The Good Dog Richard Affair
Gannon, Frank
Frank Gannon THE GOOD DOG RICHARD AFFAIR Shocking insights into Richard Nixon from the late Fawn Brodie. What wouldn't you give to have been on Air Force One on that runway in Cairo when they...
...Brodie suggests that all through these adolescent years he never resolved the problem of what was really his in the store...
...First, it depends on the coincidental geography that places Mrs...
...Bruce Mazlish {In Search of Nixon) wrote about what he saw as Nixon's self-absorption, capacity for denial, and excessive fear of being unloved...
...Tkach, but the quotation "Take good care of him" is the caption Mr...
...Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character is a sadly unbalanced book...
...Brodie claims that Richard Nixon grew up in an atmosphere in which his father punished him physically and his mother punished him both mentally and emotionally...
...She skillfully paces her material and seeds her ground to condition the reader to accept her psychobiographical points...
...Brodie hustles on to other matters, but the reader might want to linger over some of the more palpable improbabilities of this story...
...Nixon was undecided about Castro's intentions...
...This is Richard Nixon squirming spread-eagled on the merciless couch of psychobiography, written in a breathless, gossipy Hollywood style...
...She states that "If nothing else, the letter demonstrates how early he had begun to exaggerate the wrongs inflicted on him by others-a compulsion that affected his whole life...
...Nixon, she charges, profited from the deaths of his brothers Arthur and Harold both emotionally (advancing him in the affections of his parents) and financially (there would now be...
...a failure to love...
...In the case of Mrs...
...Brodie mentions neither this, nor the fact that three weeks after the election Pearson printed a retraction: The Richard and Pat Nixon who had filed the request just happened to have the same names as the vice president and his wife...
...When Hannah Nixon confronted her indirectly, the mortified klepto offered to pay back everything she owed month by month so that the secret could be kept from her husband...
...But the Long Beach Auditorium was a large public hall which held 2,000 people and had several entrances...
...Coming from a member of Mrs...
...In putting her own particular spin on Nixon's psychobiography, Mrs...
...Even as Mrs...
...While we were walking I saw a black round thing in a tree...
...Brodie's reputation as a best-selling biographer, and because her book purports to be so thoroughly researched and so full of undeniably memorable stories and details, it is bound to become a source for subsequent studies of Nixon...
...And what good has it done...
...Of course, it is possible that Nixon strode directly from the podium and through the crowd to where Mrs...
...The Daily Diary, however, was just a barebones outline of Nixon's schedule, phone calls, and whereabouts when he was anywhere outside the family quarters or residence area...
...It surfaces too often to be accidental...
...Because Mrs...
...That it was called a "diary" undoubtedly leads to some confusion-not least because Nixon himself did keep a separate, tape-recorded personal diary (not to be-eofifosed with the White House tapes...
...Fortunately, her innate delicacy prevents her from coming right out with it, so it is up to the reader to fill in the blanks...
...in Peru in 1958 when Nixon was spat upon by a hostile demonstrator, he kicked him in the shin...
...One purpose of biography is to show how men and women develop personality and character from the raw materials of their early lives...
...Nixon's increasing physical attraction to the swarthy Cuban, Bebe Rebozo...
...Brodie quotes his professional judgment that Mrs...
...I wish you would come home right now...
...Unfortunately, this is deadly serious stuff...
...I hit it with my paw...
...I even wondered if Buzhardt himself could have accidentally erased the portion beyond the five-minute gap Rose thought she might have caused...
...His inclusion in the official delegation to President Sadat's funeral led the Washington Post to run a front-page story headlined "Nixon's Redemption- Mission in Middle East Could Be His Way Back From Elba...
...Having thus proved beyond any shadow of doubt that the deaths of brothers, including his own, had played a pivotal role in his life and in his career, Mrs...
...Brodie has already discussed Rebozo's marriage and remarriage, but that apparently doesn't affect perennial bachelorhood in her reckoning...
...Brodie's work deserves serious attention more for what it will become than for what it is...
...Since Mrs...
...Brodie didn't bother to complete the Vita Remley story...
...and finally Nixon triumphant: President of the United States, cut off by Pat, sustained by Bebe, overcoming all restraints of fratricidal guilt and glorying in the death he can rain on North Vietnam without anyone holding him personally responsible...
...That the idea of kicking came easily to Frank Nixon his son made clear in Six Crises...
...At that time a married veteran owning less than $10,000 worth of property could qualify for a $50 reduction in his California taxes...
...Lest I leave the wrong impression, I want to assure potential readers that this is not a book without heroes and heroines...
...Brodie's book she questions whether his career wasn't assisted by "demonic forces...
