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The Presidency of Richard Nixon (American Presidency (Univ of Kansas Paperback))

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The author has written a refreshing account about Richard Nixon's years in office. He traces Nixon's rise as a politician, his failures, presidency, and ultimate demise. The reader gains insight about Nixon's successes with China, the Soviet Union, along with failures in Chile and the Third World. In contrast, the writer argues that Nixon made significant achievements in domestic affairs--welfare reform, environmental improvements, and conservation--that have not received adequate recognition. Next, we learn that Nixon reluctantly approved wage and price controls for political reasons. Nonetheless, the most interesting chapter about Watergate reveals the rampant corruption in Nixon's administration. Also, the author criticizes Nixon for his Vietnam strategy.

This book does a good job of summarizing Nixon's accomplishments, failures, and foibles. The excessive quoting makes it sometimes tedious to read. In addition, it seems as though the book only scratches the surface on a much disparaged president.

I read this book for a graduate class in American history. Few U.S. presidents have had as many books written about them and their administrations as Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon's presidency was defined by the historian Stephen E. Ambrose as a Shakespearean tragedy. Nixon is credited by many historians with great success in foreign and domestic policy. These achievements by themselves would normally rank him near the top of the list of America's great presidents. However, his psychological deficiencies were responsible for dragging the country through its worst constitutional crisis in its history--Watergate. Nixon's involvement in the Watergate cover up culminated in his being the only president to resign from office. This saved him from the humiliation of surely becoming the only president who would have been impeached and thrown out of office. It is against this historical backdrop, that Melvin Small wrote The Presidency of Richard Nixon. Small succeeded in writing an objectively fair history of America's thirty-seventh president. At the end of his book, Small astutely noted why a history of Nixon is so important. "The period from the end of World War II to the end of the cold war was in good measure an age of Nixon" (311).

No historian writing about Nixon can avoid trying to understand and explain his psychological profile. One would think with all the biographies from historians and memoirs from close aides, the voluminous presidential papers, and thousands of hours of tape recordings, one could get a clear understanding of Nixon's psyche. Most historians and close friends and aides of Nixon still admit that they never fully understood him. Both Nixon historians Theodore H. White and Nixon speechwriter William Safire, wrote that they were still perplexed by Nixon's multi-faceted psyche. Small recognized this conundrum while writing his biography, and like most biographers, searched Nixon's early life and upbringing to try to understand his psychological character traits. Nixon was born on January 9, 1913 in Yorba Linda, California. He was the second of five brothers. Two of his brothers died from respiratory diseases. Nixon remarked that these traumatic events in his life caused him to champion the government's involvement in health care. Nixon's family was lower middle class Quaker. During the Depression they struggled like millions of other families. Richard was an intelligent child who learned to read before entering grade school. He had a photographic memory that allowed him to excel in both his academic and political careers. He was famous for remembering the names of thousands of politicians from across the country and could memorize speeches; thus making it seem he was talking extemporaneously. Although he had the grades to attend a more prestigious college, due to financial considerations, Nixon settled on attending Whittier, a local college. He graduated second in his class in 1934, and received a partial scholarship to attend Duke University Law School. He was a very serious student in law school and never dated during his three years in attendance. "Many of his peers at Duke thought that Nixon was destined for the scholarly life, considering his powerful intellect and remote personality" (5). He was appalled by the segregated south and racism displayed by classmates. He graduated third in his class from law school in 1937 and traveled to New York to seek employment with prestigious law firms. Since it was the height of the Depression and because Nixon did not posses a law degree from an elite Northeastern law school, he found that doors would remain shut to him. Nixon was turned down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as well. Feeling disappointed from his rejections, he went back to Whittier, California and joined a small law firm where he became a partner within two years. In 1938, Nixon met his future wife Pat, while both were performing in a community theater. For Nixon, it was love at first sight and they married in 1940. During World War II, he was an airfield operations officer in the Navy. More importantly, he proved to be a very accomplished poker player, which he claimed prepared him to become a skilled negotiator. After the war, he accepted an invitation from a group of Republican businessmen to run for Congress in his home district against the incumbent Democrat, Horace (Jerry) Voorhis. Nixon's campaign against Voorhis and his later campaign for the Senate seat against Helen Gahagan Douglass were bare-knuckled affairs which relied on character assassinations painting both opponents as Communist sympathizers.

