Richard M. Nixon is still very much in the eyes—though hardly the hearts—of his countrymen. Having presented his version of the Watergate scandal on television with David Frost, the former President is now completing his memoirs, which few expect will be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Yet, as John Seelye points out, embellished autobiographies are a great American tradition going back to the times of the Puritans. A professor of English at the University of North Carolina and prolific author, Mr. Seelye published Dirty Tricks in 1974, which was an Algerish revision of Nixon's childhood (as Nick Noxin)."I think Nixon is best viewed as a phenomenon of the mythic sort," Mr. Seelye writes."Who knows or really cares about his putative homosexual or oedipal urges? He is a figure of pure art. Or artfulness.... What we need between Nixon and ourselves is not the TV screen but bars. Nothing else will suffice. And it won't ever happen, so Nixon will remain amongst us, a perpetual case of juris interruptus."

The Nixon years were marked by a growth in what has come to be called "neo-conservatism," a development analyzed by James A. Nuechterlein, an American citizen holding the rank of associate professor in the History Department of Queen's College in Canada. Mr. Neuchtehlein is "strongly attracted to neo-conservatism: in political terms, it goes beyond the free market fetishism and narrow identification with the business interests of traditional American conservatism without lapsing into the sentimentality that pervades so much of the left."