for the
385-person American delegation was good
enough to win even Haldeman’s compliments.
Comparing the two trips, Chapin writes: “The
Chinese were well mannered, intelligent, and
curious. The Russians we dealt with were
basically thugs.” Much of the advance work for
the latter journey involved anti-bugging pre-
cautions.
The author can be described as the first
Watergate defendant to go on trial, even
though his misbehavior — hiring a college
roommate, Donald Segretti, to perform cam-
paign “dirty tricks” — wasn’t, strictly speaking,Book WorldNIGGER
The Strange
Career of a
Troublesome
Word — With a
New Introduction
by the Author
By Randall Kennedy
Pantheon.
194 pp. $25Mychal Denzel Smith is the author of “Stakes Is
High: Life After the American Dream.”Ben Sasse of Nebraska. When Sasse invited
Maher to visit Nebraska, saying, “We’d love to
have you work in the fields with us,” the host
replied: “Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a
house nigger.” Not only does Maher (inexplica-
bly) wield immense power to sway the racial
discourse in this country, he also is in a
position to hire and fire Black people and
influence their career paths within his indus-
try. That he would make such a “joke” calls into
question whether he has the judgment to make
personnel decisions fairly.
Speaking of judgment: Kennedy spends
much of the book examining legal cases involv-
ing the word, most having to do with terms of
employment. Kennedy essentially re-litigates
each of his examples, assessing whether judg-
ment on the use of the word in each context
was justly rendered. Absent from this analysis
is that the majority of judges in the United
States are not Black — meaning that more
often than not the ultimate authority, in a legal
setting, about the use of the word will be
someone who will never feel the indignity of
being called a nigger. Without institutional
power, Black people have limited opportunity
to render judgment on people who cross anti-
social boundaries and should be outcast as
pariahs for such inappropriate conduct.
In his riff on DiCaprio, Wood observes that
after playing a monstrous enslaver in “Django
Unchained,” DiCaprio did not appear on
screen with a Black actor for nearly 10 years.
“He knew,” Wood says, “once you call Jamie
Foxx and Kerry Washington ‘nigger’ in front of
Samuel L. Jackson, you got to lay low for a
decade.”
Wood was joking. But his gibe had a larger
meaning. Of course, people can say anything
they want. That doesn’t mean there won’t be
consequences.used her position as instructor and ultimate
authority within the classroom to subject her
students to a pedagogical choice that could
cause them anguish. But if the classroom is a
collaborative space, where Sheck and other
White professors are not burdened by the same
insults as their students, then such decisions
must be weighed in collaboration with those
who would be most affected. The solution is to
redistribute power. In my class, whenever
abhorrent language appeared in a text, we had
a discussion prior to the lesson to decide
whether we would allow anyone in class, in-
cluding me, to utter the slur aloud. If anyone
was uncomfortable, we agreed that no one
would say it. The power was not mine alone.
Kennedy spends little time, in the original
book and in the new introduction, considering
this power, but it is the crux of the issue. Even if
there are a few reasonable instances when a
White person may utter the word — while
quoting Baldwin or playing an enslaver in a
film — they still exist within a larger world in
which a White person saying it signals some-
thing outside of that particular moment. Our
debates over the word’s use are proxies for the
more uncomfortable conversations about race
that we tend to shy away from in this country —
conversations about the way people are treated
like niggers (which is to say, subhuman) and
who has the power to treat them as such.
The word is still injurious not only because
of its specific origin as a slur but also because
anti-Black conditions remain so pervasive at
every level of our institutions. Black people
continue to be demeaned, abused and exploit-
ed as a class. Many U.S. communities are
moving with all deliberate speed to outlaw the
teaching of the nation’s history of enslave-
ment. Within such a context, it is not as
innocuous as Kennedy makes it out to be when
comedian and talk show host Bill Maher uses
the word in a joking manner. On his show “Real
Time,” Maher interviewed Republican Sen.instructive, and moving.” He provides as exam-
ples the work of writers Carl Van Vechten,
Flannery O’Connor and Mark Twain, filmmak-
er Quentin Tarantino, comedian Lenny Bruce
and a number of others.
His point is that a racial asymmetry exists
wherein Black people are the only ones “al-
lowed” to say nigger (instead of the euphemis-
tic idiom “n-word”). Such linguistic policing
does not take into account the context in which
the word appears: its use in everyday speech
often as a slur or its mention in a title of a work,
or in a direct quote.
But this troublesome word presents even
further complication.
