The Greatest Comeback - Pat Buchanan has a Winner!

              

The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon 
Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Hardcover

Pages: 392

ISBN: 978-0-553-41863-7

Publisher: Crown Forum (July 8, 2014)

                                                 

               Pat Buchanan reveals a side of President Nixon that most people know nothing of. It is truly an inside look at the goings on of a political mastermind working his magic over a torn and fragmented Republican Party leading up to the 1968 presidential election. Buchanan was with Nixon from 1966 while preparing for the campaign of 1968 until his resignation in 1974. He has included in the book several memos he submitted to Nixon with Nixon’s notes on them. The Watergate fiasco is mentioned barely in passing, as this book chronicled his comeback to the political stage, and is not meant to be a biography.

                Nixon’s narrow defeat to JFK in 1960 and his failed California gubernatorial race in 1962 are used as a launching pad to illustrate the resurrection of a ‘dead’ politician to the presidency. The Greatest Comeback is loaded with insider campaign strategies, Nixon’s feelings about African-Americans, and the civil unrest and riots of that time period. If you are a Nixon fan this is a must read. If you are one of his detractors I highly recommend that you read this book. After his political obituary was written about in ’62, Nixon pulled himself up and ran some remarkable strategies. The result was he becoming the first man since Zachary Taylor, 120 years earlier, to win the presidency with the opposition controlling both houses of Congress.

                I don’t know how Buchanan could have done any better. It is a 5-star book to me.

-          Clifton Eastham  August 29, 2014.

      ** I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review, however the opinions and analysis are mine alone.