The Final Days
Bakshian, Aram Jr.
Book Review/Aram Bakshian, Jr. Twilight in August Great has been the storm over Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein's latest public offering. Washington hack writers who have long ground out the same...
...the dwindling but still vocal band of Nixon loyalists and former White House hands are not at all happy about the overall impression left by the book...
...Washington hack writers who have long ground out the same sort of rot for considerably less pay call it a disgrace...
...In the case of cracking Watergate, the end result was a real story—a case based on facts...
...And the drama they describe, the veritable siege of the White House, has more than enough built-in color and momentum to sweep most readers from page 1 to page 476 without many yawns...
...In Washington the distinction has long been blurred by the tendency of second- and third-echelon flunkies and would-be celebrities to gossip about themselves in the usually vain hope that somebody—anybody—will find them interesting enough to quote and write about...
...But then it is always the thoroughly lost cause that most engages our feelings, even in as shabby a business as Watergate was for both soiled defenders and hypocritical attackers...
...I do not think, for example, that Pat Nixon deserves to be, by implication, labeled as a lush because one or two (continued on page 39) The Alternative: An American Spectator August/ September 1976 33 THE FINAL DAYS (continued from page 33) domestics on one or two occasions claim they saw her pour herself a glass of bourbon...
...rather monstrous—insecure, vicious, and a pathological liar on the basis of his friendly witnesses...
...you can crow, mourn, or rage about the outcome to your heart's content, but the battle will never be fought again—except on paper or in your own imagination...
...Nixon himself remains what he has always been —an enigmatic blend of conflicting qualities, as much a mystery to his friends as to his foes...
...As one who lived through the siege from the inside, I noticed many small mistakes in the text but few large ones, and I actually found myself more emotionally caught up in the events in retrospect than I had been at the time...
...In trying to reconstruct the mood and flow of the Nixon Administration's Gatterddmmerung the range and nature of the testimony has changed...
...Those of you who remember the team's detective work in covering Watergate will recall that much of its material came from dozens of frightened accountants, dim-witted grand jurors, fuddled secretaries, self-aggrandizing junior counsels, and middle- to low-ranking Administration aides...
...General Haig, to me The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein Simon & Schuster $10.95 the most sympathetic of the major figures (I have never worked with a fairer man or one better at keeping his cool even while appearing to blow it), emerges as benevolent in an inscrutable sort of way...
...This is especially true when W & B are putting together a story...
...But, having said all this, I have to conclude with grudging praise for The Final Days...
...The results are sometimes surprising...
...and, occasionally, much more rewarding...
...and, finally and most understandably, serious critics question the quality of the writing and the basic method by which the book was assembled—a method that considerably predates The Final Days but may have been reduced, in the crude hands of W & B, to the last straw in gossip-mongering...
...worked in the 1Vhite House during Nixon 's final days...
...It is more a matter of atmospherics, and, added to underlings covering themselves or seeking a little positive limelight, one is treated to a series of thinly-disguised leaks from very senior Administration officials—mostly falling over each other to show (either directly or through the mouths of their subordinates) that they were the sole beacons of decency and reason during the last days of Pompeii on the Potomac...
...it is downright onanism, but it is as common to Washington as bestiality is to certain remote rural districts...
...The only people I found myself really feeling sorry for were the members of the First Family, about whom every nasty little hint and malicious backstairs glimpse that could be gleaned has been deployed...
...deep-dyed Nixon haters who cannot bear the idea of their arch-villian or his acolytes seeming human or sympathetic for even a moment roil with indignation over the occasional compassionate scene...
...Lost causes, after all, are settled...
...Henry Kissinger, for instance despite the best efforts of his brigade GE leaking toadies, comes out looking and acting Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...The late Ogden Nash once divided the human race into two categories—gossipers and gossipees...
...It is worse than incest...
...Woodward and Bernstein possess little in the way of narrative skill or stylistic flair, but they were assisted by a first-rate research team (part of which I had the opportunity to observe in action) and by excellent professional editing at Simon and Schuster...
Vol. 9 • August 1976 • No. 10
