Richard Nixon’s Memoirs have been issued in a format that would do credit to any undertaker. It is a shiny coffin of a book, and it should be sold with some small Meccano-ish form of hearse, fitted with an attachment which plays a recording of the Dead March in “Saul.” This is entirely misleading, for the great value of the work, extracts from which appeared in The Sunday Telegraph, is its demonstration of resilience. It gives the readers hope that should they fall from the top of the Eiffel Tower a short stay in hospital will set matters right...

It was also all to the bad that Mr. Nixon had allowed his aides to choose a White House staff which were bizarre beyond belief. They resembled Bret Harte goldminers, O. Henry’s Broadway types, and, indeed, characters out of science fiction. Sitting among these grotesques, which makes anything Downing Street has suffered from of late years seem normality itself, Mr. Nixon offended all standards, not only in Washington, but anywhere else in the world where one could possibly be.

Nixon knew American society and politics from the ground up. Kennedy had the shallowness of the man who starts at the top. Nixon has his gaucheries, but they have always been part of the whole man. The Kennedy clan thought that Nixon lacked class. It was never strictly true, but even if it had been, there are worse things to lack. In the long view corn looks better than chic. Kennedy pretended to admire Casals. Nixon honestly thought that Richard Rodgers's score for Victory at Sea was great music. Nixon was the one who could actually play the piano...

Nixon's book is one long act of self-justification. To a remarkable degree the attempt succeeds. At the end his enemies are plausibly made to sound hysterical victims of what he calls 'liberal chic'... The book is well enough done to establish Nixon as a tragic figure and turn the tide of sympathy. It might even put him on the come-back trail. But we ought to keep our heads. The real tragic figures are all in Chile, Vietnam and Cambodia. It is ridiculous to class Nixon with the great villains of modern history, but not so ridiculous to be more angry with him than with them. He should have known better.