Book-a-Day Review: Fan in Chief

Fan in Chief: Richard Nixon and American Sports, 1969-1974, by Nicholas Evan Sarantakes (University Press of Kansas, 2018)

Say what you will about him, but there’s no denying that Richard Nixon was a rabid sports fan. During baseball’s centennial year of 1969, he attended ceremonies and events surrounding the All-Star game in in Washington D.C. (rather than Cincinnati) where he offered met with current and former players and a list of his all-time favorites across several categories. It must have been the highlight of his fandom. He loved attending games and chatting, quite knowledgeably, about the national pastime.

Nixon was perhaps the first chief executive to call a team’s clubhouse after a championship game and frequently offered advice — welcome or not — to various coaches, executives, and players, some of whom were flabbergasted by the attention.

Sarantakes, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College, presents an admirably researched profile of one of Nixon’s more accessible sides in Fan in Chief. Full disclosure: I pretty much skipped over the non-baseball elements of the book; so sue me. My opinion stands, however, that this is an interesting and most unusual look into the man associated with malfeasance in office, issues that have made a comeback of sorts in our current political climate.

Numerous photos show Nixon with such baseball. legends as Casey Stengel, Carl Yazstremski, Bowie Kuhn, as well as throwing out a ceremonial first pitch (not a great look). He was especially pleased when the Washington Senators hired Ted Williams as their manager; the book cover shows a beaming president holding forth with Williams and New York Yankees skipper Ralph Houk. Williams — who had said years earlier that he had no desire to pilot a team — turned the Senators into winners, guiding them to a fourth-place finish in the newly-established divisional play system and earning AL Manager of the Year kudos. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there. The ‘Nats grew progressively worse under Williams’ tenure, eventually finishing with a record of 54-100 when the team relocated to Texas, no doubt breaking Nixon’s heart. Even as his troubles grew in his second term, sports served as a way to humanize him with the public and, perhaps, as some small escape from the realities of his crisis.

The book contains several indexes, including Nixon’s “Historic Baseball All-Star Selections” in 1972 and 1992, as well as an interesting “Nixon and Sports Time Line.”