Word: nixons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Stephen Ambrose's Nixon, the second of the historian's three volumes, covers the period between his subject's debacle in the 1962 California gubernatorial election and vindication by landslide in the presidential election of 1972. As in his first installment, Ambrose sets out the chronicle in meticulous detail, relying more heavily on facts than dicta to lead the reader's judgment. Fact: Nixon was so habitual a deceiver that in 1962, 48 hours after saying defeat would at least restore his family life, he left for the Bahamas without his wife and daughters. Fact: during 1968 he artfully cultivated...
...best passages in the book recounts the campaign of 1968, a year of tragedy and stress. Nixon capitalized on the turmoil, playing to Main Street's abhorrence of disorder. Yet he also threaded his way between the extremism of George Wallace and the ambivalence of Hubert Humphrey. Nixon's caution almost enabled Humphrey to recoup in the final days, but the Republican knew his constituency well enough to squeeze out a puny plurality. Over the next four years, he built that slight advantage into a mighty force despite the agony of Viet Nam. Ambrose leaves his protagonist in inexplicable melancholy...
Roger Morris' Richard Milhous Nixon, to be published later this month, tracks the future President from distant ancestry through the 1952 election. A Harvard-trained political scientist who worked briefly in Nixon's White House, Morris has written critical books on two former colleagues, Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger. Now he starts a Nixon trilogy that promises (threatens?) to be more exhaustive than Ambrose's. From Morris we learn details about Nixon's first political victims, Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas (why Voorhis flubbed the debate with his upstart opponent, why prominent Democrats such as Joe and Jack Kennedy...
With a sure sense of West Coast history, Morris shows how Nixon's early career grew naturally from a raw strivers' culture. Just as Nixon fought hereditary barons in campus politics, he later bucked the genteel Republicanism of Earl Warren. Morris demolishes the stereotype of Nixon as disembodied political gypsy. Nixon had roots in the same soil that produced the sagebrush rebellion. Morris also reconstructs the network of Nixon's early financial backers, including some of the millionaires who would later sponsor Reagan. After only six years in Congress, Nixon connected with a national following. Ultimately, it would unseat...
Neither Ambrose nor Morris provides startling revisionism on the President whose impact, positive and negative, is still keenly felt today. Rather, they give an emerging perception, reminding us that Nixon was an uncommon leader of whom there is still more to learn...