President Nixon: Alone in the White House.

• Author: Bailey, Charles W.
• Position: Political booknotes: solitary scribbler

PRESIDENT NIXON: Alone in the White House

by Richard Reeves Simon & Schuster, $35.00

THE SCRIBBLERS, THE SCHOLARS, and the scribes may at last be able to come to closure with Richard Nixon. They have been on his case for a half-century without ever getting in a knockout punch; indeed, the only U.S. president ever forced to resign came oh-so-close to salvaging his shattered reputation before he died. The shelves already groan under the weight of books, articles, tapes, and transcripts.

So why bother with another? Why take one more shot at the Old Lion?

The answer is simple. President Nixon: Alone in the White House, by veteran national political reporter Richard Reeves, is the best account, from Nixon's own perspective, of the critical years between 1968 and 1972, when the seeds of Watergate and that whole noxious period were planted. Reeves offers a carefully researched and well-crafted history of Nixon's attempt to bend the people's government to his personal biases, which requires revisiting the plot to cover up Watergate.

Reeves, who previously published a first-rate biography of President Kennedy, revisits the key aspects of Nixon's disastrous Vietnam policy and also his one true diplomatic triumph, the restoration of U.S. relations with China. His fascinating account of Nixon's meeting with Mao Zedong appears to draw heavily on the memory and note-taking skills of Winston Lord, a young Kissinger aide who later served as U.S. ambassador to China.

But the most personal and revealing part of this book is a series of memos Reeves has unearthed, through which he attempts to show how Nixon lived his day-to-day life during that critical period of history, to "reconstruct the Nixon presidency as it looked from the center." As the book's title suggests, it frequently looked very, very lonely.

Nixon waited until late at night to pen these memos to himself. He did so when he was alone in his office, alone in the Lincoln bedroom, alone at Camp David, or alone across the street in his monastic hideaway in the Old Executive Office building--always alone, almost always in the dark, and sometimes, even in August, with a fire blazing. In such solitary precincts, Nixon's mind raced as he pondered the future:

I must get away from the thought of considering the office at any time a burden. I actually do not consider it a burden, an agony, etc ... it is God's great gift to me to have the opportunity to exert leadership, not only for America, but on...