Follow up question. Boris Yeltsin was a famous alcoholic. Did this change how seriously he was taken in the days directly after the fall of the USSR?

This is kind of late, sorry, but you never got a proper answer to this, so I assume it is OK.

I don't think most people outside of the Nixonphiles would disagree that he abused alcohol at times. While it was not remotely near the level portrayed by "hatchet job" biographers or certain other figures with a penchant for overdramatizing history (I'm looking at you, Oliver Stone), it was definitely becoming more pronounced in his last year in office. During this time period at night, Nixon would regularly give hair raising orders over the phone, moreso than usual, that his subordinates would have to ignore. However, the interesting thing about Nixon's drinking was that he really didn't drink all that much on a regular basis. He was well aware of his low tolerance for booze and was normally very disciplined about it. Nixon's inner circle unanimously attest to the fact that even during Watergate, he never drank during working hours or in the Oval Office, and certainly not the night before a meeting with a foreign diplomat to discuss his all-driving obsession of FP. There was a lot wrong with Nixon, but I don't think he can be considered an alcoholic in any conventional sense.

The trouble was 1) Nixon's inability to handle even a tiny amount of booze, to the point where they worried about the vodka during the visits to the USSR, and 2) when he drank, he had a tendency to go all out. You can listen to tapes of Nixon when he is drunk: he's slurring his words, occasionally to the point where he doesn't make any sense, after ingesting an amount of alcohol that would make most men just mildly tipsy. Why this was is largely a matter of speculation, but my theory is that Nixon was a very closed off man who very seldom let his guard down. Nixon was congenitally incapable of opening up around anyone, with the semi-exceptions of his wife, his daughters, and to a lesser extent, Bebe Rebozo. He also probably had a neurological disorder of some kind. (High functioning autism would go a long way to explaining a lot about Nixon, particularly the fact that he was fascinated with people and their reactions-like a Martian scientist-but hated people. I'm not a professional, though, so if you want me to explain more about my strictly personal theory, PM.) Regardless of what it was, for Nixon to have succeeded in politics with his personal traits took almost inhuman efforts of willpower and self-control-and it necessitated the most elaborate barriers and social mechanisms for him. Alcohol had a way of melting these barriers and this self-control. It cracked a dam that was holding back an ocean.

So, to answer your question, Nixon definitely abused alcohol, but that didn't mean he was a bona fide drunk who couldn't function without booze, especially pre-Watergate. As a comparison, I'd make a rough analogy to JFK and the salacious stories about his painkillers or with sex: Kennedy unquestionably abused both at times, but that is not nearly the same thing as being a full on druggie or out of control sex addict. And in both cases, there's no question that ideologically or personally hostile authors have tried to make a mountain out of a molehill, so to speak.

PS:

I'm on a bit of a Nixon tangent at the moment, so I'll type some more.

I'm not sure how much this matters from a practical standpoint, but IMO, Nixon's non-functionality for parts of the Yom Kippur War I strongly suspect had more to do with Agnew's resignation, the Saturday Night Massacre, and genuinely being emotionally broken from Watergate (and, if my theory is correct, socially overstimulated) than alcohol abuse. Again, since we are getting close to “personal judgement” territory both with accounts and leaks of the period and with Nixon's mental chemistry, PM me for more details.

I will go into one piece commonly cited evidential piece, though, as an example of how tricky accounts of the Nixon Administration can be, including from insiders. On the October 11th conversation between Kissinger and Snowcroft on preventing the British PM from talking to Nixon: to be absolutely clear, I'm not saying that Kissinger couldn't have been telling the straight truth and that Nixon was really drunk. But I have my doubts about that, considering that this was right in the middle of the planning for Operation Nickel Grass, where Nixon literally cut through the bureaucracy personally for the first and arguably only time of his Presidency. As most reputable authors, even left-wing ones, agree that Nixon spearheaded that aspect of the war, if nothing else and for more complex reasons than often portrayed by hagiographers, it's hard to imagine him doing that with a killer hangover and intense vomiting. Least of all when you recall Nixon's problems in handling booze: the day after drunkenly talking to Haldeman after his forced resignation, on May 1st, you can easily tell he's not at 100% percent.

