The staff consulted with the columnist Joseph Kraft, who told them that Nixon's answers had to be kept to roughly the length of a paragraph; at the end of that paragraph, Frost had to jump in with another question, otherwise Nixon would obfuscate and the thread would be lost. Above all, generalizations could not be swapped; questions had to be linked. It was this technique that led to Nixon's bitter admission: "I gave them a sword."
Nixon's uneasiness in his own skin manifested itself in various small ways during the tapings. One Monday morning, he inquired about Frost's weekend activities: "Did you fornicate?" The question was so stunningly out of any context, not to mention ill-phrased, that nobody could remember Frost's response, including Frost. Reston's own contact with Nixon was limited, but Reston did observe that the waves outside the house where they were taping were excellent and he was going to take a break and go surfing.
This interested Nixon. "We have the best surfing beach on this whole coastline off the (San Clemente) complex," he said. "You ought to come down and surf there, and afterward you can come and use our showers."
The Conviction of Richard Nixon is not overwhelmingly well-written, and Reston has an irritating tic of referring to Nixon as "Proteus," for his shape-shifting nature. He also has a weakness for cliches, but he does offer some penetrating insights. Nixon's self-destructive core meant he had to make "an ideology out of crisis," and there is much here about what the historian Fawn Brodie called "Nixon's unnecessary lies" - lies told, not for rational reasons like political survival or advantage, but for emotional justification or self-aggrandizement, or just for the hell of it.
The book's problems are less important than its undoubted historical value. It's one more volume for historians' groaning bookshelves on the subject of Nixon - a destructive personality who was somehow elected twice.
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