Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #329617 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-10
• Released on: 2008-11-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1168 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Recently convicted of mail fraud and obstruction of justice, former Hollinger International chairman and newspaper magnate Black (Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom) is better positioned than most men to chronicle the power and disgrace experienced by Richard Nixon. Black is a versatile and thorough biographer who brings not only sympathy but eloquent clarity to his task. The result is a vibrant narrative of personal and political accomplishment that, though great and heroically achieved, was often marred by self-inflicted wounds springing from personal paranoia. Black is at his best portraying the many contradictions in Nixon's personal makeup and political history. The Nixon who most fascinates Black is the firebrand cold warrior who (in partnership with Henry Kissinger) went on to invent the notion of detente and eventually opened relations with China. As Black shows, Nixon's duality followed him into his postpresidential years. The tireless son of Quakers methodically sought after Watergate to rebuild his reputation as a statesman by issuing carefully crafted publications and granting strategically timed interviews. Black's superb volume, incorporating much new research, is an important and worthy addition to the literature. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
In the thousand and fifty pages of this biography by a fallen media baron of a fallen President, few events are neglected and many are well told. But Black, attempting a reconsideration of his subject, merely provides an exculpatory gloss for seemingly every grimy facet of Nixon’s career. He presents the 1968 "Southern strategy" as a principled stand against Northern hypocrisy. On Vietnam, his invocations of "insolent" Communists, their "witless dupes," and "child grenade carriers" (as he refers to those murdered at My Lai) take on a deranged air; he unwittingly provides an object lesson in the kind of thinking that mired America there. Interestingly, given what Black refers to in the acknowledgments as his own "serious judicial problems," he argues that Nixon’s best move in Watergate would have been to surreptitiously delete damaging parts of the tapes and then make up a cover story—"whatever he wanted." Hoping to be Nixon’s redeemer, Black comes off as his apologist.
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Joan Hoff

Right up until he was sentenced last month to six and a half years in prison on mail fraud and obstruction of justice charges, newspaper mogul Conrad Black energetically promoted his new biography of Richard Nixon. Unable to travel -- he had surrendered his passport -- Black remained at his mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., but conversed one afternoon with readers at a London book shop using a video link and a LongPen, a long-distance book-signing device developed by author Margaret Atwood. Asked whether he saw any similarities between himself and Nixon, Black replied that in Nixon's case, "there was in fact a break-in and there was some activity that was not legal" -- whereas in his own case, "there was no illegality." At his Dec. 10 sentencing, he continued to insist on his innocence.

Be that as it may, Black's deep identification with the 37th president of the United States is obvious throughout his book. It portrays Nixon much as the Canadian-born media tycoon sees himself: as a self-made man of great talent, industry and conservative political principles who is tragically thwarted by liberals and a hostile press.

For such a doorstop of a book, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full contains little new information. It is long on detail and short on critical analysis. While Black consulted Nixon's memoirs and the president's other writings, his account largely relies on what others have already published. It is original only to the degree that Black uses facts gleaned from other authors to cast Nixon in a favorable light. Yet Black is so passionate about the topic and so witty in places that readers with an abundance of time and an abiding interest in Nixon may enjoy it, particularly for its tidbits about Nixon's family life and courtship of his eventual wife, Thelma Catherine ("Pat") Ryan. As a young couple in love, Black tells us, Dick and Pat "led a double life," often escaping the Quaker dowdiness of Whittier, Calif., for the nightclubs and strip joints of Los Angeles.

Black's scant research in primary sources may reflect Henry Kissinger's advice (noted at the beginning of the book's bibliography) that "Richard Nixon is much better understood reading what he wrote than listening to the idiosyncratic and inconsistent flow of what he said to his subordinates." Kissinger's suggestion that historians should ignore the president's conversations is clearly self-serving, since White House tapes and telephone transcripts show him providing less astute and more sycophantic advice to the president than Black conveys. Black's personal and professional friendship with Kissinger may account for this slanted depiction; both Kissinger and his wife served on the board of the newspaper company, Hollinger International, that Black was convicted of defrauding.

