The Final Days was published by Simon & Schuster in 1976, written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Where All the President’s Men was the story of two reporters discovering a scandal, The Final Days is the story of the scandal’s endgame — the last fifteen months of the Nixon presidency, from April 1973 (when Nixon’s closest aides, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, were forced to resign) to August 9, 1974 (when Nixon boarded a helicopter on the White House lawn and flew into exile).
The book is written in the third person, without attribution — a technique that generated enormous controversy. Woodward and Bernstein interviewed nearly 400 people, many of them repeatedly, but presented the resulting narrative as omniscient, moving inside the minds of Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, and others without identifying who provided the information. The technique produces extraordinary intimacy — the reader is present at Cabinet meetings, in the Oval Office, in Nixon’s bedroom as he wanders the halls at night talking to the portraits — but also raises questions about reliability. How do we know what Nixon was thinking? The answer is that someone close to him told Woodward and Bernstein, but we don’t know who, and the absence of sourcing made the book vulnerable to accusations of speculation.
The portrait of Nixon is devastating: a man of considerable intelligence and political skill who is destroyed by paranoia, alcohol, and an inability to accept responsibility. The scenes of Nixon’s final days — weeping, praying, drinking, oscillating between defiance and despair — are among the most memorable in American political writing. The famous scene in which Nixon asks Kissinger to kneel and pray with him has become part of the national mythology, regardless of its exact accuracy.
Collecting The Final Days
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1976): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $50–$150
- Very good: $20–$60
- Signed: $100–$300