"Seldom Has Pride So Preening Preceded a Fall So Far"

"Indeed, after wading through so many of Richard Nixon's vulgar and contemptuous characterizations of friends and foes alike, as well as his septic rants about Jews and blacks, readers of these volumes may well feel the need for a long shower, where they might reflect on how it came to be that a man whose character was such a combustible compound of principle and pettiness, cunning both grand and base, ambitions lofty as well as loathsome, political acumen and raw prejudice, was ever allowed to ascend to the presidency in the first place."


Forty years after the resignation, David M. Kennedy reviews Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter's The Nixon Tapes 1971-1972 and John Dean's The Nixon Defense in The New York Times.