Yin and Yang: Profiles of Newton, Nixon

Had former President Richard Nixon and black activist Huey Newton met, there probably would have been bloodshed.

Now that Newton is dead and Nixon’s resurrected, they come as close to getting together as they ever will. This month each is profiled by David Horowitz and Peter Collier, the lefty radicals turned right-wing revisionists; the Nixon profile is in Fame, Newton’s is in Smart.

If only Shakespeare were around to craft a historical tragedy around these characters.

The story of Newton’s rise and fall is the more compelling. When he was gunned down in Oakland last August, onlookers dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood. At his funeral, eulogists proclaimed the former minister of defense of the Black Panther party “a world hero, our king in shining armor.”

Horowitz and Collier, predictably, portray him differently. Not with as much complexity as Shakespeare might muster, but not with the sort of simplistic sneer that ‘60s bashers generally extend to fallen heroes of the age.

A “homemade existentialist,” Newton inhabited a world “where the boundaries between violence and good works, between crime and politics, were shining and unclear. He was a man, as even he acknowledged, with a profoundly divided self,” they write.

As a leader of the group that Tom Hayden declared was “America’s Vietcong,” Newton was an icon. By the end of the ‘80s, though, the revolution had lost its luster; Newton had become a petty hustler, smoking crack and “jacking” the small-time drug dealers whom he competed with on Oakland’s mean streets.

The young black hood who shot Newton over a drug rip-off, the kid who inherited the society Newton failed to change, had been 3 years old when the Black Panthers were formed.

If Newton was one side of the ‘60s yin-yang, Nixon was the other.

In retrospect, though, the two weren’t entirely dissimilar--ambitious, ruthless, tragically flawed. Collier and Horowitz don’t make comparisons between the two across the competing publications in which the profiles appear.

But Nixon is clearly held up to less rigorous standards than Newton. Trumpeting his alleged rise in historical stature, Collier and Horowitz paint a portrait based largely on friendly sources and the impressions of sycophants such as former aide, now KABC commentator, Bruce Herschensohn.

Their assessment of Newton would also seem to apply here to Nixon: his old comrades are “free to inflate his flaccid myth to epic size once more.”

As a result the piece only hints at the sort of complex, Richard III-like Nixon Shakespeare would have been quick to latch onto.

The most trenchant comment from the other side comes from the New Republic’s Michael Kinsley, who points out that myths can be made by the political Right and Left. If the late Romanian despot Ceausescu had held on for a few more years, Kinsley says, he “could have turned into an elder statesman.”

READ THEM OR WEEP

* For a look at a hero who refused to change, read “The Angriest Black Man in America,” in the March Wigwag. This is a slightly rambling yet still intriguing profile of Nebraska barber and legislator George Packer, an aging firebrand, pressure-cooked by his own integrity and intransigence.

* Playboy gets cosmic in its April interview. It ain’t another guru-addicted starlet they grill, though. Speaking with his computer-generated electronic voice, wheelchair-bound astrophysicist Stephen W. Hawking spins tales about wormholes and “the theory of everything.”

* Did anyone benefit from tax reform? Yes. Thomas M. Bloch, who, at 35, just took over as president of father Henry’s company H&R; Block. The March Family Business profiles this father-and-son enterprise, to which befuddled taxpayers forked out between $900 million and $1.5 billion last year, depending on one’s accounting method.

* Those who faint at the sight of blood had best avoid the March-April issue of In Health (formerly Hippocrates). Showcased are Lennart Nilsson’s dazzling photographs, magnified 10,000 times in some cases, of blood cells spilling from an artery, blood clots and monstrous looking scavenger cells.

* About the time Ronald Reagan became President, pink-haired quasi-punks knew how to spend a pleasant evening: Watch “Eraserhead” for the 100th time, then crank up “Rock Lobster” and dance yourself into a frenzy. Now Reagan is history, but the B-52s are making a comeback with “Love Shack,” and director David Lynch is plunging into prime-time television with Twin Peaks. The March 22 Rolling Stone features both.

* Before you shake off the last earthquake, pick up Caltech’s Engineering and Science quarterly. The winter issue features an excellent scientific overview, in full color, of Northern California’s Loma Prieta quake and other earthquake features, including a sobering look at liquefaction.

* Most East Coast magazines seem to think that California should be shot. But the March-April American Photo meant that figuratively. Skip the inevitable observations of the newly smog-intoxicated--”image becomes reality . . . blah, blah, blah” and turn to the exceptional pictures, not all of them pretty.

* What scares Eastern Europeans most about their new relations with the West? According to musician Frank Zappa, who recently met with Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel, the Czechs were unequivocal: “Frankie, Frankie, please don’t bring me Las Vegas,” they shouted. That and more, as reported in the March 19 The Nation.

START THE SHREDDERS

* Model Magazine offers advice on how a young woman can avoid getting caught between her lover and her girlfriends, complete with a list of “anxieties.” Anxiety 2: “What if they see that, well, he’s something of a doofus?” Anxiety 3: “What if he sees how shallow they are?”

Anxiety 97: “What if readers’ brains explode?”

NEW ON NEWSRACKS

* For a while, it seemed the media were finally going to give the vice president a break. Now along comes The Quayle Quarterly: A Watchful Eye on the Vice Presidency. Among the many informative (and often snide) Quayle-related essays, quizzes and features is a map called “The Quayle Trail,” with notations on the VP’s agenda.

Last May, for instance, Quayle reportedly was late for a meeting with the prime minister of Malaysia because of a golf game and two hours late for a meeting with the vice president of Indonesia because he and wife Marilyn decided to make a second scuba dive.

The Bridgeport, Conn., publication also features plenty of advertisements for Quayle T-shirts, doormats and bumper stickers, including one that pleads: “For Love of Country, Keep George Healthy!”