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Nixon's Economy: Booms, Busts,, Dollars, and Votes, By Allen J. Matusow - Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998, xii + 323 pp. Bibliographic references and index. Cloth, $35.00. ISBN 0700608885.
In Nixon's Economy, Allen J. Matusow provides a window into economic policy-making at the highest level of government. He considers President Richard M. Nixon's fiscal, budgetary, and energy policy, the president's reelection strategy, and his relations with the Federal Reserve Board. Possessing an eye for vivid detail, Matusow sketches the administration's econmic team, from the "pedantic and slow-talking" Federal Reserve chair, Arthur F. Burns (p.20), to Treasury Secretary John B. Connally, the glib Texan who brought "glamour to a drab cabinet" (p. 87). Matusoww's book joins a shelf of recent studies, including Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered (1994) and Tom Wicker's One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream (1991), which have reas0 sessed Noxon's record in domestic affairs. Unlike Hoff and Wicker, however, Matusow finds little tp applaud in the arena of policy.
Nixon's stewardship of the economy was, Matusow asserts, a "failure" (p. 304). Determined to secure reelection at any price, the president subordinated economic policy to political strategy. The result was a landslide electoral triumph, followed by stagflation-a foul brew consistingnof one part inflation, one part unemployment, and one part "oil shock." In bungling the economy, Nixon had plenty of help from a weakly-led Federal Reserve Board, ill-informed economists, and reckless Democrats eager to jump-start a new boom through government spending.
Matusow's thesis...