Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990

Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973 - 1990 by Stephen Ambrose

After I finished volume 1 of this trilogy, I actually grew to admire and like Richard Nixon.  At the end of volume 2, my admiration turned to bitterness and anger towards the man.  Now that I’ve finished the entire series, I simply feel sorry for the man.  Oh, what a great man and president he could have been!  A man who was incredibly intelligent - possibly the smartest man to ever occupy the Oval Office - was sorely lacking in the likability department, which caused many to dislike him, which caused Nixon to bite back at his critics while, at many times, breaking the law.

This third volume picks up right as he is inaugurated for his second term as president.  The fact that such a hated man easily swept his Democratic rival in the 1972 president election tells you just how divided our country was at the time.  So his second term doesn’t begin any easier and, with the election now “out of the way”, the media focuses (it seems) solely on Watergate.  Watergate, Watergate, Watergate.

75% of this book takes place from January 1973 through August 9th, 1974, the day Nixon was finally forced to resign the Office of the President of the United States.  So, yes, we read an awful lot about Watergate.  Depending on how familiar you are with this egregious time in the country’s history, may help or hinder your enjoyment of the book.  There’s a lot of detail here, and a lot of names.  The main players in the tragedy get a lot of stage time here.  Names such as Bob Haldeman, John Dean, John Mitchell and Howard Hunt have plenty of page space devoted to them. You’ll also be widely exposed to many of the minor players as well such as Donald Segretti, Dwight Chapin, Fred LaRue and Hugh Sloan.  So if you’re not that familiar with many of those individuals, having Wikipedia nearby might be handy.

Even if you think you’ve “heard it all” as it relates to Watergate, it’s refreshing here since the focus is always on Nixon the person, as well as Nixon the president.  You feel all of the turmoil, confusion and struggles that he, and his family, were going through.  This isn’t a book about Watergate, though, yet like his Presidency, anything else that is discussed seems a bit of a distraction.  No matter how much Nixon would try to steer the focus of the country to matters such as detente with Russia, inflation, and solving the country’s energy crisis, all anyone wanted to talk about was the tapes, and why we weren’t allowed to hear them if they supposedly would clear the president.

So we relive the nightmare here.  The resignation of his top aides, the John Dean testimony, the Alexander Butterfield revelation, the Saturday Night Massacre, the release of the “transcripts”, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Like the children’s book about Alexander, who had a no good, horrible, rotten day (or something like that), absolutely nothing seems to go right for Nixon during this ordeal.  It’s almost lost to history the fact that ten months prior to Nixon’s registration, his Vice President, Spiro Agnew, was forced to resign his office due to prior wrongdoings as Governor of Maryland.  Gerald Ford is nominated as successor, and the thought by many is that it’s only a matter of time before Ford is the new Commander in Chief.

So August 1974 arrives, and Nixon finally resigns since it’s “best for the country”.  He then begins his road to recovery which almost serves as a coda to this story as opposed to a major part of the book.  It’s very tough on Nixon and family in the immediate years after his involuntary exodus, but he slowly starts to recover and slowly starts to reappear in some of the most imperceptible places.  Well, time heals all wounds, and whereas Nixon is never completely forgiven, nor forgotten, he starts to gain more respect in his latter years, penning several books about the state of affairs in the political world, and becoming an advisor, to some extent, to future presidents.

Perhaps the thing that will always doom Nixon is that he never apologized for his wrongdoings.  He never admitted he was wrong, and never took any responsibility for, not only theWatergate burglary, but for the massive coverup that was clearly one of the worst constitutional crises of our country.  Had he done this, history would be kinder.  But Nixon was never an apologizer.  Men from his background and his time in history simply didn’t do such things.  As coarse as that sounds, it does seem that most people, upon reflection, realized this about the man, and moved on. 

A sad story of history, but one that really shouldn’t surprise any. During the Watergate crisis,  Nixon himself countlessly wonders why he was being picked on for doing what “every other world leader” always did.  Even the foreign superpowers at the time can’t fathom why Americans cared about such a trivial thing  (China wonders why Nixon simply didn’t take out his detractors and line them up and shoot them).  But I’ve always believed that this is what makes America great, and just because “everyone else does it” doesn’t make it right.

Stephen Ambrose mentions in the forward to this book that he “loved writing this book”.  I wish Mr. Ambrose were still alive so I could tell him how much I loved reading it.