****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This book, out-of-print but still easily found, was an important and unique book when it was published. Now, with the author's passing on New Years Eve, 1999, it gains even more importance.Richardson is primarily remembered as the Attorney General who resigned instead of following President Richard Nixon's orders to fire the special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox; Richardson's resignation ignited the firestorm of public outcry -- the Saturday Night Massacre -- that resulted in the President's resignation a year later. While this is not a Watergate memoir, Richardson does devote a chapter to his role in that traumatic event (many people have forgotten that as Attorney General, he simualtaneously headed up the prosecutions of both the Vice President Spiro Agnew and President Nixon, negotiating Agnew's plea of no-contest and resignation, clearing the way for Gerald Ford to become VP prior to Nixon's resignation).Richardson began writing the book after his resignation while serving as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and finished it shortly thereafter while ambassador to Great Britain. The book appeared during the 1976 presidential campaign during Richardson's tenure as Ford's Secretary of Commerce, his fourth cabinet post. The review in the New York Times by Stephen Hess said Richardson was "less likely to seek Federal solutions than those Democrats who have spent most of their careers in Washington, but...he is not traumatized by national Government." The reviewer spoke of Richardson's "almost religious fervor to his feelings for the civic virtues," concluding that the book illustrates that Richardson "has given more serious thought to the processes of governance and knows more about its purposes, functions and operations than anyone now seeking support for national office."Richardson sprinkles personal accounts from his extraordinary life of public service throughout the book as he covers a wide range of ground. From the Founding Fathers to the role of the individual as a citizen, from the dangers of cynicism to the importance of rebuilding trust in government. He calls for a "more thoroughly considered approach to change - a perspective that sets the attractions of potential benefits against the background of potential harm, an approach that seeks a creative balance between innovation and conservation." Such a balance, reasons Richardson, will get America to its goal of being "a society in which all of us can be and become our whole selves -- a society which enhances individual dignity and self-esteem, the ultimate values for whose sake our political processes exist." Now that America has lost one of her most brilliant public servants, this book and his other writings, continue to shine a light for Americans looking for a balanced and reasoned approach to effective government and citizen participation.
