A few admissions about what he thought was just a public relations problem
"A book both extraordinary and historic. The personal memoir of a life of conflict, an extraordinary life lived in the arena, a public life that ended with the greatest fall in modern political history. The whole story."
One man's view of tumultuous events, of course, cannot constitute "the whole story," especially when the man sits at the troubled center of much of the action and judges himself. Yet that publisher's puff for a book, designated "14374-7 General Nonfiction" in the Grosset & Dunlap catalogue and titled The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, is generally accurate. Richard M. Nixon's personal recollections of his roller-coaster career are a valuable contribution to the history of his times. Only on some highly specific points, including his familiar version of Watergate events, will critics wonder if his book lives up to its classification as nonfiction.
Working for nearly three years over yellow legal pads at his San Clemente estate, Nixon produced 1.5 million words. Even more surprising, he then went willingly, if painfully, through an editing process that slashed those hard-wrought words to fewer than 500,000−a throw-away of presidential verbiage that must make historians blink. Still, the final product is a book of 1,184 pages. And though Nixon had research help from his staff, as well as from writers who prepared drafts of some sections, the result, says Editor in Chief Robert Markell of Grosset & Dunlap, "is very much the former President's book and his words. It is his message not only to us here and now, but down through the ages."
Warner Communications Inc., which will publish the paperback edition, paid him more than $2 million. Warner then sold the hard-cover rights to Grosset & Dunlap and the newspaper syndication rights to the Times Syndication Sales Corp., owned by the New York Times Co. Sixty periodicals−30 newspapers in the U.S. and 30 magazines and newspapers abroad−this week began reprinting excerpts. U.S. newspapers were limited to running 15,000 words, foreign papers 25,000−a mere 3% to 5% of Memoirs.
As the first excerpts appeared this week, it was clear that the book does not contain any smashing revelations. It is neither chatty nor ponderous. It will satisfy neither readers looking for personal gossip nor scholars seeking profound insights into the forces shaping global politics. Yet it does move easily in short sentences and simple narrative style to convey Nixon's interpretations of history in an unambiguous fashion, full of specific, if incidental, detail.