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Kissinger’s Crises

Christopher Serpell, 20 December 1979

The White House Years 
by Henry Kissinger.
Weidenfeld/Joseph, 1476 pp., £14.95
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... to write confidential briefs which would make those events intelligible to the mind of President Nixon have been a valuable discipline. But at least part of the explanation for this metamorphosis from professorial exposition to lucid narration lies in a sentence found in the foreword to the present book: ‘Harold Evans, assisted by Oscar Turnill, read ...

Haig speaks back

Keith Kyle, 17 May 1984

Caveat 
by Alexander Haig.
Weidenfeld, 367 pp., £12.95, April 1984, 9780297783848
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... expect? He had picked his Secretary of State from among the small group of men who had made the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger foreign policy. Such a person could hardly be expected to accommodate himself to the atavism of the Radical Right. Haig must have thought that the situation was tailor-made for him. Under Nixon’s ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Man on Wire’, 11 September 2008

Man on Wire 
directed by James Marsh.
August 2008
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... doesn’t tell us to), other, later figures who couldn’t walk in the air, and especially perhaps Richard Drew’s famous photograph, taken at 9.41 a.m. on 11 September 2001, showing a man dropping downwards head first, one leg bent at the knee, only the abstract vertical lines of a building behind him, a construction that in the photograph has neither top ...

Boss of the Plains

D.A.N. Jones, 19 May 1983

The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations 
by Paul Fussell.
Oxford, 284 pp., £9.95, January 1983, 0 19 503102 4
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... to them that a boy who tries to obey Scout Laws, whatever else he does, will not grow up like Richard Nixon. (In Britain, of course, where Scoutcraft entails wiliness, such a boy might well grow up like Harold Wilson.) On Fussell’s cover is a picture of a keen-eyed lad with ‘Boy Scouts of America’ stitched on his khaki shirt: he is wearing the ...

Omnipresent Eye

Patrick Wright: The Nixon/Mao Show, 16 August 2007

Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao 
by Margaret MacMillan.
Murray, 384 pp., £25, October 2006, 0 7195 6522 7
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... of 76’ lands and taxis over to its appointed resting place. A hatch opens to reveal President Nixon. The former Red-baiter blinks before launching himself down the ramp slightly ahead of his wife, who is wearing a scarlet coat. China’s prime minister, Zhou Enlai, begins to clap as the Americans descend. After pausing to reciprocate, ...

At the White House’s Whim

Tom Bingham: The Power of Pardon, 26 March 2009

... R. Ford, President of the United States . . . do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offences against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974. ...

The Idea of America

Alasdair MacIntyre, 6 November 1980

Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence 
by Garry Wills.
Athlone, 398 pp., £12.50, September 1980, 0 485 11201 9
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... Nowhere are these contradictions and incoherences more visisbly acted out than in the career of Richard Nixon. It was Wills’s great achievement to show this in his one first-rate book – Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970). That Nixon was, had to be, an ...

Middle Eastern Passions

Keith Kyle, 21 February 1980

The Palestinians 
by Jonathan Dimbleby.
Quartet, 256 pp., £12.50, September 1980, 0 7043 2205 6
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The Rabin Memoirs 
by Yitzhak Rabin.
Weidenfeld, 272 pp., £10, November 1980, 0 297 77546 4
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... was the long, emotion-charged speech with which, as Israeli Ambassador, he acutely embarrassed Richard Nixon, who ‘sat mute with his eyes averted’. When his term as Chief of Staff was up, Rabin asked for the Washington Embassy, to the acute surprise of those who found it difficult to visualise him as a diplomat and despite the pain it must have ...

