Before the Fall

William Safire was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon from 1968 to 1973. During that time, as a Washington insider, Safire was able to observe the thirty-seventh president in his entirety: as noble and mean-spirited; as good and bad; as a man desirous of greatness. Rarely has there been a White House memoir more intimate or revealing in its exploration of the great events that took place "before the fall" of Watergate. In this anecdotal history, Nixon and his associates come alive, not as caricatures, but as men with high and low purpose: Henry Kissinger, William Rogers, H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, and Arthur Burns struggle not just for power, but for ideals. As William Safire says in his Prologue: "In this memoir, which is neither a biography of [Nixon] nor an autobiography of me nor a narrative history of our times, there is an attempt to figure out what was good and bad about him, what he was trying to do and how well he succeeded, how he used and affected some of the people around him, and an effort not to lose sight of all that went right in examining what went wrong." The book is divided into ten sections, in which run three main themes: the President, the Partisan, and the Person. As a president, Safire discusses Nixon and the Vietnam War, foreign policy, economics, and race relations. As a partisan, he discusses Nixon's attempt to form an alignment across party lines, successful in many respects before the president tolerated the excesses that eventually corrupted his administration. And as a person, Safire finds that Nixon was a mixture of Woodrow Wilson, Machiavelli, Theodore Roosevelt, and Shakespeare's Cassius--an idealistic conniver evoking the strenuous life while he thinks too much. This paperback edition of a classic primary source for historians includes a new introduction by its author. Studded with direct quotations that put the reader in the room where history was being made, Before the Fall is a realistic, shades-of-gray study of the Nixon years.

William Gardner

Prologue; 1: The Comeback; 1: Twenty Broad Street; 2: Dear Nelson; 3: Turning Point; 4: Washin' Dirty Dishes; 5: The Man Who; 6: Nixon's the One; 2: "It Sure Beats Losing"; 7: The Man at the Wilson Desk; 8: Interregnum; 9: No End Runs; 3: Bone in the Throat; 10: Hello, Europe; 11: The New Isolationists; 12: Tale of Two Bridges; 13: The Kennedy Criterion; 14: Henry The K; 15: Silent Majority; 16: The Cambodian Decision; 17: The Night At The Lincoln Memorial; 4: Lowered Voices; 18: The New Federalism; 19: The Wayward Bus; 20: "Damngovernment"; 21: The Rise Of John Mitchell; 22: Loners Stick Together; 23: Nixon's Haldeman; 24: Loomings; 25: A Swearing-In; 5: Seeds of Destruction; 26: "Us" Against "Them"; 27: The '70 Campaign Begins; 28: The Way to San Jose; 29: A Good Honest Appraisal; 30: "The Press is the Enemy"; 31: To Peking in Secret; 6: High Adventure; 32: State of the World; 33: Secret Negotiations, Inside and Out; 34: China Report; 35: The Guns of April; 36: The Road to Moscow; 37: The Moscow Summit; 7: Muddling Along on the Home Front; 38: Nixon's Ehrlichman; 39: Wayward Bus Revisited; 40: Hardball; 41: The President Falls in Love; 42: The Economic Summit; 43: AD Lib; 8: New Majority; 44: The Two-Ideology System; 45: Nixon and the Catholics; 46: Nixon and the Jews; 47: The Work Ethic; 48: Labor Rewards its Friends; 9: The Private Man; 49: There is a There There; 50: Alone Together: Pat Nixon; 51: Bebe; 52: Hideaway; 53: Julie; 10: Man in the Arena; 54: The Fall of John Mitchell; 55: The Campaign that Never Was; 56: Bizarre Incident; 57: Christmas Bombs; 58: Peace With Honor; 59: The Best Year Ever; 60: Epilogue