The Greatest Comeback

After suffering stinging defeats in the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial election, Richard Nixon's political career was proclaimed dead by everyone. Yet on January 20, 1969, just six years after he lost in California, he would stand taking the oath of office as the 37th President of the United States. How did he resurrect his political career and reunite the Republican party? In The Greatest Comeback, bestselling author Patrick J. Buchanan--who, beginning in 1966, served as one of two staff members to Nixon and who would become a senior advisor in the White House after 1968--gives a first-hand account of those pivotal years, in which Nixon worked to reverse his political fortunes in a decade marked by civil rights protests; social revolution; the Vietnam War; the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King Jr.; riots; and the rise of the New Left. Through excerpts from over 1,000 personal memos from Buchanan to Nixon and back, readers watch firsthand as Nixon pulls the far-flung strands of the Republican party--from the conservative base that backed Barry Goldwater to the liberal wing that backed George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller, not to mention an ascendant Ronald Reagan--into the victorious coalition that won him the White House.