Susan Cheever chronicles drinking in America

Richard Nixon

Martinis and rage:

"I knew Nixon was a crook, but I didn't realize how much drinking had to do with it because he never drank that much and he didn't stagger around, but alcohol certainly impaired him," Cheever says.

Nixon was a "tightly wound Quaker with a longing for power," she wrote. One night in 1960, "he even got drunk and seriously told his Catholic staffers what a great Pope he could be and how well he could run the Vatican."

Nixon didn't drink at all until he was an adult, yet you can see that he was drunk or passed out at many, many important moments, Cheever says.

One of those moments was on Aug 29, 1969, when two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked TWA Flight 840, forcing the pilot to divert the Tel Aviv-bound airliner to the airport in Damascus, Syria.

Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, reached the president by phone after dark, when Nixon had partaken of a drink or two and was in one of his common rages. He exploded into the phone: "Bomb the airport!" and sent Kissinger and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird into a scramble on how to avoid the direct order without seeming to, she says.

Finally, Laird told the president weather conditions made bombing impractical, thereby avoiding action that might well have led to larger disaster.