President Nixon: Alone in the White House. (Political booknotes: solitary scribbler).

PRESIDENT NIXON: Alone in the White House

by Richard Reeves Simon & Schuster, $35.00

THE SCRIBBLERS, THE SCHOLARS, and the scribes may at last be able to come to closure with Richard Nixon. They have been on his case for a half-century without ever getting in a knockout punch; indeed, the only U.S. president ever forced to resign came oh-so-close to salvaging his shattered reputation before he died. The shelves already groan under the weight of books, articles, tapes, and transcripts.

So why bother with another? Why take one more shot at the Old Lion?

The answer is simple. President Nixon: Alone in the White House, by veteran national political reporter Richard Reeves, is the best account, from Nixon's own perspective, of the critical years between 1968 and 1972, when the seeds of Watergate and that whole noxious period were planted. Reeves offers a carefully researched and well-crafted history of Nixon's attempt to bend the people's government to his personal biases, which requires revisiting the plot to cover up Watergate.

Reeves, who previously published a first-rate biography of President Kennedy, revisits the key aspects of Nixon's disastrous Vietnam policy and also his one true diplomatic triumph, the restoration of U.S. relations with China. His fascinating account of Nixon's meeting with Mao Zedong appears to draw heavily on the memory and note-taking skills of Winston Lord, a young Kissinger aide who later served as U.S. ambassador to China.

But the most personal and revealing part of this book is a series of memos Reeves has unearthed, through which he attempts to show how Nixon lived his day-to-day life during that critical period of history, to "reconstruct the Nixon presidency as it looked from the center." As the book's title suggests, it frequently looked very, very lonely.

Nixon waited until late at night to pen these memos to himself. He did so when he was alone in his office, alone in the Lincoln bedroom, alone at Camp David, or alone across the street in his monastic hideaway in the Old Executive Office building--always alone, almost always in the dark, and sometimes, even in August, with a fire blazing. In such solitary precincts, Nixon's mind raced as he pondered the future:

   I must get away from the thought of considering the office at any time a
   burden. I actually do not consider it a burden, an agony, etc ... it is
   God's great gift to me to have the opportunity to exert leadership, not
   only for America, but on the world scene. From this day forward I am going
   to look upon it that way and rise to the challenge with as much excitement,
   energy, enthusiasm, and, wherever possible, real joy I can muster.

As such passages indicate, self-appraisal was the dominant theme in these very private memos. Nixon had few close friends, and only limited interaction with his aides. While these memos do little to counter the public image of the president as paranoid and grave, they do often reveal stunning personal assessments in which Nixon strove to change himself. He was not, of course, a joyful man. But he resolved to try to be one:

   Goals: Personal 1. Make people have a memorable experience each day--2. Be
   worthy of 1st man in nation and in world ... Spiritual: Add element of lift
   to each experience ... Hard work - Imagination - Compassion - Understanding
   of young - Intellectual expansion - Cool- Strong - Organized - Temperate -
   Exciting.

His longing for personal improvement had a darker side--his frequent feelings of mortality, which were a subject of his memos. In one such self-addressed memo, this one on his birthday in January 1973, Nixon grapples with his advancing age, and seems tortured by what he perceives to be his lack of accomplishment:

   Age- Not as much time. Don't spin your wheels. Blessed with good health ...
   Older Men--De Gaulle, Ike, Yoshida, Adenaue, Churchill, Chou En Lai,
   Hoove.... No one is finished--until he quits.

Though Reeves does deliver a blow-by-blow account of this pre-Watergate period, unlike most earlier Nixon books, Alone in the White House doesn't focus so much on action (or on Nixon's aides) as it does on the president's personal writing. But in doing so, it paints a picture of the president that one can't help feeling is very similar to the way Nixon must have felt himself.

This book may not answer all the questions about Nixon, but you won't find another that tells as much about this enigmatic man.

CHARLES W. BAILEY was White House correspondent during the Johnson and Nixon administrations for The Minneapolis Tribune.