Nixon Memoir should be re-titled 'Stroll into Paranoia'

I am an avid reader of biographies and memoirs. I can enjoy even the most mild and passionless lives in print. Certainly, "The Memoirs of Richard Nixon: Volume I," Warner Books, 1979.  presented great promise. Indeed, through the first 400 pages, as in his political life, Nixon was compelling, insightful, incisive and brilliant. And then, just as in his life, around Page 526 of his 669-page life he took a turn for the weird, woolly and strange.

His memoir has become quite unreadable as either a historic document for me, or as the marker of a man whom I hold great regard for as a leader. You see, in about the year 1969, RM (1969-1974) starts to think in a non-linear way, listening to the unqualified opinions of those who adore him instead of honestly approaching issues. RM starts to think of himself in the third person and seems to allude to his own unquestioned superiority to understand some 'one true way' of his understanding that no one else understands. In short, he sounds quite mad to me.

This is a shame, because earlier in his memoir, he sounded ever bit the expert politician, conservative bulldog and anti-Communist hero. But to think I am going to go on with more than a hundred pages of lunacy for the sake of having said I endured Nixon's last pages is ridiculous (not unlike his final years in power).

By the time RM had become president he was experienced all right. Too experienced. He had left his original thinking in his suit back in 1964 and never bothered to unpack it from his European fact-finding study back then.

I am left thinking of the book the way one might the man's public life: Smashing start! Amazing middle! And the end just went on and on and on with some cranky old weird guy yelling in the distance.

Shame.

Anyway, on to Carlo D'Este's "Eisenhower."