Volume 34, Number 12 · July 16, 1987
The Best Man
By Alan Brinkley
Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913–1962
by Stephen E. Ambrose
Simon and Schuster, 752 pp., $22.95
Stephen Ambrose began his distinguished biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower with open admiration for his subject. Eisenhower, he writes, was 'a great and good man…one of the outstanding leaders of the Western world of this century.'[1] He offers no comparable evaluation of Richard Nixon in this first of two volumes on the life of the thirty-seventh president; indeed, there is no preface or foreword of any kind. Ambrose opens the book, almost abruptly, with a discussion of Nixon's ancestors. He ends, equally unceremoniously, with the defeated candidate driving home from his 'last press conference' in 1962. Yet even without saying so, Ambrose has produced a study of Nixon that is in many ways as powerfully 'revisionist' as his earlier study of Eisenhower. Other biographers have scrutinized Nixon's youth and early career for the seeds of his later failures. This book makes it possible to understand why, through most of his life, Nixon was a great success.
Review, 4401 words
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