The Conviction of Richard Nixon

Starred review from December 31, 2007
In 1977, three years after his resignation, Richard Nixon returned to the public eye in a series of interviews with British television journalist David Frost, for which Nixon received $1 million. Figuring his political and lawyerly skills were more than a match for Frost's interrogation, Nixon instead found himself doing exactly what his successor, Gerald Ford, had tried to prevent with a presidential pardon: publicly admitting that he had broken the law. Reston Jr. was one of the aides Frost hired to help him plan his line of attack; this book, written at the time of the interviews, is being published for the first time now (Reston has supplied a foreword and afterword), but it hardly reads like history. Instead, watching the comeuppance of a highly unpopular and divisive president will provide gratifying thrills for the politically disenchanted. Some references may fly by a modern audience's radar (“Ralph Abernathy pissing on the presidency�), but Reston's passion for finding the chinks in Nixon's armor makes for fascinating reading.