Before the Fall, by William Safire

Before the Fall By William Safire Doubleday, 704 pp., $12.50 William Safire, one of the first and best of the Nixon speechwriters, left the White House compound just before the Watergate mortar shells began to pound in and just before the Administration froze into traumatic immobility.

For those of us who joined Nixon during the last year (I had come from