Revising the Revisionist's Revision

...His landslide 1972 re-election victory over George S. McGovern had the perverse result of bringing his worst traits to prominence...

...I came as Javits' press secretary...

...The other is the extensive diaries of the late H.R...

...Thus he, too, shows Nixon to have been an unscrupulous figure who often bungled the hand he was dealt, but who managed to plow ahead in China, Russia and even in Vietnam, when his pragmatic and opportunistic instincts came to the fore...

...As Reeves illustrates, most of the illegal activities in the White House began in 1970, after the New York Times reported that as part of the war in Vietnam, Nixon had launched a secret bombing campaign against neutral Cambodia...

...But [Nixon] could very well hold Israel's fate in his hands and it isn't wise to let him believe that all the Jewish money went to Hubert...

...For as long as he could, Nixon denied that the five Watergate burglars were in the employ of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) and operating under Mitchell's direct orders...

...Reviewed by Andrew J. Glass Senior correspondent, Cox Newspapers On the same August day in 1968 that Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague, I sat in Richard M. Nixon's sunny Manhattan living room as a political dialogue unfolded, a conversation with little relation to the plight of the Czechs...

...The misdeeds rose to a higher level in 1971, when the Times published the Pentagon Papers, detailing the Pentagon's secret history of the Vietnam War through the Johnson Administration...

...As did Melvin Small's undervalued 1999 book, The Presidency of Richard Nixon, Reeves seeks to revise the revisionist's revision of the Nixon story...

...Nor does he traffic in such fringe figures as Arnold Hutschnecker, the physician who asserted in Anthony Summers' recent study, The Arrogance of Power, that Nixon often tranquilized himself in the White House by taking shots of whiskey laced with Dilantin, an antiepileptic drug...

...It does not much matter what Nixon knew about the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex...

...Reeves places the Republican leader well to the left of any of his GOP successors in advocating, for example, a Federally guaranteed family income for every welfare recipient...

...On reaching the pinnacle of Executive power, he vainly sought to mask his contempt for the Democratic-led Congress, his own Cabinet, the Federal bureaucracy, the national press corps and, to be sure, "the Jews...

...One is the infamous Nixon tapes, now increasingly available to scholars...

...In the end, Reeves finds, "so many layers of lies were needed to protect the layers of secrecy that no one, including the President himself, knew what the truth was anymore...

...This book makes evident again that one cannot fathom Richard Nixon's Presidency without first seeking to understand the man...

...Nixon had asked New York's Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and Senator Jacob K. Javits to his Fifth Avenue apartment to discuss an issue that he felt could determine whether he or Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey would be the next President...

...Parity dictated that the Governor and the Senator bring their own aides...

...You're all for Hubert," Javits told them...

...In addition, he interviewed Nixon several times before his death in 1994, and he spoke with such insiders as Rockefeller, Mitchell, John Dean, John Ehrlichman, Leonard Garment, William Safire, and Henry Kissinger...

...For the most part Reeves relies on two primary sources...

...The 18minute erasure that expunged parts of his talk with Haldeman would most likely have placed him within the web of guilty knowledge...

...While the shameful story of his ultimately failed attempt to subvert the Constitution has been told before, retelling it at this point in time could prove useful in debunking present conservative efforts to portray Nixon as a Promethean figure—as he himself would have it...

...The President had his spokesman, Ron Ziegler, dismiss the affair as a "third-rate burglary attempt...

...Garment, Safire and Kissinger were among the few "good Jews" whom he trusted...

...In reconstructing the Nixon Presidency from its innermost core, Reeves probes the often conflicting facets of his subject's devious political mind without resorting to any tedious psychobabble...

...But Kissinger, feeding Nixon's already well-formed paranoia, baited him into authorizing a unit of "plumbers"— operatives directed to siphon political intelligence on perceived enemies and plug further news leaks...

