Did you catch this review in last Sunday's Washington Post? It examines a book recently published, though actually first written over 30 years ago, by James Reston Jr., who it so happened had an important role in preparing the journalist David Frost for the series of interviews he did with (by then) ex-President Richard Nixon in 1977. Naturally the focus was Watergate, and the book apparently does a good job of telling the story of Frost's preparation for the interviews and how, with the help of Reston's research, the host was eventually able to get Nixon to make a sort of apology to the American people for having dragged them through the Watergate mud, and to admit some guilt. Fine. But then the reviewer, Matthew Dallek, who is a recognized historian and surely should have known better, wrote this: "Even if these interviews had never taken place, it's likely that Nixon's reputation would have remained in poor shape. But as it happened, these sessions wrung from Nixon an admission of wrongdoing and the apology sought by Reston; 45 million viewers got a ringside seat at the spectacle of Nixon impeaching himself. Reston's intelligent, passionate memoir shows how "the most-watched public affairs program" in television history helped prevent a Nixon comeback, as he had most famously achieved in his 1952 Checkers speech. After the interviews aired in 1977, there would be no more comebacks."
Huh? No more comebacks? Are you serious? In the 1980s, until his death in 1994, Nixon would secretly advise nearly every occupant of the Oval Office (even Bill Clinton); would write several influential books, on Vietnam, on nuclear weapons; would by the '80s give speeches to newspaper editors and others, and receive warm applause; would open his presidential library in the early 1990s with much fanfare; and, when he died in 1994, his funeral was attended by President Clinton and the other living ex-presidents, and not only would Clinton give him a glowing tribute, but also then-Republican Senate minority leader Robert Dole, beginning his own run for the presidency, was so moved in giving his own eulogy to Nixon that he was moved to tears. In fact, Nixon by then had indeed made a comeback (albeit his last one); he had become the respected elder statesman he'd sought to be in the last two decades of his life. I myself don't see this as having been a horrible thing, though I can understand it if others do or did. But to appear to be rather unaware of it, as Dallek was, is rather hard to believe.
