Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962; The Foreign Politics of Richard Nixon: The Grand Design; The World and Richard Nixon

Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962; The Foreign Politics of Richard Nixon: The Grand Design; The World and Richard Nixon

Stephen E. Ambrose
Franz Schurmann
C. L. Sulzberger
Reviewed by By Gaddis Smith
Summer 1987
Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.
Stephen E. Ambrose
Simon & Schuster
1987
695 pp.
$22.95
Franz Schurmann
Institute of International Studies, University of California
1987
403 pp.
$18.50
C. L. Sulzberger
Prentice Hall Press
1987
252 pp.
$18.95

These three volumes will, each in its way, contribute to the rehabilitation of Mr. Nixon's reputation. The first-by a fine historian and biographer of Dwight D. Eisenhower-is a straightforward, no-nonsense political biography covering Nixon's career up to his 1962 defeat as a candidate for governor of California. Another volume will follow. Mr. Ambrose admits that he had never admired Mr. Nixon and had to be persuaded to undertake this work. But he is fair, giving Mr. Nixon full credit for intelligence, an extraordinary capacity for work, political skill and responsible behavior as vice president. On the other hand, he adds many details to the familiar story of a cold, ruthless campaigner suppressing or simply lacking the qualities of grace and compassion.

Mr. Schurmann's study is a repetitious blend of insight and the obvious. The argument that President Nixon's approach to the Soviet Union and China was innovative, constructive and his own (not merely borrowed from Henry Kissinger) is sound, but no longer startling. The best part of the book deals with the inapplicability of the "grand design" to the realities of the Third World. Most of the book was written in 1975-76; it would have had more impact had its publication not been delayed for a decade.

Mr. Sulzberger's The World and Richard Nixon is a fulsome tribute, a collection of long quotations by and about Mr. Nixon (many drawn from the author's diaries and interviews conducted over the years, including a long 1986 interview with his subject). Some of the material has been previously published.

Related

Essay, Jan 1971
The Nixon Doctrine and Our Asian Commitments
Earl G. Ravenal

Eighteen months after its enunciation at Guam the Nixon Doctrine remains obscure and contradictory in its intent and application. It is not simply that the wider pattern of war in Indochina challenges the Doctrine's promise of a lower posture in Asia. More than that, close analysis and the unfolding of events expose some basic flaws in the logic of the Administration's evolving security policy for the new decade. The Nixon Doctrine properly includes more than the declaratory policy orientation. It comprises also the revised worldwide security strategy of "1½ wars" and the new defense decision-making processes such as "fiscal guidance budgeting." These elements have received little comment, especially in their integral relation to our commitments in Asia. But the effects of this Administration's moves in these areas will shape and constrain the choices of the United States for a long time to come.

Read
Essay, Oct 1972
After the Cold War
George F. Kennan

IN the years since the end of the Second World War, American foreign policy has consisted primarily of the effort to cope with two immensely difficult problems which the events of that war brought into being, neither of which had been adequately anticipated and which the discussions among the victor powers at the end of the war failed to solve. One was the question of how should be filled the great political vacuums created by the removal of the hegemonies recently exercised by Germany and Japan over large and important areas of the Northern Hemisphere. The uncertainty and emerging disagreement over the attendant questions concerned not only much of Central and Eastern Europe but also parts of East Asia that had been overrun by the Japanese, including-alas-Indochina; and the settlement of the Asian aspects of the problem came to involve not only the United States and the Soviet Union and the inhabitants of the affected territories themselves but also, with the completion of the Chinese Revolution, the new communist power in China.

Read
Essay, Oct 1970
The New Generation of Isolationists
James A. Johnson

The decade of the sixties has produced a new school of isolationism. The reaction to the war in Vietnam, the demands of domestic problems and the seeming hollowness of traditional assumptions of international involvement- all give rise to this outlook. The isolationism is sometimes incoherent, occasionally inconsistent, and very attractive to a large portion of the younger generation.

Read