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James Perry is a veteran reporter of both American politics and Richard Nixon. Since 1962 he has covered national politics from Washington D.C., first at the Observer then the Wall Street Journal. He is also an historian, with published works including  Us and Them: How the Press Covered the 1972 Election and A Bohemian Brigade, the Civil War Correspondents. 

Less partisan than R.W. Apple in the New York Times, James Perry remembers both the highs and lows of Nixon's life. Including the events that Apple glosses over, Perry notes that even Nixon's early career was memorable: the "mean and dirty" congressional campaign in 1946 which "set the pattern" for his subsequent elections, and "another nasty race" for Senate in 1950. In contrast to Apple's vascillating conclusion on Nixon's Capitol years that "he employed slashing tactics that provoked strong emotions among voters. He was demonized on the left and lionized on the right", Perry writes "It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that millions of Americans openly, and viscerally, despised Richard Nixon."

Perry also retells the many internal contradictions that disappear in the positive eulogies for the man: "as president, he slowly began to wind down the nation's military involvement in Vietnam, despite a secret bombing campaign and an invasion of Cambodia", "nothing was more astonishing than his trip to China in 1972, when America's best-known Cold War warrior sat down with Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai", and "he was just as unpredictable at home."

In their efforts to present Nixon's life as one complete and total image of triumph over adversity, many of the more positive eulogies do him a diservice by ignoring these stunning about-faces which allowed Nixon to exploit and adapt to the changing historical imperatives of his times.
 

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