Word: nixons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...essence of Nixon existed those days on television, the medium that after first failure he learned to manipulate so well. He used it in a way no president has matched, "taking his case to the American people" with an earnest, dogged persistence and Jack Webb-like reliance on purported facts that Jimmy Carter can only suggest. Whether it was an economic program, a war policy, or a foreign affairs development that led the news, Nixon could be counted on to hit the living rooms of Peoria himself, thus skirting the biased, liberal, effete snobs of the eastern Establishment press...
Perhaps that is why the excerpts of Nixon's memoirs are so thoroughly and predictably disappointing. In a dull, clipped prose more reminiscent of Jerry Ford speaking off-the-cuff than his own roiling Pat Buchanan-William Safire speeches or football-fuck-em vernacular, nothing of the real Nixon emerges. The weird intensity, the paranoid desperation of the man who believed he always knew the right answer, and alone could act upon it, is gone. Instead, we are given a shallow, simplistic portrait of events, with the personality of the Great Vindictor sucked clean out of them. By contrast...
...EXAMPLE, there is nothing revealing in the excerpt about Watergate. It is just a lame construction of already published events in such a way as to absolve Nixon of sinister motives and serious criminal intent. He explains his involvement as passive and oddly disinterested, claiming to have known nothing of the planning and little of the extent of the coverup. He quotes his diary to show he was relaxing on Bob Abplanalp's island on a date by which both Bob Haldeman and Charles Colson have testified they had notified him of events. The tone is set for a revision...
...almost as if Nixon were trying to "normalize" the days of his presidency, make them more plausible, ordinary. The famous on-your-knees-Henry episode of prayer in The Final Days is thus described as a calm last instance of a regular personal ritual with religious and family significance. It may have been. Kissinger's reaction is not recorded...
...another excerpt, Nixon trivializes his trip to China by revealing--as you always suspected--that great heads of state meeting at the summit sound more like Floyd the barber and Andy Griffith than men of destiny deciding the course of the world. Nixon, Kissinger, Mao and Chou discuss Mao's health; Mao claims he likes rightists and makes other jokes; all agree that talking is a good thing; Chou looks at his watch. Nixon reveals that Chou was capable of sitting through long meetings in Chinese without falling asleep. These glimpses of power are fascinating, but present a pattern...