There’s another facet that Kennedy largely
overlooks as exemplified in an incident he
recalls at the New School in 2019. Professor
Laurie Sheck upset a student in her graduate
creative writing class during a discussion of a
documentary about James Baldwin called “I
Am Not Your Negro.” Sheck told the class that
the film’s title was a modification of a phrase
Baldwin had uttered in an interview. He had
said: “I am not your nigger.” In explaining,
Sheck used the full word, and the student’s
complaint led to an investigation by the New
School administration, which ultimately de-
termined the professor had not violated uni-
versity policy on discrimination.
I taught a class at the New School in the fall
semester following this incident, and it was,
understandably, a focus of the new faculty
orientation. We were led in a number of exer-
cises regarding offensive language and how to
handle our encounters with it in the classroom.
But I never felt that Sheck had erred in saying
“nigger” aloud — she did not use the word to
insult any student or Baldwin, or to express
any disdain for Black people. She uttered a
quote that contained the word. Where she was
at fault, to my mind, was acting as though she
had the sole power to determine whether it
was appropriate for her to say the word. SheI
n the two decades since he published his
book “Nigger: The Strange Career of a
Troublesome Word,” Randall Kennedy has
witnessed the persistence of the n-word as “an
oft-heard feature of the soundtrack of Ameri-
can racism at its most base and violent.” He’s
also watched as efforts to expunge the word
have “lost perspective, abandoned essential
norms of freedom of thought and expression,
and degenerated into petty tyranny.” While he
has discovered that the word is here to stay
with all its repugnant associations, he believes
it also can be put to use for good. As he writes in
a new introduction to his book, rereleased on
the occasion of its 20th anniversary, he ap-
proves of the use of the word “as a tool of
antiracist protest, or as a comedic interven-
tion, or as a gesture of solidarity, or as a sly term
of endearment.” These uses, he argues, “mani-
fest a wonderful capacity to transmute ugli-
ness into art.”
Illustrating Kennedy’s point, comedian Roy
Wood Jr. turned the ugliness of the n-word into
art in his 2021 special, “Imperfect Messenger.”
In the show, Wood praises Leonardo DiCaprio
for his vivid portrayal of an enslaver in the 2012
film “Django Unchained.” White actors, Wood
contends, need to play heinous characters in
the interests of accurately depicting stories of
racism. And then Wood gives his routine its
comedic turn, saying DiCaprio is “one of the
bravest White allies I ever seen in my life. ... He
put 10 toes in the ground and called ... J amie
Foxx a nigger to his face, in front of Samuel L.
Jackson — bra-ve-ry.”
Such an incident, had it occurred off-screen,
might have spelled the end of DiCaprio’s career
or, at least, his standing as a well-respected,
A-list actor. But in context, for authenticity’s
sake, it was 100 percent necessary.
Kennedy would likely concur. As he writes in
his introduction, “There are people of all back-
grounds, including different racial identities,
who put nigger to uses that are enjoyable,Is using this word ever okay? And who has the power to decide?RACE IN AMERICA REVIEW BY MYCHAL DENZEL SMITHTHE PRESIDENT’S
MAN
The Memoirs of
Richard Nixon’s
Trusted Aide
By Dwight Chapin.
William Morrow.
480 pp. $29.99In a memoir,
Dwight Chapin,
pictured here,
explores the
dynamic between
him and H.R.
Haldeman that
began before the
two men worked in
the West Wing.D
espite its title, “The President’s Man,”
this memoir from Dwight Chapin, Rich-
ard Nixon’s appointments secretary and
special assistant, should really be called “The
Chief of Staff’s Man,” concentrating as much as
it does on the sad and sometimes chilling story
of Chapin’s relationship with the cast-iron
H.R. Haldeman.
Raised in Kansas and Southern California,
Chapin did his first campaign work for Halde-
man and Nixon before he had even graduated
from the University of Southern California,
during Nixon’s failed 1962 California guberna-
torial race. Chapin later worked for Haldeman
at the J. Walter Thompson ad agency before
devoting himself full time to Nixon’s victorious
presidential quest in 1968.
The Haldeman-Chapin dynamic was estab-
lished long before the two men entered the
West Wing: “He advised me, trained me, pro-
tected me, and nurtured me,” writes Chapin. “I
had a need to be liked, to be respected, and he
understood that.” Haldeman, sounding like
HAL in the movie “2001,” would scold Chapin
(“I’m disappointed in you, Dwight”) for paying
too little attention to detail. Obsessed with the
time management of Nixon, whose physical
movements were tracked on a “locator board,”
Haldeman could be “abusive” — Chapin’s word
— toward his underling, especially in memo-
randums. When a college friend of Chapin’s,
playing a joke, greeted the arrival of the
president’s helicopter with a “Welcome
Dwight Chapin” sign — whose much smaller
letters said “And President and Mrs. Nixon” —
the Nixons were amused. Haldeman was not.
