Random House
June 2015
On Sale: June 16, 2015
Featuring: Richard Nixon
640 pages ISBN: 0812995368 EAN: 9780812995367 Kindle: B00UEL0J0G Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
“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.”—Walter
Isaacson, author of Steve
Jobs
Evan Thomas delivers the best
single-volume biography of Richard Nixon to date, a radical,
unique portrait of a complicated figure who was both
determinedly optimistic and tragically flawed. The New
York Times bestselling author of Ike’s Bluff
and Sea of Thunder, Thomas brings new life to one
of American history’s most infamous, paradoxical, and
enigmatic politicians, dispensing with myths to achieve an
intimate and evenhanded look at the actual man.
What drove a painfully shy outcast in elite
Washington society—a man so self-conscious he refused to
make eye contact during meetings—to pursue power and public
office? How did a president so attuned to the American
political id that he won reelection in a historic landslide
lack the self-awareness to recognize the gaping character
flaws that would drive him from office and forever taint his
legacy?
In Being Nixon, 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.
As maudlin as he was Machiavellian, 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 détente
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 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.
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.
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