Time of Illusion: Vietnam

Easily the best book yet written about Watergate and that surreal blot on history known as The Nixon Administration. Powerfully -- and beautifully -- written by the great Jonathan Schell("The Fate of the Earth"), this work is must reading for all those who view Richard Nixon as some sort of mysterious American Everyman, at heart in fact the last true American Progressive. Yeah, sure. Written only two years after RN fled the White House just ahead of the posse, "The Time of Illusion" dramatizes the Nixon men and their time as the ultimate in fear-obsessed, contradictory, petty cynicism -- and leaves the revisionist "poor misunderstood Richard" fabulists(Oliver Stone, Tom Wicker, Stephen Ambrose) right where they belong: in the toilet. Thirty years after these events, there remains something attractive and deeply moving about these overwhelmed Nixon men, trying to keep the house of cards from collapsing. And the brave, wonderfully democratic time that brought it all down. Read now, it only makes the size, audacity and ruthlessness of the current Bush criminality seem even more overwhelming. A must read.