Nixon: A Life. - book reviews

National Review, May 30, 1994 by Charles Colson

THIS is a book I did not want to read. Not because it's about Richard Nixon. I am a member of what was once a small cadre but is today a growing legion of unabashed Nixon admirers--as became strikingly clear after his death. In the longer perspective he will be regarded as one of the great leaders of this century for his extraordinary foreign-policy achievements. Nor was I reluctant because I was unimpressed with the author. To the contrary, over the course of several interviews I found him to be a keen journalist. Jonathan Aitken is also a rising political star as British Minister of State for Defense.

No, it's just because I've read more than one lifetime's worth of Nixon and Watergate books. In the immediate aftermath of the Great Debacle, I read everyone's books--Woodstein, Dean, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kissinger, and a score of lesser lights. All followed the same tedious formula: the author was made to appear the hero, the rest of us Nixon aides bad guys.

I can't do it again, I thought. But this book breaks the formula. It is refreshingly different.

To begin with, Nixon: A Life is a page turner, well written and fast paced. It is no small accomplishment to maintain interest when every twist of Nixon's life is so familiar. But Mr. Aitken manages to do it through lively prose and fresh insights.

More important, the book captures the Richard Nixon I knew and the history of this era better than any other book to date. Just as it took a Frenchman, Tocqueville, to explain to us our own democratic system, perhaps it has taken an Englishman to explain our democracy's greatest political convulsion.

Mr. Aitken has a distinct advantage over other biographers: an outsider's detachment coupled with an excellent nose for politics. He shows uncanny insight into the motives, manners, and intrigues of the Nixon inner circle. With one or two notable exceptions, he has all of us pegged perfectly; that includes Henry Kissinger. "Kissinger and Nixon," Mr. Aitken writes, "had a tyrannical streak which Nixon displayed toward his enemies and Kissinger toward his staff. They were each capable of towering rages and of deep reflection; of high elation and bleak depression...[but] Nixon was the humbler and kinder member of the partnership." As Mr. Aitken makes very clear, Nixon was also the real genius. Unlike most commentators, Aitken has the relationship straight: "Kissinger had a horse trader's skill in bargaining; Nixon had a horse breeder's gift for conceiving geopolitical winners."

Why didn't Nixon destroy the tapes? That is the question I'm asked most frequently. Mr. Aitken casts new light on the problem. When Alexander Haig, then Chief of Staff, and the late Fred Buzhardt, a wily South Carolina lawyer, learned the taping system would be made public, they decided the tapes had to be destroyed before they were subpoenaed. Leonard Garment, however--a one-time Nixon law partner (whose political judgment Nixon openly disdained) and now assisting in Nixon's defense--learned of the plan and threw a tantrum, threatening to publicly resign if the tapes were destroyed.

As fate would have it, Nixon was in Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from pneumonia. The debate raged at his bedside with Haig and then-Vice President Agnew urging a bonfire, Garment remaining intransigent. It is obvious that Nixon was confused, because at one point, according to Mr. Aitken, he ordered all the tapes delivered to his hospital room to be stored under the bed, which would have meant raising the bed twenty feet. Ultimately the President made the fateful decision: no bonfire, he told Haig; he might need the tapes to defend himself against his recently fired aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman.

On such bizarre moments great empires rise and fall. Whether it was because of medication, a fit of paranoia, a desire to keep an accurate history, or to placate Mr. Garment, the decision was made--and the fate of the Nixon Presidency sealed.

Aitken captures "the real Nixon" better than anyone else has done. Nixon was arguably the most formidable intellect to occupy the White House in this century. He was an avid student of philosophy and history. For pleasure he might be found reading the parliamentary debates of Edmund Burke or Plato's Republic. He knew Disraeli's life intimately, conscious of the parallels with his own.

No one on the staff was his intellectual equal. One day when I advised a particular course of action on a minor domestic issue, Nixon leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling momentarily, and said, "That's not what you advised in a memo you wrote me just about a year ago. Have you changed your mind?" Stunned, I hurried back to my office to scan my files. There it was, written 12 months earlier, exactly as he had remembered.

Contrary to the Herblockian stereotype, Nixon was kind, decent, and honorable. In the course of his painstaking research, Aitken has uncovered several revealing incidents in Nixon's past. For example, when his first business venture went sour and friends lost money, Nixon later looked them up, offering to make good their losses out of his own pocket.