Richard Milhous Nixon
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician |
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| Author: | Roger Morris |
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| Publisher: | Henry Holt & Company |
Among the stories is the surprising courtship of Pat, with its equally revelatory portrait of the future First Lady; Nixon’s long-obscured prewar politics; his government and wartime military service; the seminal congressional campaign of 1946 and the legendary Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, set against the period’s anticommunist hysteria. And, for sheer drama, the Alger Hiss case is certain to surprise and shock even aficionados of that career-making episode. Likewise, the young prodigal’s double-dealing aboard Earl Warren’s Chicago-bound 1952 campaign train and covert run for the Vice Presidency (climaxed by the celebrated “Checkers” speech) is a tour de force of American political history.
Any one of these half-dozen riveting tales is a book in itself; taken together, they allow us to understand who we were and have become during the “American Century.”
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Reviews
Amazon.com
Weighing in at over 1,000 pages, Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician is undoubtedly the most detailed single volume on the political career of the disgraced ex-president. But the events in this book take place decades before the Watergate scandal, in an era when many were unsure whether Nixon might ever climb to heights of power from which to topple. After covering the first 33 years of Nixon’s life in about 300 pages, Roger Morris immerses the reader in the major controversies of Nixon’s time on Capitol Hill: the Alger Hiss case, the hotly contested California Senate race against Democrat incumbent Helen Douglas, and the charges of improper conduct that rocked the 1952 presidential campaign and motivated a desperate Nixon to make an appeal to the American public on live television (the speech is perhaps best remembered for his invocation of the family dog, Checkers). Morris takes Nixon to his 1953 inauguration, leaving the reader in no doubt of what it cost Nixon, the Republican Party, and America to make that moment happen. —Ron Hogan
