Thomas, more than Weiner, understands the appeal Nixon had to voters. Thomas’s Nixon is brilliant but flawed, while Weiner’s Nixon is the reverse, flawed but brilliant. “But the fears and insecurities that led him into sinfulness also gave him the drive to push past self-doubt, to pretend to be cheerful, to dare to be brave, to see, often though sadly not always, the light in the dark.’’ For a man obsessed with history’s judgment, that is as fair an assessment as any.
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. “He was not so naive as to believe that he could truly control either events or perceptions,’’ Thomas writes, “but his realism did not stop him from making heroic, sometimes overly theatrical, attempts to dominate the world stage and all who stood upon it.’’ He identifies Nixon politically as the last of the GOP activist presidents but portrays him personally as awkward, shy, hesitant, though with an insatiable need to dominate. Surprisingly, he gives the former president, more than Ronald Reagan, the conservative movement’s favored son, credit for molding the contemporary Republican Party.
From Nixon’s hardscrabble California childhood to his post-presidential exile, Thomas proves an amiable and fair-minded tour guide.
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