Brief Shining Moments

Christopher Hitchens: Donkey Business in the White House, 19 February 1998

Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 
by Taylor Branch.
Simon and Schuster, 746 pp., $30, February 1998, 0 684 80819 6
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‘One Hell of a Gamble’: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-64 
by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali.
Murray, 416 pp., September 1997, 0 7195 5518 3
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The Dark Side of Camelot 
by Seymour Hersh.
HarperCollins, 497 pp., £8.99, February 1998, 9780006530770
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Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson , Bobby Kennedy and the Feud that Defined a Decade 
by Jeff Shesol.
Norton, 591 pp., £23.50, January 1998, 9780393040784
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The Year the Dream Died 
by Jules Witcover.
Warner, 512 pp., £25, June 1997, 0 446 51849 2
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Without Honor: The Impeachment of President Nixon and the Crimes of Camelot 
by Jerry Zeifman.
Thunder's Mouth, 262 pp., $24.95, November 1996, 9781560251286
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The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis 
edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow.
Howard, 740 pp., £23.50, September 1997, 0 674 17926 9
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Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam Papers: A Documentary Collection 
edited by David Barrett.
Texas A & M, 906 pp., $94, June 1997, 0 89096 741 5
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Taking Charge: The Johnson Whitehouse Tapes 1963-64 
edited by Michael Beschloss.
Simon and Schuster, 624 pp., £20, April 1998, 0 684 80407 7
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Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes 
edited by Stanley Kutler.
Free Press, 675 pp., $30, November 1997, 0 684 84127 4
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The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the Jupiters, 1957-63 
by Philip Nash.
North Carolina, 231 pp., £34.70, October 1997, 0 8078 4647 3
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... is to be noticed in the newest pile of Kennedy-era books. For the baby-boomers, the Kennedy-Nixon years represent the time when, for them at least, politics became vivid and real: when, to borrow Auden’s lapidary words, the menacing shapes of our fever were precise and alive. And it’s fair to say that nobody will be poring over, for example, the ...

Reasons for thinking that war is a good thing

Eric Foner: The death of Liberalism, 27 June 2002

The Strange Death of American Liberalism 
by H.W. Brands.
Yale, 200 pp., £16, January 2002, 0 300 09021 8
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... the Cold War consensus killed liberalism.’ Liberalism’s death was not immediate. For even as Richard Nixon abandoned the Cold War paradigm by visiting China and agreeing to détente with the Soviet Union, he embraced sweeping new liberal initiatives at home. It was under Nixon that the protection of the ...

Rug Time

Jonathan Steinberg, 20 October 1983

Kissinger: The Price of Power 
by Seymour Hersh.
Faber, 699 pp., £15, October 1983, 0 571 13175 1
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... same person four or five times to make sure that he got it right. He went through the memoirs of Nixon and Kissinger with a microscope and compared them with his own findings. He used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to government documents and had, of course, the huge pile of documents left by the various Watergate investigations, prosecutions ...

At the Royal Academy

Peter Campbell: Philip Guston fouls the nest, 5 February 2004

... as any on which to hang thoughts about Philip Guston is San Clemente, painted in 1975. It shows Richard Nixon on the Californian shore. His pink, phallic nose droops between gross, grey, stubbled testicular cheeks. A tear runs down one of them. Bloodshot eyes swivel from under a black hedge of eyebrow. He looks back and down towards his ...

Done Deal

Christopher Hitchens: Nixon in China, 5 April 2001

A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China 
by Patrick Tyler.
PublicAffairs, 512 pp., £11.99, September 2000, 1 58648 005 7
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... America would suffer, too … And, personalising his attack, Li said that it had taken men like Nixon and Kissinger to have the vision to open relations with China, but Clinton and Christopher had no such vision. They would be blamed for ‘losing’ China. One of the great merits of Patrick Tyler’s history of this relationship is its ...

Who Will Lose?

David Edgar, 25 September 2008

Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future 
by Newton Minow and Craig LaMay.
Chicago, 219 pp., £11.50, April 2008, 978 0 226 53041 3
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... This last fact is revealing. In the first televised presidential debates in 1960, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon argued for four hours. Since televised debating returned in 1976, 13 presidential and ten vice-presidential candidates have spent a further 39 and three-quarter hours standing at podiums, sitting at tables or prowling among studio ...

Spliffing

Richard Davenport-Hines: Drugs, 2 November 2000

The Science of Marijuana 
by Leslie Iversen.
Oxford, 278 pp., £18.99, April 2000, 0 19 513123 1
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Drug Diplomacy in the 20th Century: An International History 
by William McAllister.
Routledge, 344 pp., £16.99, September 1999, 0 415 17989 0
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The Control of Fuddle and Flash: A Sociological History of the Regulation of Alcohol and Opiates 
by Jan-Willem Gerritsen.
Brill, 278 pp., €52, April 2000, 90 04 11640 0
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Drugs and the Law: Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 
Police Foundation, 148 pp., £20, March 2000, 0 947692 47 9Show More
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... drugs were used to defend social norms. Men like Anslinger, who was obsessed with Red China, and Richard Nixon, who revived the widespread use of cocaine by his maladroit War on Drugs, regarded their sale and use as a collective threat from outsiders. The ‘silent majority’ (a phrase Nixon borrowed from Homer, who ...

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