Patrick J. Buchanan, bestselling author and senior advisor to Richard Nixon, tells the definitive story of Nixon’s resurrection from the political graveyard and his rise to the presidency.

After suffering stinging defeats in the 1960 presidential election against John F. Kennedy, and in the 1962 California gubernatorial election, Nixon’s career was declared dead by Washington press and politicians alike. Yet on January 20, 1969, just six years after he had said his political life was over, Nixon would stand taking the oath of office as 37th President of the United States. How did Richard Nixon resurrect a ruined career and reunite a shattered and fractured Republican Party to capture the White House?

In The Greatest Comeback, Patrick J. Buchanan—who, beginning in January 1966, served as one of two staff members to Nixon, and would become a senior advisor in the White House after 1968—gives a firsthand account of those crucial years in which Nixon reversed his political fortunes during a decade marked by civil rights protests, social revolution, the Vietnam War, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr., urban riots, campus anarchy, and the rise of the New Left.

Using over 1,000 of his own personal memos to Nixon, with Nixon’s scribbled replies back, Buchanan gives readers an insider’s view as Nixon gathers the warring factions of the Republican party—from the conservative base of Barry Goldwater to the liberal wing of Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney, to the New Right legions of an ascendant Ronald Reagan—into the victorious coalition that won him the White House. How Richard Nixon united the party behind him may offer insights into how the Republican Party today can bring together its warring factions.

The Greatest Comeback is an intimate portrayal of the 37th President and a fascinating fly on-the-wall account of one of the most remarkable American political stories of the 20th century.

Softcover, 392 pages

Introduction

The Resurrection of Richard Nixon

"Barring a miracle his political career ended last week." —Time on Nixon (November 16, 1962)

Buchanan, was that you throwing the eggs?” were the first words I heard from the 37th President of the United States.

His limousine rolling up Pennsylvania Avenue after his inauguralhad been showered with debris. As my future wife, Shelley, andI were entering the reviewing stand for the inaugural parade, the Secret Service directed us to step off the planks onto the muddy White House lawn. The President was right behind us. As he passed by, Richard Nixon looked over, grinned broadly, and made the crack about the eggs.

It was a sign of the times and the hostile city in which he had taken up residence. He had won with 43 percent of the vote. A shift of 112,000 votes from Nixon to Vice President Humphrey in California would have left him with 261 electoral votes, nine short, and thrown the election into a House of Representatives controlled by the Democratic Party. In the final five weeks, Humphrey had closed a 15-point gap and almost put himself into the history books alongside Truman—and Nixon alongside Dewey. But the question that puzzled friend and enemy alike that January morning in 1969 was:

How did he get here?

In The Making of the President 1968, Theodore H. White, chronicler of presidential campaigns, begins with a passage from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: “Marley was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker and the chief mourner. . . . Old Marley was dead as a door-nail.” That Richard Nixon would be delivering his inaugural address from the East Front of the Capitol on January 20, 1969, would have been mind-boggling a few years before. This is not to say that Nixon was not a man of broad knowledge, high intellectual capacity, or consummate political skill. He had been seen in the 1950s as the likely successor to Dwight Eisenhower. As vice president, he had traveled the world, comported himself with dignity during Ike’s illnesses, survived a mob attack in Caracas, and come off well in his Kitchen Debate with Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev. In 1960, no one had challenged him for the Republican nomination.

Yet Nixon had lost. While the election was among the closest in U.S. history, and there was the aroma of vote fraud in Texas and Chicago, Nixon was seen as a loser. He had not won an election in his own right in ten years. He had twice ridden Eisenhower’s coattails into the vice presidency. In the off-year elections of 1954 and 1958, where he had been the standard-bearer, the party had sustained crushing defeats. By the day of Kennedy’s inaugural, conservatives were shouldering aside Eisenhower Republicans to engage the Eastern Establishment of Dewey and Rockefeller in a war for the soul of the party. As Democrats had moved beyond Adlai Stevenson to a new dynamic leader, so had we—to Barry Goldwater.

Back home in California, Nixon plotted his comeback. He would challenge Governor Pat Brown in 1962, go to Sacramento, and be available should the party turn again to him. Should the GOP look to a new face in ’64, a likely reelection year for JFK, he would finish one term as governor and pursue the presidential nomination in 1968. California was replacing New York as first state and the governor’s chair in the Golden State was an ideal launching pad for a second presidential run.

