Those weren't the days: Nixon has been looking better lately compared to George W. Bush. But in fact he's as bad as we remember.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power - Book review

Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power

by Robert Dallek HarperCollins, 752 pp.

Liberal historians have begun waxing nostalgic about past Republican presidents, extolling them as presenting a stark contrast to the current occupant of the White House. Consider Ronald Reagan. Deemed a heartless and dangerous conservative in the 1980s, he is now being lionized by progressive scholars like John Patrick Diggins, who depicts him as a worthy successor to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Perhaps the most interesting rehabilitation has been that of Richard Nixon. His image has gotten periodic makeovers since his resignation from the presidency in 1974 until his death in 1994, when he was hailed as an eminence gris of American politics. Nixon was a wise realist in foreign affairs, we are often told, who reached out to the Soviet Union and China. At the same time he instituted environmental reforms and pushed affirmative action on the domestic front. The moral seems simple enough: Bush represents a dangerous deviation from the sensible Republican presidents of yesteryear.

But as Robert Dallek's marvelous new book, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, demonstrates, the reality is much more complicated. Dallek, who has previously written critically acclaimed biographies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, is a seasoned historian who follows the Plutarchian model of letting the evidence speak for itself. From the tens of thousands of pages of newly available documents--including Nixon tapes, Kissinger telephone transcripts, and national security files--Dallek offers a potent reminder of the widespread and oft-deserved loathing that Nixon and Kissinger inspired. Many stories of Nixon's perfidiousness are fairly well known, but Dallek does a commendable job of amplifying previous judgments with new material he has unearthed. What emerges is a portrayal of Nixon that can hardly compare favorably to George W. Bush for the simple reason that Nixon comes off as so much like George W. Bush.

Nixon in particular broke new ground as a polarizer. He wanted to turn his domestic critics into the functional equivalent of traitors; the antiwar college kids, whom he loathed, were supposed to serve as a kind of domestic Fifth Column, like the communists of the early 1950s, that could shore up the Republican base and stigmatize the Democrats in the eyes of the Silent Majority he felt he represented. In 1970, for example, Nixon's press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler read a statement of Nixon's after the shooting of students at Kent State which declared that it "should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy." It almost seemed that the president of the United States was blaming the students for their own deaths. According to Dallek, nothing shook Nixon's conviction that he needed to wage warfare on his opponents. Despite his landslide election victory in 1972, Nixon was, Dallek writes, "almost morbid," convinced that his adversaries in the Georgetown salons and elsewhere were already...