COME UP BIG

The chronicle of a government official and business leader.

In his nonfiction debut, Wardell recounts the story of his life, observing how unlikely that life would have seemed to his undergraduate self when he failed out of Hamilton College and thought he’d hit rock bottom. Over the following 60 years, he was decorated for his service in the Vietnam War, went on to work for the administrations of presidents Nixon and Ford, navigated the highest levels of corporate America (including becoming CEO of WittKieffer), and successfully battled cancer in his retirement. The author fleshes out these life adventures in detail, particularly his time in the government, working for Alexander Haig in the Nixon White House and then for Henry Kissinger at the State Department under Ford. Wardell provides an insider’s view of these administrations, detailing, for example, his day-to-day responsibilities while the Watergate scandal steadily engulfed Nixon’s White House. He notes that Haig was never rude to him but was simply preoccupied (“it wasn’t that he didn’t trust me,” the author recalls; “He just kept me out of it for my own good”); the author found himself increasingly marginalized and felt that “things were falling apart.” Wardell’s narrative is full of names that went on to greater prominence—figures like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who were Wardell’s colleagues. The author writes humbly but authoritatively about his front-row seat for the action in Vietnam, providing photos of his happy-go-lucky younger self. He strikes the same approachable tone in his memories of the downfall of the Nixon presidency, and he’s equally humble as the narrative moves on to his time as CEO. (“In one of the nice congratulatory lies that are always told by search people to the chosen one, they said that picking me was totally unanimous,” he writes, “but I knew damn well that it hadn’t been.”) The cumulative effect is winningly cheerful.

A warmly inviting story of a full life.