President Nixon: Alone in the White House

"I wanted the list to include one book that covered the whole of the Nixon presidency. Watergate dominated Nixon’s presidency but was not the only thing. The problem is that some of the surveys don’t really capture Nixon. They tend to be dry monographs or whitewash his underside. But the Reeves book is a close narrative. “His supporters saw in him a wholesomeness that helped propel his success” Reeves tries to show you, day-by-day or month-by-month, life inside Nixon’s White House. But it also has a strong theme. You see that Nixon’s character came into play—his secrecy, his duplicity, his suspiciousness—with respect to his policymaking. In this view, Watergate doesn’t seem like an aberration, it seems like an outgrowth of tendencies that infected all of Nixon’s presidency. It’s a very good introduction to the significant political and policy developments of his presidency, but it’s also a very good introduction to his character. To make a big splash, Nixon announced the opening to China in 1971 without having done much to prepare the public. Kissinger secretly negotiated—in China—to make the announcement more dramatic and redound to their credit more. To be fair, there are elements of diplomacy that do need to be conducted with secrecy or at least discretion. But Nixon reveled in secrecy. The obsession with secrecy led him to set up the plumber’s unit, which was so called because they were supposed to stop leaks. This was an illegal White House intelligence unit that committed burglaries to find out who was leaking from the White House and how to stop it. Leaking is something other presidents have been concerned with, but none went so far as to set up a private intelligence unit in the bowels of the White House."