RICHARD NIXON

THE LIFE

JOHN A FARRELL Scribe UK, 737pp, £30, Oldie price £19.04 inc p&p

‘Never in the history of American democracy have so many people loved to hate one man so much,’ wrote Niall Ferguson in his Sunday

Times review. However, he welcomed this ‘readable if superficial book’s recognition that, on a host of issues, Nixon was in truth the most liberal Republican president of the modern era… Contrary to liberal folk memory, Nixon was a centrist who secured a

second term by a landslide not through skulduggery but because his foreign and domestic policies were hugely popular… That he was a crooked square should not distract us, as it has distracted Farrell, from the undoubted achievements of his presidency.’ Larry Harnisch, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, considered that ‘it is no small feat to humanise Richard Nixon, but Farrell does it’. When it comes to Watergate, he ‘does a masterful job of storytelling’ with ‘a treatment that is more like a novel than a biography. Many writers could take lessons in clarity and organisation from Farrell’s handling of Watergate. He moves through the story quickly but without sacrificing detail to hold the readers even when they know the outcome.’

In his New Statesman review, John Bew wrote that Farrell’s biography ‘is brimming with… wince-inducing vignettes, woven into a sharply observed but refreshingly uncensorious assessment… Here was a tragic, troubled and talented figure with whom it is possible to feel empathy at one minute and then disgust the next.’ Farrell’s ‘tradecraft as a biographer is stunningly good, based on years of hunting for new evidence, and he provides us with the fullest picture of the man to date’.

‘Nixon’s foreign and domestic policies were hugely popular’