Nixon soon gained national notoriety as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). During committee hearings, Nixon doggedly pursued Alger Hiss, a well-heeled former State Department employee in the Roosevelt administration who was accused of being an American Communist Party member and Soviet spy. Nixon's work on HUAC garnered him a reputation as a tough anti-Communist which brought him to great prominence in the Republican Party. At the 1952 convention the party leaders prevailed on Dwight Eisenhower to take Nixon as his vice presidential running mate. "Eisenhower was astonished to discover that his running mate was only thirty-nine, which soon made him the second youngest vice president in history" (14). The relationship between the two men was not warm. Nixon wanted to please Eisenhower. However, Eisenhower saw Nixon as a political lightweight and even asked him to consider not running as vice president for the second term, but instead take a cabinet position to gain "executive experience." Despite Eisenhower's treatment of Nixon, he became his party's standard-bearer for president in the 1960 election against John F. Kennedy (JFK). He lost the election in one of the closest races in history; JFK defeated Nixon in the popular vote by a 49.7 to 49.5 percent margin. Just two years later leaders of the Republican Party talked Nixon into running for governor of California, against the Democratic incumbent Edmund "Pat" Brown. Nixon was politically humiliated in another close election. In what he called his last press conference after his stinging defeat, Nixon lashed out at the press, who in days after ran stories predicting the end of Nixon's political career. However, Nixon used his years out of the limelight to build a lucrative law practice in New York City, and traveled around the country making hundreds of speeches, as well as campaigning on behalf of Republican congressional candidates. In addition, he studied and wrote articles on foreign policy issues. All this work in addition to the problems of the Vietnam War made him an attractive candidate and he once again became the Republican candidate for president in1968. The "new Nixon" burst forth on the political scene.

Nixon won the election against the incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey, because the Vietnam War became unpopular with the American public, and Nixon promised to restore law and order to a riot torn country. Nixon soon busied himself with building his cabinet before his inauguration. President Johnson was very amicable to Nixon and invited him to the White House for several transition meetings. It would be the first time that Nixon ever saw the living quarters. When Nixon observed Johnson's taping machine in the Oval Office, he ordered a staffer to get it out. He would not use a taping machine until 1971. Small's chapter entitled A Private President's Public Relations, expertly points out Nixon's unusual character traits while he was president, which many historians and politicians have written about in countless books. Two of Nixon's closest aides, Bob Halderman and John Ehrlichman where known as the "Berlin Wall" because it was their duty to reduce strictly access to the president. Nixon was a shy man who hated to meet new people. "Nixon also preferred talking on the phone to seeing people in person" (215). He had an aversion to firing and hiring people, and he would get others to perform these odious functions for him. Nixon was much more at ease working alone in the Executive Office Building than in the Oval Office.

The presidential duty that Nixon was most passionate about was foreign policy; a duty that was so important to him that he virtually became his own Secretary of State for several years, and he never trusted the State Department bureaucrats. What became Nixon's most important staff hiring would be that of Dr. Henry Kissinger as his National Security Advisor and later his Secretary of State. Little did Nixon realize that Kissinger would become "not only the president's chief planner, coordinator, and operator of U.S. foreign policy but also the most popular, respected and internationally famous of all the president's advisers" (50). Together both men would add a new word to the American vocabulary--détente. Small noted that Nixon embarked on a monumental foreign policy shift for America. The consummate Cold War warrior, Nixon was most proud of his two great foreign policy achievements, "the establishment of détente with the Soviet Union and the opening of relations with China" (97). Kissinger, in his book Diplomacy, is very flattering of Nixon's foreign policy acumen. "No American president possessed a greater knowledge of international affairs. None except Theodore Roosevelt had traveled as much abroad, or attempted with such genuine interest to understand the views of other leaders." In Small's chapter titled "Running for Ex-President," he related that in an attempt at rehabilitating his legacy Nixon wrote eight books dealing with foreign policy issues between 1980 and 1992, "almost all of which became best-sellers" (305). Nixon's 1985 book No More Vietnams had an ominously prophetic warning for America. "The most violent and dangerous forces in the Mideast are not Communist revolutionaries taking orders from Moscow but Moslem fundamentalist revolutionaries egged on by Khomeini." Although Nixon as well as most historians focused on his diplomatic successes, Small wrote glowingly about Nixon's domestic policy triumphs in his biography.

