In the summer of 1999, when I was 16 years old, I remember walking to a train station in West London from a babysitting job when a 40-something man in a Range Rover pulled up, told me he was on television, and then announced to his young son (also in the car) that I was “Daddy’s new girlfriend.” I don’t know who the man was; I didn’t get in the car, not because I was afraid but because I’d just bought Californication for my minidisc player and wanted to listen to the album on the way home. But what he did wasn’t abnormal for the time. This was two years before the 35-year-old TV presenter and radio host Chris Evans (not the actor) married the 18-year-old pop star Billie Piper in Las Vegas, after a months-long relationship that started when he gave the teenager—so young, she hadn’t yet learned to drive—a Ferrari filled with roses. A year later, in 2002, the BBC Radio 1 host Chris Moyles offered, live on air, to take the singer Charlotte Church’s virginity on her 16th birthday, claiming that he could “lead her through the forest of sexuality” now that she was legal.

I’ve often wondered how Millennial women in Britain survived the aughts: not just the incessant fat shaming and the ritualized alcohol abuse, but also the cheerful, open predation that was everywhere in popular culture then. This weekend, the London Times and the TV documentary series Dispatches revealed coordinated allegations that the TV star turned conspiratorial wellness personality Russell Brand had victimized multiple people from 2006 to 2013, including a 16-year-old girl who says he picked her up on the street when he was 30, referred to her as “the child” and cradled her like a baby when he found out she was a virgin, and then later choked her with his penis until she—fearing she would actually suffocate—punched him in the stomach. The dual reports also allege that Brand raped a woman he knew at his home in Los Angeles and attempted to rape another until she screamed so hard that he flew into a rage. (Brand has said he “absolutely refutes” what he describes as “a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks.”)

Beyond these serious allegations, there’s also recorded evidence, documented on TV comedy specials and on Brand’s own radio show during the 2000s, that Brand relentlessly harassed women he worked with, sexualizing and dehumanizing them on air, and then belittling them to the public when they objected. This was the particular insidiousness of aughts-era misogyny, which people like Brand propagated but absolutely didn’t invent: the idea that if girls, or young women, complained about how they were being treated, they were joyless scolds, too uncool to get the joke and too ugly to be concerned about anyway.

[Read: Why were we so cruel to Britney Spears?]

The trap was that women were expected to cheerfully participate in their own objectification or risk being not just exploited but also vilified. It was an ethos informed by porn and disseminated by a new stable of men’s magazines. In 1999, when I was trying to decide where to go to college, a naked image of the children’s-television presenter Gail Porter was projected onto the Houses of Parliament without Porter’s knowledge or consent in a stunt by the magazine FHM, inadvertently saying volumes about what kind of status girls my age could actually hope for. Why bother investing in an education or a career when the dominant cultural paradigm was interested only in sexual power? And the messaging worked. By 2006, according to Natasha Walter’s book Living Dolls, more than half of British girls polled in one survey said they would consider nude modeling. The previous year, female students at Pembroke College, Cambridge, posed topless for their student magazine. Out of 11 female cast members from the 2006 season of the hit British reality show Big Brother, four posed topless after leaving the show, to capitalize on their new notoriety.

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Russell Brand had his own Big Brother connection, hosting a spin-off talk-show series about the British franchise, or that the toxic influencer Andrew Tate—currently charged in Romania with rape and sex trafficking, charges that Tate denies—also appeared on the show. Reality television from its conception relied on two things: provocation and exposure. People watched to see who would fight, who would hook up, who would crack under the pressure. The medium demanded ratings, and ratings came from finding not average people to sequester in a TV goldfish bowl, but extreme personalities who craved their own 24-hour soapbox and the promise of instant notoriety. Sex has always been the subtext of the series—I vividly remember the tabloid press’s frame-by-frame analysis in 2004 when two Big Brother contestants supposedly became the first people to have intercourse on the show. (By way of encouragement, and to emphasize how invested people were in this new television frontier, Playboy TV offered a £50,000 prize at the time to anyone bold enough to do so.)

