Not Enough New on Nixon

...They were all familiar with his tendency to let conversations go on around him...

...Haig's skillful management of the process is well documented...

...and apparently spilling his guts to the Washington Post's most famous reporting team in the doomed hope of making his peace with history...

...The Secretary of State's role in the final act was minimal, thus much of the material about him seems gratuitous, used simply because it was too juicy not to...

...Woods had been as willing to talk as, say, Buzhardt, there might have been a very different "real story...

...The flaw is not, as some have charged, that the authors have exposed too much about him—Presidents are fair game—but rather that they do not tell us enough...

...yet who could have done better...

...But even Buzhardt, who heard some of the Diotabelts, would not disclose their contents in any detail...

...And I think they know it...

...once said, "when I can't support the President," Fortunately for Nixon, much of the country shared the sentiment...

...Raging at secretaries, humiliating aides, obsessed with his image, contemptuous of the President, flattering the President, the most admired man in America emerges less than superhuman...

...No, the problem here isn't the truthfulness of what appears...

...Ziegler may have been privy to Nixon's "decision-making curve," but unfortunately readers of The Final Days are not...

...This chronicle is filled with tantalizing backstage detail of our most sensational political drama, bringing together aspects of the Watergate denouement only the leading players saw individually —What Even Deep Throat Didn't Know...

...The night before he resigns, Nixon tells Congressional leaders, "I have a wonderful family and a pretty good wife...

...Many are troubled by the absence of attributions...

...For although this book is primarily about Nixon —his final days, after all, are the ones that matter—he pervades its pages more than he inhabits them...

...The so-called real Nixon never did stand up...

...Does it also tell an accurate one...

...This volume represents an extraordinary research job—maybe the best possible—by Woodward and Bernstein and their two associates, Scott Armstrong and Al Kamen...

...There is omnipresent Buzhardt, "capable of developing legal justifications for almost anything," telling Nixon that "he didn't think it was his job to give moral advice—he was a lawyer...

...Near the end, Nixon summons Kissinger to the Lincoln Sitting Room and there shares his lonely anguish with him...

...On the dust jacket there is a somber photograph of Richard Nixon, his back slightly to us as it has always been, his downward look revealing nothing...

...Except perhaps once: that last morning in the East Room, wearing his eyeglasses for the first time ever in public, recalling his parents ("my mother was a saint"), tearful, naked in his anguish...

...To be sure, there are some intimate glimpses of Nixon—informing his family of the smoking pistol, praying with Henry Kissinger in the final hours—yet they are the exceptions...

...Nixon's most successful cover-up has always been of himself...

...Rose Mary Woods could see what Watergate was doing to Nixon...

...I. for one, am prepared to believe that the thrust of most everything in this book is correct...

...The result is not only that their versions of events are missing, but that they themselves are practically invisible...

...with morbid fascination...

...Kissinger, who secretly monitors all calls, signals an aide to pick up an extension...

...there seems no other way he could have hung on as long as he did in a White House seething with intrigue...

...Discussing certain tapes, Presidential Counsel Leonard Garment and Haig agreed that they were exceedingly unclear and ambiguous, "like every conversation in the Oval Office...

...Ziegler, sitting with his boss for hours at a time, was "impressed by his complexity and sensitivity," witnessed "the deterioration of his spirit," watched the President's "decision-making curve move up and down"—and apparently kept all the particulars to himself...

...He is our longest-running soap opera and a figure worthy of Shakespeare...

...More to the point, major league journalism today, for better or for worse, depends heavily on unnamed "high-level sources,' "senior officials" and the like...

...Probably we shall never find out what he thought about the flowers...

...Everyone was covering up something, and Nixon was lying to them all...

...It was the kind of place where Special Watergate Counsel J. Fred Buzhardt "was counting on [White House Chief of Staff General Alexander M.] Haig to find out the President's reaction to what [Press Secretary Ronald L.] Ziegler would secretly report to Nixon...

...Nixon had talked out of his real feelings and, oddly, he would discourse on everyday occurrences—the weather, the flowers in the White House garden, birds...

...Nixon was so private...

...Reviewed by Calvin Fentress Special assistant (on leave), Senator Charles H. Percy Nixon Nixon Nixon Nixon...

...If Ms...

...As the President's men fan "the fading embers of survival" in The Final Days, several of them come memorably into focus...

...Ron Ziegler ("the Nixon Administration's purest creation") is said to have been close to the President in those prematurely concluding White House days...

...Five days from the end and 12 hours after Nixon tells his family nothing has been resolved, Ziegler walks into Presidential Assistant Patrick Buchanan's office...

...One turns to The Final Days much as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is said to have approached the Presidential tape transcripts...

...Thirty years a star and still in the spotlight...

...Our phantom First Lady...

...Henry," says the broken man upstairs, "please don't ever tell anyone that I cried...

...More than anyone else,' note the authors...

...The decline and fall of Richard Nixon made for compelling theater two years ago, and that is no less true today...

