With the centennial of Richard Nixon’s birth coming up in 2013, it is fitting that a reevaluation of the most reviled Republican president of the 20th century is under way. Conrad Black started this process a few years ago, with his biography, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. Mad Men, the smart TV drama set in the early 1960s, recently showed protagonist Don Draper, the quintessential self-made man, talking politics at a cocktail party. He’s for Nixon, Draper explains, because Nixon is a self-made man, as opposed to that rich brat, Kennedy. If there has been another positive reference to Nixon in prime time over the past 40 years, I missed it.
Now comes political novelist Thomas Mallon, with an oddly fascinating, fictionalized version of the scandal known as Watergate, to revise and refresh our recollection of the event, its protagonist, and the supporting characters. Its plot generally follows the events, locations, and time line of the actual scandal. Mallon has a subtle wit, and this imposition of his political novel over the historic record suggests, provocatively, that there won’t be much daylight between history and this fiction. That is a daring gambit, when the central event looms so large in the memories of the political class.
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