Years ago, after Richard Nixon had resigned and gone into temporary exile, my boss introduced me to Sam Dash, the former Senate Watergate Committee’s chief counsel. I remember asking Dash if he thought we had heard the last of Nixon. “Never!” he answered. “He’ll always be around, with people attacking and defending him.”
First there were those devastatingly dark TV portraits, then the well-publicized David Frost interviews for which he received $600,000 according to Tim Weiner, plus an additional $2 million for his ghosted memoirs. Rick Cleveland’s well-received new play, “Five Presidents,” has our five living ex-Presidents gathering in Yorba Linda for his funeral. Gerald Ford arrives early at the Presidential Library and Museum and finds himself staring at a photo of Nixon. He then asks a Secret Service agent not to leave. “I’m not sure I want to be left alone with him,” says the accidental President who saved Nixon from time in Leavenworth. Continue reading “Review of Tim Weiner’s “One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon””