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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.