And so Big Brother was a natural forum for Brand. The Dispatches documentary shows him pulling his trousers down while sitting on a female interviewee’s lap, and running down the street after a man in urine-soaked underwear asking for a “cuddle,” among other antics—employing blatant, aggressive sexuality as his defining comedic mode. He was so open about who he was—writing about his heroin addiction and sex addiction in his memoir, flaunting his status as a sex pest on TV, and later in movies—that it’s astonishing now to see how much he actually seems to have gotten away with. Since the Times and Dispatches reporting emerged, attention has focused on internal inquiries from the BBC (where Brand had a radio show from 2005 to 2008) and Channel 4, which hosted Big Brother, to examine whether complaints about Brand were made at the time. But this feels rather beside the point given how much evidence already exists in the public domain. Brand’s raptorial sexuality was his personality, his unique selling point, and for a very long time he was handsomely rewarded for it. If people really want to reckon with the legacy of such strikingly recent cultural misogyny, in other words, it’s best not to comfort themselves too soon with the idea that Brand was in any way an anomaly.

Not long after the Writers Guild of America’s strike started in May, Eugene Ramos began trying to walk the picket lines at least twice a week every week. On such occasions, he dons his sunglasses and baseball cap—equipment for “war,” he calls it—to combat the Los Angeles sunshine, heads to a studio’s entrance, and scribbles his name on a sign-in sheet before joining the rally.

But Ramos isn’t a member of the WGA or SAG-AFTRA (the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), the unions that are attempting to negotiate new contracts with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents major studios’ positions regarding issues such as staff size, streaming residual payments, and artificial intelligence. He’s a writer, yes, but in animation. Most animated projects don’t count toward WGA membership—in part because of a long-standing industry impression that writing for animated projects takes less effort than writing for live action, a misconception that has historically left animation writers’ concerns overlooked or misunderstood. (The WGA did not respond to requests for comment.) Ramos, whose last gig was for Netflix’s The Dragon Prince, hopes that fact can change, especially if those like him support their colleagues now. “The way I look at it is I am fighting for my future,” he told me. “The guild’s fight, I felt, was my fight.”

In representing both actors and writers, the dual strike is advocating for a significant swath of Hollywood. But many in the entertainment business, like Ramos, have gone un-unionized or underrepresented—and others belong to organizations that cannot address their most pressing concerns. Some groups have not been recognized as actual unions allowed to bargain with employers. And some unions either represent different types of workers in the field (and thus have a broader mandate than some of its members might like) or aren’t powerful enough to contend with major studios. Over the past several weeks, I spoke with a wide range of industry professionals in such communities, most of whom expressed solidarity with their striking colleagues while also conveying dismay over how labor unions—or the groups they do belong to—aren’t yet working for them.

The Animation Guild (TAG), for instance, offers services through the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the union representing crew members. But, as with the WGA, the rules that determine coverage are complex. Though TAG is a union, it represents workers in plenty of areas beyond writers, including storyboard artists and animation technicians; writers make up only a small percentage of its membership. And because production companies have a say in whether to hire unionized animation writers, some projects go without any union oversight at all. (Ramos, for example, isn’t a member of TAG, because the series he worked for did not sign an agreement with the union.) Meanwhile, support staff across the industry—writers’ assistants, production assistants, script coordinators, and more—can also apply for representation through IATSE, but only on a local level. And most documentary filmmakers, who are usually classified as independent contractors, don’t have a dedicated union exclusively representing their interests—they operate underneath a handful of alliances, advocacy groups, and guild memberships.

These workers could simply remain idle during the work stoppage—or even ignore the striking unions by crossing picket lines—but many have begun to transform the ongoing efforts into a greater movement across Hollywood. For some, the combined strike appears to have been galvanizing: Marvel’s in-house visual-effects artists voted unanimously this month to unionize. Reality-TV stars have been pushing for unscripted talent to form a collective bargaining unit. “People are saying, ‘We should be getting more active; we should be thinking of how this impacts our industry,’” Brian Newman, a film producer who works on both narrative and documentary projects, told me.

