The High Cost of Watergate

...Ambrose says he loved writing this book...

...Perhaps it would have failed, but the fact remains that a potential settlement of the Middle East problem could be torpedoed by Kissinger because Watergate kept Nixon from doing his job...

...Kissinger, who wanted only a simple cease-fire, was furious...

...This will be resisted by liberals who still refuse to give Nixon credit for anything, and by conservatives who never felt he was one of them and have a vested interest in representing the Reagan years as America's finest...

...We lost more than we gained when Nixon resigned, Ambrose finds...

...The tapes were important to his strategy, not because they enabled Nixon to keep track of who knew what and what he had said to whom ??”a major concern, for he was weaving an intricate web of deceit...

...The choicest idea of his first term, the Family Assistance Program, was sabotaged by Congressional Democrats to prevent Republicans from getting credit for reforming the welfare system...

...When the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace was dedicated on July 19, 1990, everyone showed up...

...But Ambrose regrets that much of Nixon's foreign policy and the last hopes for domestic reform went with him...

...Another decade of arms races and superpower competitions passed before relations with the Soviet Union improved...

...In volume one Ambrose described Nixon's rapid rise from small-town lawyer to the Vice Presidency, his narrow loss to John F. Kennedy, and then his humiliating defeat by Edmund G. "Pat" Brown for the governorship of California in 1962...

...Haig replied angrily that he had problems of his own and could not worry about the Secretary's...

...Ruin and Recovery is biography at its best, a fabulous story told with great zest and drive, as fair to its subject as it can be, yet strongly opinionated...

...the third widest margin in history...

...Except for expanding some Great Society programs, Nixon did not accomplish much at home...

...No matter, Ambrose is right...

...The principal lie concerned the role he played in the illegal wiretapping of reporters' and National Security Council staff members' telephones between 1969 and 1971...

...Nixon had not been interested when Brezhnev initially brought up the idea, but the Yom Kippur War persuaded him that a long-term solution had to be imposed upon the participants...

...With his usual doggedness he worked hard to rehabilitate himself, continuing to meet with world leaders and to write books...

...Part of that cost was blowing an outside chance to end the Arab-Israeli struggle...

...That would have finished any other politician, and at the time everyone except Nixon believed he was through...

...Aghast at the thought of losing the only senior member of Nixon's government who still commanded respect, the media did not call his bluff...

...but mistakenly "chose to try to save all by risking all...

...most obviously by burning the tapes...

...Nixon, however, wasburied by then in a tangle of lies and coverups that confused even him...

...author, "American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960" The first line of Stephen E. Ambrose's smashing conclusion to his biography of Richard M. Nixon says it all: "This is the political story of the century...

...On June 4, 1973, after listening to hours of recorded conversation between himself and White House Counsel John Dean, Nixon told Chief Adviser H. R. Haldeman that the tapes established his innocence...

...Everyone remembers the disgraced President's big strokes: d?©tente with the Soviets, the strategic arms limitation talks, the opening to China...

...As this suggests, Ambrose is not a Kissinger fan...

...Thus he considered using edited versions of the tapes on his own behalf, since they contained exculpatory remarks he had made for that very purpose...

...Yet Nixon derived no pleasure from his triumph because the Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress and he knew they were out to get him...

...Readers will love it too...

...He remains as mendacious as ever, as self-serving and as self-righteous, but he is in the game again ??”forever it appears...

...Almost everything is worse now than when Nixon was President, not solely because he left office too soon, yet that is part of the reason...

...but because he thought that they would be his salvation...

...This will astonish anyone who heard Dean's testimony before Congress, which amounted to a damning indictment of the President and was supported by the tapes...

...Even so, he concludes that Nixon was unfit to govern, and that he would have been impeached had he not resigned...

...The tight focus helps, for it is easy to get lost in the telling of the huge and complex Watergate saga...

...It instructed the Secretary of State to accept an informal offer made by Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev prior to the outbreak of fighting to cooperate with the United States in a superpower resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict...

...The cable, Ambrose says, showed the President at the top of his form and offered the first real hope for a lasting peace in the Middle East...

...He called Alexander M. Haig, the new White House Chief of Staff, to rail against Nixon's change of course...

...Because the new turn in foreign policy was so personal, it depended on Nixon staying in of fice...

...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of History, Rutgers...

...Ambrose relates as much of the story as he needs to, always keeping Nixon at the center...

...Moreover, as Ambrose points out, he was convinced that if he handled the public relations side o f a problem well he had solved the problem itself...

...Sarcastically Kissinger asked what kind of trouble could there be in Washington on a Saturday night...

...Whether or not he would have gotten any of these through Congress, he meant to try, which is more than his successors have done...

...The last third of volume three describes Nixon's climb back from oblivion...

...After he left d?©tente collapsed and SALT II was never ratified...

...They would succeed, too, as a result of the crimes and deceptions that we know collectively as Watergate, though not until Nixon had put up a tremendous fight...

...the three other living Presidents, four secretaries of state, Bob Hope, and Barbara Walters...

...Two thirds of Ruin and Recovery's 597 pages of text concerns that fight, and, while many books have already been written about Nixon's fall, none is so absorbing...

...In his second term Nixon tossed out various proposals, including an expanded student loan program, health insurance for all Americans, energy independence, and mass transit improvements...

...Richardson, and his deputy William Ruckelshaus, the President sent a long cablegram to Henry Kissinger in Moscow...

...Although Watergate turned out well in that the guilty paid for their crimes, the cost was high...

...Despite his active participation in the scheme, Kissinger blew up when newspapers began reporting the story in June 1974...

...Indeed, he represents the Secretary as the one successful liar in Nixon's official family...

...On the morning of October 20, 1973, during the Yom Kippur War and just hours before the Saturday Night Massacre of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, Attorney General ElliotL...

...It also helps that the author is a seasoned interviewer and mines the infamous Nixon tapes with skills gained from long experience as an oral as well as a document historian...

...Haig then told him of the impending confrontation between the President and the Justice Department...

...Ambrose thinks Nixon could have held on to the Presidency in any number of ways...

...Of the scholars who have subjected Nixonto critical study, andfewhaveexamined him in any other way, Ambrose is the fairest...

...But no sooner was his "final" press conference at an end than he began planning his future...

...Kissinger realized at once that Nixon would be too busy to follow through on the superpower initiative so he could safely ignore it...

...In volume two Ambrose showed how over the next few years Nixon positioned himself to become the inevitable GOP candidate for President in 1968, how he narrowly scraped by that year, and how he went on to win re-election with 60.7 per cent of the vote in 1972...

...With Nixon's departure the Republican middle ground collapsed: The GOP fell into conservative hands, Ronald Reagan became President, spending for armaments surged upward, domestic programs were slashed, the income tax was reduced, and a mountain of debt accumulated that has paralyzed government...

...He went so far as to hold a special press conference to falsely proclaim his innocence, and he threatened to resign if people did not stop questioning his honor...

...And without him to protect it revenue sharing died, a major reason why so many cities and states are in financial distress today...

...He is an elder statesman no w, a venerable presence at official occasions and a pompous font of obsolete wisdom on foreign policy issues...

...all, as Ambrose said in volume two, uniquely Nixonian...