...By contrast, the opinions, conversations and even memos of someone like David Gergen, an obscure speech writer who had minimal direct contact with the President, are cited frequently...

...Such an account clearly could not have been written without anonymous sources...

...Thirty years watching Nixon perform and we still don't know the man...

...Consequently, the resignation decision, which should be the climax of the book, is barely perceptible...

...That's probably the real Nixon," said one aide...

...I have difficulty with quoted thoughts, and I wish the authors had forgone that device...

...There is David Eisenhower, not at all the cartoon figure he seemed to many...

...Obviously some of those who saw Nixon most and knew him best weren't talking, least of all to Woodward and Bernstein...

...Clearly, The Final Days tells a very human story...

...To their credit...

...the President's own thinking is completely blurred, as is the man sometimes...

...It is that in a book purporting to tell "the real story of those final days," so much is missing...

...There is no further word, then or later, about how, when, where, or with whom the President made that choice...

...The private dialogues that flesh out the narrative infrequently include him...

...But she is essentially absent from this account, quoted only twice for a total of 13 words...

...Yet there was no grand strategy, in Garment's words, just consistently bad judgment...

...And, we are told, "even with his daughter Julie he had rarely revealed his emotions...

...Nixon did not react...

...Nixon is the main subject of their often intriguing and occasionally essential conversations, however it turns out they knew little more about him than the rest of us did...

...The perspective of a book like this one is shaped less by what actually happened than by who subsequently would talk about it...

...What I will not leave to history is a discussion of my public honor," Kissinger has declared...

...One thing was clear, Buzhardt said: The President thought he had to submerge his true feelings at any cost...

...was angry, erratic, even speculatively suicidal—in other words, he suffered hugely (as who would not...

...Sorry, too late...

...But what ultimately eludes Woodward and Bernstein's superior journalistic talents is, to use their phrase, Nixon's "private reality...

...The decisive tapes gave us a better fix on him than we ever had before, and The Final Days does not go much beyond it...

...They reveal that Nixon occasionally recorded his daily reflections ("Nixon with his defenses peeled away...

...Two pages later: "Normally, Nixon followed a conversation carefully with his eyes, back and forth, boring in on whoever was talking or being addressed...

...His marriage straining between the pull of Julie's "uncomplicated devotion'' to her father and his own conscience, he is valuably sensitive to what was required of the family at the end...

...All Woodward and Bernstein could learn was that these tapes "provided a dark, almost Dostoevs-kian journey into Nixon's fears, obsessions, hostilities, passions and inadequacies...

...The decision is to fight it through the Senate," he announces...

...he kept looking into the fire...

...Yet for all its inside scenes and 394 sources, it is no panorama...

...This was not an honorable business conducted by honorable men in an honorable way," Kissinger told his aides...

...for each conversation involving the President, the authors pass on hundreds between the likes of Haig and Buzhardt...

...That much always seemed clear about him...

...Haig wondered sometimes what Nixon did when he was alone, because he spent so many hours that way...

...That was the Nixon Buzhardt had heard on the Dictabelts," report Woodward and Bernstein...

...But they proved the last time out when challenged that they are careful reporters, and the Nixon brigade denied much of what they wrote then, too...

...Afterward, when the Secretary has returned to his office, the phone rings...

...Smiling almost all the way, keeping her nightmare of a life closely guarded, she is as shadowy in this book as she was in the White House...

...in the face of his larger-than-life catastrophe...

...Trying his hardest to see or hear no evil, torn between his loyalties to country, Commander in Chief and self, Haig followed a course in those last days that is not to be found anywhere in the Constitution...

...She had worked for him the longest and saw him daily...

...There is Haig, worrying about creating the appearance of a coup d'etat as he orchestrates Nixon's resignation, a task not even his rise from Army colonel to surrogate President in five years has prepared him for...

...Nixon's wife, his personal secretary, his best (and perhaps only) friend—loyalists to the dismal end, and beyond...

...Let's smile as if we liked each other," Pat Nixon tells Representative Rhodes at a party...

...And had Richard Nixon spoken his piece, there most definitely would have been...

...You can't imagine how miserable I feel," House Minority Leader John J. Rhodes (R.-Ariz...

...And one is not disappointed...

...I am not...

...Bebe Rebozo is another who gets the once-over-lightly treatment, despite the fact that he may have had more influence on Nixon than all the lawyers combined...

...Months at a time go by without the Chief Executive ever coming into sight...

...No wonder the Woodward-Bernstein book is a smash hit...

...It is the President...

...How quiet her desperation...

...Kissinger "had never really been consulted about resignation...

...Haig was concerned that he didn't really know the President and had never felt close to him...

...And there is Henry Kissinger...

...Buzhardt "felt the same overwhelming distance...

...His private honor may be all that history can handle...

...we're all hooked on Nixon...

...No matter...

...It's a little late to change the ground rules now...

...We do learn that as Watergate consumed him, he drank, prayed, wept...