A mostly evenhanded (from this great distance) consideration of a president from one of his closest advisers.
The populist conservative and senior adviser to Richard Nixon tells how he helped turn the loser into a winner.
Against all odds, Nixon won the presidency in 1968, barely defeating Hubert Humphrey and reviving the moribund GOP in the process. As one of Nixon’s first young converts, then a St. Louis Globe-Democrat editorial writer fresh out of Columbia’s journalism school, Buchanan (Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, 2011, etc.), a disappointed Goldwater supporter and one of the more hard-core young Republicans then emerging, talked his way into Nixon’s good graces as early as 1966, during the period of Nixon’s toiling in the “wilderness” of his Manhattan law firm after the crushing defeats of 1960 (against JFK for the presidency) and 1962 (for governor of California). The same sore loser who had made his unfortunate “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” morning-after speech had two qualities that saved him, Buchanan writes: loyalty to his party and a fighting spirit. Indeed, restoring the party base was a key element to his ultimate success, since the GOP had lost both houses by 1954 and was fatally split by 1964 between the John Birch Society-Goldwater hard-liners and the more moderate Republicans represented by New York’s Nelson Rockefeller and Michigan Gov. George Romney. Nixon—as well as Buchanan and other important “advance men”—threw their energy into courting the conservative press and laying down a strategy for helping the GOP recoup losses in the midterm election of 1966. This strategy included reasserting law and order, endorsing Rockefeller (whom they loathed) for governor, and fashioning a new Republican Party of the South that rested on human rights and not bigotry. Buchanan was privy to all kinds of secret conversations and memos regarding Vietnam, LBJ, RFK and many unsung politicians and newspapermen who shaped the debate.
A mostly evenhanded (from this great distance) consideration of a president from one of his closest advisers.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-553-41863-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown Forum
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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