Others said they feel conflicted about the consequences of that broader campaign, especially as the WGA strike has stretched past 140 days (negotiations are scheduled to finally resume on Wednesday). Amanda Suarez, a writers’ assistant, has regularly gone picketing and engages in the growing online discussions that her fellow support staff have initiated about unionizing and officially joining the WGA. But her priority, as job opportunities have dwindled because of the strike-mandated work stoppage, is to figure out whether her career in Hollywood can ever stabilize. During other hiatuses, she’s kept herself afloat by working jobs tangential to script-writing, such as assisting on podcasts that interviewed talent promoting upcoming work. Now, however, she’s struggling to see a clear path for career advancement as the strikes—and the talk of unionizing—drag on. Although the WGA’s efforts could potentially lead to a contract that expands writing-staff sizes and encourages promotions—which could theoretically help Suarez ascend, over time, beyond an assistant position—she needs money to make it to the other side of the strike.

“When you are a writers’ assistant, you go into it knowing, like, the next step is staff writer, and I won’t be here long,” she said. “Unfortunately, with the way things are now, the support staff are in that position for much longer … This time around, this [strike] has affected both my film and television [work] and my side hustles. It’s like, ‘Should I even be entertaining this as a future?’ I flirt with the idea of going back to school and becoming a nurse every day.”

For those outside the striking unions who still want to support workers, showing solidarity is not a simple undertaking. Those unaffiliated with the WGA or SAG-AFTRA are allowed to continue working, but many have chosen to stop in case their projects—even at the pitch stage—benefit a studio looking to make up for lost content. Some of those who might otherwise choose to pursue such job opportunities feel that doing so could harm their career in the long term; in an industry built on connections, being seen as a scab is damaging for even the most established personalities. Others, especially crew members, cannot work or line up their next gigs, because productions have paused. For everyone I spoke with, the writers’ and actors’ efforts have been a reminder that every corner of the industry faces its own set of problems. Some have just begun their own attempts to find solutions; others have been pushing for better practices for years.

Whether the current strike is helping—or hindering—their ventures depends on whom you ask. Members of the documentary community, for example, told me they’re long used to operating without much support. If anything, they’re heartened to see how unified Hollywood workers’ efforts appear this time, and have thus been emboldened to keep pushing for their own union. “We can only do so much,” said Beth Levison, a documentary producer and a co-founder of the Documentary Producers Alliance, an advocacy group that offers guidelines for documentary business practices. “We’re all starting to look at ourselves and ask, ‘What could we be doing differently right now, and how could we be organizing?’”

Many of those in animation seem to feel similarly encouraged to reassess what they can push for—and potentially get—in Hollywood. For much of its history, the field has gone overlooked, and its writers say they faced shrinking writers’ rooms and low pay long before their live-action counterparts felt squeezed. “The concerns have already hit us, so we know what it’s like,” Shaene Siders, an animation writer-producer, told me. As part of a committee the WGA put together of nonunion members, Siders gave the guild advice on animation writers’ needs. The focus on labor practices in Hollywood, she added, has already helped further the animation writers’ efforts to be better recognized: In July, the WGA East announced that it would be considering adding animation writers to its ranks. (The guild did not respond to a request for an update.) Like Ramos, Siders has also joined the picket lines, and hopes that her show of support will be matched in the future by the WGA. Should the Animation Guild’s members choose to take any collective action of their own, she said, “we hope they’ll reciprocate.”

[Read: A strike scripted by Netflix]

For other, smaller corners of the industry, the sort of representation that many seek for their specific needs has been elusive. Consider music supervisors, who oversee the selection and licensing of songs for visual entertainment and hire music editors. Although music editors are covered by IATSE, music supervisors have no bargaining unit of their own. After observing IATSE’s broader push in 2021 to improve working conditions, they worked closely with the union to put one together. But last year, the AMPTP rejected their request for recognition; as a result, a smaller group of music supervisors under contract with Netflix attempted to form a unit, only to be denied by the National Labor Relations Board in June.

These basic setbacks—being accepted as a union is an essential step to forming one—are illuminating. Netflix hires music supervisors as independent contractors, so the NLRB has determined that they’re ineligible for unionization, but many crew members in Hollywood can take on work as independent contractors while benefiting from union protection under IATSE. The problem for music supervisors, then, goes beyond finding a way to express their concerns. So far, they’re not even being seen as a body of workers that could use its own representation.

