From the President: Richard Nixon's Secret Files

Journalist/historian Oudes here does a masterful job sifting through the tens of thousands of documents generated by the White House staff during Richard Nixon's presidency. The title notwithstanding, many of the memos and letters presented here were written by Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson and other less well-known figures, as well as by the president himself. Several now familiar themes are reinforced: mistrust of the press, identification of ``friends'' and ``enemies,'' examples of hardball politics of the 1972 campaign and the battles with congressional committees over the release of Watergate documents. Side by side with memos on fairly trivial mattersbirds crashing into the windows of the Oval Office, modern art in U.S. embassies and a semiliterate appeal from Elvis Presley who offered his services as an anti-drug spokesmanare discussions of the weightier issues facing Nixon: normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China, domestic unrest and Vietnam. The book provides an instructive, revelatory look at the character and workings of the Nixon White House. First serial to People. (Jan.)