Customer Reviews

With Nixon

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I found this book of great benefit in terms of understanding the real feelings of the players inside the White House during the Nixon Presidency. The author who was a speechwriter during Richard Nixon's term as president tells his story as one on the inside and with knowledge of Nixon's innermost feelings during the most difficult periods of the Watergate saga. The reader also gets good insights into people like Kissinger, as well as the events surrounding the issue of detante. The book was written almost twenty-five years ago but is incredibly fresh as a record of those tumultuous days.

Although I enjoyed Ray Price's WITH NIXON, I realized in reading it that I was comparing it to Safire's BEFORE THE FALL and finding Price not quite up to Safire's standard. Part of the reason in retrospect might be that Price is not nearly as generous to Safire as Safire is to Price. One gets the impression in reading Price that Safire and Pat Buchanon were "punch and judys" back-ups for Nixon instead of the "murderer's row" that Peggy Noonan so famously named them. Perhaps the difference is that Price is focused on Nixon while Safire is focused on himself and then others in the Nixon administration.

Still, Price writes wonderfully well and the book moves quickly. Nixon's genius in foreign policy is placed front and center. Nixon's statecraft is also exalted. When Price deals with Nixon's "dark side" he laments the close contact that Chuck Colson had to Nixon. Quite interesting also is the way Price paints John Dean as someone looking out only for himself, a picture that nearly all associated with Dean paint.

Highly Recommended, but Safire is the still the one to read first on the Nixon years.