Hilary Staff, one of the music supervisors behind the push to unionize with IATSE’s help, told me that the dual strike has “made things difficult” in part because the WGA and SAG’s combined strength is a reminder of how neglected a position like hers can be. (In fact, she pointed out, most people she encounters on picket lines have no idea music supervisors do their jobs without union support.) “I think if they’re successful with this strike, that will be helpful for us when we return to the bargaining table … but [right now] we just can’t work,” she told me. “We don’t have insurance; we don’t have pensions … The last time I walked the picket line with some fellow supervisors, we were talking about how we’re still going to do whatever we can to fight like hell to get what we deserve, but I think the state of [how things are going] is a little bit discouraging.”

She’s not alone in feeling mixed about the moment. Daniel Thron, a visual-effects, or VFX, artist, told me he’s happy to see his colleagues at Marvel voting to unionize, but, he said, “I don’t get the sense there’s a big wave coming out of it yet” for people in his field. For too long, he explained, his pocket of the industry has worked an important but largely invisible job—visual effects, when done well, should be unnoticeable—shaped by studio demands yet done mostly on a contract basis, which can lead to variable rates and hours, depending on the project. (A growing VFX-focused group within IATSE exists, but workers are scattered among those directly employed by major studios, those who work freelance, and those who work at VFX houses that bid to take on projects.)

Throughout his career, Thron has depended on fellow VFX artists for opportunities and any sense of job security. As much as he supports the WGA and SAG strikes, he sees this moment less as a chance to determine how much studios should do for workers and more as a time for shifting focus away from studios entirely. “I think there’s a greater upset going on than anyone is really confronting … I don’t know why we’re negotiating with anybody over anything when we’re the ones who make the things,” he said. Maybe, he explained, the strikes can be about more than just getting major studios to meet workers’ demands—it can be about “creating a new kind of Hollywood that is creator-driven.”

That, of course, is far easier said than done—even for those who have representation in the industry. Sally Sue Lander, a first assistant director who has worked in Hollywood for more than three decades, told me that she and her friends in the business feel “very confused and lost.” As a member of the Directors Guild of America (DGA), which signed a new contract with the AMPTP in June and thus avoided a strike, she’s allowed to work—but hasn’t since February. The combined strike began in July, which put productions on pause and halted any gigs Lander had been hoping to begin.

[Read: The businessmen broke Hollywood]

As Lander observed the WGA’s and SAG-AFTRA’s persistence from afar, she grew dismayed by how quickly her own guild had reached a new agreement. Not much in Hollywood is sustainable at the moment, she realized; even the job she has done for more than 30 years has plateaued in compensation. “I’m very grateful to be a part of the guild,” she said, “but I do think it needs to modernize … I feel like the contract was a great contract for three years ago. What the DGA missed was the fact that this is part of a bigger labor movement in the country … You have to look at this as: Eventually there will be a new type of [entertainment] industry.”

So, on the 100th day of the WGA’s strike earlier last month, she joined the picket line for the first time. “I had felt like I didn’t deserve to be there, because my union made a deal,” Lander said. “However, we’re suffering just like they are.” Maybe, she reasoned, combining forces with the actors and writers will help all of their respective unions—and even those without representation—push for a new Hollywood rather than “re-create a past that will never happen again.” Besides, she explained, “I can’t just sit around anymore. I need to be a part of this.”

Call it coincidence, serendipity, an aligning of the planets—whatever the term, the moment was creepy and amusing all at once. I was beavering away in the basement research room at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, in Yorba Linda, a suburb of Los Angeles, when Henry Kissinger twice came into view—in the flat, cursive form of Nixon’s scrawl in the margins of the book I was reading, and then in the rounder corporeal form of the man himself, in the hallway outside the door.

Kissinger, the last surviving member of Nixon’s Cabinet, was in Yorba Linda last fall for two reasons: to speak at a fundraising gala for the Richard Nixon Foundation and to promote a book he had published earlier in the year, at the improbable age of 99. The book, Leadership, contains an entire chapter in praise of Nixon, the man who had made Kissinger the 20th century’s only celebrity diplomat.

I was there to gather material for a Nixon book of my own. I had been nosing around in a cache of volumes from Nixon’s personal library. I was particularly interested in any marks he may have left in the books he’d owned. From what I could tell, no one had yet mined this remarkably varied collection, more than 2,000 books filling roughly 160 boxes stored in a vault beneath the presidential museum. Taken together, they reflect the broad range of Nixon’s intellectual curiosity—an underappreciated quality of his highly active mind. To give an idea: One heavily underlined book in the collection is a lengthy biography of Tolstoy; another is a book on statesmanship by Charles de Gaulle; another is a deep dive into the historiography of Japanese art. Several fat volumes of The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant’s mid-century monument to middlebrow history, display evidence of attentive reading and rereading.

