THE FOOL, THE ATTENDANT, THE VILLAIN:

...The shock of Watergate was precisely that it did expose a part of the machinery of the system that normally remains concealed and thus revealed the sorry condition of modern political life...

...But in fact, though Nixon was indisputably an evil person, he merely extended existing governmental and electoral practices and in all his crimes depended on the cooperation of various executives, lawyers, politicians, and establishmentarian types and on the acquiescence for the most part of the pulpit, press, and pub-lic...

...And he is probably America's greatest living master of the molasses metaphor, as in: "Stripped of power, they were what they had been in the beginning-the flotsam of politics, now left behind on the beach by the wave that had carried them so high, scavengers' trophies, their sadness gloated over by most of those who came to watch...

...Yes, villainy-for clearly the little man is hoping that such Reader's Digest ideas as these will become accepted into the popular accounts and academic textbooks of our time, achieving the stature of Received Truth...

...Power shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment, is a study of the Nixon Administration and will be pub-lished by Random House in November...

...John Osborne is a different matter, for though (as the New Republic's White House man) he was close to the Nixon court for six years, he seems to have been totally overwhelmed by it and is unable to muster any of the fool's insight or the jester's wit...

...And anyway, if they weren't so evil, do you think Nixon would have risked the cover-up...

...the White House had begun to ripple in a tight but widening vortex of internal turmoil" (neatest trick of the oceanographic week), and "he left behind two men who knew they had triggered reality" (whatever that may be...

...For example...

...He is an exact Reader's Digest rightist, a man who can argue that direct democracy is dangerous and that the Electoral College system is valuable because- now get this-it prevents elections "from degenerating into the violence that can accompany the narrow act of head-counting...

...In the end there's no mistaking the fact that for all his lightness Breslin, like an unemployed jester, is nobody's fool...

...If White were merely a Wechsler-Broder journalist, he would be just a scalawag...

...It is a dull collection of journalistic essays, insignificant to begin with and the more obvious when put between hard covers, pale, insipid froth that does not deserve to last any longer than froth normally does...

...Now this is simple nonsense, jibberish, the mewling of alleycats, and yet it has a ring of solemnity that lets it slip by as if it were a profundity...

...And that's dangerous...

...and even if it were true that such a myth existed, and Nixon broke it, then it would follow logically that America at present is no longer bound together, and that is palpably untrue...

...3. That Nixon, however much you blame him for Watergate, was a brilliant master of foreign policy...

...and he was responsible for the collapse of the American dollar through two devaluations, the decline of the European federation, the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile, and the capitulation of the West to the OPEC oil powers...

...The whole book reads the same way: pompous nonsense creating dangerous distortions...

...Things like: "nationalism is a bedrock issue . . . mined most intensively by Republicans" (when was the last time you saw people mining bedrock...

...As such, then, White wields unusual influence over the received impressions and popular understandings of contemporary history, providing both casual readers and serious students with an instant and accepted version of how American politics work...

...The terrible, frightening thing is that White is at once so muddle-headed and so simple-minded, so sentimental and so cantankerously conservative...

...Teddy White began his career by writing, with the same stunted conservatism and the same smarmy prose, about China, and he is talking these days about going back there next year to do another book...

...Breslin's fool is witty: "The Office of President is such a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy, that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit...

...2. That Watergate was the fault of a single man, with a bad upbringing and a bad staff, and revealed nothing wrong with the American system...

...Breslin as the fool has provided us with a light, good-natured, somewhat rambling tale about two fat, whisky-drinking, cigar-smoking Irish politicians -Tip O'Neill, the Massachusetts Congressman who helped engineer the House forces behind the impeachment proceedings, and Jimmy Breslin himself, who hung around watching O'Neill at work...

...White can go on and on with the creation of such distortions, but I'll spare you any more: these suffice to show his myopic vision, his foolishness, his cleverness, and his villainy...

...He is automatically on the best-seller lists and a regular with the Book-of-the-Month Club, who made this book their June selection...

...even before Nixon no adult seriously thought that Presidents were specially careful about hewing to laws except those they themselves approved...

...He is a regular contributor to Readers Digest, still the most widely read magazine in America, in whose pages much of this present book first appeared...

...The Watergate exposures, says White, "gave the American people the intolerable choice between cynically accepting an aberration in conventional political practice or dramatically repudiating the hereditary faith in their national government...

...as an Institution, however, he is nothing less than a villain...

...He is deft and glancing, offering small set-pieces, profiles in miniature, anecdotes, brief descriptions, as if writing a series of short columns-which has always been his true art-and careful enough even to avoid the actual impeachment hearings, as if that might Kirk Patrick Sale is the author of SDS...

...This man is not a fool nor a supernumerary, but a positive blackguard, a three-suited, worsted-stocking knave...

...He throws all the events of contemporary history into a bag of his own devising, jumbles them around, and miraculously picks out one falsity after another, one pernicious myth after another, and places them before us with great solemnity, as if they were truths, and proceeds to make of them a grand design that is supposed to end up looking something like a vast American flag...

