Rating: 
Summary: If you Love, "Hating Nixon", this is your book.
Review: While it is probable that this is all true, it appears author, Richard Reeves, probably could find more to say that is complementary about Joseph Stalin than he has about Richard Nixon. If your inclination is to believe that Nixon was 'satan incarnate', this is the book for you. The text comprises 599 pages, including introduction, prologue and epilogue, and the sum total that is complementary about Nixon could easily be contained in less than one short chapter. He frequently offers opinion as fact, as, when he erroneously states that Nixon was wrong in his prediction that the public would remember Kennedy's involvement in the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne. Reeves devotes very little space to Nixon's successes, but positively exults in his failures and defeats. He states that there are over 40 mil. documents in the Nixon library, of which about 7 mil. are available to researchers. He appears to have been interested in only that fraction which depict Nixon in an unfavorable light. I was very disappointed in this book, which cannot be considered as an even, or unbiased, account of Richard Nixon.
Rating: 
Summary: Some perspective developing
Review: While much of the material in this book has been revealed before, its greatest value is in advancing the emerging consensus about Nixon and his role in Watergate and other illegal White House activities. The central question during the controversy was "What did Richard Nixon know, and when did he know it?", and that quesion focused on the Watergate break-in of June 17, 1972. What Reeves helps make clear is that focusing on the break-in misses the point of Nixon and his downfall. Watergate was a symptom of a much more sinister and cynical White House atmosphere that was created and driven by Nixon and a very small cadre of trusted aides - primarily Haldeman and Kissinger. The question about Nixon's advance knowledge of the June 17 break-in is less important than the systematic way Nixon and Kissinger conducted foreign policy and the way Haldeman (and to a lesser extent, Ehrlichman) conducted the president's domestic politics and goverment business.It is a riveting portrait of Nixon and the men around him - a more dispassionate "Final Days" that has a surprising objectivity about it. Obviously, Reeves' selection of topics and facts is critical to the book's point of view, but there are a good number of sympathetic passages, as Nixon seemed to invest as much anguish wrestling with himself to do the right things as he did to do in his enemies.
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