Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon

by Theodore H. White

Book Overview

The Nixon crisis of 1973-1974 threatened the nation in ways we did not immediately understand. Stripped of drama and confusion, however, the problem was that our President had placed himself above the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0689106580
• ISBN13: 9780689106583
• Release Date: January 1975
• Publisher: Atheneum Books
• Length: 373 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Solid Narrative

Theodore H. White (1915-1986) narrates the Watergate scandal and the fall of President Richard Nixon in this book written as several trials from that scandal were still playing out in federal courtrooms in 1975. Readers learn much about the widespread scandal, which ran to the top. We see Nixon as clearly capable, but also a suspicious, devious liar (and tax cheat). Nixon saw politics as a hard-knuckled, take-no-prisoners affair, dating back to his smear campaigns for Congress (1946) and the Senate (1950), in which he came close to labeling his opponents as communist traitors. Such a view made it easy for him as President to approve of political espionage, and then to obstruct justice to cover the wrongdoings. The author also interviews and/or examines many of Nixon's devious lieutenants, including Haldeman, Colson, Liddy, etc. This book isn't White's best effort, but it's well-written and worth reading, as are the narratives from the Bob Woodward/Carl Bernstein pair that first uncovered the scandal (ALL THE PRESIDENTS MEN and THE FINAL DAYS). White was a liberal journalist who'd drifted toward the center, and he seems to have written this book with a sense that he'd been betrayed by Nixon. Actually, the betrayal was more from the author's inability to see Tricky Dick's flaws, as well as over-rating Nixon's accomplishments in MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1972.

The Unmaking Of The President 1974

The facts behind Watergate, the only scandal ever to take down a sitting president, have become so conflated with Hollywood myth, political posturing of the right and left, and the trivia over Deep Throat as to obscure just what Richard Nixon did to deserve losing his office less than two years after his landslide reelection. Fortunately, Theodore H. White was on the scene to give his on-the-spot analysis. 1975's "Breach of Faith" begins strongly with the last days of the Nixon administration when a shell-shocked staff led by Alexander Haig sort out the best way of getting their boss to leave office for the good of the country while fending off former aides under indictment seeking pardons. People who talked about Watergate showing American democracy at its finest, White makes clear, missed the emotional carnage at the scandal's center. "The true crime of Richard Nixon was simple: he destroyed the myth that binds America together, and for this he was driven from power," White writes. Yes, people working for Nixon's subordinates did bug the office of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel, getting caught the second time. Nixon didn't approve that, but he did approve other surveillance activities, and tried to use the CIA to pull the FBI off their Watergate investigation when the water started to boil. He listened agreeably to talk of using IRS audits for political payback. There's one episode where Nixon pigeonholes an assistant attorney general, Henry Petersen, with a suggestion that they not give immunity to the man who would eventually use that immunity to blow Watergate wide open, John Dean. The tapes Nixon had recording everything capture Petersen bravely telling Nixon he will not let anyone, even the president, interfere with his agency's prerogative on who gets and doesn't get immunity in their investigation. Anyone who dismisses Watergate as a victory of partisan politics clearly needs to read the narrative of that conversation included here, really one of the unfairly forgotten events of this convoluted case. At the same time, getting back to White's point about the "true crime" of Watergate, Nixon was more culpable of setting a criminal tone for his office than of any concrete crimes. The hiring of subordinates like Bob Haldeman, his imperious chief of staff, was more responsible for and deserving of Nixon's fate than penny-ante stunts like bugging Daniel Ellsberg's shrink. White quotes an aide: "Nixon was by nature an excluder. Haldeman liked to exclude people. When Nixon's need met Haldeman's abilities, you had an almost perfect recipe for disaster." White doesn't get everything right. Some of his Nixon psychoanalysis is simple and reductive, especially as White backtracks across Nixon's career and loses some of the journalistic narrative that anchors the book's strong beginning. He misses a big part of the story by skimming over Sam Ervin's Senate hearings, when many of the bombshells were made public. There's

Breach of Faith

"The true crime of Richard Nixon was simple: he destroyed the myth that binds America together, and for that he was driven from office." - Theodore White In 1975, the year BREACH OF FAITH was published, there was nobody better equipped to explain the fall of Richard Nixon than journalist Theodore White. With the ink barely dry on President Ford's pardon, and with Nixon $400,000 in debt (pesky unpaid taxes) and months away from a rescuing book deal, America kept a nervous, quasi-suicide watch eye on the hermit of San Clemente. In a time hungry for explanations there was no shortages of books. Woodward and Bernstein gave us an exciting detective story, John Dean gave us contrition, G. Gordon Liddy gave hand-in-the-flame defiance, Charles Colson and Jeb Magruder gave themselves back to God, and wrote about it. Most valuably of all, White's BREACH OF FAITH gave us context. That context takes shape as White delves deeply into the personal and political character of Richard Nixon. White's journalistic career began in China, from where he covered the Revolution for Time magazine in the late thirties. Later he would return to America and report on its presidential campaigns for a number of years, writing a series of `Making of the President' books from 1960 to 1972. Nixon ran for president in 1960, 1968 and 1972. He was a Banquo's ghost-like presence in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson overwhelmingly defeated Barry Goldwater. Nixon's career in national politics and White's career as a domestic reporter ran along parallel tracks. In a sense Watergate almost had to be reported on by White - it marked the end of something he'd spent a generation observing. White begs off explaining `the essential duality of his (Nixon's) nature... the good mind and the evil spirit.' Not, I suspect, because of a lack of insight into Nixon's character. In fact, given the anti-Nixon time it was written in and White's deep affection for the Kennedys, BREACH OF FAITH presents a generously sympathetic picture of Nixon. The book divides roughly into two equal halves. The first is devoted to the plodding rise of Richard Nixon. The second looks at how the `systems' - the press, the congress, and the courts, converged to witness his precipitous fall. That story, White writes, `has elements of an American tragedy.' White's Nixon is the product of a rather cutthroat California political system, a system that rewards those willing to use innuendo and dirty tricks to win. Hardened, and embittered, by two consecutive losses - the presidency in 1960, the governorship of California in 1962 - by 1968 Nixon is conditioned to kick back hard at his enemies - real, imagined, and potential. Sympathy for a subject doesn't mean an author absolves them of responsibility. The high crimes and misdemeanors, the obstructions of justice and abuses of power, are Nixon's alone. The only mitigating circumstance may be the `evil synergy' created when Nixon found himself alone with Chief of

The Spirit of the Time

This may not be Theodore White's best book, but it is an excellent account of Watergate. It was published the year after Nixon resigned and draws on interviews with many of the central characters of the story. White puts the Nixon White House and the scandal in the context of post-war American politics, which he had covered in depth as a journalist and the author of classic accounts of the campaigns that preceded Nixon's demise. He also puts the events in the context of the decisions that Nixon had to make. I had not realized that the Saturday Night Massacre came at about the same time as the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East. White seems to speed through the events of the last year--one might want more about the House Judiciary Committee--but the book summons up much of the feeling of the time. His portraits of Nixon, his minions, and his opponents are fascinating and insightful.

good intro to nixon

THis book offers a very solid perspective on one of the more remarkable politicos of our time and why he fell. While White tended to get a bit sentimental about America in his later years, this book is hard-nosed and very interesting and well written. Essentially, WHite argues that it was not what Nixon did that did him in as much as lying about it. I don't think that that quite covers it, but it puts a lot into perspective. He treats Nixon fairly.One of White's better books.