RICHARD NIXON: 1913-1994 : The Book on Nixon: No Biographer Has Had the Last Word

When Richard Nixon decided to have a secret recording system installed in the White House, he figured the tapes of important meetings would prove invaluable in preparing books he might write after leaving office.

“From the beginning,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “I had decided that my Administration would be the best chronicled in history.”

But the now-infamous tapes, which helped lead to his downfall, wound up providing more of a presidential chronicle than he bargained for.

The man one historian describes as being “heroic, admiring and inspiring while simultaneously being dishonorable, despicable and a horrible example,” ranks as the third most-written-about American President--behind Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

From Theodore H. White’s “The Making of the President, 1960” to Roger Morris’ “The Rise of an American Politician” to Stephen E. Ambrose’s three-volume biography, “Nixon,” the 37th President of the United States has been the subject of scores of biographies and historical volumes.

USC political science professor William Lammers says there are about 120 books on Nixon and his political life in the university library alone.

But while Nixon’s role in opening relations with China, detente with the Soviet Union and ending the Vietnam War assured his place in history, it is the drama of Watergate and his subsequent resignation to avoid impeachment that opened the floodgates on Nixon books.

Says former CBS diplomatic correspondent Marvin Kalb, who covered Nixon and is now director of a press-politics center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University:

“All Presidents generate biographies--even Herbert Hoover. But Nixon’s capacity to generate copy . . . relates primarily to Watergate and then . . . to a number of diplomatic initiatives toward China and Russia.”

Ambrose, Lammers, Kalb and several other historians and political scientists recommend the following books for those who want to learn more about Richard Nixon:

The Memoirs

Start with the Nixon memoirs, suggests Ambrose, referring to “RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), the 1,120-page opus Nixon wrote while in exile in San Clemente. “It absolutely is the place to start . . . and he makes the best case for himself that can be made in regard to the Watergate. Nixon, of course, basically claims innocence.”

In a book Nixon wrote 12 years later, “In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat and Renewal” (Simon and Schuster, 1990), Ambrose said Nixon also claimed he had nothing to do with any payoffs to the Watergate burglars.

“I point out in my third volume that . . . (in) the tape of his meeting with (White House counsel) John Dean, Nixon orders Dean to see to it that the money--$160,000--would be gotten to the burglars as hush money and it be done by the morning, and it was. He (Nixon) just lies. . .”

Watergate Titles

Other Watergate titles include Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men” (Simon and Schuster, 1974) and “The Final Days” (Simon and Schuster, 1976), “Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon” by Theodore H. White (Atheneum, 1975), and “Silent Coup: The Removal of a President” by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin (St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

Many of the key Watergate figures also wrote books: H. R. Haldeman’s “The Ends of Power” (Hall, 1978), John Dean’s “Blind Ambition” (Simon and Schuster, 1976), John Ehrlichman’s “Witness to Power” (Simon and Schuster, 1982).

Recommendations

Lammers: “One of Us” by Tom Wicker (Random House, 1991): “It represents, to some extent, a more favorable view of Nixon than you would have expected, given Wicker’s long history of supporting generally Democratic causes.”

“The Nixon Presidency: Power and Politics in Turbulent Times” (Greenwood Press, 1990): “a fairly scholarly book by Michael Genovese. It’s substantially about (Nixon’s) time in power and not so much his early political career.”

Kalb: “Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician” by Roger Morris (Holt, 1990): “It’s an excellent book--the richness of detail and of scholarship; it’s just beautifully written. And in class I still go back to ‘The Final Days.’ I think that is about as good a book as you can get written in the heat of the moment and (on) a subject like Watergate.”

James Schmidt, professor of political science and sociology at Boston University: “Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man” by Garry Wills (Houghton Mifflin, 1969): “It’s still the one to read, as it were. It’s not a scholarly biography like Ambrose’s volumes, but it attempts to talk about Nixon in the context of American liberalism, and he uses Nixon to talk about the tensions in America as a liberal society.”

Jonathan Schell’s “The Time of Illusion” (Vintage, 1975): “It does the best job of tying together the Watergate period with the secret war in Vietnam.”

Joan Hoff-Wilson, a professor of history at Indiana University: “Richard Nixon and His America” by Herbert Parmet (Little Brown, 1990) and Wicker’s “One of Us”:

“Both of these books . . . attempt to place his life and career within the context of American culture by showing he was a normal American and not the aberration that Watergate made many people think he was.”

“Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years” by J. Anthony Lukas (Viking Press, 1976): “An early good study of Watergate. That’s the best account of Watergate that exists, contrary to the fact that everybody cites Woodward and Bernstein. Lukas is a superb example of investigative reporting done at the time.”

*

More books will undoubtedly be written about Nixon.

Kalb, in fact, just turned in the manuscript for his own Nixon book, “The Nixon Memo.” The book, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in October, was prompted by a 1992 “private” memo Nixon circulated in Washington criticizing what he termed then-President George Bush’s “penny ante” approach to sending financial aid to Russia.

Kalb says Nixon sent the memo, knowing it “would galvanize the press to apply pressure on the government” to affect U.S. public policy regarding Russian aid.

Another book is due out from Basic Books in May. “Nixon Reconsidered” by Hoff-Wilson, who says that “unlike all the other books about him, and unlike these eulogies we’re currently hearing, his foreign policy turned out to be much weaker than conventional wisdom suggests.”

Even Nixon will have his 10th volume published posthumously next month. In “Beyond Peace” (Random House), he analyzes America’s “urgent foreign and domestic issues” and offers his proposal for “the renewal of our national purpose.”