Chapin is aware that Haldeman, who died
in 1993, used him as “an outlet for his frustra-
tion and his anger.” Haldeman seems to have
realized it, too. In one early entry (March 24,
1969) from his diaries, the chief of staff record-
ed a “flap with Chapin” involving a bit of “lousy
staffing”: “I overreacted as usual.” Almost four
years later, when it came time to fire Chapin
over improper campaign activities, Haldeman
got John Dean to drop the ax. But Chapin never
retracts his statement that Haldeman was “my
closest friend.”
Chapin offers the reader sympathetic and
defensive glimpses of Nixon, depicting him as
“a very sensitive man.” (Nixon, too, had trouble
firing people face to face.) While admitting
that the president became “increasingly isolat-
ed” during his years in the White House,
Chapin explains away the wilder rhetorical
excesses and revenge fantasies on the secretly
recorded Oval Office tapes as “musing out
loud.” His overall estimation of Nixon remains
high but confused: “By any truthful measure,”
he insists, “Nixon’s domestic policy was bril-
liant and successful.” Not to genuine conserva-
tives it wasn’t, then or now. Chapin also
declares “that there are people who believe
that Richard Nixon and his administration did
not want the Vietnam War to end; that theHe worked as Nixon’s aide, but he was also Haldeman’s punching bagBETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGESMEMOIR REVIEW BY THOMAS MALLONThomas Mallon’s novels include the political
trilogy “Watergate,” “Finale” and “Landfall.”20 SUNDAY | 1 P.M. Randall Kennedy discusses
“Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word”
with Kiese Laymon, streamed through Politics and
Prose Live at politics-prose.com/events.
21 MONDAY | 6 P.M. John Avlon discusses “Lincoln
and the Fight for Peace,” streamed through Politics and
Prose Live.
6 P.M. Kosoko Jackson and Ashley Herring Blake
discuss “I’m So (Not) Over You” and “Delilah Green
Doesn’t Care” with Christine Bollow, streamed through
Loyalty Bookstore at loyaltybookstores.com/event.
8 P.M. Bill Hayes and Alison Bechdel discuss “Sweat”
and “The Secret to Superhuman Strength” with Bill
Goldstein, streamed though Powell’s Books at
powells.com.
22 TUESDAY | 7 P.M. Kosoko Jackson discusses “I’mBooks at solidstatebooksdc.com.
25 FRIDAY | 12 P.M. Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel
discuss “The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite
Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology,” streamed through
Harvard Book Store at harvard.com/event.
5 P.M. Francesca Stavrakopoulou discusses “God: An
Anatomy,” streamed through Harvard Book Store.
8 P.M. Jennifer Huang discusses “Return Flight” with
Jeni De La O and Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie,
streamed through Loyalty Bookstore.
26 SATURDAY | 5 P.M. Bruce Johnson discusses
“Surviving Deep Waters” with Gordon Peterson,
streamed through Politics and Prose L ive.
For more literary events, go to wapo.st/literarycal.So (Not) Over You” with authors Christina Hobbs and
Lauren Billings, who write as Christina Lauren,
streamed through One More Page Books at
onemorepagebooks.com/event.
7 P.M. Erik Larson discusses “The Splendid and the
Vile,” streamed through Sixth & I Historic Synagogue at
sixthandi.org and in person at 600 I St. NW. $20-$27.
202-408-3100.
23 WEDNESDAY | 7 P.M. Keith Beutler discusses
“George Washington’s Hair: How Early Americans
Remembered the Founders,” streamed through
George Washington’s Mount Vernon at
mountvernon.org.7 P.M. Debbie Millman discusses “Why Design
Matters: Conversations With the World’s Most Creative
People” with Roxane Gay, streamed and in person at
Sixth & I. $12-$67.
24 THURSDAY | 7 P.M. Isaac Fitzsimons, Ayana Gray,
Julian Winters and Ibi Zoboi appear on Penguin Teen’s
Black Girl Magic + Black Boy Joy panel with Cree
Myles, streamed through Loyalty Bookstore.
7 P.M. Sarah Weinman discusses “Scoundrel” with
Casey Cep, streamed through Politics and Prose L ive.
7 P.M. Anna Pitoniak discusses “Our American Friend”
with Jennifer Close, streamed through Solid StateLITERARY CALENDARFeb. 20-26