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Summary
Summary
These transcripts document two years of the Richard Nixon presidency and take you directly inside the White House: "A treasure trove" ( The Boston Globe ).
These are the famous--and infamous--Nixon White House tapes that reveal for the first time President Richard Milhous Nixon uncensored, unfiltered, and in his own words.
President Nixon's voice-activated taping system captured every word spoken in the Oval Office, Cabinet Room, other key locations in the White House, and at Camp David--3,700 hours of recordings between 1971 and 1973. Yet less than five percent of those conversations have ever been transcribed and published. Now, thanks to historian Luke Nichter's massive effort to digitize and transcribe the tapes, the world can finally read an unprecedented account of one of the most important and controversial presidencies in US history.
This volume of The Nixon Tapes offers a selection of fascinating scenes from the period in which Nixon opened relations with China, negotiated the SALT I arms agreement with the Soviet Union, and won a landslide reelection victory. All the while, the growing shadow of Watergate and Nixon's political downfall crept ever closer. The Nixon Tapes provides a never-before-seen glimpse into a flawed president's hubris, paranoia, and political genius--"essential for students of the era and fascinating for those who lived it" ( Kirkus Reviews , starred review).
Reviews (2)
New York Review of Books Review
RECLAIMING CONVERSATION: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, by Sherry Turkle. (Penguin, $17.) Dialogue is a gateway to developing introspection and compassion, Turkle argues, but as technology mediates more of our conversations, our interpersonal and emotional skills have deteriorated precipitously. Turkle cautions against the unquestioning embrace of technology, calling instead for a return to face-to-face talks and more personal interaction. THE VISITING PRIVILEGE: New and Collected Stories, by Joy Williams. (Vintage, $16.95.) Gathered in part from her previous collections but including 13 stories new in book form, these tales exhibit Williams's trademark blend of grim humor and despair; in the title story, a woman finds unexpected solace in visits to her friend being treated for depression. The book amounts to what our reviewer, Ben Marcus, called "one of the most fearless, abyss-embracing literary projects our literature has seen." TRANS: A Memoir, by Juliet Jacques. (Verso, $19.95.) The author, who chronicled her sex-reassignment surgery and transition in columns for The Guardian, writes lucidly about her coming-of-age and experiences of feeling out of place. As she puts it, "I felt trapped not by my body but a society that didn't want me to modify it." AS CLOSE TO US AS BREATHING, by Elizabeth Poliner. (Lee Boudreaux/Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) Three Jewish sisters converge on a familiar summer destination, a stretch of Connecticut's coast known as Bagel Beach, and find comfort in domestic rituals, religion and one another. Poliner's wideranging novel, narrated by one of the sisters' children, flits back and forth in time over a nearly hundred-year period, with a family tragedy at the story's center. BIG SCIENCE: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the MilitaryIndustrial Complex, by Michael Hiltzik. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) Lawrence, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, played a role in the Manhattan Project, and his inventions helped set a trend of enormous projects. But chief among his contributions was developing, as one admirer put it, "the modern way of doing science." By forging closer ties between science and politics, he helped make science far more interdisciplinary. THE GREEN ROAD, by Anne Enright. (Norton, $15.95.) The members of an Irish family, after years in far-flung locales, return for what might be a final Christmas holiday together. In this masterly novel, Enright, the 2007 Man Booker winner, writes as expertly about the AIDS crisis in New York and humanitarian work in Mali as she does about Ireland. THE NIXON TAPES: 1973, edited by Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $16.95.) In these illuminating transcripts, the president's words from a turbulent period speak for themselves. At the outset of this volume of the tapes, Nixon has won re-election but soon turns to obsessing over the gathering Watergate scandal and plotting his response. ?
Library Journal Review
Surprisingly, the last of the nearly 4,000 hours' worth of tapes made by President Nixon was released only last August, and very little of this material has been transcribed and published. CBS News historian Brinkley (e.g., The Wilderness Warrior) and Nichter, an associate professor at Texas A&M University and former founding executive producer of C-SPAN's American History TV, have selected, edited, and annotated key passages from the tapes with topics ranging from negotiating with North Vietnam to managing the reelection campaign. The book will be released, along with accompanying digitized audio recordings, on the 40th anniversary of Nixon's resignation. Obviously important; with a 50,000-copy first printing. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.