Since Nixon spent most of his time dealing with foreign policy, he allowed cabinet heads and White House aides on domestic affairs to propose new legislation. Daniel Patrick Moynihan a former Harvard professor and Johnson aide, started to doubt "big government's approaches to social problems" (45). He accepted a position as advisor on domestic affairs and enjoyed a very friendly relationship with Nixon. Moynihan once quipped that Nixon's administration may have been one of the most progressive ever on domestic issues. Small believed that Moynihan's remark was a bit of a stretch, though for a Republican administration, it was not too far a stretch. Small noted that conservative Republicans "were horrified when Nixon proposed a guaranteed annual wage for poor people disguised as welfare reform and a variety of other social and environmental policies" (185). Nixon doubled the budgets for the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the Arts. Nixon's administration created the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, and established the Environmental Protection Agency. In a special message delivered to Congress on the environment in February of 1970, Nixon proposed twenty-two pieces of legislation including, regulating automobile emissions, water pollution, pesticides, strip-mining, and ocean dumping. During his first term in office, Nixon approved a 51 percent increase in Social Security benefits and in 1972 signed into law an automatic cost-of-living increase to keep up with inflation. Just in Nixon's first term, "outlays for the elderly increased by 71 percent" (190). Thus, Small contended that by looking at Nixon's domestic policies, "one can understand why observers in the year 2000 might label him the last liberal president" (214).

Despite all of Nixon's achievements in foreign and domestic policy, his legacy will forever be blackened by the stain of the break in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building and his direct attempt to cover it up. Small and other historians in explaining the Watergate debacle have opined that Nixon desperately wanted to win re-election in 1972 in a landslide victory. By doing so, Nixon thought that he could remake the Republican Party, and "bring about the New American Revolution" (273). Politically, he wanted to remake the Republican Party by uniting conservative southern Democrats with the working class Americans of the Silent Majority, and traditional Republicans around social issues. In addition, Nixon announced in his second inaugural speech that the federal government needed to be smaller and less paternalistic in its scope with the American people. Unfortunately for Nixon, he and his aides were willing to bring the re-election victory about at any cost, including egregious violations of rights and laws. Small summed up the Watergate debacle in Lincolnesque terms when he wrote about the crimes and misdemeanors that had been committed. "Whereas some presidents participated in some of those illegal activities much of the time, and others did almost all of them on occasion, none of them committed all the illegal acts that constituted Watergate all the time" (273).

In conclusion, Melvin Small did an excellent job using a plethora of primary and secondary sources, and presidential papers from the National Archives to write an engaging and balanced biography of Richard Nixon. In his book, he provided informative notes, one of the best bibliographical essays found in a history book, and a thorough index; all of which will aid readers who want to further research aspects of Nixon's presidency. Small decided to write a topical biography instead of a chronological biography. Since Small told Nixon's story in a little over 300 pages, his topical narrative device worked quite well. Small's biography of Nixon is an excellent introductory work for anyone wishing to gain a better understanding of Richard Nixon, his political career, and the history of the Cold War era.

As a graduate student, I recommend this book for anyone interested in Nixon, American History, and Cold War History.

The only reason to give this a bad review would be due to its lack of getting down to the juicy Nixon facts. Other than that, it is a marvelous journey into the Nixon administration. For the most part, it is unbiased and I enjoyed it. If you want to get a look at the Nixon administration from a more or less politcal standpoint, then go for it. If you would like an Enquirer/novel type "tell all" book, then look again. 4/5

Helpful. Interesting.

Smart, strange man who overcomes dislike of people to run incredibly large country of people. More effective on Vietnam than given credit for. Problem with honesty.

Nixon had a dark side. His Checkers speech in 1952, in which he used a dog as a prop, should have alerted Americans to his character. His loss to Kennedy in 1960 left him with an inferiority complex. Nixon hated the Kennedys and would never have been president if JFK had not been assassinated. He was not all bad. He stood up to Khrushchev. He opened up China and ended the Vietnam War even if it took four years. He was loyal to a fault. He denied any knowledge of the burglary at Democratic Headquarters inside the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. It brought him down. Nixon and Watergate became synonymous. Nixon became the only president to resign as impeachment proceedings were underway. It is ironic that his signature is on the plaque left on the moon by Apollo 11 astronauts. Nixon and Johnson were the worst presidents of the 20th century.