I’ve just been reading about Nixon’s efforts to bug Ted Kennedy in this morning’s Guardian, by giving him leaky secret service agents. There’s something compelling about his level of political honesty, mixed in with the ruthlessness.
“You understand what the problem is,” Nixon told Haldeman and Ehrlichman on 7 September 1972. “If the [son of a bitch] gets shot they’ll say we didn’t furnish it [protection]. So you just buy his insurance.
“After the election he doesn’t get a … thing. If he gets shot it’s too damn bad. Do it under the basis, though, that we pick the secret service men.
“Understand what I’m talking about?”
So I’m now in the market for a good book about the man. Sue read Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate about Lyndon Johnson, recently, and it was just a rip-roarer of political intrigue. Any recommendations on Nixon? I’m after the real “this is what a bastard looks like” portrait. Thanks.
God, I wish Caro had written a book about Nixon.
The best Richard Nixon bio is the essay by Hunter S. thompson about nixon’s death and funeral here: http://www.counterpunch.org/thompson02212005.html
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Nixon’s meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy “my dog Checkers” speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.
When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise–a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he’d run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.
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Superb, thanks.
Matt,
Having read your stuff for years, I’m confident that you will enjoy Anthony Summers’ book on Nixon as much as I did. And Summers is a Brit, no less. It’s called The Arrogance of Power, and every chapter is a mindblower. You of all people will enjoy this. Scandale!