The Memoirs of Richard Nixon [antikvár]

Sources and Acknowledgments This is a memoir—a book of memories. Since memory is fallible and inevitably selective, I have tried whenever possible to check my recollections against the available records and to supplement them with contemporary sources. Some of these sources—memos, correspondence, public papers—are self-evident. A few of them need further elaboration. Throughout my public career I have had the habit of making extensive handwritten notes about my ideas, conversations, activities, and speeches. These notes, most of them made on yellow legal pads, total more than 20,000 pages extending from my outlines for the debates in the 1946 campaign to the outlines of my resignation speech in 1974. They range from offhand observations to extremely detailed passages of dialogue. Between 1954 and 1957, while I was Vice President, I made diary-type dictations covering 112 different meetings, conversations, or events. I cannot remember why I started or why I stopped making them, and they cover such a wide variety of subjects and personalities that there does not seem to have been any single purpose behind them. These diaries, which were dictated on Edison Voicewriter platters, were transcribed in 1961 when I wrote Six Crises, but I did not use them directly in that book and they are quoted here for the first time. IX