Being Nixon; A Man Divided

New York, N.Y.: Random House, 2015. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xv, [1], 619, [5] pages. DJ is price clipped. Footnotes. Illustrations. Acknowledgments, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. Includes Introduction: The Fatalistic Optimist. Also includes Sections on The Striver; At the Mountaintop; and The Fall. Also includes Epilogue: Rise Again. Red dot on the bottom edge. Evan Welling Thomas III (born April 25, 1951) is an American journalist, historian, and author. He is the author of nine books, including two New York Times bestsellers. Thomas was a graduate of Phillips Academy, Harvard University (B.A.), and the University of Virginia School of Law (J.D.), from 1991 he was a reporter, writer, and editor at Newsweek for 24 years. Prior to that, he was at Time Magazine. Thomas began his reporting career at The Bergen Record in northeastern New Jersey. Thomas was, for 20 years, a regular panelist on the weekly public affairs TV show Inside Washington until the show ceased production in December 2013. He taught writing and journalism at Harvard and Princeton between 2003 and 2014. For seven years, from 2007 to 2014, he was the Ferris Professor of Journalism in residence at Princeton. In this book, Evan Thomas peels away the layers of the complex, confounding figure who became America's thirty-seventh president. The son of devout Quakers, Richard Nixon (not unlike his rival John F. Kennedy) grew up in the shadow of an older, favored brother and thrived on conflict and opposition. Through high school and college, in the navy and in politics, he was constantly leading crusades and fighting off enemies real and imagined. Nixon possessed the plainspoken eloquence to reduce American television audiences to tears with his career-saving "Checkers" speech; meanwhile, his darker half hatched schemes designed to take down his political foes, earning him the notorious nickname "Tricky Dick." Drawing on a wide range of historical accounts, Thomas reveals the contradictions of a leader whose vision and foresight led him to achieve detente with the Soviet Union and reestablish relations with communist China, but whose underhanded political tactics tainted his reputation long before the Watergate scandal. One of the principal architects of the modern Republican Party and its "silent majority" of disaffected white and conservative ex-Dixiecrats, Nixon was also deemed a liberal in some quarters for his efforts to desegregate southern schools, create the Environmental Protection Agency, and end the draft. Derived from a Kirkus review: A sympathetic-unusually so-portrait of the disgraced president by accomplished biographer and historian Thomas. Richard Nixon is so often the villain that it's sometimes surprising to be reminded of his real accomplishments, no matter how politically calculating or unwilling, from d�tente with the Soviet Union to the establishment of the environmental regulations current Republicans are trying to demolish. By the author's account, Nixon "wanted to be upbeat, to be an optimist," and some of his struggle can be seen in the construct of that optimism versus the brooding darkness and essential solitariness that he embodied. Indeed, as Thomas' biographical study builds, it becomes ever more unlikely that Nixon, a loner in the constituency-pleasing game of politics, could ever have succeeded. Score one for Nixon, as Thomas awards him full points for dogged determination. And score sympathy points for Nixon's ability to rise above constant rejection to get as much done as he did, from amassing a small fortune at playing cards to opening the gates of the Forbidden City. Even so, Thomas' account is by no means uncritical. Though even paranoiacs have enemies, Nixon specialized in being "ever alert to put-downs," whether from the media or from those born into wealth and power. This is one of the better books on Nixon in the recent crop, worth reading.