Tricky to the End

...True, they did not get $ 1 million...

...Herbert Parmet, in a previous "revisionist" biography, found that Nixon's odious 1946 California campaign for the seat of Representative Jerry Voorhis was "indistinguishable" from that of other Republicans and eventually received general attention solely as a result of Nixon's subsequent prominence...

...Nixon's principal fear??that "the U.S...

...Many people, including me, thought so long before the Watergate scandal forced him to flee the White House...

...Still, this was not an original idea, and he himself had formerly been one of its foremost critics...

...That's the way he wanted it...

...Moynihan persuaded the President that he too could attain greatness as a conservative reformer...

...Dean quickly assented, and Nixon went on, "You'd better damn well get that done...

...Vietnam was a vastly greater challenge, and there he achieved nothing...

...military forces to UN nation-building projects unless our vital interests are involved, a test...

...instead, he treats it as a "minor" matter, largely by distorting the record...

...In foreign policy, he seems reluctant to acknowledge that certain courses, such as strongly supporting Russia's President Boris N. Yeltsin, preclude other courses, like developing close relations with Yeltsin's democratic opponents...

...Even if it had been vindicated, I find it hard to accept Aitken's confidence that the 1973 cease-fire with North Vietnam would have saved this country from defeat had Nixon remained in power...

...In the 1950 Senate race, he speciously accused his Democratic opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, of casting votes as a House member in company with the notorious pro-Soviet New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio??yet she, Aitken notes, made the same accusation against him...

...During his initial White House bid, in 1960, Nixon met his match for ruthlessness in the Kennedys, and his refusal to contest JFK's dubious triumph was both realistic and responsible...

...Could it be relevant that the Bosnian Muslims, unlike the Haitians and the Somalians, are white...

...Nevertheless, Nixon, whose early "taste for liberalism" was noted by one of his college professors, took his reforming vocation seriously...

...Perhaps so, but what sense does it then make to argue that "We should not commit U.S...

...the question is how, and by whom, they are to be governed...

...Alas, his tenth and final work, Beyond Peace (Random House, 262 pp., $23.00)??a statement of goals for the United States in the aftermath of the Cold War??is not one of them...

...The chief proposition of Beyond Peace is that "because we are the last remaining superpower, no crisis is irrelevant to our interests...

...Some were fairly interesting...

...A lot of Beyond Peace reminds me of Nixon's speeches: He continually scores points by arguing against exaggerated claims that almost no one truly makes ("The democratic revolution in Russia and its political and free-market reforms are irreversible") and attributes these debating points to vaguely defined straw men ("those who find nothing right with America...

...At bottom, he did little more than walk through an open door...

...Hanoi did not accept the deal because it had been overpowered, as Nixon and Aitken have argued...

...On the domestic side, Nixon mainly trots out a collection of Right-wing platitudes relieved by occasional appeals to "enlightened but limited government" activity and strong support for freedom of choice in abortion...

...While his rejected Family Assistance Plan, a low-level guaranteed minimum wage, was deemed insufficient by liberals, the benefits were high enough to have made a difference in rural areas, where poverty was worst...

...Was he, as Aitken claims, a strategist of genius...

...Aitken asserts that the "$1 million was never paid, and at the end of the conversation, he [Nixon] ruled out any White House payment of money to the defendants...

...neither Somalia nor Haiti satisfied...

...Nixon was fascinated...

...And how, having written those words, could Nixon implicitly demand intervention in Bosnia by insisting that "had the citizens of Sarajevo been predominantly Christian or Jewish, the civilized world would not have permitted the siege" to go on until "a Serbian shell landed in the crowded marketplace...

...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nixon's liberal domestic adviser, recognized that streak in his boss...

...When Nixon again ran for President, in 1968, he took the low road??with his polarizing "Southern strategy"??but went on to use the credit he earned among that region's whites to preside over the actual desegregation of its schools...

...In any case, there was a Watergate affair...

...About two years after Nixon came into office, Moynihan suggested that he read Robert Blake's wonderful biography of Benjamin Disraeli, another very pliable politician...

...In reality, Haiti and Somalia are ethnically homogeneous, and no one suggests that they should not be nations...

...We will always have Dick Nixon to kick around...

...Nixon believed that despite a strong taste for the rhetoric of self-reliance, Americans really want the security of the welfare state??at least insofar as it benefits them personally??and he was prepared to court both sides of this fractured political personality...