While this biography contains no fresh information about the major crises Nixon faced during his pre-presidential years -- such as his role on the House Un-American Activities Committee or the slush fund that resulted in his famous 1952 "Checkers" speech -- it does offer a few shrewd insights into his early life and political career. As a youth, Black says, Nixon was an outsider and lacked natural political gifts but nonetheless could relate to ordinary people because he "reminded them of themselves." Until the 1940s, Nixon had no "opportunity to think much about the world, or develop what would prove an historic gift for foreign policy." Yet throughout his political career, Black argues, Nixon tried "to balance . . . liberal and conservative Republicans" and actually "was a force for comparative moderation" who "generally kept clear of the more extreme forms of partisan backbiting." Black also makes a convincing case that Nixon lacked traditional racial prejudice, held anti-segregationist views and made an early commitment to civil rights.

Roughly half of the book's 1,152 pages are devoted to Nixon's presidency, the subject that suffers most from Black's reliance on secondary sources. His account of Watergate, for example, is out of date because he did not consult recently released tapes. These tapes show that Nixon was more deeply involved with White House Counsel John W. Dean in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in than Dean revealed at the Senate Watergate hearings, where Dean wanted to come across as a reluctant witness and heroic whistleblower. Conversations between Nixon and Dean on March 16, 1973, show them concocting the story that "there was not a scintilla of evidence in the investigation that led anywhere near the White House." Careful review of the new tapes also suggests that Dean's famous warning to Nixon on March 21, 1973, about a "cancer . . . within the presidency" was, in fact, a rehearsed utterance he intended to cite if summoned to testify.

While Black properly gives Nixon credit for détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China, he twists the facts when it comes to the president's Middle Eastern, African and Latin American policies in an effort to portray them as unmitigated successes. Most egregiously, he denies any U.S. involvement in Gen. Augusto Pinochet's 1973 overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende, ignoring evidence that Nixon and Kissinger allowed clandestine CIA funding of opposition media, politicians and organizations and that they brought American financial pressure to bear on Allende's democratically elected government. Declassified CIA documents indicate that Kissinger and Nixon, as well as President Gerald Ford, turned a blind eye to Pinochet's human rights violations.

Pinochet died in December 2006 before he could be tried on charges related to the torture and killing of some 3,000 Chilean citizens -- charges that Black blithely dismisses as "short-term human rights outrages in perturbed conditions." Black concludes that Pinochet was "ultimately good for Chile" and that Allende's overthrow was "another clear-cut Nixon victory."

Instead of turning this and other questionable foreign policies into triumphs, Black might have better served the president he so admires by concentrating on Nixon's domestic policies. They ranged from desegregation of Southern schools, to federal environmental legislation, expansion of social security benefits and support for civil rights for women and Native Americans. These initiatives, along with Nixon's failed attempts to overhaul welfare and health care, make him the most active Republican reformer in the White House since Theodore Roosevelt. But domestic policy battles are often hard to portray as heroic, and Black short-sightedly insists that Nixon's historical greatness lies in his global diplomacy.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Critical praise of Richard Nixon
This is pure conjecture, but I wouldn't be too surprised if this turns out to be how Conrad Black actually does write his biographies.

Step 1 - Pick a giant.
Step 2 - Write a first draft praising the giant's achievements and qualities.
Step 3 - Write, from scratch, a second draft attacking the giant from all sides, finding his every fault, his every weakness.
Step 4 - Tone down both drafts.
Step 5 - Combine both drafts in strict chronological order, mixing the praises with the criticisms.

And what we get is a very fair, very balanced biography, in this case of Richard Nixon, perhaps the first definitive one volume biography of the 37th President of the United States.

It is one thing to criticize those in power and quite another to wield it power oneself. Black has wielded power and this gives perspective and considerable authority to his work.

Like his biography of Franklin Roosevelt, this biography of Nixon should rank as one of the great works of critical praise. To pick the obvious example of Watergate, Black evaluates Nixon by concluding his "conduct was blameworthy, but the response to it was extreme". An accurate judgement for an event that "resulted in no theft, no injury, no property damage, no useful espionage".

And yet Black is often mystified by Nixon's "failure to grasp the realities of ... the political problems" especially given Nixon's known political saviness. In general, however, Black is praiseworthy. He lauds Nixon's trip to China, he corrects the record and enthusiastically credits Nixon with ending America's involvement in the Viet Nam war. Black's stance reflects the historical importance of the Nixon presidency.

