The horror.Īll that was a long time ago, of course, and Weiner is unfettered by any of the above considerations.

Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall as “black of course…dumb as hell” was redacted until after Marshall’s death. The fact that President Nixon referred to U.S. And all of us, kids and adults alike, were stunned by the number of times the words “expletive deleted” were used.

The words I heard were “discrepancies” and “evasions”. It took awhile before anyone in the journalistic community used the word “lie”, for example. Even if I hadn’t been so fascinated, there was no getting away from it.ĭuring the time Nixon was in office, most of the media criticism of his behavior was initially soft-pedaled out of respect for his office.

It happened at home it happened at school and it probably happened in workplaces. As soon as someone opened the newspaper, or turned on the television, or started to talk about something they had seen on the news, everyone within hearing range erupted in one direction or another. But as young as I was, I have to tell you, dear reader, that the times were so polarized, so politicized (not unlike the time in which we now find ourselves) that issues like Civil Rights and the Vietnam War could not be relegated to the more traditional venues, such as the evening news or the newspaper. I was just a kid during Nixon’s first term. How much will it cost to keep this thing quiet? So, can we find a way to go back and make it look like I told you during the first paragraph, like I was supposed to? And for God’s sake, don’t tell anyone. And by now I am already supposed to have told you that I read this book free, thanks to Net Galley and Henry Holt Company. This is by no means the most important part of the Nixon story as told by veteran political writer Tim Weiner, nor even the most humorous, in a grim, gallows sense it’s just a small sample of the bizarre, the paranoid, and above all, the crooked, reprehensible deeds committed by Nixon and his creepy co-conspirators during his administration. The things you can learn once you start digging. Question: What do an old typewriter, a copy machine, Scotch tape, and a razor blade share in common?Īnswer: They were all tools used by White House employee Howard Hunt, at President Richard Nixon’s request, to forge a cable that would make (dead) President JFK appear to have ordered the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem.

Tim weiner nixon