Solitary White House Years (Nixon as seen up close)

Author: Richard Reeves
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2004-09-01
Features: The Lonely White House Years is a compelling narrative work that tells the story of a man who once dreamed of becoming an architect, his extreme introverted personality, and the days he experienced. Late at night, he sat on the White House roof, writing himself notes in his yellow stationery book, striving to regulate himself in his struggle for his goals: "Compassionate, brave, refreshed, courageous, and enthusiastic about work (not arrogant, but commanding). The goal—to reform the government bureaucracy, every day is an opportunity to do something memorable for others. To be a good person, one must do good deeds, requiring happiness, calmness, confidence, and inspiration." However, downstairs, he was constructing a White House filled with deceit and intrigue. He did not trust anyone because, in his solitude, he believed others were just like him. His rule relied on secret directives and false records, and when in public, he memorized his scripts—even during one-on-one meetings with his aides and cabinet. His key assistants, Holdman and Henry Kissinger, also monitored him just as he monitored them. Meanwhile, cabinet members, generals, military commanders, and everyone else were watching each other—searching through briefcases and desks, eavesdropping on phone calls. In the White House, no one knew if anyone else was telling the truth. Nixon's primary goal was to restore order to the U.S. war in Vietnam. But in reality, he delayed the fighting there, systematically setting lies on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. To the world's astonishment, he opened the door to Communist China and sought détente with the Soviet Union—and secretly persuaded Mao Zedong and Brezhnev to cover up his lies, protecting the secrets of his White House, big and small. Despite this, he was still a visionary figure, yearning for a new world order and working to prevent a fatal global racial war from occurring. On this point, he believed that the conflict between the East and the West, including the racial war between Westerners, Russians, and Asians led by China and Japan, was inevitable. Domestically, he promised welfare reform, income sharing, drug programs, and environmental protection, and reluctantly advanced the desegregation of schools—all of which showed that his domestic policies were nothing more than castles in the air. Reeves portrays the destruction of a president's fate from the very beginning of this book. It begins with Nixon and Kissinger using the CIA to cover up a murder committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam in 1969, leading to the theft and public release of the Pentagon Papers, then the White House's secret counterintelligence activities, and culminating in the Watergate break-in and the cover-up, revealing the famous "Watergate scandal." Richard Reeves's book holds an authoritative position among the many works about Nixon in the White House. It is a shocking story.