Richard Nixon: The Shaping of his Character

by Fawn M. Brodie

Portrays Nixon as a complex, multicharacter man with grandiose fantasies who used lies and denials to gain approval and to catapult himself to power, only to engineer his own destruction

Genres: History, Biography, American, Presidents, Nonfiction

576 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1981

About the author

Fawn McKay Brodie (September 15, 1915 – January 10, 1981) was a biographer and professor of history at UCLA, best known for Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, a work of psychobiography, and No Man Knows My History, the first prominent non-hagiographic biography of Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement.

Raised in Utah in a respected, if impoverished, Latter-day Saint (LDS) family, Fawn McKay drifted away from religion during her years of graduate work at the University of Chicago and married the ethnically Jewish national defense expert Bernard Brodie, with whom she had three children. Although Fawn Brodie eventually became one of the first tenured female professors of history at UCLA, she is best known for her five biographies, four of which aim to incorporate the alleged insights of Freudian psychology.

Brodie's controversial depiction of Joseph Smith as a fraudulent "genius of improvisation" has been described as a "beautifully written biography ... the work of a mature scholar [that] represented the first genuine effort to come to grips with the contradictory evidence about Smith's early life." Her psychobiography of Thomas Jefferson became a best-seller and reintroduced Jefferson's slave and purported mistress Sally Hemings to popular consciousness even before advances in DNA testing increased evidence of a sexual liaison. Nevertheless, Brodie's study of Richard Nixon's early career, completed while she was dying of cancer, demonstrated the hazards of psychobiography in the hands of an author who loathed her subject.

Reviews

[Macjest · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a read. I recently visited the Nixon Library and came away very curious. Naturally, the library painted a fairly rosy picture of the man, but also took no pains to hide Watergate. So, I wondered, if the man was so “good” why was he also so self destructive? My library didn’t have much to offer. I picked up this book. It was very informative, yes. However, the author was somewhat contradictory on some points and VERY opinionated. Take this line in the last chapter. “We know he would not have used the tapes honestly.” Ok, you can extrapolate from past behavior, but should a biographer insert their opinion like that? There were several instances of opinionating besides this. That’s why I rated the book so low.

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much of the author’s biased opinions and not enough historical data. Some of it reads like a junior high burn book. We get it, you hate Nixon.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I often tell my students that if Abraham Lincoln had to come before a jury and defend his life, much like Albert Brooks in the movie of the same title, he would have nothing to be ashamed of. If Richard Nixon had to endure the same test...I don't think he would come out so well,

[Vince · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tricky Dick really needed a hug.

[Joy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grim, but well-written. I learned a lot about the politics of the 1950s and 1960s. You can see exactly where the right-wing started to go off the rails.