Good Biography on Nixon?

Can anyone recommend a good biography on President Nixon? I don't want to read the Washington Post's take on Watergate and the downfall of his presidency, nor do I want to read a sycophantic hagiography.

I'm watching Oliver Stone's 'Nixon' again, which, although I don't believe very much Stone alleges here about Watergate or Cuba or the JFK assassination, is still an excellent piece of film-making. But I'd rather read something which adheres as close as possible to the actual truth.

As for Watergate, I believe much of what's contained in Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin's excellent 'Silent Coup,' but none of that has yet to make it into the mainstream, let alone any work of the major biographies and historians (although the Atlantic Monthly recently did an article on some newly released Nixon tapes that fit in 100% with what Colodny and Gettlin allege about the Admiral Moorer spying affair). What else is out there on Watergate that treats the whole thing fairly?

I think Ambrose's 3-volume biography is well worth reading if only because he is fair-minded enough to say that he virtually despised Nixon when he began volume I but was urged by his publisher to persist, and did so. After he completed volume III, Ambrose admitted he had come to like Nixon, and that while 'living with' Nixon in the library for 6 years (Ambrose was never granted an interview by Nixon), he was never once bored. He gives Nixon 'full marks' for his foreign policy achievements on numerous occasions, and notes that all of the people he interviewed who had worked with Nixon had only praise for him, most notably perhaps, Daniel Moynihan whose praise was fullsome in declaring that Nixon had presided with calm and had guided the U.S. through what was tantamount to a 'second Civil War' during his first term. I particularly think that the Epilogue to Ambrose's Volume III is worth a look. There, Ambrose even anticipates that the importance of Watergate may well diminish as other presidents are brought to account.

Tom Wicker, in his One of Us, is another who was not predisposed to like Nixon or his policies, but he gives Nixon very high marks for his progressive domestic legislative initiatives, even discussing Nixon's legalistic, but highly effective desegration of schools in the South to Lincoln's emancipation initiative, pointing out that the attitudes of the two presidents were not dissimilar. Like Ambrose, Wicker is inclined to give Nixon (who grew up in near-poverty) credit for feeling deeply (not acting opportunistically) in respect to the more liberal initiatives that were designed to assist those with limited means (e.g. college assistance). Wicker, unlike Ambrose, seemed to believe, as did Chris Matthews in his Nixon & Kennedy that much of Nixon's paranoia was owing to a measure of abuse that would have had the same effect on most of us, to wit, Nixon was One Of US. I gravitate to writers who are openly willing to concede they are or were, if anything, anti-Nixon when he was president because, whenever they are complimentary, it is almost certain to be coin-of-the-realm praise. Perhaps Nixon's severest critic during his days in political life was Gore Vidal, and it is, therefore, interesting that Vidal should have written an oddly complimentary essay about Nixon for Esquire in 1983, long after Watergate.

In this article, which is reprinted in Vidal's United States 1952-1992, Vidal still has his fun with Nixon, but devastates one of Nixon's early pathobiographers (Fawn Brodie) -- Anthony Summers is her natural successor, if not her bastard son. Vidal describes Brodie's psychobabble as "horseshit", and at one point, declares that Nixon was the only great U.S. president during the last half of the 20th century because he brought a measure of sanity in the nuclear age and, as a bona fide cold warrior, had the political clout to do so. To the degree that the age of (nuclear) anxiety, which had existed for a full quarter century before Nixon became president, virtually ended with the arms control agreements of Nixon's first term, Vidal was making a good point. The generations who have grown up following Nixon's presidency have little cognizance of how gnawing that concern once was -- although they are now getting a small taste of what it was like from the current scares about the possible use of nuclear weapons by terrorists and rogue states.

Of course, Nixon was never sappy about disarmament. Indeed, in one of his finest and most influential best-sellers, The Real War, which was published just before Reagan's first term, he drafted a blueprint for Reagan's foreign policy, pointing out that the Soviets had reneged on much of what was intended in detente and should be called to account for it, virtually calling them an evil empire. Nonetheless, it was Nixon who put in place the sort of negotiating tools that Reagan and later Bush used to keep the lid on while the Soviet Empire collapsed. It is not said often enough that, before Nixon, there had been little meaningful negotiation, and there had been no formalized structures for negotiation between the U.S. and its Communist adversaries. My guess is that Putin, a former Communist, and a devout advocate of the ABM Treaty, is likely to be a very great Nixon admirer, perhaps viewing Nixon and his Cold War policies in much the way Dubya views Churchill's WWI policies.

This morning, I received this article by Pat Buchanan, one of Nixon's speech writers, from the Nixon Library. It may interest you:

BULLETIN FROM YORBA LINDA -- **Watergate 'Happiest Days of Big Media's Lives,' says Buchanan**

June 17, 2002

By special arrangement with Creator's Syndicate and as the media mark the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, the Nixon Library is pleased to present this column by former Nixon White House aide Pat Buchanan.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

'Twas a Famous Media Victory

With the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in hard upon us, the calls are coming in. Would this writer like to join a panel to "discuss" the Watergate break-in?

