Pipes’s book works hard at making Nixon-in-winter a true conservative as he emerged from his worst days of physical and emotional wreckage after leaving Washington to become a kind of consul without portfolio, the eminence grise of the Republican Party.
Hughes gives us a pleasantly dense tale of the shadows in Richard Nixon’s mind that might have been there even without the Chennault Affair—assuming he would have been elected without the Chennault machinations. We can never know if it determined the election outcome, but one major consequence of the Affair that we do know was Watergate.