Leaders

...And scattered throughout the text are turns of phrase that our most accomplished stylists would be proud to have devised...

...And it is these that make his sketches so valuable: candid snapshots of leaders at work and play, with Mr...

...But needless to say, several reviewers have totally misread it, dismissing the author's reflections on leadership as empty posturing...

...Does this make them invalid...

...The obvious truth is that Mr...

...Nixon was peculiarly ineffective as President...

...On the contrary, I should think...

...Nixon.' Throughout his entire public career his watchful second nature, his demon, his Doppelganger, has stuck implacably to his side, -never giving him a moment's rest, at least in public, from its merciless running commentary on his every word and gesture...

...The American people allowed him to be driven from office by a rabble...

...The former President has developed a clean, straightforward style, generally avoiding rhetoric and occasionally achieving eloquence...

...What in fact he does is rely on the best available biographies of each of his subjects in order to provide the general reader with just enough life-and-times information to enable us to put his own observations into perspective...

...Nixon's success as a portraitist that he manages in each case to give the devils their due...

...In addition to its other considerable virtues the book is well written...

...It is a kind of ferocious irony that the men he has now written about in Leaders saw so much more of that in him than did the American people to whom this outstanding book is addressed...

...Some of the book's more fatuous reviewers complained about the former-as if Mr...

...Others among the West's recent leaders may.be his intellectual peers, but it is doubtful that any, save possibly Helmut Schmidt, have a quality of mind that is at once so broadly reflective and icily analytic...

...They include, in addition to the admirable chapter on de Gaulle, lengthy studies of Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur, Shigeru Yoshida, Kon-rad Adenauer, Nikita Khrushchev, and Chou En-Lai...

...So Mr...

...And one senses, too, the effort it cost him to restrain his impatience with Pandit Nehru and his daughter Mrs...

...Theodore Roosevelt, a skilled and prolific author before he became President, continued to write until his death in 1919...

...Who, after all, knows better than Richard Nixon the penalty of ignoring them...

...And now he has written a book in which on every page-sometimes consciously, sometimes perhaps not-he not only describes and evaluates a contemporary but measures himself against a pitiless ideal...

...For example, his admiration, bordering on reverence, for the late Charles de Gaulle tells us as much as anything could about what humanly attainable standards of leadership the author himself aspired to-strikingly and revealingly different from those of his three successors in the Oval Office...

...And on the needless suffering imposed on Third World peoples by their flamboyant leaders he notes that "too many people have gone to bed with their ears full but their stomachs empty...

...Nixon's seasoned judgments on their characters and motives...

...The Nixon reflections on leadership thus have the double-domed authority of success as well as failure...

...Nixon might want to include in his next book...

...Nixon is at least as well aware as his critics of the respects in which his own conduct in office failed to meet the standards set forth so thoughtfully in Leaders...

...Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, and Carter all wrote lengthy accounts of their presidential terms and Nixon and Ford wrote full-scale autobiographies...

...Nixon knew them all...

...Those of us who have had to live with our own far less vigilant demons know what agonies they can cause-all too often unmerited...

...Who has -earned at greater cost the right to distinguish between effective and ineffective action on the part of a national leader...

...In each case, the account consists of a combination of standard biographical material and the author's own personal observations and character analysis...

...It is a measure of Mr...

...Nixon's books, published late last year, is entitled Leaders, and the dust jacket accurately describes it as "profiles and reminiscences of men who have shaped the modern world...

...Nixon says: "Unity is sometimes more important to the unifiers than to the unified...

...It is a stunning and unnerving performance...

...LEADERS Richard Nixon / Warner Books / $17.50 Karl O'Lessker What are Presidents to do after they leave office...

...It is hard to know whether so grossly inaccurate a reading owes more to malice or stupidity, though both are surely involved...

...Gandhi...

...Save for the ghastly misadventure of Watergate- which the French rightly perceived from beginning to end as a crazily overblown tempest in a teapot, elevated to the status of high tragedy by a rabble of Nixon-haters in Congress, the bureaucracy, and the media-save for that, the Nixon presidency would certainly have been counted a historic success: all the more so had we been able to envision what would then have been "the road not taken"-a road which, in the catastrophic wake of Mr...

...This is by no means to say that Mr...

...Nixon should have buried himself in the archives of a dozen nations in order to meet some bibliographical standard appropriate to a Ph.D...

...It is an extraordinary cast of characters and Mr...

...And it is worth pointing out to that particular subset of Nixon haters who used to accuse him of suffering from a kind of Gaullist folie des grandeurs that one can (and indeed should) aspire to an ideal without in the least imagining oneself to be the ideal...

...And there are shorter but no less incisive sketches of China's Mao and Russia's Brezhnev, Nasser and Sadat of Egypt, Ben-Gurion and Meir of Israel, Nehru and Indira Gandhi of India, Italy's de Gasperi, Ghana's Nkrumah, Indonesia's Sukarno, the Philippines' Mag-saysay, Singapore's Lee, Australia's Menzies, the Shah of Iran, and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia...

...Most of them are men whom he admired, but he is equally perceptive about those with whom he disagreed and even disliked: Khrushchev above all, but also Nkrumah and Sukarno...

...He is as candid and as coolly analytical about their strengths as about their weaknesses...

...It is in many ways his best book (though my personal favorite remains the Memoirs), not only because of what it tells us about his subjects but because of what it tells us about himself...

...William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover, to both of whom writing was as natural as posing before a television camera is to today's politicians, produced important works throughout their retirement years...

...The most recent of Mr...

...Nixon throughout his long public career didn't let us see more of this essential core of himself...

...Two examples: Of Nehru's zeal to create a united India out of that immensely diverse subcontinent, Mr...

...Might there not be one additional precept of leadership to be drawn from this melancholy contrast that Mr...

...One can only regret- and "regret" is too mild a word- that Mr...

...Nixon's resignation, has led to the enslavement, death, or exile of tens of millions of people...

...dissertation...

...No American President, I think, has been more self-conscious about his role as world and national leader than Mr...

...But of this post-World War II group, only Richard Nixon has taken on authorship as a vocation: three books in print and a fourth soon to follow...

...For a period of less than nine years, that's a record that would put most aspiring professors to shame...

...Most of Leaders is given over to those "profiles and reminiscences" promised on the dust jacket...

...But their deeper interest for many readers will lie in what they tell us about the self-image of this most complex and controversial political figure of to our time...

...The world's leaders almost without exception accorded him immense and well-deserved respect...

...Nixon has been nothing if not self-aware...

...By any standard, then, this is a remarkable and rewarding book, not least because only Richard Nixon could have written it...