“... his personal life as if he were taking part in a reality TV show. The last tragic US president was Richard Nixon: he was a crook, but a crook who fell victim to the gap between his ideals and ambitions on the one hand, and political realities on the other. With Ronald Reagan (and Carlos Menem in Argentina), a different figure entered the stage, a ...”

“... Charles II never appear, whatever the artist or the medium, any more prepossessing than those of Richard Nixon trying to wriggle away from the press, and yet if anything this only adds to his political viability. Unlike his father, he’s a big man having fun. Enough of pious heroes! In a sense there no longer was fine art. Oh, there was a royal ...”

“... President Kennedy (who won the election of 1960 thanks in part to the disastrous appearance of Nixon in the first of the televised debates), and finally Presidents Johnson and Nixon, both of whom were severely damaged, as was Senator Joe McCarthy, by the dramatisations on TV of such horror shows as Vietnam, the Watergate ...”

“... from politics. The Vietnam War had given way to his war with feminism; and his odd sympathy for Richard Nixon as the victim of liberals and the CIA deprives Watergate of the dramatic place it occupies in The American Century. On the other hand, in recognising Nixon as a Kennedy/Johnson heir and in considering his ...”

“... in the early Seventies for what the Establishment called his bizarre and repulsive views on Richard Nixon and the 1972 Presidential campaign he constituted a real problem for the American press – specifically, those pundits, political tastemakers, and powerbrokers who lived within the pernicious confines of the Beltway that surrounds ...”

“... campaign until, just a week before the debate in New York, it ended with the election of Richard Nixon. Friedman had been closely involved with Barry Goldwater’s reactionary, anti-desegregationist campaign in 1964, and was now an adviser to Nixon; the New York Times called him a ‘radical ...”

“... and so never lived to know what I have known – the Beatles, black power, the Administration of Richard Nixon – all this has taken place in a trivial after-time and has nothing to do with anything that really mattered, with summer and someone hardly remembered, a youth so abruptly translated from vivid, well-loved (if briefly) flesh to a few scraps ...”

“... in public schools, which ordered states to allow women some access to abortion, which directed Richard Nixon to release incriminating tapes, which ordered states to permit same-sex marriage, and which rejected Donald Trump’s last-ditch pleas for a judicial coup d’état. It is also the court which ruled that African Americans, no matter their ...”

“... J. Parnell Thomas, later jailed, and Joseph McCarthy, together with such men as John E. Rankin and Richard M. Nixon, posed as crusaders, hounding writers, actors, directors, and ordinary citizens whose political opinions were their only crime. The ensuing black list infected Hollywood like dry rot. The whole affair now looks ...”

“... opposition; Bahr was horrified, but luckily nobody found out about it). He welcomed an approach by Richard Nixon, despite the reluctance of the Politburo and of his implacably negative foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, and greeted Henry Kissinger with bear hugs and heavy jokes. When the president came to Moscow in May 1974, he found Brezhnev ‘like a big ...”

“... campy romps such as Myra Breckinridge and Duluth, political dramas (The Best Man, An Evening with Richard Nixon), and TV travelogues (Vidal in Venice). With the exception of John Updike, no American novelist of the postwar period has shown as much disinterested devotion to criticism as a regular practice (as opposed to an easy way to keep your name in ...”

“... of Communism the emergence of Senator McCarthy; the Civil Rights movement; Vietnam; the return of Richard Nixon; Watergate – it is all there, introduced with a swift and studied casualness. ‘Meanwhile, the war in Europe ends, the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki ... ’ Meanwhile? I suppose there is a blurry sort of truthfulness in this ...”

“... most fulfilled by leaders who are, or at least resemble, movie stars ... No less an expert than Richard Nixon assured Elvis that he had the power over people’s imaginations that would enable him to obtain high office ... In truth, Elvis aspired to an office higher than that occupied by any president. He viewed himself as one who ruled the world by ...”

“... threatened no one, and about which no one in the West knew or cared much. Long after the event, Richard Nixon wrote: ‘It [June 25, 1950] was a miscalculation by them, based upon a misrepresentation by us.’ Lord Gladwyn, British envoy to the UN during the Korean War, writes that he at first thought ‘the probability surely was that ... the invasion ...”

“... most ambitious work, A Public Burning, will forget how in that vision of Cold War America Richard Nixon finds himself bare-bottomed in front of an immense audience, and is subsequently buggered by Uncle Sam; those who have read Gerald’s Party (1985 – in fact, a later work than Spanking the maid, 1982) may well recall the cleaning of ...”