President Nixon: Alone in the White House

Richard Reeves

reviewed November 2018

I discovered this author by accident and read a book he wrote on President Kennedy (Profile in Power) and thought it was a wonderful read, so I had no problem snapping this one up on Richard Nixon. The style of writing is the same in both books; the two men, as most know, radically different.

This is not a biography. Like its ‘Kennedy’ counterpart, this retrospective focuses on Nixon’s years in the office as president. The narrative starts during his inauguration in 1969 and finishes in April of 1973 as his administration was rapidly decomposing due to the Watergate scandal. The narrative highlights the more well-known events of the Nixon administration, good and bad, and does seem to get bogged down in places when talking about things like price controls and inflation. It’s a bit hard to stay interested when digesting such things.

There have been many books written about Nixon, and one of the things that makes this book stand out a bit from the rest is the focus on the word in the title - “Alone”. Sadly, Nixon truly was a loner, and whereas this characteristic can aid certain people in certain occupations, being the leader of the free world really isn’t one of them. Nixon was great when it came to things like formulating world policy, but having to stand around at a cocktail party and make small talk about things such as the weather was a nightmare for him. There were times when I read about his aloofness and I actually howled out loud with laughter. We read about, for example, when Nixon was planning the White House Christmas party, and he purposely made sure his schedule would prevent him from actually being there during the festivities.

Of course, he had been a politician for a very long time, and his remoteness made an awful lot of people not like him over the years. Again, not a good thing for a politician. Because of this, the man developed a very unhealthy paranoia of those around him, and he methodically made daily decisions in the White House to purposely try to harm his enemies. These decisions were highly immoral and, many times, illegal. He would pour over daily summaries of the day’s news with a pen as he scribbled notes in the margins for his team to “fix these issues” at all costs. When we read about this behavior, it really isn’t a surprise that his team actually tried to burglarize the Democrat headquarters with the aim of simply bugging the telephones.

This book is not an attempt at mudslinging. It really does give the man credit where credit is due. It mostly dismisses him from most of the responsibilities of the Viet Nam war, and provides glowing praise of the man during his summits with Communist China and Brezhnev’s Russia. The man truly could have gone down as one of the greatest had he not been such a paranoid recluse. There were, however, other disturbing signs as well. The book portrays him to be a bitter racist (‘we shouldn’t focus on the blacks, they can’t help us win any elections’) with a particular animosity of Jews. Maybe such behavior was more common 50 years ago, but it’s still quite sickening to read about it.

The book does its due diligence as the Watergate scandal slowly breaks and festers, yet I never really felt the emotional connection to the tragedy while reading. This is probably because I’ve read so many books about Watergate, where the reader had more time to focus on the actual situations. Since this book is all encompassing, the tragedy never seems to sink through the skin. In fact, for some reason, this book stops in April 1973. I’m not sure why. I wish the author would have carried his narrative through until Nixon’s resignation 16 months later. Why did this book stop when it did? It could be because the focus during this time was so narrowly on the administration coming apart, that the sources for this time were few and far between. There’s a brief ‘afterwards’ in the book that quickly summarizes the latter events, but I felt a bit cheated. I wish Richard Reeves would have cut down on much of the mundane comings and goings in the early years and filled that space, instead, with the last 1 ½ years of Nixon’s tumultuous administration.

This book really isn’t that necessary for one who may have read a lot about Richard Nixon, but it succeeds where it should, and truly shows the tragedy of the man’s character of being isolated, paranoid, untrustworthy, and simply alone. One gets the feeling that had Nixon not been these things, he truly could have been one of the greats. Instead, he’s arguably one of the worst.

A tragedy indeed.

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