AMERICAN NOTES: The Nixon Genre

As he himself admits, Richard Nixon has a face that invites caricature. But lately the lampooning of the President has expanded far beyond the cartoonist's drawing board and become a minor genre of the arts. Documentary Film Maker Emile de Antonio has compiled MilLHouse (TIME, Oct. 18), a wickedly derisive splicing of Nixoniana. Novelist Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate) has come forth with The Vertical Smile, a politico-sexual farce whose hero, Duncan Mulligan, is a Wall Street lawyer, transvestite and presidential candidate known, lest anyone miss the point, as "Funky Dune."

Finally, Novelist Philip Roth (Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint) has written Our Gang, due out in November, starring President Trick E. Dixon, his wife Fitter, Attorney General Malicious, Vice President What's-his-name and others, including Jacqueline Charisma Colossus. In Roth's manically scurrilous satire, Dixon stealthily retires to a bombproof White House locker room during a national crisis and suits up in his "Prissier College" football uniform to bolster his confidence. At times, the mimicry of Nixon's manner and cadences is brilliant. Alternating between the Swiftian and the sophomoric, Roth has Dixon assassinated by drowning in an oversized Baggie and ending up in Hell, running for the office of Devil against Satan himself.

There may be some nasty fun in all of this meat ax malice, and some political truths as well. But most of it is so extravagantly hostile that even a determined Nixon hater may find himself feeling an unexpected sympathy for the victim.With enemies like that, Richard Nixon may have to lean less on his friends.