Three years after his resignation, Nixon negotiated a large fee to do a series of interviews with British TV personality David Frost. In preparing for the encounter, Frost hired a team of researchers to supply him questions and background facts. One of that team was James Reston Jr. He chronicles the event in The Conviction of Richard Nixon. The conviction, of course, arose from Nixon’s confessions about his complicity in Watergate. (These interviews are the source for the current Broadway play, Frost/Nixon, and also for a movie that’s due out next year.) By 1977, though, the world was basically beating a dead horse. Not being in power, Nixon no longer posed a danger to the republic. But Reston asserts in his foreword that there are frightening parallels between what Nixon and his minions did to undermine the Constitution and international law and what’s happening in the current administration. Nixon’s dark legacy, he concludes, lives on.
Valiant Women is a vital and engrossing attempt to correct the record and rightfully celebrate the achievements of female veterans of World War II.
