i didn’t know you were allowed to write a history book with such a snarky, almost sardonic tone throughout. felt like the longest book ever, took me months to get through, though incredibly it doesn’t even reach the “juicy” impeachment and resignation parts. the book ends right as nixon is reelected, however the watergate break-in has already happened.

overall nixon is a fascinating figure, possibly one of the presidents i’m most interested in. he was a lifelong political underdog, gifted with almost no natural charm or family wealth/connections like his perennial rivals (the kennedys, reagan), but managed to slog his way to the country’s top office through sheer effort, guile, political maneuvering, and a superior understanding of underlying public opinion (his “silent majority”). what drove it all seemed to have been a genuine personal conviction that he was the best man for the job and that the country needed him, especially when it came to foreign policy, his pet topic.

despite his overwhelming “shifty politician” aura, he outworked and outplayed his opponents to eventually reach the presidency, but even in the country’s highest political office he still felt like the underdog, under constant attack from the media and distracted from dealing with his precious foreign policy by domestic turmoil like the vietnam protests. there’s obviously a lot about the vietnam war in the book, and my overall impression is that the war went on for so long almost exclusively due to politicians trying to save face in US domestic politics. the war didn’t seem winnable almost from the start, but no president/political party was willing to take the reputational hit from being seen as the ones who “lost” the war, the only alternative was to try and negotiate a peace settlement generous enough that it could be played off as a victory, or at least not look like total capitulation. nixon especially clung to a desperate hope that perhaps the war could still be won with just one more huge troop escalation or extended bombing campaign, while at the same time adopting a “madman” persona in negotiations that he hoped might scare them into coming to the table for a settlement favorable to the US.

nixon was an incumbent running against a disorganized democratic party, so a big question is why did he feel the need to get up to shenanigans like watergate? it seems he was genuinely convinced that the fate of the country was on the line in the 1972 presidential election, that the country would fall into ruins if he let a democrat win, and as a result he was willing to do whatever it took to win. with his authorization (but cloaked under many layers of plausible deniability), the committee to re-elect the president (CREEP for short, you can’t make this stuff up) assembled a group of young political operatives to spy on and sabotage democratic primary candidates. they were basically professional trolls, they called themselves the “ratfuckers” got up to antics (which they called “ratfucks”) like spamming campaign offices with bogus calls and letters, or handing out flyers to hoboes that promised free food at expensive democratic donor luncheons. their objective was to get george mcgovern elected in the democratic primary as the presidential nominee, because it was believed he would be the easiest opponent to defeat in the election. the way they boosted him was by sabotaging every single campaign except for his, and in the end mcgovern ended up as the democratic nominee after a chaotic democratic convention (which became so divided in part with assistance from nixon’s political maneuvering).

unfortunately, nixon’s goons were loyal and unscrupulous politics guys rather than seasoned criminals, and when trying to do some spying on the democratic party they royally bungled the DNC HQ break-in at watergate and got caught. however, nixon’s involvement would only come to light months down the line, and in the meantime nixon ended up winning re-election in a historic landslide carrying 49 states, including mcgovern’s home state of south dakota. still, he was left feeling frustrated, the republican party didn’t manage to get a majority in either chamber of congress. in the wake of his great victory nixon, the perpetual underdog, could be found cursing out massachusetts for having gone for mcgovern…