"Don't Buy Books by Crooks"

"In late April, as Grosset & Dunlap fired up its million-dollar advertising campaign, the committee began arranging its own print ads for the day of the book’s first newspaper serialization. The Times and The Washington Post declined to run the ads, on grounds of taste, but Mary McGrory, who had won a Pulitzer for her Watergate columns, profiled the group in her syndicated column, describing its one-room headquarters between a laundromat and band rehearsal space, along with its grievances, which centered less on the book itself than on Nixon’s ability to cash in on the whole mess. 'Four years ago,' Flanigan told McGrory, 'he had a chance to tell the truth for free. Now he’s charging $19.95 a copy to tell us the same old story.'"

Craig Fehrman in The New York Times recalls the 1978 controversy over the publication of Richard Nixon's memoir, RN.