"When I first met Richard Nixon," Robert Bork says in the book he completed a few weeks before his death in December, "I could see in his expression the conviction that someone had blundered badly."

With the dry wit that, together with his mastery of the dry martini, made him delightful company, Bork says the president, who "almost visibly recoiled," evidently considered his red beard emblematic of Ivy League leftwingery. Nixon probably thought the barbarians were within the gates.

They were. On Nixon's staff.