Word: nixon
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Vast oceans of words have been poured between hard covers trying to document and explain Richard Nixon, perhaps the most peculiar man ever to occupy the White House. Given this tidal wave, what more could be written that is worth swimming through? The answer is Richard Reeves' new book, President Nixon: Alone in the White House (Simon & Schuster; 702 pages...
What Reeves has done is to tell the story of the Nixon presidency by focusing on key decisions and then, through a meticulous examination of logs, diaries, official memorandums and, of course, the White House tapes, reconstruct the events that both preceded and followed those decisions. The idea, he explains, is to try to re-create what it must have been like to have been President Nixon. Reeves used the same technique in writing brilliantly about John Kennedy's presidency, and what emerges from this new masterpiece of research is a distillation of Nixon and his men, making a kind...
This essential Nixon is even weirder than we might remember. He was always on the run, moving restlessly from the Oval Office to his hideaway in the nearby Executive Office Building, to Camp David, then off to Key Biscayne, then suddenly to San Clemente. He was running to avoid the very thing most politicians crave: contact with other human beings. In each place, he wrote endlessly on yellow legal pads, issuing orders (many of which were wisely ignored by his staff), commenting in the margins of memorandums, annotating news summaries, denouncing his opponents and often his friends, urging ever more...
Most pathetically, Nixon frequently penned what Reeves calls an introvert's "dialogues with himself," long lists of resolutions about what he needed to do to project himself as a person he was not. Only two weeks into his presidency he compiled three pages of self-instruction demanding that he be "Compassionate, Bold, New, Courageous," that he show "Zest for the job" and be seen as "not lonely, but awesome...
...COURT:If we didn?t have Chief Justice William Rehnquist, we wouldn?t have George W. Bush. So do we owe our current president to Watergate counsel John Dean, who championed Rehnquist?s nomination? In October, the Free Press will publish "The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court" by John Dean. According to his publisher, Dean?s book is "the explosive, never-before-revealed story of how William Rehnquist became a Supreme Court Justice, told by the man responsible for his candidacy." Author tour...