The thing here is that you have to be very, very careful with what Nixon and Kissinger said about each other throughout the Nixon Presidency because more often than not, they had a hidden agenda of some sort. Both men subverted the other for their own power gain throughout all the 5.5 years they were together on a routine basis. Another thing to factor in was the crucial Middle East issues afflicting the world at this time, because their agendas for the region were far more ideologically divergent with this part of the world than elsewhere, especially by 1972-1973 (this is complicated and involves a lot of nuance when it comes to both men, but basically, Nixon favored an imposed peace on the region, in conjunction with the USSR if necessary. Kissinger didn't-his main goal was to keep the USSR out of the process). October 1973 was bringing that to a head right at the first time in the administration where Kissinger was more and more keeping the whole thing afloat. Nixon had no ability to penalize him in the middle of Watergate's climax, and they both knew it. Kissinger regularly referred to Nixon as a drunken madman long before Watergate, and tried to do his best to subtly obfuscate the reality that it was Nixon who made the major strategic calls rather than him.

Kissinger would later flat out ignore a direct order that Nixon gave him on his way to Moscow to talk about an imposed peace with Brezhnev, which arguably raises questions of Constitutional process insofar as a non-native citizen of the USA usurping Presidential authority: this goes way, way beyond petty maneuvering to shut someone out of a meeting. So, between all these factors, I certainly don't put it beyond Kissinger to have at least exaggerated, if not lied, about Nixon's drinking so that he could have the British PM to himself. Given that this was right after Agnew's resignation and before Nickel Grass, Nixon would have been indisposed/busy anyway, so he certainly could have convinced Snowcroft. Another plausible theory is this: Nixon simply didn't want to talk to anybody and ordered Haig and Kissinger to keep people away: this was an extremely regular occurrence in the Nixon years. This would have justifiably frustrated Kissinger in the middle of an international crisis, so while he granted the request, he also engaged in a little social back-biting.

(Let me be fair and say Nixon gave as good as he got: he regularly referred Kissinger to psychiatric treatment, took a sadistic pleasure in making him feel as insecure in an openly anti-Semitic Oval Office environment as possible, often portrayed him condescendingly as a insignificant, anonymous flunky who needed help in wiping his own ass from a stoic tough guy President-this was every bit as inaccurate as Kissinger's portrayal of himself as a heroic lone cowboy reigning in an unbalanced, potential nuclear war starting President-and had Kissinger and his staff illegally wiretapped on a nonstop basis throughout the Presidency. Nixon and Kissinger were very effective as a foreign policy duo: Nixon wouldn't have had a hope in hell of implementing his vision without Kissinger, Kissinger simply could not exist without Nixon. But there was absolutely no warmth or love lost between the two, although Kissinger's insights into Nixon's personality in his autobiography, to be fair, are probably among the best there are.

They had very similar, high-horsepower minds. They had a very similar dark view of humanity. They were far more ideologically similar than many people back in the day thought: both were fundamentally conservative in an old school, pre-Reagan sense. Kissinger aptly notes how this misperception eventually caused both of them trouble from their supposed political "groups". Whether it was Kissinger from his Ivy League academic colleagues and the "Georgetown" set-it is no exaggeration to say that many of these people obsessively viewed Nixon as the embodiment of all they despised about Middle Americans, and by 1968, as actually more of a threat than the USSR-or it was Nixon from said "Middle American" ideological conservatives who were instinctively leery of Kissinger by dint of "Harvard Jewish refugee" background and ideology alike, the string of perceived betrayal abounded. The point I'm trying to drive home is that but for the circumstances that put them together in power, they would have been highly unlikely to meet in life, and it showed. They never hung out with each other or anything.)