Perfectly Clear; Nixon from Whittier to Watergate

New York: Quadrangle, 1973. First Printing. Hardcover. Good/Fair. 25 cm. xiii, [3], , 239, [1] pages. Appendices. Index. Illustrated endpaper. DJ somewhat soiled and discolored, with small edge tears. Inscribed by the author. Frank Fabian Mankiewicz II (May 16, 1924 - October 23, 2014) was an American journalist, political adviser, president of National Public Radio and public relations executive. He briefly attended Haverford College before dropping out to join the army infantry during World War II and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, Mankiewicz received a Bachelor of Arts in political science from University of California, Los Angeles in 1947; a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1948; and an LL.B. from University of California, Berkeley in 1955. He was president of National Public Radio from 1977 to 1983, overseeing the creation of Morning Edition and the expansion of the network. His work in politics earned him a place on the master list of Nixon's political opponents. He was also an unsuccessful candidate for the United States House of Representatives in Maryland in 1974. In 1974, Mankiewicz acted as a secret emissary, carrying messages from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Fidel Castro, and then reporting back to Kissinger. In January 1975, Mankiewicz and Lawrence Eagleburger held a clandestine meeting with Castro's representative Ramon Sanchez-Parodi at LaGuardia airport. This secret diplomacy failed to produce a political breakthrough. The author was the national political director for George McGovern's Presidential campaign. Of the McGovern aides, Mankiewicz is the one who has been encountering Nixon all his political life. His is an obsession nourished in the southern California soil, beginning in 1946, even though Mankiewicz and Nixon grew up there in worlds apart. One of the ironies of this book is that Frank, who came of age in the tinseled trappings of Hollywood, is today the one who pleads for the old verities in the self righteous tones of a Biblical prophet and who finds in Richard Nixon, the small town boy who worked in his family's grocery store, the slickest big city hustler of all time. At the center of Mankiewicz's book, "Perfectly Clear," is a lengthy review of all the Nixon scandals that came to light -in essence, the author's presentation of the case against Richard Nixon. For Mankiewicz, Watergate has become simply the, new code word for the Old Nixon, so another part of the book is spent on a digest of all the early Nixon campaigns, which show, to some degree, that the Watergate mentality was there all along. Thus Mankiewicz writes a book that serves up a banquet of details about people like Sheridan Downey, Manchester Boddy and McIntyre Faries. Downey, as everyone surely remembers, was the incumbent United States Senator from California whose decision not to run for re election led to the fight between Nixon and Helen Gahagan Douglas. If you want to know more about them and about the tidelands oil issue and Mankiewicz's opinion of whether Jerry Voorhis was ever endorsed by the Political Action Committee of the C.I.O. in 1946, then this may be the book for you. The evidence the author offers here shows that Nixon has always unscrupulously distorted the records of his political opponents, forcing them to engage in an argument on narrow grounds, an argument that Nixon invariably won. What this debater's tactic has to do with the institutional corruption in the Nixon Administration-the secret bombing, wiretapping and abuse of police power-is less clear. To explain these more contemporary forms of wrongdoing, Mankiewicz summarizes what he sees as "a sort of 'CIA ization' of domestic life and politics" fed by America's cold war footing and reverence for the modern Presidency.