The most laughable of Nixon's apologists is Oliver Stone. In his film "Nixon," he re-created Nixon's famous predawn trek to the Washington Monument to speak with antiwar protestors, but with one significant addition. Confronted by a girl who asks him why he doesn't simply end the war, Nixon hesitates and the horrorstruck girl realizes the truth. "My God," she says, "you can't stop it, can you? It's out of your control." Hustled away by Secret Service agents, Anthony Hopkins' Nixon says that this girl knows what it took him years to learn about politics. Of all the times that the movies have rewritten history, there is no more ludicrous claim than that the commander in chief is powerless to end American involvement in a war.

Witnessing such justifications coming from people who are not stupid is something akin to seeing a man raised on Shakespeare weep over "The Waltons." They are the intellectual equivalent of Nixon's peerless manipulations, the Checkers speech or the use of his dead mother ("My mother was a saint") in the moments before he left the White House in disgrace. Falling prey to Nixon's transparent sentimentality they shrink queasily at the prospect of confronting him for what he is, as if to do so would make them the schoolyard bully picking on the kid who never fit in.

Over and over since his death, Nixon's biographers have told us that he was a very complex man. Bunk. Lying and deviousness are not the same thing as complexity. Nixon was not Macbeth, or even Iago. He was too puny. As Norman Mailer so brilliantly put it, remarking on the 1960 presidential nomination, Nixon's ascension was "the apocalyptic hour of Uriah Heep."

Summers doesn't fall for the complexity argument. The strongest aspect of "The Arrogance of Power" is the case it makes for Nixon as the most consistent of men. Seen in the context of the lying, cheating and lawbreaking that characterized every aspect of his political career, Watergate was not Nixon's self-destruction but his fulfillment, the essence of everything he stood for. Nixon's apparent mental breakdown toward the end of his presidency, likely exacerbated by his abuse of the anti-epileptic drug Dilantin as a tranquilizer and his drinking problem (which accounts for his frequent slurred speech and disassociated demeanor), reads here as a moment of self-definition.

Nixon had been stripped down to his motivating essence, his self-serving lust for power. So much so, Summers writes, that in a visit to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as Watergate revelations traced the misdeeds ever closer to him, Nixon said, "We gentleman here are the last hope, the last chance to resist." Chief of naval operations Adm. Elmo Zumwalt said, "One could come to the conclusion that here was the commander in chief trying to see what the reaction of the chiefs might be if he did something unconstitutional ... He was trying to find out whether in a crunch there was enough support to keep him in power."

As frightening as it is to think of Nixon's floating the idea of a military coup, the notion is the logical extreme of the scheming he had already orchestrated following the break-in and throughout the Senate hearings. In her "The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits," Mary McCarthy writes of Nixon as so accomplished a manipulator that he was able even to find the weak spot of Sen. Sam Ervin, playing off his fear of increasing pressure on the president during the looming international crisis of the 1973 Middle East War. Perhaps Ervin wouldn't have worried so much had he known what Summers reveals here. On Oct. 23, 1973, Kissinger was told by Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that the Soviets could very well be sending troops to the conflict. Kissinger, attempting to get in touch with Nixon, was told by chief of staff Alexander Haig that Nixon had "retired for the night." While the United States went to DEFCON III, preparation to launch a nuclear attack, the president of the United States was passed out, drunk. (Haig still denies this. Kissinger's aide, Roger Morris, has quoted Kissinger's assistant Lawrence Eagleburger saying that it did happen.) Kissinger handled the crisis and the Soviets backed down.

That's the most frightening of Summers' revelations. It is not the most nefarious. Some of the episodes described here have already been well-documented, like the 1950 California Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas that earned Nixon the nickname Tricky Dick. In the campaign, Douglas was smeared as a Communist (the "Pink Lady" she was called) and anonymous calls were placed to voters asking if they knew she was Jewish (she was married to the actor Melvyn Douglas). But others, some of which have been hinted at for years, are detailed more convincingly by Summers than they have ever been before.

Taking the advice that Deep Throat gave to Bob Woodward, "Follow the money," Summers is able to chart much of Nixon's dirty dealings by laying out who bankrolled him. He makes a very convincing case that Nixon received millions of dollars from organized crime, much of channeled through his friend Bebe Rebozo. Money may also explain why Nixon chose Spiro Agnew as his running mate. (The announcement had caused gasps from the floor of the 1968 Republican Convention and prompted a famous Hubert Humphrey ad in which hysterical laughter is heard over the image of a TV screen bearing the legend "Agnew for Vice President.") Thomas Pappas, an immigrant Greek millionaire who passed on $549,000 in contributions for Nixon's 1968 campaign from the military junta that overthrew the Greek government, had "put in a good word for Spiro" with Nixon, who later admitted Pappas influenced the selection.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"