Just finished noted historian Stephen E. Ambrose second volume on Nixon: Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972 and it’s quite a task.
Ambrose as at his best walking the reader from Nixon’s failed run in the California gubernatorial campaign where he famously stated to the press “Your not going to have Nixon to kick around anymore” to his landslide re-election in 1972 with Watergate just beginning to explode.
The details of Nixon’s inherited war in Vietnam are the most revealing. Vietnam cast such a long shadow on Nixon’s Presidency. However all things begin equal he could not escape the shadow of Johnson’s role escalating the war in Vietnam. Nixon himself destroyed the “Imperial Presidency” he so hungered to achieve.
