THE PRESIDENT'S MAN

A former Nixon associate, jailed for perjury during the Watergate investigation, professes his loyalty to his former boss.

During his childhood, Chapin (b. 1940) and his family moved from a Kansas farm to Southern California. As a teenager, he fell into politics not long after arriving in Encino, where “we lived right across the street from the flamboyant and very popular pianist Liberace.” After serving as senior class president in high school, he went door to door, “the bottom rung of politics,” for Sam Yorty, “the independent maverick and outspoken mayor of Los Angeles.” Soon he was working as an advance man for Nixon, “the most complex man I’ve ever known.” While Chapin allows that Nixon could be impenetrable and always played his cards close to his chest, he remains a true believer, so much so that he largely pins the Watergate mess on John Dean. Like Chapin, who served time in a country-club prison in California for lying to Congress, Dean, Haldeman, and a few other once-familiar names figure in the narrative. The account is of value for a few small matters, his protestations of innocence not among them—everyone is innocent, by his account, and it’s only through Democratic machinations that he was unfairly jailed. Foremost among the book’s virtues is Chapin’s fly-on-the-wall look at the inner workings of the Nixon White House, with a president given to self-isolation and paranoia, “practiced at revealing very little of himself,” and a staff fraught with internal squabbling. The takeaways on the ever ambitious Henry Kissinger and Al Haig are to the point. However, as the author sagely notes, “Watergate is now becoming ancient history. Most Americans are curious as to what it was about, but their eyes glaze over when anyone starts to talk about the details of the story.” Too much of this frequently self-serving book will induce just that stupor.

Contains a few useful insights but of tertiary interest to students of the Nixon presidency.