Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House

Content aside, whether or not you are interested in the Nixon administration, this is a wondeful memoir written in a very readable yet elegant style. I suspect that Safire had the Earl of Clarendon leaning over his shoulder when he wrote this. It's full of wonderful character studies of the major and minor players in the administration. Safire is not enitirely candid in what he writes and he does pull his punches, but if you are good at reading between the lines, it's all there. A very enjoyable read. Each chapter focuses on a person or key event during the years. Watergate is covered but only tangentally.

The Watergate break-in was terrible for President Richard Nixon and great for William Safire's Nixon memoir. Because the worst of what went on was already out in public view, it allowed Safire's 1975 account of his time as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration to be brutally frank, a luxury he puts to good use. Safire had more reason to be disappointed than most of Nixon's former aides: he had had his home phone tapped by his boss, apparently because he had friends in the press. Safire's sharp narrative eye picks out weeds in the Rose Garden, like top Nixon aide Jeb Magruder, "a man of mirrors" Safire writes, for whom "buck-passing and back-stabbing was standard procedure." But the overall sense of "Before The Fall" is of a man who likes Nixon, warts and all, determined to record the good as well as the bad. This was an unfashionable take in 1975: The book's original publisher-to-be, William Morrow & Co., rejected it on the grounds, Safire claims in his introduction, that it "did not join in the general revulsion." Because of that, "Before The Fall" may have never gotten the due it deserves as one of the best books ever written by a White House observer. Nixon was one of his nation's most flawed and most interesting leaders, and Safire's book, in nearly 900 pages, keeps a running account of his unique complexities. "Nixon's Dr. Jeckyl worried about Nixon's Mr. Hyde, and usually tried to suppress him, but mostly only tried to conceal him," he writes of his boss's duality. Safire, who became best known in his subsequent job as the right-leaning columnist for the New York Times, displays a seeming photographic ability to take it all in. Because he writes about so many aspects of Nixon's presidency in focused chapters (such as his relations with Catholics, his friendship with Bebe Rebozo, his trip to China), you feel a fuller sense of what goes on in a presidency, its many facets and challenges. Safire augments his eyewitness account with a fondness for historic lore and frequent wit (a footnote notes Cambodian leader Lon Nol's place in the pantheon of famous palindromic names.) The engaged nature of Safire's commentary, its lack of pretense and moralizing, its understanding treatment of human frailty, makes this very long book a very easy read. Give Safire credit also for not slamming the usual suspects. Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman get much of the blame for Watergate and did go to prison for it, but the two top Nixon aides are seen by Safire in a kinder light. Chief of staff Haldeman is an office ramrod, but stands by Safire when a televised Nixon speech goes awry and encourages open discussion around the President. Ehrlichman, receiving an apology from a magazine for misspelling his name, writes back to say he likes it better the way they had it. Liberals may howl at his supportive depiction of the Christmas bombing of Cambodia, while conservatives may find themselves fuming at his happy recounting of Nixon's domestic policy, wh

This was one of Safire's first books after leaving the government and setting up shop at the New York Times. It's a massive but highly readable memoir of his service as speechwriter at the Nixon White House. His view of the president is highly nuanced but ultimately sympathetic. He unloads on Henry Kissinger for having Safire's phone tapped; writes a revealing portrait of Pat Moynihan and how that administration became more "progressive" than either liberal critics or conservative allies could admit; writes admiringly about Julie Eisenhower as "a glimpse of what her father could have been if he hadn't listened so often to the dark side of his personality." He touches on Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and the dirty tricksters and puts them in context of the domestic civil war that was produced by Vietnam--Safire was ahead of his time in giving Nixon more mercy and judging his adversaries as hypocritical (and disasterously wrong about the consequences of a Communist takeover in Southeast Asia.) Highly entertaining and informative--also see his novel of about the same time, "Full Disclosure", for a "roman a' clef" about his Nixon experience.