Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, his administration undone by the Vietnam War quagmire, had announced he would not seek re-election. Near the beginning of the book, the 1968 presidential election looms into view. Weiner also avoids the trap of dwelling on the president's background, noting only how Nixon's personality - the ruthlessness, the ambition, the political instinct and the amorality - was revealed in his formative years. This includes some material that was only declassified last year. Weiner slices through these disparate elements, pulling in only the threads that advance the telling of Nixon's story. Because of this, it is easy to become mired in the details of the Nixon presidency. Because Nixon wiretapped his own offices and (illegally) those of other people, and his aides took copious notes of conversations, there are reams of documentation of what happened during his administration. Most books about Nixon suffer from a lack of perspective. His chief legacy is not the opening of communist China, but a pattern of presidential abuse of power from which our country is still recovering. And this certainly would be the judgment that Nixon wanted history to have of him.īut as Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Tim Weiner expertly shows in "One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon," the late president was an aberration, and his deeds nearly destroyed the country. The conventional wisdom among Nixon apologists is that the Watergate scandal has been overblown, that the crimes were those that had been committed by other presidents, too, and that Richard Nixon was a great man who did great things.
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