Being Nixon: A Man Divided
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Evan Thomas. (2015). Being Nixon: A Man Divided. Random House Publishing Group.

Evan Thomas. 2015. Being Nixon: A Man Divided. Random House Publishing Group.

Evan Thomas, Being Nixon: A Man Divided. Random House Publishing Group, 2015.

Evan Thomas. Being Nixon: A Man Divided. Random House Publishing Group, 2015.

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Thomas, Evan
   • bioText: Evan Thomas is the author of nine books: The Wise Men (with Walter Isaacson), The Man to See, The Very Best Men, Robert Kennedy, John Paul Jones, Sea of Thunder, The War Lovers, Ike’s Bluff, and Being Nixon. John Paul Jones and Sea of Thunder were New York Times bestsellers. Thomas was a writer, correspondent, and editor for thirty-three years at Time and Newsweek, including ten years (1986–96) as Washington bureau chief at Newsweek, where, at the time of his retirement in 2010, he was editor at large. He wrote more than one hundred cover stories and in 1999 won a National Magazine Award. He wrote Newsweek’s fifty-thousand-word election specials in 1996, 2000, 2004 (winner of a National Magazine Award), and 2008. He has appeared on many TV and radio talk shows, including Meet the Press and The Colbert Report, and has been a guest on PBS’s Charlie Rose more than forty times. The author of dozens of book reviews for The New York Times and The Washington Post, Thomas has taught writing and journalism at Harvard and Princeton, where, from 2007 to 2014, he was Ferris Professor of Journalism.
   • name: Evan Thomas

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2015-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

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title

Being Nixon

fullDescription

The landmark New York Times bestselling biography of Richard M. Nixon, a political savant whose gaping character flaws would drive him from the presidency and forever taint his legacy. 
“A biography of eloquence and breadth . . . No single volume about Nixon’s long and interesting life could be so comprehensive.”—Chicago Tribune
One of Time’s Top 10 Nonfiction Books of the Year
In this revelatory biography, Evan Thomas delivers a radical, unique portrait of America’s thirty-seventh president, Richard Nixon, a contradictory figure who was both determinedly optimistic and tragically flawed. One of the principal architects of the modern Republican Party and its “silent majority” of disaffected whites 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.
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, Nixon was constantly leading crusades and fighting off enemies real and imagined. He possessed the plainspoken eloquence to reduce American television audiences to tears with his career-saving “Checkers” speech; meanwhile, Nixon’s 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’s biography reveals the contradictions of a leader whose vision and foresight led him to achieve détente with the Soviet Union and reestablish relations with communist China, but whose underhanded political tactics tainted his reputation long before the Watergate scandal.
A deeply insightful character study as well as a brilliant political biography, Being Nixon offers a surprising look at a man capable of great bravery and extraordinary deviousness—a balanced portrait of a president too often reduced to caricature.
Praise for Being Nixon
“Terrifically engaging . . . a fair, insightful and highly entertaining portrait.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Thomas has a fine eye for the telling quote and the funny vignette, and his style is eminently readable.”—The New York Times Book Review