...Aitken insists the President knew nothing of the trespass at the offices of the Democratic National Committee before it occurred...

...In fact, though he had always been a partisan battering ram of the Republican Right, his Presidency was not at all conservative...

...no wonder he told Chairman Mao that "those on the Right can do what those on the Left can only talk about...

...Nixon does deserve credit for ending the isolation of Communist China and thus giving the United States sharply improved leverage in its dealings with the USSR...

...Domestic spending rose steadily and dramatically, both in dollar amounts and as a proportion of the budget...

...In a similar vein, he was somehow able to write, "The debate in the United States between Europe-firsters and Asia-firsters made little sense during the Cold War, and it makes no sense now...

...Both must come first...

...In foreign policy, Nixon's willingness to experiment is more widely accepted...

...Although Disraeli had seized control of the Tory Party as the head of its most reactionary elements, he was later responsible for a radical broadening of the franchise and the creation of Britain's social service network...

...This failed, as Aitken reminds us, but thanks to the resistance of Vernon Walters, then deputy director of the CIA, not to any hesitation on the President's part...

...It seems unlikely...

...But on the whole, Nixon: A Life is a reasonable and very readable telling of the 37th President's story from an admirer's perspective...

...Aitken fails to tell the reader that the agreement permitted 145,000 North Vietnamese troops and a larger force of Vietcong guerrillas to occupy much of South Vietnam...

...By and large I agree with the author and not Nixon's leading biographer, Stephen Ambrose, who says merely that the issue has not been resolved...

...The allegation that almost took Nixon off the 1952 Republican national ticket??his acceptance of a "slush fund" to cover political expenses??was thoroughly unfair: Such arrangements were common in those days, and Roger Morris, a Nixon biographer who resigned from the National Security Council over the 1970 invasion of Cambodia, demonstrated that his pile was managed more scrupulously than Adlai Stevenson's much larger one...

...And no dogmatic conservative would have introduced wage and price controls, as Nixon did in 1971...

...The most important evidence against Nixon??the famous "smoking gun" conversation with Bob Haldeman, his first chief of staff??revealed a plan to use the CIA to foil the FBI's Watergate investigation...

...Unfortunately, Nixon must also have admired the dark side of Disraeli, an unrelenting competitor who forced his way to "the top of the greasy pole" in the face of huge obstacles and the hostility??to some extent quite justified??of his rivals...

...on the contrary, it suspected that without direct American involvement, the Thieu regime would collapse...

...Nonetheless, it was Nixon's addiction to political scandal that made someone else consider the preposterous break-in a worthwhile undertaking??possibly, as the author is certain, John Dean, counsel to the President and the first White House official to admit involvement in the coverup...

...Had there been no Watergate affair, would Americans have consented to re-enter the fighting in 1975, when the Communists made their final push...

...Bosnia was never independent before 1992, and its statehood is contested by more than half of its population...

...In short, Aitken does not suceced in excusing the inexcusable...

...Like Attken, Richard Nixon was a politician who wrote books...

...I think not...

...But he is not the first to show that some of the charges responsible for the diabolical reading of his subject's character were exaggerated or mistaken...

...The second most serious evidence was the discussion in which Nixon and John Dean entertained the possibility of giving the Watergate burglars $ 1 million to shut up...

...Nixon did tell Dean, however, that there was "no choice" about paying Howard Hunt, one of the burglars, the $ 122,000 he was then demanding...

...It was at Nixon's behest that the Environmental Protection Agency, and a good deal of the legislation it enforces, came into being...

...Aitken cannot dispute Nixon's participation as well, for the facts are clear...

...Besides, China's bitter and occasionally violent relations with the Soviet Union made it respond eagerly to Nixon's overtures...

...would cease to be a military and diplomatic power" if we lost??has proved to be utterly false...

...The pugnacity and unfairness that inspired so many people to hate Richard Nixon so fiercely for so long??and turned him into the central character in our great national drama of Watergate??is constantly in evidence...

...In the early going, Tricky Dick lived up to his reputation as a scoundrel of the first rank primarily in his attacks on President Harry S. Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and the Democratic Party...

...Jonathan Aitken, Minister of State for Defense Procurement in the present British Conservative government and his trusted friend, seeks to persuade us otherwise in Nixon: A Life (Regnery, 633 pp., $28.00...