Nixon Off the Record: His Candid Commentary on People and Politics.

• Author: Meacham, Jon

It was Richard Nixon's final comeback, and, like so many of his others, it went surprisingly well. In the '80s and early '90s, there were the carefully scripted private dinners with younger journalists and politicians (the cuisine was almost invariably Chinese, a none-too-subtle reminder of who went there first); The New York Times op-eds on Russia or other weighty international matters; the densely written, and largely unread, foreign-policy books. "The Old Man," as his political proteges called him, would have had us all believe that his resurgence from Watergate to respectability was unplanned, a natural course of events. But Nixon's private world, first in exile in San Clemente in the '70s, then in Manhattan, where he moved in the winter of 1980, and finally in Saddle River, N.J., where he lived until his death in April 1994, was really a staging area for a shrewdly manipulated campaign for redemption.

Monica Crowley, a young woman who served on Nixon's small retirement staff from 1990 to 1994, takes us inside this narrow universe with an accounting of the late president's running political asides, commentary, and anxieties about his status. He war-gamed each phone call, memorized details about his dinner guests, fretted about whether Bush or Clinton would adequately defer to him. It's an intriguing book, if only for the fresh evidence it provides of what people familiar with the Nixon of the White House tapes and the Haldeman diaries would expect from the Old Man. This is, as The New Yorker smartly noted, "Nixon Unplugged"--the casual and occasionally intemperate remarks of a man who spent much of the second half of the century revising his own history and nursing old grudges. Consider Eisenhower. "`He was very charming and warm socially,' Nixon allowed one day in 1991, `but he was a hard-ass ... He was a tough son-of-a-bitch. As you know, he didn't endorse me in 1960 until he absolutely had to. That was pretty devastating to my campaign..."'

Nixon unvarnished is not a pretty sight, so it's not surprising that the late president's daughters are said to be upset with the book, and with Crowley. Crowley came into Nixon's orbit when she was an undergraduate at Colgate and wrote him a long letter about his 1999: Victory Without War. Nixon answered, and invited her for a talk; it led to a job as an editorial assistant. Crowley would write contemporaneous memos recounting his comments; these notes form the basis for Nixon Off the Record.

It...