{"product_id":"before-the-fall-an-inside-view-of-the-prewatergate-white-house-9781412804660","title":"Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House","description":"\u003cp\u003eWilliam Safire was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon from 1968 to 1973. During that time  as a Washington insider  Safire was able to observe the thirty-seventh president in his entirety: as noble and mean-spirited; as good and bad; as a man desirous of greatness. Rarely has there been a White House memoir more intimate or revealing in its exploration of the great events that took place \"before the fall\" of Watergate. In this anecdotal history  Nixon and his associates come alive  not as caricatures  but as men with high and low purpose: Henry Kissinger  William Rogers  H. R. (Bob) Haldeman  John Ehrlichman  Charles Colson  and Arthur Burns struggle not just for power  but for ideals. As William Safire says in his Prologue: \"In this memoir  which is neither a biography of Nixon nor an autobiography of me nor a narrative history of our times  there is an attempt to figure out what was good and bad about him  what he was trying to do and how well he succeeded  how he used and affected some of the people around him  and an effort not to lose sight of all that went right in examining what went wrong.\" The book is divided into ten sections  in which run three main themes: the President  the Partisan  and the Person. As a president  Safire discusses Nixon and the Vietnam War  foreign policy  economics  and race relations. As a partisan  he discusses Nixons attempt to form an alignment across party lines  successful in many respects before the president tolerated the excesses that eventually corrupted his administration. And as a person  Safire finds that Nixon was a mixture of Woodrow Wilson  Machiavelli  Theodore Roosevelt  and Shakespeares Cassius--an idealistic conniver evoking the strenuous life while he thinks too much. This paperback edition of a classic primary source for historians includes a new introduction by its author. Studded with direct quotations that put the reader in the room where history was being made  Before the Fall is a realistic  shades-of-gray study of the Nixon years.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45646687436853,"sku":"ByrdShop_1412804663","price":58.08,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781412804660.jpg?v=1781677309","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/before-the-fall-an-inside-view-of-the-prewatergate-white-house-9781412804660","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}