Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990.

• Author: Witcover, Jules

Does the country really need another book on Richard M. Nixon? For one who has spent nearly 40 years having Dick Nixon to kick around and has done his share of kicking, the answer at first blush is: enough already. All too familiar are the deception, tastelessness, and shamelessness of this world-class rotter who poisoned American political life for so long, chronicled exhaustively - nay exhaustingly - once again by this author. Who needs to be reminded?

But wait a minute. Like Bram Stoker's prince of darkness, not only is Richard Nixon back, but he no longer fears the daylight. And why should he? Seventeen years after the Watergate stake was driven into his heart, he is casting a shadow again, a very large one, on the foreign-policy consciousness of the country. His transparently self-congratulatory books, his occasional television forays, and his endlessly gratuitous advice to the country that told him to get lost in 1974 are all conspicuous elements in his re-resurrection.

As Ambrose(*) notes, a whole generation has come of age without a clear remembrance of Nixon's crimes, so maybe another book laying them out in all their squalor would be a public service. Whether this book is the one to perform that service, however, is arguable. On the one hand, it is comprehensively accurate in regurgitating the sordid details of the Watergate cover-up and the aftermath, gleaned tirelessly from the available Watergate transcripts and tapes and relatively few interviews (only 17 in all, an embarrassingly small number for a book of 637 pages) with players major (Bob Haldeman, Chuck Colson, Gerald Ford) and minor (Hugh Sidey, Richard Reeves, William Safire). But its reliance on such written sources as Nixon's own exceedingly self-serving books and one by the even more discredited revisionist Spiro Agnew risks diminishing its overall credibility.

Equally corrosive is the fact that Ambrose, after having presented all of the Nixon obscenities and correctly identifying them as such, falls back on the old everybody-did-it dodge, contending that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were guilty of all or most of Nixon's crimes but just didn't get caught. While it is true that neither JFK nor LBJ was a choir boy, neither of them systematically subverted the Constitution in the manner of Nixon and his henchmen. The author, while repeatedly and devastatingly spearing Nixon for his lies and evasions, is strangely sympathetic, even idolatrous, toward him on other...