One Man Against the World

Starred review from June 15, 2015
Weiner, a National Book Award winner for Legacy of Ashes, pulls no punches in his devastating account of Nixon's presidency, drawing on documents declassified in the last seven years. As his depressing introductory note states, "For those who lived under Nixon, it is worse than you may recollect. For those too young to recall, it is worse than you can imagine." Weiner doesn't spend much time on Nixon's formative years, judging them to be irrelevant to an objective assessment of a ruthless politicianâone whose conduct in the 1968 presidential campaign L.B.J. later deemed treasonous. For those who remember Nixon primarily for Watergate, Weiner also presents an eye-opening account of his role in the Vietnam War, when he initiated all-too-serious discussions of using nuclear weapons on the North Vietnamese. Weiner describes Nixon as "at war with his own military leaders" and notes that the president "would drink toasts and sign treaties with the men who were arming his enemies." Additionally, chilling excerpts from tape recordings that have only recently been made accessible include cold-blooded exchanges between Nixon and thenâSecretary of State Henry Kissinger in which the two debate the merits of committing war crimes in order to win in Vietnam. This is powerful raw material, but Weiner's brilliant turns of phrase transform it into something extraordinary.

Starred review from June 15, 2015
Sobering, eye-opening study of Richard Nixon's booze-soaked, paranoid White House years and the endless tragedies they wrought. "The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy." So said Nixon, who never minded making room for one more name on his fabled-though very real-enemies list. It speaks volumes about Nixon that there is still more to learn about him, 40-plus years after Watergate. It speaks further volumes that what we are learning is even worse than what we knew: John Dean's The Nixon Defense (2014) just scratches the surface. Enter Pulitzer and National Book Award winner Weiner (American Studies/Princeton Univ.; Enemies: A History of the FBI, 2012, etc.), who is particularly interested in Nixon's fraught efforts to disengage from Vietnam while not appearing to abandon an American ally. "Why not give this up?" asked Chinese leader Zhou Enlai, who encouraged Nixon to get out, promising that if the war were to continue, China would be honor-bound to help its communist neighbor. Alas, writes the author, Nixon and the ever sycophantic Henry Kissinger could never figure out how to pull that off. Weiner's findings, drawing on the entirety of Nixon's secret tapes and other documents, are certainly newsworthy: Nixon, for instance, busily selling ambassadorships, wanted to dismantle not just the State Department, but effectively the whole of the government, filling its ranks with loyalists. So bent was he on this that he put into motion a plan to have his entire Cabinet resign the day after the election, with the next step to "rebrand the Republican Party in coalition with conservative Democrats, create what he called a New Majority to last until the end of the twentieth century, and destroy the remnants of LBJ's Great Society once and for all." That project continues, of course, in different hands all these years after Nixon's coverup of a coverup. No one who reads this incisive book will be nostalgic for Nixon, no matter how disastrous his successors.

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Starred review from August 1, 2015

According to National Book Award winner Weiner (Legacy of Ashes), President Richard Nixon's (1913-94) most tragic flaw was his idea that the presidency was above the law; a delusion that drove him to the "gutter politics" that led to the Watergate scandal in 1972 and his inevitable resignation in 1974. While much included here will resonate with scholars and avid Nixon readers, Weiner's deep research of archival documents that were not declassified until the 21st century reveals new, chilling information--notably about bombings in Southeast Asia and a near-nuclear confrontation with the former Soviet Union. These findings either correct or verify the works of previous Nixon biographies. Here, Weiner focuses on diplomacy and Watergate because he asserts that Nixon did not care about domestic politics except where his presidential campaigns were concerned. Nixon's unwavering misconception that he could bomb North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos into submission resulted in the deaths of millions of civilians. This, indeed, was the former president's greatest tragedy. The author sadly concludes that subsequent presidents (Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama) failed to learn from Nixon's flaws and have exhibited Nixonian deceits. VERDICT An enthralling and vital work that will appeal to history buffs and presidential historians. Weiner recommends John W. Dean's The Nixon Defense for an unvarnished view of the beleaguered president's resignation.--Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2015
To whatever degree Richard M. Nixon's reputation has been restored since his leaving office, this book is a major and definitive counter. It is thorough, devastating, and brilliantly convincing, perhaps the best profile of that complex man and his era we have had. A Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and National Book Awardwinning author (Legacy of Ashes, 2007), Weiner is a highly credible reporter who here masterfully handles a great wealth of detail, much recently declassified, and lays the whole mess out with exceptional clarity. As he says in the opening, and then stunningly demonstrates, the story is richer and stranger than we ever knew. And sadder, more horrifying, and, even after 40 years, infuriating. The simple core of his argument is that Watergate and Nixon's disgrace would not have happened without Vietnam. Nixon, who saw his domestic opponents as more dangerous than foreign enemies, was motivated in all his decisions by political considerations, yet his gravest decisions undermined his allies abroad, while his grandest delusions armed his enemies at home. These are strong charges and apply to his scuttling of the peace talks before his election in 1968, the falsification of bombing reports in regard to the invasion of Cambodia, and a general and fully recounted record of secrecy, deceit, outright lies, malice, and an unprecedented abuse of presidential power. Those seeking to understand America in the second half of the twentieth century and, distressingly, beyond would do well to begin here. The tragedy was not Nixon's alone, but his role in it has never been portrayed more vividly.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)