Every morning a friendly factotum would wheel out a gray metal cart stacked with dusty boxes from Nixon’s personal library. On the afternoon Kissinger arrived, I had worked my way down to an obscure book published in 1984, a decade after Nixon left the White House. A significant portion of Bad News: The Foreign Policy of The New York Times, by a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily News named Russ Braley, is a blistering indictment of the Times’ coverage of the Nixon administration. In Braley’s telling, the Times’ treatment swung between the unfair and the uncomprehending, for reasons ranging from negligence to malice.

The book had found its ideal reader in Richard Nixon. The pages of his copy were cluttered with underlining from his thick ballpoint pen. It occurred to me, as I followed along, that Nixon was being brought up short by his reading: Much of the material in Bad News was apparently news to him.

[From the May 1982 issue: Kissinger and Nixon in the White House]

My reading was interrupted by a commotion outside the research room. I stuck my head out in time to see Kissinger and his entourage settling into the room across the hall. A group of donors and Nixonophiles had gathered to hear heroic tales of Nixon’s statecraft.

I dutifully returned to Braley. When I got to a chapter on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, I found an unmistakable pattern: Most of Nixon’s markings involved the man holding court across the hall. And Nixon wasn’t happy with him. Kissinger, Braley wrote, had actually invited Ellsberg to Nixon’s transition office in late 1968 to explicate his dovish views on Vietnam, more than two years before the Papers were released. Nixon’s pen came down: exclamation point! Kissinger gave Ellsberg an office in the White House complex anyway, for a month in 1969—a stone’s throw from the Oval Office. Slash mark! Kissinger spent his evenings “ridicul[ing]” Nixon “in private conversations with liberal friends.” This last treachery summoned the full battery of Nixon’s marginalia: a slash running alongside the paragraph, a check mark for emphasis, and a plump, emphatic line under “liberal friends.”

Page 551 from Bad News: The Foreign Policy of The New York Times, by Russ Braley (Photograph by Joel Barhamand for The Atlantic)

Still, Braley went on, when the Pentagon Papers were leaked, their publication alarmed Kissinger, because they posed a “double threat” to national security and to the conduct of foreign policy. “And to K!” Nixon wrote in the margin.

The contrast between Nixon’s bitter hash marks about Kissinger from the 1980s and Kissinger’s present-day celebration of his old boss offered a lesson in the evolving calculation of self-interest. It also conjured the image of a solitary old man in semiretirement, learning things about a now-vanished world he’d once thought he presided over. It happened often in the reading room in Yorba Linda: With unexpected immediacy, the gray metal cart carried the past into the present, in small but tangible fragments of Nixon himself.

The task of a marginalia maven is at right angles to the task of reading a book: It is an attempt to read the reader rather than to read the writer. For several decades now, scholars have been swarming the margins of books in dead people’s libraries. Those margins are among the most promising sites of “textual activity,” to use the scholar’s clinical phrase—a place to explore, analyze, and, it is hoped, find new raw material for the writing of dissertations. Famous readers whose libraries have fallen under such scrutiny include Melville and Montaigne, Machiavelli and Mark Twain.

A book invites various kinds of engagement, depending on the reader. Voltaire (whom Nixon admired, to judge by his extravagant underlining in the Durants’ The Age of Voltaire) scribbled commentary so incessantly that his marginalia have been published in volumes of their own. Voltaire liked to argue with a book. Nixon did not. He had a lively mind but not, when reading, a disputatious one; he restricted his marginalia almost exclusively to underlining sentences or making other subverbal marks on the page—boxes and brackets and circles. You get the idea that he knew what he wanted from a book and went searching for it, and when he found what he wanted, he pinned it to the page with his pen (seldom, from what I’ve seen, a pencil).

[From the April 1973 issue: The president and the press]

In his method, Nixon resembled the English writer Paul Johnson. I once asked Johnson how, given his prolific journalistic career—several columns and reviews a week in British and American publications—he managed to read all the books he cited in his own very long and very readable histories, which embraced such expansive subjects as Christianity, ancient Egypt, and the British empire. His reaction bordered on revulsion at my naivete. “Read them?!” he spat out. “Read them?! I don’t read them! I fillet them!” As it happens, Nixon was an avid reader of Johnson, whose books he often handed out to friends and staff at Christmastime.

