HOW THE GOOD GUYS FINALLY WON by JIMMY BRESLIN 192 pages. Viking. $6.95.
U.S. v. RICHARD M. NIXON by FRANK MANKIEWICZ 263 pages. Quadrangle. $8.95.
THE LAST NIXON WATCH by JOHN OSBORNE 213 pages. New Republic. $7.95.
WATCHMEN IN THE NIGHT by THEODORE C. SORENSEN 167 pages. M.I.T. Press. $8.95.
BREACH OF FAITH by THEODORE H. WHITE 356 pages. Atheneum—Reader's Digest Press. $10.95.
Rushed, flawed, repetitive, sometimes contradictory, the first wave of post-Nixon Watergate books is now in full flood. The question is: Do the writers have anything much to say that Americans really want to hear? The answer is a qualified yes. Some new nuggets of Nixonian intrigue rise to the surface. Diverse perspectives are offered on the men around the President—Mitchell, Haldeman and Ehrlichman—on precisely what brought Nixon down, and on how the Government and press have been affected. Most notably, these books provide small, sharp, almost novelistic insights into the personal struggles—some devilish, some inspiring—of individuals caught up in the scandal.
Rootless Outsider. Watergate is too recent to permit calm interpretation. Yet four professional President watchers and one street-wise verbal brawler with a police reporter's eye and literary style to match, have dared to look back in anger or regret. Perhaps because Americans are weary of grandiose pronouncements, it is the writers who think smallest who seem most worth reading.
Jimmy Breslin's book, which bristles with anecdotes and is embellished with Irish blarney, is the best of the lot.
Of the other four writers, Theodore White, author of The Making of many Presidents, including Nixon, is the only one to offer a total read for anyone who wants to wallow in Watergate. He skillfully retells the whole story of the President's fall, even dealing with his character as a rootless outsider who bitterly resented social slights offered him by men like Eisenhower and Rockefeller. Most important, White's book includes an absorbing day-by-day account, based on personal interviews, of what the President and the men around him—especially General Alexander Haig and Lawyers Leonard Garment and James St. Clair—were doing during the final weeks of the crisis. For some days, White says, Haig was in fact the country's "Acting President" as he maneuvered to help bring about a resignation, while the moody Nixon veered between defensive anger and despair.
White sometimes seems trapped between his gift for swift narratives and his fondness for sweeping analysis. Quite properly, he assails Nixon for his "true crime: he destroyed the myth that binds America together . . . the myth that somewhere in American life there is at least one man who stands for law, the President." Yet he overpraises Nixon's non-Watergate presidential actions at home and abroad, even to the bombing of Hanoi and the Cambodia "incursion." White is also dealing in vapors when he contends that the press turned wrathfully upon Nixon because its "chief public enemy," Spiro Agnew, "had been spared the shame and public guillotine of impeachment."