On learning the motivation of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters He couldn't figure out how to fight his domestic political enemies who were opposed to his policies he couldn't figure out how to get his plans past Congress. More than 500 American soldiers were dying every week in Vietnam we had more than half a million soldiers committed over there. To do that, he had to somehow settle the Vietnam War. He was determined from the day he was sworn in to be re-elected by the greatest landslide in American political history. He had won election as president in the greatest resurrection since Lazarus in 1968, by a tiny fraction of the vote - less than 1 percent and only 43 percent of the vote. Kennedy in 1960 in the presidential election. Richard Nixon, we must remember, had lost by just a hair's breadth of a vote to John F. On the challenges Nixon faced when he assumed office He said so himself - Nixon did - that Vietnam found its successor in Watergate.' The two wars became one: Vietnam morphed into Watergate. 'At home, he had bugs, break-ins, black bag jobs and burglaries. 'In Vietnam, he had a weapon - B-52 bombers,' Weiner says. Nixon was waging fights both at home and abroad. That fear 'turned into anger and that anger turned into self-destruction and every hour of these new tapes and these released transcripts adds to the record of a man committing political suicide day-by-day,' he says. Nixon was consumed by fear, Weiner tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

After having pored over these documents, Tim Weiner provides answers to these and other questions in his book One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon. Hundreds of hours of Nixon's tapes were made public in 20. Tens of thousands of files from the Nixon White House, National Security Council, CIA, FBI, State Department and Pentagon were declassified between 20. Richard Nixon's presidency has always been one surrounded by questions and controversy: Why did he wiretap his own aides and diplomats? Why did he escalate the war in Vietnam? Why did he lie about his war plans to his secretary of defense and secretary of state? What were the Watergate burglars searching for, and why did Nixon tape conversations that included incriminating evidence? In his new book One Man Against the World, Tim Weiner explores some of the questions surrounding the presidency of Richard Nixon, pictured above in the Oval Office on Feb.

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