John Adams, another busy producer of marginalia, liked to quote a Latin epigram: Studium sine calamo somnium. Adams translated this as: “Study without a pen in your hand is but a dream.” Nixon acquired the pen-in-hand habit early, as his surviving college and high-school textbooks show, and he kept at it throughout his life. For Nixon, as for the rest of us, marking up books was also a way of slowing himself down and attending to what he read. He was not a notably fast reader, by his own account, but his powers of concentration and memorization were considerable. Going at a book physically was a way of absorbing it mentally.

One of the most heavily represented authors in Nixon’s personal library is Churchill, whom Nixon revered not only as a statesman but also as a historian and an essayist. Nixon’s shelves sagged with Churchill’s multivolume histories and biographies: The World Crisis, Marlborough: His Life and Times, The Second World War, A History of the English Speaking Peoples. Churchill’s Great Contemporaries, a series of sketches he wrote in the 1920s and ’30s sizing up roughly two dozen friends and colleagues, was clearly a favorite. When I retrieved Nixon’s copy from a box, I found it dog-eared throughout.

Nixon’s tastes ran heavily toward history, but he could be tempted away from the past to a book of present-day punditry, if the writer and point of view were agreeable. According to a report in Time magazine, when half a million citizens descended on Washington, D.C., in November 1969 to protest the Vietnam War, Nixon holed up in his private quarters with a book called The Decline of Radicalism: Reflections on America Today. The book, slim and elegant, had been sent to Nixon by its author, the historian Daniel Boorstin.

Judging by his notations, Nixon was interested less in Boorstin’s turgid cultural analysis of “consumption communities” and more in his thesis that the ragged protesters gathering outside the White House fence constituted something new in American history: They were not radicals at all but nihilists. Nixon brought out the pen, and in Yorba Linda, a continent and decades away from his White House hideaway, I could still feel the insistent furrow of his underlining on the page. He marked several consecutive paragraphs in a section called “The New Barbarians,” in which Boorstin criticized protesters for their “indolence of mind” and “mindless, obsessive quest for power.”

People read books for lots of reasons: instruction, pleasure, uplift. This was Nixon reading for self-defense.

The book I most wanted to see in Yorba Linda was Nixon’s copy of Robert Blake’s biography Disraeli (1966). A re-creation of Nixon’s favorite room in the White House was one of the Nixon museum’s prime exhibits when it opened, in 1990, a few years before Nixon’s death. (It has since been redesigned.) Nixon himself chose Disraeli to rest on his desk for the public to see. The book was given to him during his first year in the White House, in 1969, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard professor, prominent Democrat, and future U.S. senator from New York. To the surprise of just about everybody, the year he took office, Nixon made Moynihan his chief domestic-policy counselor, a counterpart in those early days to Kissinger as head of the National Security Council. Despite Nixon’s enduring image as a black-eyed right-winger, his political ideology was always flexible, if not flatly self-contradictory.

[From the November 1974 issue: The friends of Richard Nixon]

Moynihan the liberal hoped to persuade Nixon the hybrid to take Benjamin Disraeli, the great prime minister of Victorian Britain, as his model. Disraeli was a Tory and an imperialist, and at the same time a social reformer of vision and courage. According to Moynihan, Nixon read the book within days of receiving it. Soon enough, the president was calling himself a “Disraeli conservative.” The precise meaning of the tag was clear to Nixon alone, but we can assume it underwent a great deal of improvisation and revision as his presidency wore on.

Disraeli’s appeal to Nixon went beyond his light-footed ideology. Speaking to his Cabinet at a dinner one evening in early 1972, Nixon called Disraeli a “magnificent” politician. Now, he went on, the “fashionable set today would immediately say, ‘Ah, politicians. Bad.’ ” As he saw it, the “fashionable set”—the epithet, suffused with reverse snobbery and class resentment, is pure Nixon—believed that politicians disdain idealism and think nothing of principle. “But,” Nixon said, “the pages of history are full of idealists who never accomplished anything.” It was “pragmatic men” like Disraeli “who had the ability to do things that other people only talked about.” Nixon, who had never shied away from calling himself a politician, wanted to see himself in Disraeli, or at least in Blake’s Disraeli—this “classic biography,” to which, he told his Cabinet, he often turned for inspiration on sleepless nights. And here the book was, Nixon’s own copy, at the top of my growing stack in Yorba Linda.