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Chicago Tribune
   • content: "A biography of eloquence and breadth . . . No single volume about Nixon's long and interesting life could be so comprehensive."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Max Boot, The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "Terrifically engaging . . . a fair, insightful and highly entertaining portrait of the thirty-seventh president . . . Being Nixon should be read by anyone with a more open mind about the oddest man ever to occupy the Oval Office."
3. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "[A] fully rounded portrait, carefully pairing each indictment of Nixon with a mitigating perspective . . . Thomas has a fine eye for the telling quote and the funny vignette, and his style is eminently readable."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The Boston Globe
   • content: "From Nixon's hardscrabble California childhood to his post-presidential exile, Thomas proves an amiable and fair-minded tour guide. . . . The result, in Thomas's rendering, is a man of intertwined threads, in some ways the personification of the contending passions of American life of the period."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Time
   • content: "How self-aware are the great men of history? That's the fascinating question at the heart of Evan Thomas's new book on Richard Nixon. . . . Here in one sharp and briskly written volume is what you really want to know about the great and horrible thirty-seventh President: How could someone so wise about the world be so utterly clueless about himself? . . . [Nixon] is revealed in Thomas's hands as awkward, striving, victimized and alone--strange habits for a man who opted for such a public life, and traits that carried the seeds of his destruction."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Carl Bernstein, The Washington Post
   • content: "Ambitious . . . Thomas's book is filled with anecdotes that humanize Nixon. There are pages suggesting real insight and, especially, how the president was seen by those around him. . . . There are well-crafted word-pictures of Nixon throughout the narrative, from his legendary awkwardness to his catastrophic frustration and vindictive rage."
7. • premium: False
   • source: The Washington Times
   • content: "A well-written and balanced account . . . gracefully written and highly readable . . . [Thomas's] interest goes to the man himself, like most of us a man of contradictions, a man with a dark and light side, with the dark side often leading to disastrous decisions, encouraged by his increasingly tight circle of self-serving advisers."
8. • premium: False
   • source: The New Yorker
   • content: "[Nixon's] oddity, more than any policy choices or impeachable crimes, is the subject of this book, which is marked by unexpected and startling empathy. . . . One feels for Nixon."
9. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times
   • content: "[A] glossy, armchair-ready biography . . . [a] book in tune with our time. It's a trick of fate that Nixon, a sitting president who experienced a version of supersize public shaming, might have appreciated for its futuristic appeal. Instead of being passively read, Being Nixon invites argument."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
    • content: "What was it really like to be Richard Nixon? Evan Thomas tackles this fascinating question by peeling back the layers of a man driven by a poignant mix of optimism and fear. The result is both insightful history and an astonishingly compelling psychological portrait of an anxious introvert who struggled to be a transformative statesman."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus Reviews
    • content: "An infamous, polarizing, and enigmatic political figure--President Richard Nixon--comes to life in a surprising and engaging look at a man capable of great bravery and extraordinary deviousness."--Publishers Weekly "As Thomas's biographical--and sometimes psychobiographical--study builds, it becomes ever more unlikely that Nixon, a loner in the constituency-pleasing game of politics, could ever have succeeded. . . . This is one of the better books on Nixon in the recent crop."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Jay Winik, author of April 1865 and The Great Upheaval
    • content: "The great Evan Thomas has brought us a measured, concise, and important American biography. Now that the shouting and tumult have faded and Richard Nixon moves from our contemporary politics toward history, Thomas offers wise insights, based on many new sources, achieving what might have seemed impossible: He has rendered a new Nixon who, in vital and unexpected ways, is very different from the character about whom, for the past seventy years, so much has been said and written."--Michael Beschloss, author of Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders
13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from June 29, 2015
      In this surprisingly sympathetic investigation of President Nixon's psyche, Thomas (Ike's Bluff) depicts the infamous president as a man torn between optimism and anxiety, whose "strengths were his weaknesses, and vice versa." Beginning with a 16-year-old Nixon overcoming his first crisis (a disastrous school play), Thomas understands Nixon as introverted, insecure, solitary, and self-conscious of his humble origins, but able to bear humiliation and defeat in the pursuit of his goals. Fundamental to Nixon's tenacity were the women in his life—first his mother, and later his wife and two daughters—who saw the fundamental goodness in a man often maligned by the media and whose unyielding support quietly sustained Nixon across the many defeats of his political career. In Thomas's view, the long path to Nixon's fall began with anti-war protests and the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which upset the delicate balance of Nixon's warring selves and led him to give in to his worst impulses. Thomas doesn't shy away from showing Nixon at his worst, acknowledging Nixon's penchant for the "maudlin," his "self-pity," his fear of confrontation, and his often poisonous rivalry with Henry Kissinger. Thomas is generous to his subject, contextualizing Nixon and often teasing out his well-concealed desire to do the right thing. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      A sympathetic-unusually so-portrait of the disgraced president by accomplished biographer and historian Thomas (Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World, 2012, etc.). 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 detente 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 Manichaean construct of that optimism versus the brooding darkness and essential solitariness that he embodied. Indeed, as Thomas' biographical-and sometimes psychobiographical-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 and native moroseness 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, like H.W. Brands' recent Reagan, 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. Though evenhanded throughout, Thomas sometimes risks being taken for one of the Pat Buchanan school of apologists: "The facts of Watergate, as they dribbled out, were bad enough, but an inflamed press corps did not stop at the facts"; "He was not paranoid; the press and the 'Georgetown set' really were out to get him." Even allowing for a little politicking, this is one of the better books on Nixon in the recent crop, worth reading alongside Rick Perlstein's decidedly less sympathetic Nixonland (2008) and Tim Weiner's One Man Against the World (2015). COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from August 1, 2015
      