But in 1962 Nixon had lost again. He had begun the campaign behind, but had been gaining ground when the Cuban missile crisis aborted his surge. Kennedy’s perceived triumph over Khrushchev had given a boost to every Democrat. Then came the “last press conference,” where Nixon berated his tormentors and declared himself finished with politics. “It had seemed the absolute end of a political career,” wrote Norman Mailer. “Self-pity in public was as irreversible as suicide.” Career over, Nixon packed up his family and moved to New York, the city of his old antagonist Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller.

So it was that Nixon began the sixties losing to Kennedy, losing to Pat Brown, quitting politics, and moving east to practice law. He had lost his political base and seemed to have no political future. How did this politician of the forties and fifties, an Eisenhower Republican of moderate views and middle-class values, a two-time loser, emerge from a decade of assassinations, riots, sexual revolution and social upheaval, and the rise of a radical New Left and a militant New Right to win the presidency?’

In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway writes of a mystery on the mountain. “Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.” This book is an effort of the aide closest to Nixon in his now-legendary comeback to explain how he maneuvered through the conflicts and chaos of that most turbulent decade of the twentieth century to reach the “western summit”—and become President of the United States.

Source: Scribid.com

Patrick Buchanan has been a senior advisor to three presidents, twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and the nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.

Born in Washington, D.C., Mr. Buchanan was educated at Gonzaga High School where he was graduated first in his class in 1956. He attended Georgetown on a full academic scholarship, and was graduated with honors in English and Philosophy in 1961, and inducted into the university’s Gold Key Society. He received a master's degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia in 1962. At 23, he became the youngest editorial writer on a major newspaper in America: The St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

After arranging a meeting with former Vice President Richard Nixon in December of 1965, Mr. Buchanan became the first full-time staffer in his legendary comeback. He traveled with the future President in the campaigns of 1966 and 1968, and to the Middle East, Africa, and Israel in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War. From January of 1969 to August of 1974, he was a Special Assistant to President Nixon, and worked with the president on the Cambodian invasion speech and with Vice President Agnew on many of his speeches on the media and student disorders.

Mr. Buchanan was a member of the official US delegation to the Peoples Republic of China in 1972, and attended the Moscow-Yalta-Minsk summit of 1974. After President Nixon’s resignation, Mr. Buchanan served President Ford until October of 1974.

After leaving the White House, Mr. Buchanan became a nationally syndicated columnist, and in May of 1982 began as a panelist on NBC’s “The McLaughlin Group” and a co-host of CNN’s new show “Crossfire.”

In 1985, Mr. Buchanan returned to the White House as Director of Communications. He accompanied President Reagan to his Geneva summit with Mikhail Gorbachev and was with President Reagan in Hofde House at Reykjavik, which has been described as the decisive summit of the Cold War. On leaving the White House in 1987, Mr. Buchanan returned to journalism, his syndicated column, and to “The McLaughlin Group,” “Crossfire,” and began hosting a new show, “Capital Gang” on CNN.

In December 1991, Mr. Buchanan challenged President George H. W. Bush for the Republican nomination and almost upset the president in New Hampshire, winning 3 million votes in the GOP primaries. In August 1992, Mr. Buchanan opened the Republican convention in Houston with his speech on the “culture war,” which is now ranked among the most controversial in convention history. In 1996, he ran a second time for the GOP nomination, won the New Hampshire primary, and finished second to Sen. Dole, again, with 3 million Republican votes.

After winning the nomination of the Reform Party in 2000, Mr. Buchanan retired from politics and became again an author, columnist, and a commentator on MSNBC for almost a decade.

Mr. Buchanan has written 14 books, including seven straight New York Times bestsellers: A Republic, Not an Empire; The Death of the West; Where the Right Went Wrong, State of Emergency, Day of Reckoning, Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War, Suicide of a Superpower and The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority. His newest book is Nixon’s White House Wars.

Mr. Buchanan is currently an author, columnist, chairman of The American Cause foundation, and an editor of The American Conservative. He is married to the former Shelley Ann Scarney, who was a member of Richard Nixon’s vice presidential staff from 1959-61 and a member of the White House Staff from 1969 to 1975.