Disraeli is packed with observations about political tradecraft. They are penetrating, specific, and cold-blooded. The little dicta come from both the biographer and his subject. “He was a master at disguising retreat as advance,” Blake wrote approvingly. Nixon underlined that sentence, and then this one from Disraeli’s contemporary Lord Salisbury: “The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies.”

A line, a check mark, a circle—why Nixon deployed one notation and not another for any given passage is a question as unanswerable as “Why didn’t he burn the tapes?” But it was politics that always caught his eye, and activated his pen. Disraeli, Blake wrote, “suffered from a defect, endemic among politicians, the greatest reluctance to admit publicly that he had been in the wrong, even when the fault lay with his subordinates.” Another from Blake: Successful politicians “realize that a large part of political life in a parliamentary democracy consists not so much in doing things yourself as in imparting the right tone to things that others do for you or to things that are going to happen anyway.”

Should we take marked passages like these, with their ironic acceptance of the fudging and misdirection called for in the political arts, as a gesture toward self-criticism on Nixon’s part? Probably not: Nixon knew himself better than psycho-biographers give him credit for, but self-awareness is not self-criticism. In his chosen profession, he took the bad with the good, and his casual, creeping concessions to the seamier requirements of politics are what eventually did him in.

[From the October 2017 issue: How the Vietnam War broke the American presidency]

If you go looking for them, you can see reflections of Blake’s Disraeli throughout Nixon’s presidency, encapsulated in enduring phrases here and there. It was in Blake that Nixon came across Disraeli’s famous description of “exhausted volcanoes.” Disraeli coined it to disparage the feckless time-servers in William Ewart Gladstone’s cabinet after they had been in office a few years. Nixon underscored not only “exhausted volcanoes” but the rest of the passage from Blake’s text: The phrase, Blake writes, “was no mere gibe … For the past year, the Government had been vexed by that combination of accidents, scandals and blunders which so often for no apparent reason seem to beset an energetic administration in its later stages.”

Nixon feared the same fate for his second term—a loss of energy and direction. The day after his landslide reelection, in 1972, he called together his Cabinet and senior staff. He told them of Disraeli’s warning about “exhausted volcanoes.” And then, with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, serving as the lord high executioner, he demanded their resignations en masse.

Not everything in Blake’s Disraeli caught Nixon’s interest; certainly not everything was useful to him. As I paged through, I saw there were many longueurs, stretches of several dozen pages, sometimes more, where no filleting of any kind happened. And then—inevitably, suddenly—Nixon the reader is seized by passages of sometimes thunderous resonance, and the pen is again called into play.

“Disraeli,” Blake writes, “really was regarded as an outsider by the Victorian governing class.” One can almost see Nixon sit bolt upright and pick up his pen. This is the same ostracism that Nixon himself felt keenly throughout his personal and professional life, in fact and in imagination. The following page and a half, discussing the disdain of the “élite” for Disraeli, is bracketed nearly in its entirety. Some sentences are boxed. Some passages, like this one, are underlined as well as bracketed:

Men of genius operating in a parliamentary democracy … inspired a great deal of dislike and no small degree of distrust among the bustling mediocrities who form the majority of mankind.

The antagonism of the elites was not the determining fact of Disraeli’s career, but both biographer and subject perceived its profound effects, and so did the man reading about it 90 years after Disraeli’s death. As president, Nixon felt himself similarly situated: the political leader of an imperial nation, highly skilled, aching for greatness, yet in permanent estrangement from the most powerful figures of the politics and culture that surrounded him, nearly all of whom he judged, as Disraeli had, “bustling mediocrities.”

When reading about the elites, Nixon pressed the ballpoint deep into the page. We marginalia mavens, tracing our fingers across the lines today, can only guess, of course. But it may be that in 1969, sitting in the reading chair in his White House hideaway, he already sensed that this was not bound to end well.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Nixon Between the Lines.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.