Synopsis
During the last four years of Richard Nixon's life, Monica Crowley served as his foreign-policy assistant and political confidant - a trusted member of the small circle of advisers with whom he shared hours of daily one-on-one conversations. This is the remarkable story of the final public and private years of the thirty-seventh president, based on full reconstructions of the conversations Crowley had with him at the time. His hardheaded views on the end of the cold war, his emotional final trip to China, his powerful inside role during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and his poignant thoughts on the legacy of Vietnam are recounted - as well as his frustrations with being out of power and with the foreign-policy failures of Presidents Bush and Clinton. With astonishing candor, Nixon also shares his final, startling thoughts on Watergate, including his assessments of all the major players in the scandal and what he would - and would not - have done differently. And he offers an uncompromising look at the way the sexual scandals surrounding the Kennedys, Bill Clinton, Clarence Thomas, and Robert Packwood have changed the politics of scandal.
Publishers Weekly
In this plodding sequel to Nixon Off the Record (1996), Crowley, confidante, research consultant, travel companion and foreign policy assistant to the former president from 1990 until his death in 1994, records her conversations with him based on her daily diary. While her memoir contains few surprises in its admiring portrayal of Nixon as a farsighted politician and wise elder statesman, it presents him in his own authentic voice. He bristles with contempt at President Bush, whom he accuses of political overinvestment in Gorbachev, and praises Yeltsin as a progressive leader. Defending his Vietnam War policy as necessary to stop North Vietnam's expansionism, Nixon blames Congress's cutback of military funds as the reason America lost a winnable war. On Watergate, he wavers between defensive dismissal, acceptance of responsibility and blaming a press corps bent on retaliation because he unearthed Alger Hiss as a communist spy. Nixon chastises the American people for condoning Clinton's sexual infidelities, accuses Clinton of obstruction of justice in the Whitewater scandal, airs his scorn for intellectuals, expresses grief over his wife's death and discusses his wide readings ranging from Aristotle to Machiavelli.