[The Selling of the President 1968] is the best thing that's happened to Richard Nixon since somebody told him to stop wiggling those fingers. The author, Joe McGinniss, has done the President the immense and obviously unintended favor of showing him to be the normal, temperish, profane, vulnerable adult male that his spokesmen at the White House keep insisting he isn't. They are under the illusion that Mr. Nixon is best served by making him out to be superhumanly calm, beyond disturbance—a Presidential potato…. Joe McGinniss informs us—and accurately, I am told by some of the men who figure in this book and who still work for Nixon—that he wasn't like that during the campaign last year….

Joe McGinniss 1942– Photograph by Nancy Doherty

[The] campaign staffers who managed the Nixon TV effort last year would have saved themselves a lot of pain and deprived us of...