The biggest surprise for me was learning how pro-civil rights Nixon had been. Of all presidents except for Bill Clinton, whom Toni Morrisson called America's first black president, Nixon was the most respecful of civil rights and of the lives of African Americans. This mindset resulted directly from Nixon's egalitarian Quaker upbringing as black friends came and ate supper at the Nixon table just because that's what you do with friends. He sacrificed considerable political capital on civil rights principles; he made no gains, nor expected any, from a black electorate committed to Johnson's War on Poverty and Great Society programs and he lost the support of many southerners who loved everything about him except his civil rights stance. (Clearly an instance of the political courage JFK wrote about but himself failed to muster.)

From a literary point of view, Watergate brings great irony to this book. Just as Black cannot understand how a man of Nixon's intellect and vision could have so completely misjudged the effects of Watergate, it equally boggles the mind how a man as superlatively intelligent and accomplished as Conrad Black could have misjudged the effects of his own actions with respect to his own legal worries. I suppose he should have found and burned the security video tapes showing him carrying out boxes of incriminating documents.

While excellent, the Nixon biography isn't quite as good as Black's Roosevelt biography, and not without one or two annoying defects, the most dismal of which are the dozen or so references to Wagner's Ring operas that Black attended (and funded in part!) in Toronto while writing the book. But that's a quibble, and we should blame a weak editor for not having forced Black to remove these quotes.

Vincent Poirier, Dublin

a true test for Detente
The moment I finished reading this book, the image of the late USA President came to me when he left office and waved to the crowd his last Good-bye. Nixon looked hesitant and undecided like a man relieved of an overwhelming burden. His Good-bye expressions were made indicating how far he had worn out of his Office; his eyes refused to meet the camera.
Perhaps what is quite revealing is that Nixon policies and behaviors were formulated to keep pace with `Détente `. There has been a wave of publicity unparalleled in contemporary American foreign policies relating to the appointment of Henry Kissinger in September 1973. Never before has a President and a Secretary of State had such interest by Newsmen and Biographers alike. Both names were associated with secret channels notably in Vietnam, Arab/Israeli conflict, and of course - Detente. I can safely say that Nixon, in particular, was less a friend of the media until Watergate blew its hurdles in the face of the world and the legend `'impeachment" was then born. What followed invoked a cauldron of aggressive and sympathetic editorials. Hostile comments were destructive in character and reflected envy.
I am convinced these 1000+ pages transpire feelings of persecution centered more upon the Office and less upon the Person whom many have loudly hated and secretly admired.
Mr. Conrad Black could picture the late President of the United States of America at his best moments slouched back in his chair, his long legs stretched out above the table in the deceptively thoughtful pose caricaturists had made famous in their media.

Not the tiresome "good guys vs. bad guys" approach
The length of "Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full" (1,152 pages) should surprise no one. Richard Nixon served in both houses of the U.S. Congress and was elected Vice President of the United States- all before the age of 40. No one has appeared on a national ticket more often (5 times, equaled only by FDR), nor held national office longer (13-1/2 years).

No single book can tell the whole story. However, Conrad Black's biography of Richard Nixon has many virtues to recommend it. It is very well written. The rhythms, diction and idioms of Black's Anglo-Canadian English lend a freshness to the text without calling attention to themselves. Black sometimes uses a turn of phrase that is a bit unusual to the American "ear"-- yet after a split-second it seems absolutely right and true. At his best, Black is capable of sentences that rival Gibbon's, though he is never less than clear and engaging, with flashes of humor and irony. The book is well-documented, but could use closer editing here and there. (In a couple of places, brief "quotes" from famous speeches by FDR and Nixon are, in fact, paraphrases- though the meaning remained unchanged.)

A particular strength of this biography is that it lends proportion and perspective to the various periods and issues of Nixon's long career. Black gives fresh accounts of all-but-forgotten events, such as the Nixons' physical courage when attacked by violent mobs on their state visit to Venezuela in 1958. Black also provides some insights into the important relationships of Nixon's professional life- Eisenhower, the Kennedys, Kissinger and others- without resort to psychoanalytic pretensions or lurid speculation. The book's final pages form a summary of Nixon's career- more generous than some accounts, though not less accurate.

Finally, Black's approach is refreshingly free of the tiresome "good guys vs. bad guys" approach. Nixon was a remarkably complex and driven man, whose successes and failures changed the world. Contrary to common belief, his ethics were not always distinguishable from- and in some areas, were superior to- the ethics of his contemporaries in either party. The book is generally free of academic priggishness, shallow moralizing, and partisan demonology. All this, and Black's willingness to praise the characters and accomplishments of public figures regardless of political persuasion, give this book a healthy dose of uncynical humility.