One Man Against the World exists thanks in great part to three people: Stephen Rubin, the courageous president and publisher of Henry Holt and Company; Gillian Blake, Holt’s extraordinary editor in chief, who gave every word meaning; and my brilliant literary agent, Kathy Robbins, who has stood by me for twenty years.
At the Robbins Office, David Halpern contributed mightily. At Holt, thanks to Chris O’Connell, Meryl Sussman Levavi, Jenna Dolan, Eleanor Embry, and Caroline Zancan.
The collected works of Richard Nixon include 2,636 hours of taped White House conversations open to the public. The struggle to wrestle them from Nixon—and the continuing effort to transcribe them—has been an epic battle. The last 340 hours of tapes were released on August 21, 2013, nearly forty years to the day after their existence was revealed at the Senate Watergate Hearings. The talented Cynthia Colonna helped me immeasurably in transcribing hundreds of crucial Nixon tapes.
All Nixon historians stand on the shoulders of Stanley Kutler, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1994, Kutler sued the National Archives and the Nixon estate to force the release of the White House tapes. He won. He worked tirelessly for more than twenty years to bring the truth of the Nixon administration out of the past and into the light of day. Stanley died in April 2015. I wish he could have read this book.
Harry Robbins Haldeman produced handwritten and dictated diaries that describe in minute detail the mind of Richard Milhous Nixon. Haldeman’s candor can be checked meticulously against contemporaneous documents and records. Haldeman almost always got it right—and his reflections have a mordant sense of humor. Without his diaries (online and in the public domain at the Nixon Library’s website), replete with passages declassified as recently as November 2014, no accurate account of Richard Nixon’s presidency would be possible.
The memoirs of members of the Nixon administration are often self-serving, and sometimes demonstrably false. An exception is John W. Dean III’s The Nixon Defense, published in August 2014. Dean—who, like Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, plotted to destroy his master—may not be the most reliable narrator of the Nixon tragedy, but his book is essential. With the help of forty-two Nixon Presidential Library archivists and six personal assistants, Dean transcribed a multitude of previously unpublished tapes. His book is a straightforward script of the conversations and confrontations that preceded Nixon’s downfall.
Timothy Naftali led the Nixon Presidential Library for four crucial years until November 2011. He is an unsung hero of American history. I am grateful to him, his successors, and every staff member of the Nixon Library, who will serve generations of Americans throughout the twenty-first century.
The editors, historians, and archivists of The Foreign Relations of the United States series produce the official diplomatic history of America, published continuously since the Civil War. Their work is unique and invaluable. Laboring tirelessly—often against strong opposition from the CIA—they have printed fifty-six thick volumes of declassified documents on the foreign policies of the Nixon administration, all available online. Since 2007, these have incorporated the transcripts of hundreds of hours of conversations among Nixon, Kissinger, and their top military, diplomatic, and intelligence officials.
My mother, Professor Dora B. Weiner, is a distinguished historian. She taught me how to read and write. I am forever grateful to her.
I love my wife, Kate Doyle, who works with all her heart and soul in the name of human rights, and our daughters, Emma Doyle and Ruby Doyle, who know that American democracy is a work in progress—and that work may take a long time. We are all in it for the long haul. I dedicate this book, and my life, to them.