William Safire was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon from 1968 to
1973. During that time, as a Washington insider, Safire was able to
observe the thirty-seventh president in his entirety: as noble and
mean-spirited; as good and bad; as a man desirous of greatness.
Rarely has there been a White House memoir more intimate or
revealing in its exploration of the great events that took place
"before the fall" of Watergate. In this anecdotal history, Nixon
and his associates come alive, not as caricatures, but as men with
high and low purpose: Henry Kissinger, William Rogers, H. R. (Bob)
Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, and Arthur Burns
struggle not just for power, but for ideals. As William Safire says
in his Prologue: "In this memoir, which is neither a biography of
[Nixon] nor an autobiography of me nor a narrative history of our
times, there is an attempt to figure out what was good and bad
about him, what he was trying to do and how well he succeeded, how
he used and affected some of the people around him, and an effort
not to lose sight of all that went right in examining what went
wrong." The book is divided into ten sections, in which run three
main themes: the President, the Partisan, and the Person. As a
president, Safire discusses Nixon and the Vietnam War, foreign
policy, economics, and race relations. As a partisan, he discusses
Nixon's attempt to form an alignment across party lines, successful
in many respects before the president tolerated the excesses that
eventually corrupted his administration. And as a person, Safire
finds that Nixon was a mixture of Woodrow Wilson, Machiavelli,
Theodore Roosevelt, and Shakespeare's Cassius--an idealistic
conniver evoking the strenuous life while he thinks too much. This
paperback edition of a classic primary source for historians
includes a new introduction by its author. Studded with direct
quotations that put the reader in the room where history was being
made, Before the Fall is a realistic, shades-of-gray study of the
Nixon years.
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