A must for political readers as well as theater and movie buffs. Donald G Pile, Shawnee Mission, Ks.

The information is fascinating... production background, interviews with directors and actors who have played Richard Nixon.... anything that is relevant to the interpretation of RNix as a character in plays and films.... Great to nibble away at over time or feast on right away!

Over the last decade or so, there has been a substantial rethinking of the Nixon presidency.... Until the appearance of Allen Matusow's new book, however, Nixon's economic policies had not received a similar reassessment. In a very readable and well researched exploration of Nixon's economics, Matusow makes a compelling case that Nixon held no principled position whatsoever and that his economic policies were overtly and explicitly driven by his attempts to create a new electoral majority.... The Nixon presidency, as seen through Matusow's account, becomes an excellent case study in public-choice economics and the failures of interventionism.

Three major strengths of Matusow's book deserve special mention. First, he has made extensive use of archival materials that were inaccessible until recently. By using the presidential office files, Bob Haldeman's extensive notes, and the various books and recollections of Nixon's associates, he has assembled a large amount of material from a variety of sources to document various meetings and discussions in great detail. The result is a very ugly view of the politicization of economic policy that puts one in mind of the old saw about not wanting to know how sausages or laws are made....

A second strength of the book, of special interest to economists, is Matusow's careful documentation of the role played by well-known economists in the Nixon administration. Arthur Burns, Herbert Stein, Paul McCracken, Milton Friedman, and others all have starring roles in the drama. Except Friedman, none of them presents an appealing picture. Matusow extensively documents the ways in which Nixon's economic advisors were quick to sacrifice principles, particularly free-market principles, for political expediency.... Matusow makes extensive use of Friedman's Newsweek columns to illustrate the ways in which Nixon's policies did not correspond with the Friedman's free-market, monetarist line....

The book's third strength is Matusow's use of economics. In more than three hundred pages of analysis of Nixon's economics, I found very few places where Matusow made an obvious error of theory or history.... But in most cases he handles the economics nicely, especially in his discussions of inflation, where he keeps the behavior of the money supply always at the forefront, and the energy crisis, where he does a fine job of documenting the various government interventions that precipitated the crisis and the horrendous policy mistakes that exacerbated it.... Matusow deserves particular praise for his discussion of Bretton Woods and the gold window, in which he deals with some complicated issues in international monetary economics and does a good job of rendering them comprehensible....

Matusow has carefully and cogently documented Nixon's use of the instruments of power in pursuit of his own political goals and illuminated the disastrous results (double-digit inflation and the worst recession since the 1930s, not to mention a legacy of interventionism that has continued to the present) that Nixon's economics engendered. Matusow's book, though not couched in such terms, is an excellent case study in public-choice economics and is recommended to students of public choice and recent U.S. economic history.

This book fills a big gaping hole in economic history. There are probably hundreds of books on Nixon and Vietnam, China, and Watergate. But very few exist on his other policies, including his economic policies. This is especially strange considering that his Administration presided over the final destruction of the gold standard, first sustained budget deficits, and the beginning of the Great Recession of 1970s.

Thus, this book is extremely useful. Almost month-by-month it describes the swinging pendulum of booms and busts that resulted from Nixon's economic mismanagement and the world economy's response to it. This is a very thorough work, meticulously documented. The author carefully documents endless cases of sacrifice of economic policies to blatantly short-term political goals.

It's also a good narrative, it weaves all the facts and explanation together, and it's organized very well. I found it very easy to read and understand it. It sheds much light on the economic causes of all those strange events of the 1970s. It's also a great companion to a more general history of USA during those years.

Finishing this book 4/23/2000, I found it really interesting. Since it was actually written in 1988, a lot of the information is outdated. But most of it makes sense still. Nixon gave tips, political strategies, and predictions about the next twelve years. And he was right about most of them. This is a really good book, even though it is old. I still learned a lot from it.

This was one of Safire's first books after leaving the government and setting up shop at the New York Times. It's a massive but highly readable memoir of his service as speechwriter at the Nixon White House. His view of the president is highly nuanced but ultimately sympathetic. He unloads on Henry Kissinger for having Safire's phone tapped; writes a revealing portrait of Pat Moynihan and how that administration became more "progressive" than either liberal critics or conservative allies could admit; writes admiringly about Julie Eisenhower as "a glimpse of what her father could have been if he hadn't listened so often to the dark side of his personality." He touches on Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and the dirty tricksters and puts them in context of the domestic civil war that was produced by Vietnam--Safire was ahead of his time in giving Nixon more mercy and judging his adversaries as hypocritical (and disasterously wrong about the consequences of a Communist takeover in Southeast Asia.) Highly entertaining and informative--also see his novel of about the same time, "Full Disclosure", for a "roman a' clef" about his Nixon experience.

A wonderful quick read with a great touch of humor to a historical journey! I strongly recommend it!

Delivers the basic goods; suspense, suprise, danger, good dialogue in high places, ingenious situations. Hard to put down.

"The Gods of Antenna" is a well written "book of lists" that details a particular technique of telling the news and then a list of examples. The book was written by a person in the Nixon White House 2 years after Watergate... this guy is an insider with an interesting perspective... although the examples are a bit dated for someone not "of age" in 1976. Go to microfiche and check his sources. Well worth it. I don't own a copy of the book (I'm looking for it here.) So, I won't give an example because I can't quote it exactly. Regardless, this relatively short book could be used as a textbook for Public Relations and as a guide to understanding the quality or character of the news that we read or watch on TV.

Nixon, for all of his faults, was a brilliant man and he writes a great book. A lot of good commonsense advice for living your life, educating yourself and seeing the world. He shares numerous anecdotes from his experiences as a congressman and president, but this book is mainly about how to get the most out of the time that you have on this earth and about how to get the largest possible perspective on the world around you. He was one of our few presidents in the past 40 years that actually had a global view on how they executed the presidency and that shows through in this reading.

I just wish that he had lived his life as he wrote this book.

As wonderful as Presidential memoirs tend to be, Richard Nixon's memoirs serve as one of the most well written and certainly the book that most helped any ex-President image wise. This book gets fairly personal at times, and it tells the fascinating and lengthy story of one of the American Presidents. Enjoy.

It's too bad that this book is out of print. Probably it stopped selling because of its title -- people must have assumed that it was only relevant for the Nixon era. Not so! The book is valuable today for the evocation of the early part of that time (especially the summer of 1968), but more than that, it is a masterful analysis of that collection of shared intellectual assumptions that make up a great deal of American political (and other) impulses -- specifically, that set of post-Lockean interpretations of social, moral, economic and political life which fall under the rubric of "liberalism". Wills details the connection between Nixon and this background, and the results are far-ranging. Many of the great American assumptions about life are implicated and their mythical foundations revealed: equality of economic opportunity, electoral "mandates", democracy via fair elections in countries that do not have them, fair competition of ideas in academia, and others. Wills leaves no stone unturned. The book deserves to be reprinted again.

Original review above was July 1998; Below added Jan 2003:
Hurrah! It's back in print! Get your copy before it disappears again!

I should have mentioned that, in addition to the fun of watching Wills dismantle the superstructure of liberalism, the book provides great pleasure through its style. Wills writes non-fiction better than most poets write sonnets.