...First, he is boring, boring, boring, going on and on with his little theories, back and forth with his cap-sulated histories, up and down with his inconsequential details, in and out with his pontifications about This Great Nation, around and about with Watergate events whose facts are familiar to all of us, even the slow readers...

...it is not one myth but an elaborate system of laws, markets, and corporate exploitation that binds this nation together, such as it is...

...Teddy White has become an American Institution, albeit of the Mac-Donald's rather than the Smithsonian kind...

...But those crimes were in fact monumental, including burglary, bugging, bribery, extortion, fraud, embezzlement, election rigging, and tax evasion at a bare minimum, and they were part of a massive, illegal system of government repression that had been going on at least since 1970 and was capable even of operating against one of the two major political parties...

...he was manipulated into a detente with Russia which ended up producing repeated suckerings at the SALT negotiations and a grain deal disastrous for the U.S...

...He is just there, some third-ranked Earl of Suffolk, watching everything that goes on, recording it without highlights or shadows, endlessly scribbling, and far more concerned with having "access" to this or that White House functionary than with the corruptions that man might be weaving...

...But in fact Nixon's foreign policy was a failure: he threw away millions of dollars and lives for nearly six years on a war which he was finally forced to surrender...

...And he is, true to his calling, obsequious to his liege, who is variously described as "courtly," "a lovely spring rain of a man," "effective," "trustworthy," and possessed of "the full nobility of his profession," capable even, along with the other "good guys" of the House, of taking us "to heights we as a nation never have seen before...

...flu new book...

...1. That the Watergate crimes were not so evil in themselves and Nixon's only real sin was in the cover-up...

...That would mean that White would be out of the country for the 1976 elections, and nothing would benefit the American electoral process-to say nothing of those who care for contemporary history-more than that.mporary history-more than that...

...I had begun making a list of White's distortions as I went through his book, but the list grew so long, and I so despairing, that I eventually tore it up in disgust...

...He is privy to court gossip, such as the story of how Nixon needled Kissinger during one important White House meeting on the Yom Kippur war about "a broad" that he had supposedly just been in bed with...

...Now this is not history-writing, it is fantasy-making: no such myth exists anywhere, even in the simplest civics class...

...economy...

...With Theodore White, however, we are in still a different realm...

...Thank goodness, then, that White shows at least two monumental ineptitudes...

...How the Good Guys Finally Won THE FOOL JIMMY BRESLIN THE ATTENDANT, Viking'$6-95 THE VILLAIN The Last Nixon Watch JOHN OSBORNE New Republic, $7.95 KIRKPATRICK SALE Breach of Faith THEODORE H. WHITE Atheneum, $10.95 It may be that I've had a summer of too many straw-circuit plays, but somehow these three authors keep reminding me of Shakespearean characters: Breslin the fool, Osborne the attendant lord, White the villain...

...His Making of the President books have been enormously successful-so much so, in fact, that this title, unlike any other in the history of American publishing, has now become trademarked...

...be too heavy for us all...

...It's enough to make a person gag...

...And not once in all these pages-unless I fell asleep, which is always possible-did I detect the slightest trace of humor, waggishness, drollery, or charm, not once a witticism, quip, or mot...

...In not a single one of his four previous Nixon Watch books did Osborne ever betray wit or wisdom, and those who came to admire that in this man will not be disappointed with this last entry in the series...

...Obviously the man was just as much a bumbler abroad as he was at home...

...And again: Nixon, White says, "destroyed the myth that binds American together . . . that somewhere in American life there is at least one man who stands for the law, the President...

...A man who at the age of 60 is as much in awe of the President-any President-as a six-year-old on a White House tour ("I'm always scared when I speak to a President"), a fawning, genuflective chauvinist...

...Yet with all of this Breslin is insightful, as a good Shakespearean fool should be, with more than a grain or two of truth among his chaff, intelligent and interesting about the backroom workings of Congress, the corruptions of fund-raising, the nature of lawyers, the style of Boston politics, the workings of the Judiciary Committee staff...

...Three of the most glaring of White's fabrications, however, stick in my memory, and craw, and they should be pinioned briefly...

...Horrifying as that prospect may seem to the Chinese, I fervently hope that they can see their way to offering the man an invitation...

...He can even refer to San Cle-mente as Nixon's "Elba on the Pacific," when what he really means is Saint Helena-Elba is the place that Napoleon came back from to rule France for another hundred days...

...it is a basic principle of our jurisprudence that the law stands apart from all men and there is no one who stands "for" it...

...Second, White is a genuinely bad writer, and he's getting worse the older he grows...

...He is not writing history, he is manipulating it, simplifying it, distorting it, using it-and only his skill with inflated rhetoric, his obfuscating purple bombast, lets him get away with it...

...A man who believes that "manipulation" by those television networks and interference by youthful "amateurs" are really the two decisive elements of midcentury political power, and has not a single, not even a glancing, not the merest passing, reference to the role of American corporations, their money and their lobbies and their influence, in the running of American government...

...A man who can write, with a straight face, about the "foreign menace" of Southeast Asia and the "brilliancy" of the American subjection of postwar Japan...