Leading historian David Reynolds takes a fresh look at the controversial career and embattled presidency of Richard Nixon.
Reynolds argues that Nixon was genuinely successful as an international statesman, with his historic visits to communist China and the Soviet Union helping to thaw the Cold War. Yet behind the scenes, Nixon's diplomacy was a story of intrigue and rivalry. The methods that won him acclaim on the international stage also doomed his presidency in the infamous Watergate scandal.
An intimate psychological profile, the film reveals how Nixon was driven by a deep inferiority complex and ruthless ambition to escape a loveless, impoverished background. Nixon clawed his way to the most powerful job in the world yet could never shake off this past.
With the help of Nixon's scribbled memos, audio recordings and rarely seen home movie footage and photos, the film throws new light on Nixon's obsessive secrecy, relentless deception and paranoid mistrust of key aides, especially his foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger.
Shy and tortured, Nixon ran his presidency largely from a hideaway office across the road from the White House. The film recreates this, his 'den', the place where Nixon dreamed of greatness but was haunted by his demons.

Marking the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, historian Professor David Reynolds re-assesses Stalin's role in the life and death struggle between Germany and Russia in World War Two, which, he argues, was ultimately more critical for British survival than 'Our Finest Hour' in the Battle of Britain itself.
The name Stalin means 'man of steel', but Reynolds's penetrating new account reveals how the reality of Stalin's war in 1941 did not live up to that name. Travelling to Russian battlefield locations, he charts how Russia was almost annihilated within a few months as Stalin lurched from crisis to crisis, coming close to a nervous breakdown.
Reynolds shows how Stalin learnt to compromise in order to win, listening to his generals and downplaying communist ideology to appeal instead to the Russian people's nationalist fighting spirit. He also squares up to the terrible moral dilemma at the heart of World War Two. Using original telegrams and official documents, he looks afresh at Winston Churchill's controversial visit to Moscow in 1942 and re-examines how Britain and America were drawn into alliance with Stalin, a dictator almost as murderous as the Nazi enemy.

2003 film by Rob Zombie