Stephen Ambrose

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The Man Who Came Back

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SOURCE: “The Man Who Came Back,” in Contemporary Review, Vol. 261, No. 1518, July, 1992, pp. 45-6.

[In the following review, Wright offers praise for Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990.]

Despite the high drama of a now-familiar story, and despite the daunting detail, this is a remarkably fair study. Indeed, Ambrose comes gradually to like Nixon [in Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990]. ‘That is not easy to do, as he doesn't really want to be liked.’ What he admires—and what he conveys—is that Nixon never gives up, and is always true to himself.

The main strength of the book lies in its variety: beginning in the triumph in the Presidential election of November 1972 to the slow two-year agony, from the (foolish, unnecessary and unauthorised) Watergate break-in until the resignation of August 1974; the roll-call of the now near-fictional characters, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean and Mitchell, Colson and the Cubans; Nixon's awareness that ‘It will be each man for himself, and one will not be afraid to rat on the others’; and, afterwards, the long and solitary anguish of his own night of the soul, in retirement in California. He was aware that he had made bitter enemies over his twenty-five years in Federal politics, and that they had been unforgiving. Hatred of Nixon became and long remained a national obsession. But the qualities that had ministered to his own undoing—his own lack of trust in others, and his own conspicuous lack of friends—became now his bedrock. He set out deliberately to maximise his strengths, notably his special expertise in foreign policy—in the opening to China, in ending the American involvement in Vietnam, in warning Israel not to go too far, in establishing détente in Europe. The few men he had come to trust were, in fact, the leaders of other countries—De Gaulle and Churchill, Mao and Chou—and they now became his models and his inspiration; they too had fought back, and went on fighting. He became not only a foreign policy expert but an Elder Statesman, listened to with a new, reluctant and hard-won respect at home and abroad. So that Ambrose can conclude that ‘when Nixon resigned, we lost more than we gained.’

Ambrose adds, in his epilogue, his own psychological analysis; he sees much that explained Nixon in the early poverty, the struggle for recognition, the total self-containedness. His verdict is admirably balanced. Nixon was ‘heroic, admirable and inspiring, while simultaneously being dishonourable, despicable and a horrible example.’ As the years pass, he grows in stature. Perhaps Kissinger's view is the shrewdest of all: ‘He would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him.’

This is a superb, readable and scholarly biography of a remarkable and fascinating man.

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