Trial by fire.('Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full')(Book review)

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Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, by Conrad Black (Public Affairs, 1,148 pp., $40)

ALMOST a decade ago, at the zenith of his power and wealth, Conrad Black set out to write a biography of the most powerful and enduring of American presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At first glance, it seemed a strange encounter. Black championed legendarily right-wing politics; Roosevelt was ... well, Roosevelt. And yet, Black fiercely admired and in some ways even identified with the man who once damned people like Black as "economic royalists." Yet the book proved a surprising intellectual and commercial success, widely and rightly applauded as the best single-volume biography of America's longest-serving president.

Since then, fortune has turned on Black. He has been investigated, indicted, and convicted. His companies have been stripped from him and massive penalties imposed. Through the ordeal, he has behaved with courage and dignity, supported by the steadfast love of his wife and his children.

Somehow, Black found time during this tribulation to continue writing. And once you heard he had begun, his choice of subject was obvious and inevitable: the most embattled and tenacious of American presidents, Richard Nixon.

Black brought to his Roosevelt project a distinct and revisionist point of view. His FDR is much more prescient about Hitler and Stalin and much less radical on economics than the FDR of most history books. With Nixon, Black offers something more unusual than a novel thesis: direct personal knowledge of his subject. Black spent many hours with Nixon in the president's final years. Black was also an intimate friend of Nixon's most important adviser, Henry Kissinger. Some of the most fascinating passages in the book come when Black allows us a glimpse of the weird triangular friendship between the three men. Black writes:

 
   Kissinger always has been an inexhaustible 
   storehouse of nasty opinions 
   about almost everyone. Only a few extremely 
   powerful or intimate people are 
   exempt from his rather unattractive habit 
   of running down everyone, no matter how 
   congenial he is with the subjects when he 
   sees them.