THE FIRST POST-WATERGATE BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD NIXON
NIXON, Richard Milhous – Francis Aungier PAKENHAM, 7th Earl of LONGFORD. Nixon: A Study in Extremes of Fortune. London: Butler & Tanner Ltd for Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980.
Octavo (215 x 137mm), pp. ix, [1 (blank)], 205, [1 (blank)]. 4 half-tone plates with illustrations recto-and-verso. (Very small marginal mark on final ll.) Original orange boards, spine lettered in gilt, dustwrapper, not price-clipped. (Extremities minimally rubbed, spine slightly creased at head, dustwrapper very slightly faded on spine.) A very good copy.
First edition. After serving two terms as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice-president from 1953 to 1961, the Republican Richard Nixon (1913-1994) lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy. Following his assassination in 1963, Kennedy was succeeded by his vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson, who was re-elected in 1964. In 1968, however, Nixon was elected the 37th President of the United States, going on to win a second term in 1972 – although the investigations into the Watergate burglary had already begun before Nixon’s inauguration and the inexorable series of revelations were leading back to the White House and Nixon, eventually causing Nixon’s resignation as president on 8 August 1974.
The British politician and social reformer Frank Pakenham, Lord Longford (1905-2001) states in his ‘Foreword’ that ‘[w]ords without number have been written about President Nixon, but I cannot discover up till now a biography of his which has been published since Watergate’ (p. ix), and Nixon is based on two long meetings with his subject, a range of interviews with his associates and others, and printed and other sources. Longford’s biography essays an account of Nixon’s career which, while taking account of the Watergate scandal, is not entirely defined by it; however, many contemporary and later critics felt that Longford could not, as a non-American, fully comprehend the moral injury inflicted upon the American polity by Watergate.
£19.50
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