Though few under 40 can remember what it was about, our Big Media never tire of retelling their version of the story of Watergate. Why? First, because, with Nixon unknown to a new generation, they can recast the tale as a morality play in which liberals saved America.

Second, those were the happiest days of their lives. They were on a permanent high, for they were, at long last, wreaking delicious revenge on the man -- "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy excepted -- they hated more than any other. One liberal triumphantly titled his book of the era, "When the Good Guys Finally Won." What a howler.

Why did they hate Nixon so? Why do they hate him still? What motivated the Nixon-haters in politics and press to so revile him? Born poor, with an older and younger brother dying before they were 18, Nixon's story was classic Horatio Alger. He excelled at school, worked in his dad's grocery, served his country honorably in World War II, came home to run for Congress and was elected with fellow vet John F. Kennedy. But unlike his playboy friend, Nixon took Congress seriously. In his first term, he vaulted to national fame by exposing as a traitor, spy and agent of Joe Stalin inside the Truman-FDR inner circle the Golden Boy of Liberalism, Alger Hiss.

In the Truman era, Americans were angrily demanding answers. Twelve million Americans had fought World War II to victory, but Stalin seemed the big winner. Ten Christian countries of Eastern Europe had been ceded over to the Great Terrorist by Churchill and FDR at Yalta. The most populous nation on earth, China, for which we had gone to war, had fallen to the murderous madman Mao Tse-tung. From Indochina to Korea to Czechoslovakia, communism was ascendant.

What Nixon provided was hard evidence that the suspicions of American patriots were justified. FDR's regime had indeed been honeycombed with Stalin's spies and homegrown Red traitors. Nixon had exposed the best and brightest of the New Dealers as dupes. They would never forgive him.

In 1948, both parties nominated Nixon for a second term in the House. Not only did Jack Kennedy agree with Nixon, castigating FDR and Secretary of State George Marshall for the loss of China, JFK's father sent a check to Nixon's 1950 Senate campaign. Nixon won a massive landslide over Helen Gahagan Douglas, after Mrs. Douglas had been carved up as a naive fellow traveler in her Democratic primary.

The Left seethed with resentment. For now, Nixon -- the most effective anti-Communist of his era, the Bayonet of the Republican Party in the triumphant 1952 campaign against feckless liberal egghead Adlai Stevenson -- had captured the vice presidency at 39 years of age.

When the liberal New York Post launched a smear to drive Nixon off the Eisenhower ticket -- accusing him of having a "secret" slush fund -- Nixon's televised counter-attack, the famous "Checkers speech," not only solidified his position but made him the first Republican politician in decades with broad appeal across Middle America.

In the 1960 campaign, the national press corps went into the tank for Kennedy, covering up a lifestyle that made Clinton look like a Trappist monk. And though there is hard evidence the 1960 election was stolen in Chicago and Texas, the press was delighted at Nixon's defeat.

In 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis blacked out Nixon's surging campaign for governor of California and he denounced the media at his "last press conference," the Establishment exultantly declared him dead.

But after the Goldwater rout of 1964, Richard Nixon began the greatest comeback in American history. He led the GOP to a 47-seat gain in the House in 1966 and, two years later, to victory over the great liberal Democrat Hubert Humphrey.

Then, with both Houses of Congress, the bureaucracy, Big Media, and the cultural and academic elites viscerally opposed, Nixon, by 1972, seemed to have achieved his greatest coup: A U.S. victory in Vietnam. He and Spiro Agnew were rewarded with the greatest popular landslide in history, carrying 49 states against another champion of liberalism, George McGovern. But by now, Nixon had stumbled.

Instead of throwing his old friend John Mitchell to the wolves when Mitchell's aides got caught filching papers from the Democratic National Committee, Nixon let White House aides attempt to contain the scandal.

Like FDR, JFK and LBJ, he crossed the line. But where they had been protected by Democratic Congresses and their media allies, Congress and the media seized on Watergate and colluded to destroy a president who had defeated them and taken the country completely away from them.

After 18 months of relentless attack, with his Great Silent Majority shrunk to 25 percent of the country, Nixon had to resign. To crown the Left's victory, Vietnam, cut off by the same vindictive Congress from the means to defend itself, fell to Asian communism, as did the poor Cambodians.

Congress then proceeded to gut the FBI and CIA, for which we are paying so heavily today. And that, children, is the story of Watergate you will not hear. I know, because I was there.

Buchanan's comment about Nixon's unwillingness to toss Mitchell to the press lions is important, but in my opinion, an over-simplification. Nixon's main problem, amply supported by the evidence of the White House Tapes, was that Mitchell, although he almost certainly did authorize the Watergate breakin, would never admit that he had done so. Indeed, Mitchell went to his grave still denying that he had authorized the breakin. Under those circumstances, I don't know what Nixon could have done.

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