Book Review
Nixon’s Populist Path

Nixon’s Populist Path

Though President Richard Nixon exuded conservatism, he was really a populist president. He got the conservative votes, and in return he gave his constituents the cold shoulder. ...
Steve Byas

Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever, by Patrick J. Buchanan, New York: Crown Forum, 2017, 436 pages, hardcover.

“The conservatives get the rhetoric, and we get the action,” Senator Hugh Scott, the Republican minority leader, said in 1969. The liberal Republican was pleased that the presidential administration of Richard Nixon was giving the “action” to the liberals, despite the staunch conservative rhetoric emanating from the White House.

That “rhetoric” was mostly the work of Nixon’s conservative senior advisor Pat Buchanan, who had been with Nixon since 1965, when the former vice president had begun his amazing political comeback (those years have been expertly documented in Buchanan’s previous book The Greatest Comeback). In this delicious read, Buchanan reveals a different perspective on the Nixon presidency than we have heard before, from a man who was there. The major challenge with reviewing Buchanan’s well-crafted book is that it contains so much meat that I can only feed the reader a small portion of it.

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