{"id":6602,"date":"2014-07-09T17:56:29","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T21:56:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/buchanan.org\/blog\/?p=6602"},"modified":"2014-07-14T19:12:31","modified_gmt":"2014-07-14T23:12:31","slug":"book-review-rebirth-richard-nixons-political-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buchanan.org\/blog\/book-review-rebirth-richard-nixons-political-career-6602","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: The Rebirth of Richard Nixon’s Political Career"},"content":{"rendered":"

By John R. Coyne Jr. – Special to The Washington Times <\/a><\/p>\n

In the 1960s, the country was running out of control \u00e2\u20ac\u201d race riots, cities burning, assassinations, campus anarchy. The producers who did the nation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work and paid its taxes saw their beliefs mocked, their children proselytized and radicalized on campuses where faculties sneered at values they brought with them from home, and where administrators lived in fear of offending New Leftists.<\/p>\n

These were the people \u00e2\u20ac\u201d solid, productive Americans of both political parties \u00e2\u20ac\u201d who would form the nucleus of Richard Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s New Majority<\/strong><\/a> . After a close-run win in 1968, that New Majority spoke loudly in 1972, defeating Sen. George McGovern \u00e2\u20ac\u201d a good and decent man whose candidacy was captured by the radical left and its loonier fringes \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and delivering Nixon, who gave them a voice and a historic 49-state landslide victory.<\/p>\n

Before Nixon could engineer that extraordinary realignment, he had to fight his way back from the 1962 loss in the California governor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s race, which seemed to mark the end of his political career, when he told a gleeful press corps they wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have Dick Nixon to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153kick around\u00e2\u20ac\u009d any longer. One network ran a special called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d including among its commentators the Soviet spy and perjurer Alger Hiss.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The funeral services were short-lived, however, and the story soon shifted from death to resurrection. The rebirth of Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s political career is the subject of this splendid political memoir by Pat Buchanan, then a young editorial writer for the now-defunct St. Louis Globe-Democrat, who in 1966, convinced that Nixon was going to run again in 1968, told Nixon he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d like to get aboard early. He was flown to New York and hired, bringing the Nixon office staff to three \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Rose Mary Woods, Mr. Buchanan, and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Miss Ryan\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the maiden name of Pat Nixon, the future first lady from whom I used to bum cigarettes,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the author writes.<\/p>\n

From that day to the last, Pat Buchanan was joined with Richard Nixon, never wavering in his dedication and total loyalty. From 1966 on, he handled much of Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s correspondence, writing speeches, speech inserts, position papers, editorials, memos (thousands of them, with Mr. Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s handwritten replies, all preserved), conducting opposition research, serving in a variety of positions running from a brief stint as advance man to an even briefer one as press secretary. (He disqualified himself, fearing he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d eventually punch one of the members of what future Vice President Spiro Agnew would call \u00e2\u20ac\u0153an effete corps of impudent snobs.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d)<\/p>\n

During the last years of the Nixon presidency, when with Aram Bakshian and Ben Stein I shared an office next to Mr. Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcs, then a senior adviser to the president, we all came to count him a friend and a man to be admired. Dead honest, direct, highly intelligent, focused, knowing exactly who he was, Mr. Buchanan was Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s good right arm from beginning to end. In an appearance at the televised Watergate show trials, straightforward and unapologetic in his testimony, he brought for a day some relief and even a measure of hope to an embattled White House, where the mornings usually began with the latest mortar shell lobbed in by The Washington Post, carrying the latest piece of creative writing from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. (If the New Journalism was defined as applying fictional techniques to factual reporting, the Woodward-Bernstein version seemed to involve applying journalistic techniques to the writing of fiction.)<\/p>\n

Mr. Buchanan also served as Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ambassador to conservative leaders, such as Bill Buckley and Bill Rusher, and to their followers, who Nixon called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Buckleyites.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d After defusing a potential crisis by writing a letter that Rusher called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a masterpiece of broken field running,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mr. Buchanan was asked by Rusher, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Are you Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ambassador to the conservatives, or our ambassador to Nixon?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d His answer: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The former, always.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

This is a fast-moving account of those comeback years, written in strong, clear prose, and despite the disaster lying just down the road, surprisingly good-natured, with little or no enmity, except for the most deserving cases, and with an upbeat portrait of Nixon as a surprisingly compassionate man, but a tough politician, energetic and well-informed, with a deep knowledge of world affairs and ideas about how to reset the balance of power and restore America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s international standing, badly damaged by the two preceding administrations.<\/p>\n

There are good sketches of key Nixon staffers \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Bill Safire, Ray Price, Richard Whalen, Ken Khachigian, Agnes Waldron, Mort Allin, Dwight Chapin; a special tribute to Bill Gavin, who wrote the moving train-whistle section of Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s acceptance speech in Miami; and acknowledgments of the work of political strategists such as Bill Timmons, who made the Nixon campaign a model to be emulated. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also an appreciation of the wonderful Nixon family, quoting Norman Mailer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s observation that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a man who could produce daughters like that could not be all bad.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

In a postscript, Mr. Buchanan writes: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Had Nixon stepped down in January 1973, he would be ranked as one of the great or near-great presidents.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And of that, there could be little doubt, as he demonstrates by enumerating the administration\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s singular successes, both domestic and international.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153In all of this,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he writes, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I was there, right from the beginning and right to the end, intimately involved in every battle of Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s White House years,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of which there were many, ending in Watergate and what Mr. Buchanan calls \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the first successful coup d\u00e2\u20ac\u2122etat in American history.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153But all that is the subject, the Lord willing, of another book.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

That will be a book well worth waiting for.<\/p>\n

John R. Coyne Jr., a former White House speechwriter, is co-author of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Wiley).<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more at: The Washington Times <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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By John R. Coyne Jr. – Special to The Washington Times In the 1960s, the country was running out of control \u00e2\u20ac\u201d race riots, cities burning, assassinations, campus anarchy. The producers who did the nation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work and paid its taxes saw their beliefs mocked, their children proselytized and radicalized on … <\/p>\n

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