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Nixon was certainly a worthy target on which to vent such feelings, and while it is highly unusual to write history in terms of personal rage, Mee somehow seems to capture an underlying anger that conventional histories of the Watergate era miss. He relates a mood with an effectiveness that no objective account could offer, but with an air of authority that a straight piece of fiction or biography would not provide. It is Mee's style that makes the book a cohesive and meaningful treatment of "the wounds that Watergate inflicted on the American psyche" (as the blurb...
...Mee discharges his rage in one frenzied paragraph of violent passion in which his writing seems to be as much of a catharsis as the impeachment he writes about--"I impeached myself and exiled myself, removing myself from friends, family, and all the world, committing multiple ax murders and suicide all at the same time." And in the next paragraph Mee finally meets Haldeman, who of course turns out to be a nice guy--in fact "one of the great flat-out bores of our times...
HALDEMAN has become obsessed with all that has been written about him and the Nixon administration. When Mee meets him, Haldeman is suddenly no longer a man to be despised, a man to rage against; Haldeman is now grotesque, a man whose activity has become locked around one period in his life, when he was on hand to help twist American history. When Mee finally meets the enemy, the duplicitous villain he had expected turns out instead to be an object of pity. Watergate is an obsession for Haldeman, but Mee does not need to linger over those unpleasant details...
After his meeting with Haldeman, his mind cleared, Mee closes the book by pulling two appropriate tales from his past. One involves a happy day of love-making sometime in the late '60s--plucked out of the past to provide a relief from the tension that had been building in the book. And the last few pages relate an encounter Mee had with Arnold Toynbee, the British historian, in the early '70s. At the meeting, Mee put forth his elaborate theories about the course of Western civilization, but Toynbee apparently dozed through the tirade and didn't catch a word...
Like Toynbee, the reader probably won't remember much of the theorizing Mee lays out in his new book, but the state of mind Mee evokes is quite memorable. It is a reading of the national psyche. And if Mee ends the book with an unwarranted optimism about American democracy, one cannot fault his sense of the country's mood...