...That wasn't what we came here to discuss," Javits replied, sensing that Nixon was merely trying to salvage some value from the failed meeting...

...If I were you, I'd be for Hubert too...

...Do we really need another Nixon book...

...a friend asked Reeves a few years ago, shortly after he embarked on this project...

...Haldeman, Nixon's de facto deputy president, parts of which he is the first to use here...

...Of course, when the crunch came, Nixon turned tail...

...On the domestic front...

...I think I can contribute something that other books haven't," he responded...

...NEO-Nixonians at libraries and foundations that venerate the memory of our 37th President will despise this book...

...When a team of plumbers broke into a psychiatrist's office looking for damaging information on Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press, Nixon, for all his "national security" arguments, trapped himself in a political sewer without an exit...

...Nevertheless, during Kissinger's initial years as his National Security Adviser, Nixon barred him from dealing in any substantive way with Middle East policy...

...A syndicated columnist whose journalism career goes back to his days as a reporter for the old New York Herald Tribune, he is the author of nine previous volumes, including President Kennedy: Profile of Power and The Reagan Detour...

...New York voters, Nixon noted, could vote for Humphrey by pulling either the Democratic or Liberal Party levers...

...That hitherto unreported Nixon fandango would have been right up Richard Reeves' alley...

...One of Nixon's more loathsome attributes, documented by Reeves, was his closet anti-Semitism...

...By the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the marginalized President could no longer keep Kissinger from becoming a key player...

...In Richard Nixon: Alone in the White House, Reeves offers a character study of a politician who detested most people, struggled to memorize all of his ostensibly spontaneous remarks, and created a "scenario" for every occasion without caring whether he dealt in truth or falsehood...

...At first blush, Nixon thought the documents could be used to embarrass the Democrats, who were then seeking to embarrass him for having failed to end the fighting...

...We can never do business with them," he added, referring to the Conservatives who, with Nixon's furtive help, would later become major players in New York's Republican ranks...

...Finally, a frustrated Nixon turned to Javits and said: "Jack, could you raise some money for me among your people...

...Following those revelations, Nixon ordered wiretaps of reporters and government employees in an unsuccessful bid to discover who had leaked the story, setting a pattern for subsequent dirty tricks...

...In any event, as Reeves amply shows, Nixon did himself in by orchestrating the subsequent cover-up— even as he told subordinates that the only way they could possibly doom themselves was by concealing the truth...

...But in due course the Presidential candidate arranged for a corporatejetto fly Javits to Burbank, California, where he helped deepen Nixon's campaign coffers amid Jewish movie moguls and real estate magnates...

...In the process he succeeds in showing us why, for all his promise, Nixon proved to be such an abysmal failure as President...

...Reeves closes his account, save for a brief Epilogue, in the spring of 1973, after it had become apparent that the Nixon Presidency would fall off the political cliff...

...Reeves, often using the President's own legal pad jottings, strives to illuminate Nixon's perverse personality...

...The last third of Reeves' book offers a clinical account of the sordid events that would almost surely have led to Nixon's impeachment by the House and removal from office by the Senate, had he not fled ahead of the posse...

...Citing memos and tapes, it demonstrates that in his White House years Nixon was a political charlatan, a financial cheat and a head case...

...Although Nixon supporters could similarly choose to back him on either the Republican or Conservative Party slates, their votes could not be summed unless the two feuding political units agreed to field a unified set of Presidential electors...

...Since Nixon invariably sought to avoid direct confrontations, he also had on hand John N. Mitchell, his then law partner and campaign honcho (and future Attorney General), to make the unity pitch...

...Dick, those bastards want to destroy us," Rockefeller said, spurning Mitchell's plea...

...It was, we all know, yet another lie...

...His finely crafted, voluminously documented new biography picks up the tale a few months later, following the close electoral outcome Nixon anticipated in that Manhattan meeting...

...In August 1972, Nixon told reporters, "No one in the White House staff, no one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident...