The Presidency of Richard Nixon

Helpful. Interesting. Smart, strange man who overcomes dislike of people to run incredibly large country of people. More effective on Vietnam than given credit for. Problem with honesty.

I read this book for a graduate class in American history. Few U.S. presidents have had as many books written about them and their administrations as Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon's presidency was defined by the historian Stephen E. Ambrose as a Shakespearean tragedy. Nixon is credited by many historians with great success in foreign and domestic policy. These achievements by themselves would normally rank him near the top of the list of America's great presidents. However, his psychological deficiencies were responsible for dragging the country through its worst constitutional crisis in its history--Watergate. Nixon's involvement in the Watergate cover up culminated in his being the only president to resign from office. This saved him from the humiliation of surely becoming the only president who would have been impeached and thrown out of office. It is against this historical backdrop, that Melvin Small wrote The Presidency of Richard Nixon. Small succeeded in writing an objectively fair history of America's thirty-seventh president. At the end of his book, Small astutely noted why a history of Nixon is so important. "The period from the end of World War II to the end of the cold war was in good measure an age of Nixon" (311). No historian writing about Nixon can avoid trying to understand and explain his psychological profile. One would think with all the biographies from historians and memoirs from close aides, the voluminous presidential papers, and thousands of hours of tape recordings, one could get a clear understanding of Nixon's psyche. Most historians and close friends and aides of Nixon still admit that they never fully understood him. Both Nixon historians Theodore H. White and Nixon speechwriter William Safire, wrote that they were still perplexed by Nixon's multi-faceted psyche. Small recognized this conundrum while writing his biography, and like most biographers, searched Nixon's early life and upbringing to try to understand his psychological character traits. Nixon was born on January 9, 1913 in Yorba Linda, California. He was the second of five brothers. Two of his brothers died from respiratory diseases. Nixon remarked that these traumatic events in his life caused him to champion the government's involvement in health care. Nixon's family was lower middle class Quaker. During the Depression they struggled like millions of other families. Richard was an intelligent child who learned to read before entering grade school. He had a photographic memory that allowed him to excel in both his academic and political careers. He was famous for remembering the names of thousands of politicians from across the country and could memorize speeches; thus making it seem he was talking extemporaneously. Although he had the grades to attend a more prestigious college, due to financial considerations, Nixon settled on attending Whittier, a local college. He graduated second in his class in 1934, and received a parti