Kennedy's philandering is acknowledged, but without hyperbolic attention, and his use of drugs to counteract Addison's disease is discussed in relation to the effect on his performance (notably at his disastrous Vienna summit with Khrushchev). JFK confronted Khrushchev without igniting a nuclear war, and he concluded the landmark limited test-ban treaty, but he stumbled at the Bay of Pigs, was tugged reluctantly from his view that civil rights involved political rather than moral issues, and became increasingly mired in Vietnam. The cumulative impression is of a natural politician who reacted to events rather than mastering them. Not only are certain neglected aspects of the Kennedy presidency explored in great depth here (e.g., how this bored, restless White House economics student came around to Keynesianism)-but so are topics delved into countless times before. While finding the President to be "intelligent, detached, candid if not always honest," Reeves also shows him as disorganized, impatient, and addicted to the notion that it was "brains," not ideology or idealism, that counted. Reeves (The Reagan Detour, 1985, etc.) draws on scores of recently released documents (including transcripts of Oval Office audiotapes) and interviews with surviving New Frontiersmen to create a day-to-day, sometimes even minute-by-minute, chronicle of JFK's decision-making. President Nixon is the astonishing story of a complex political animal who was as praised as he was reviled and who remains a subject of controversy to this day.Behind the scenes in the Kennedy Administration-in well- documented, unusually revealing depth. Reeves shows a presidency doomed from the start by paranoia and corruption, beginning with Nixon and Kissinger using the CIA to cover up a murder by American soldiers in Vietnam that led to the theft and publication of the Pentagon Papers, then to secret counterintelligence units within the White House itself, and finally to the burglaries and cover-up that came to be known as Watergate.
His closest aides spied on him as he spied on them, while cabinet members, generals, and admirals spied on all of them - rifling briefcases and desks, tapping each other's phones in a house where no one knew what was true anymore. Using thousands of new interviews and recently discovered or declassified documents and tapes, Richard Reeves's President Nixon offers a surprising portrait of a brilliant and contradictory man.Įven as he dreamed of presidential greatness, Nixon could trust no one.
Who was Richard Nixon? The most amazing thing about the man was not what he did as president, but that he became president at all.
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