      For better or worse, argues Thomas (Ike's Bluff) in this fascinating and impressively researched biography, President Richard Nixon (1913-94) was motivated by fears and insecurities that created a drive to succeed, which resulted in monumental political achievements and also sowed the seeds for his downfall. The author draws heavily on recently available White House tapes as well as interviews conducted with former Nixon staffers. Driven by childhood poverty to mistrust the wealthy, who slighted him in college and his early career, Nixon was sensitive to the needs of the poor and supported legislation that promoted desegregation, voting rights, and welfare reform, while opposing integration when currying votes from Southerners. Thomas presents Nixon as neither conservative nor liberal but rather as an optimist, much like most mid-20th-century politicians, regardless of party, who believed government's mission was to offer creative solutions to economic and social problems. Although Nixon was ruthless to his enemies, Thomas reminds us of the president's generosity as a loving husband and father who was wellliked by White House staff. VERDICT This compulsively readable account will find a wide audience among general readers, historians, and Watergate buffs who seek a fuller understanding of this controversial man. It is finely complemented by Tim Weiner's One Man Against the World (see review below), which focuses on Nixon's foreign policies. [See Prepub Alert, 3/30/15.]--Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      April 15, 2015
      

      Currently an editor at large at Newsweek, New York Times best-selling author Thomas (e.g., Ike's Bluff) presents a portrait of Richard Nixon that aims to encompass his contradictions as schemer and sentimentalist, silent-majority defender and seeming liberal who desegregated Southern schools and founded the Environmental Protection Agency. With a 40,000-copy first printing and a five-city tour.

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      August 1, 2015
      

      For better or worse, argues Thomas (Ike's Bluff) in this fascinating and impressively researched biography, President Richard Nixon (1913-94) was motivated by fears and insecurities that created a drive to succeed, which resulted in monumental political achievements and also sowed the seeds for his downfall. The author draws heavily on recently available White House tapes as well as interviews conducted with former Nixon staffers. Driven by childhood poverty to mistrust the wealthy, who slighted him in college and his early career, Nixon was sensitive to the needs of the poor and supported legislation that promoted desegregation, voting rights, and welfare reform, while opposing integration when currying votes from Southerners. Thomas presents Nixon as neither conservative nor liberal but rather as an optimist, much like most mid-20th-century politicians, regardless of party, who believed government's mission was to offer creative solutions to economic and social problems. Although Nixon was ruthless to his enemies, Thomas reminds us of the president's generosity as a loving husband and father who was wellliked by White House staff. VERDICT This compulsively readable account will find a wide audience among general readers, historians, and Watergate buffs who seek a fuller understanding of this controversial man. It is finely complemented by Tim Weiner's One Man Against the World (see review below), which focuses on Nixon's foreign policies. [See Prepub Alert, 3/30/15.]--Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

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The landmark New York Times bestselling biography of Richard M. Nixon, a political savant whose gaping character flaws would drive him from the presidency and forever taint his legacy. 
“A biography of eloquence and breadth . . . No single volume about Nixon’s long and interesting life could be so comprehensive.”—Chicago Tribune
One of Time’s Top 10 Nonfiction Books of the Year
In this revelatory biography, Evan Thomas delivers a radical, unique portrait of America’s thirty-seventh president, Richard Nixon, a contradictory figure who was both determinedly optimistic and tragically flawed. One of the principal architects of the modern Republican Party and its “silent majority” of disaffected whites 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...

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   • description: Biography & Autobiography / Presidents & Heads of State
2. • code: HIS036060
   • description: History / United States / 20th Century
3. • code: POL040010
   • description: POLITICAL SCIENCE / American Government / Executive Branch