Being Nixon

People forget Nixon was reelected by a landslide after Watergate broke. He just couldn’t help himself—he kept fighting, he persecuted reporters, and he lashed out at everyone he felt had slighted or doubted him. It’s what continued to feed the story and ultimately sank him. Like many such people, he ended up doing more damage to himself than anyone

The relationship between the two, as one Nixon biographer noted, was similar to that between Ahab and the whale: awe and fascination on Nixon’s part, “soured with fear and a desire to supplant; along with a knowledge that whatever nobility one may aspire to will come from the attention of the Great One.”47

For Eisenhower, it was an unforgettable insight into the nature of Washington politics at the highest level.

As President, conscious always of television, he tried to be what he conceived of as “presidential,” composed his face into a “dignified” (expressionless, immobile, carefully still) mask, spoke in deliberate cadences that he believed were “statesmanlike,” so that on television, which is where most Americans got to know him, he was stiff, stilted, c