Word: nixons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bestseller lists and stayed there. (Dial Press has 115,000 copies in print and plans to publish 10,000 more.) The reason seems to be that Lasky tells readers something that quite a few of them want to hear: that abuse of presidential power did not start with Richard Nixon. No responsible authority, of course, ever claimed that it did. But, not content to refute a charge that no one has made, Lasky goes much further. He claims in effect that F.D.R., J.F.K. and L.B.J. all were much bigger crooks than Nixon. They were not portrayed in the press...
...Lasky's book has any value, it is in raising a number of serious and worthwhile questions: To what extent did past Presidents overreach their authority? Were their violations in any way comparable to the excesses of Nixon? Did much of the U.S. press judge Nixon by a tougher standard than it had applied to his predecessors...
...book is getting attention, nonetheless, because Lasky is correct in some of his major contentions. However, it is deplored by many students of the presidency because it gives major emphasis to minor episodes of wrongdoing, repeats unproved charges without offering fresh evidence and, in the end, lets Nixon almost totally off the hook...
...enmeshed in Viet Nam involved serious deception of the American people by their Government, most notably under Johnson. Ironically, much of the deception that Lasky deplores was detailed in the Pentagon papers; yet Lasky considers publication of the documents such a serious breach of security that, in his view, Nixon had every right to unleash his plumbers against Daniel Ellsberg. Typically, Lasky dwells at length on the well-publicized assassination attempts against Castro while Kennedy was President, but he notes only in a phrase that the CIA's deal with two Mafia figures to rub out Castro was struck...
...Unproved Charges In addition to magnifying the minuscule, Lasky reports as undisputable fact many old charges that have never been proved: that Johnson stole a Senate primary ejection in Texas in 1948; that J.F.K. defeated Nixon in 1960 only because votes were stolen with his approval in Illinois and Texas; that Harry Truman won a 1934 Senate primary election in Missouri on votes fraudulently delivered by the Prendergast machine...