Read Being Nixon: A Man Divided for Free Online

Nichter’s website nixontapes.org . Any student of the Nixon tapes should start at Nichter’s meticulous site.
    The transcripts of the tapes quoted in the book were made by me.
    I was fortunate to be advised by some Watergate scholars. James Rosen, author of an excellent biography of John Mitchell, is deeply versed on the topic and read my manuscript carefully. So, too, Geoff Shepard, who was a young White House lawyer engaged in Nixon’s defense and is still turning up evidence to support his cause. Max Holland, author of
Leak
, a brilliant study of the source known as “Deep Throat”—FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt—gave me generous and shrewd advice. Tim Naftali, the former head of the Nixon Library, shared his strongly held and informed view of Nixon; I used many of the oral histories conducted by him for the Library. Of Nixon scholars, Melvin Small has to be one of the best; he offered useful feedback on my manuscript (warning me, for example, to be careful with the memoirs of “that old thespian” Nixon). Thomas Schwartz at Vanderbilt was helpful on Vietnam, as was Jeff Kimball at Miamiof Ohio. Annelise Anderson at the Hoover Institute explained the origins of the all-volunteer army, and Earl Silbert, the federal prosecutor on Watergate, and Richard Ben-Veniste, the lead lawyer in the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s office, helped me think through some of the many enduring puzzles.
    Thanks to my friends Robin West and Ted Barreaux for their Nixon reminiscences and to Rick Smith for introducing me to Darrell Trent and Brent Byers for their Nixon memories from Bohemian Grove.
    Oscie and I spent about two months at the Nixon Library, where we were well taken care of by archivists Meghan Lee and Pamla Eisenberg and by archives director Gregg Cumming and audio-visual specialist Ryan Pettigrew. Jonathan Movroydis and Sandy Quinn at the Nixon Foundation opened up the Jonathan Aitken papers and gave me access to Nixon’s private library, enabling me to see his many underlinings in his favorite books. At the Nixon Library, my friend and longtime researcher Mike Hill was with us for some of that time (working profitably on Henry Kissinger’s phone calls and documentation from October 1973) and ventured as well to the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress in Washington (Safire, Garment, and Haig papers), the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas (Woodward and Bernstein papers), and the Virginia Historical Society (David Bruce papers). Thanks to Elizabeth Moynihan for access to Pat Moynihan’s papers as well as for her lively recollections. Mike wishes to thank Rick Watson at the Ransom Center; Jeff Flannery, head of the Manuscript Reading Room, and Patrick Kerwin at the LOC; and Nelson Lankford at the VHS. My thanks to Joe Dmohowski at Whittier College for access to a great oral history collection, an unpublished early biography of Nixon, and his deep knowledge of Quaker Whittier. (Thanks, too, to Hubert Perry, Nixon’s Whittier College contemporary, for sharing his recollections.) Stephanie George at California State–Fullerton helped me with hundreds more oral histories of Nixon’s early days. My appreciation to my friend Peter Drummey for showing me the Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society; to Jon Darman for some Saturday Night Massacre memorabilia from the private papers of his father, Richard Darman; to Amy Fitch at the Rockefeller Archives for help with the diary of Dr. Kenneth Riland (and to Richard Norton Smith for alerting me to it); to Susan Luftshein at the University of Southern California for the Herb Klein papers; to the reference librarians at Harvard University, which houses the papers of Theodore White; to Dan Linke at Princeton University’s Mudd Library, which houses the John Foster Dulles and Arthur Krock papers. My friend Paul Miles, former professor of history at Princeton, shared with me valuable oral histories from the David Halberstam papers