...Nixon hugged the Irish Setter King Timahoe because she was starved for affection from her husband...
...Take, for example, her treatment of one of the staple biographical elements of Nixon's early life: the story of the prominent townswoman caught shoplifting in the Nixon market...
...The story of Vita Remley, for example, is a dramatic addition to the Nixon canon, providing in microcosm the petty vindictiveness, pent-up rage, and violent emotional instability Mrs...
...Brodie states that Nixon lied in the Checkers speech when he said the Fund was not kept secret...
...Brodie makes so much of the friendship between Nixon and Bebe Rebozo, her errors in this regard are particularly noteworthy...
...and the dark guilt of fratricide...
...Hannah Nixon kept two early examples of her second son's precocious writing ability...
...After listening to his "Checkers" speech, Nixon wrote that Frank Nixon had observed, "It looks to me as if the Democrats have given themselves a good kick in the seat of the pants...
...Bryant was keeper of the Executive Mansion's kennels and Mrs...
...And Dr...
...Hutschnecker for a checkup...
...Remley, fearful of losing her job, told only a few friends...
...Discussing motivation in politics, he said, 'It's always good to have the whip on your back.' " If this seems indirect, Mrs...
...Until Nixon's more passionate critics exorcise their own ghosts from the 35 years of bitter controversy that have surrounded him and meet him on the solid ground of historical fact, they will continue to flail at a bogey at least partly of their own imaginations, convinced that he is about to stage another successful comeback and at last achieve his goal of suppressing the Constitution.another successful comeback and at last achieve his goal of suppressing the Constitution...
...Suspicion had now invaded the White House...
...Brodie cites the president's Daily Diary: an astonishing record that chronicled what he did every moment of his life save for his trips to the bathroom...
...Brodie writes that after the resignation, "Rebozo's role in the complexities of the Nixon marriage for the first time became a matter of public comment...
...Lloyd Etheredge ("Hard-ball Politics: A Model'') described Nixon as suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder...
...From Jerry Voorhis to Archibald Cox, the list of those against whom Nixon has been pitted reads like the liberal pantheon of the last four decades...
...Prosecutor Leon Jaworski was certain of this, but Nixon, in his memoirs, continued to deny it, and said that the...
...Nixon discovering that the reward for lying to everyone about everything is constantly higher political office...
...Indeed, at one point in Mrs...
...When the woman's crime was discovered, a family conference was held to decide what to do...
...Nixon asked John Dean, "Have you kicked a few butts around...
...Again, in the case of the 1952 Fund crisis, Mrs...
...To advance her theories, Mrs...
...Mrs...
...Miller wrote for the photo in his book...
...Having read extensively in both pre- and post-Watergate oral history materials, I have observed that those who before Watergate remembered personally seeing Nixon walking on water afterwards had vivid and total recall of the times they saw him pulling the wings off flies...
...She does not credit Richard Nixon, child, youth, or man, with one worthy achievement, one decent, intention, one unselfish action, one normal motivation, one human instinct...
...What it is is a very bad book, and had it been written by anyone else it would have sunk quietly into the fever swamps of the by now extensive eccentric Nixonphobic literature...
...Brodie declares that "No one goes to a doctor who specializes in emotional problems unless he is driven by a special wretchedness.'' Finally, on page 503, we hit paydirt: Mrs...
...he met her at the pool area, that at 5:02 P.M...
...In his political life, Nixon was often vindictive and revengeful...
...And in a ridiculous version of the power relationships in the Eisenhower White House, she has Nixon virtually initiating and masterminding the plot to overthrow Castro as a means to assure his own election as president, all this despite contemporary documentary evidence that...
...during the almost 19 months of his second term in office...
...As for her use of new and otherwise uncorroborated materials about so chronicled and controversial a figure, only a naive or disingenuous historian could accept them so uncritically...
...he returned to the compound residence...
...You may laugh, you may cry, but you'll never forget the story they said couldn't be told: Nixon's mother, the castrating saint...
...the impact of death in advancing his career...
...I lost my temper and bit him...
...The pool was next to the residence, and the "return" there meant that the Nixons were now in their house for the evening and therefore off the logs...
...The page does indeed show a photograph of Rebozo and Dr...
...Remley confided (after all, the damage had already been done by Pearson's column and the other publicity surrounding the exemption request), ever breaks his silence...
...Few people in our history have excited quite the same range of emotions as Richard Nixon...
...Fortunately, within just a few pages, s£e is able to answer even this tough question...
...Brodie informs us that Rebozo stayed aloof from the so-called Palace Guard "led by Haldeman and Ehr-lichman, who cracked the whip for the clean-cut handsome young staffers...
...But because of Mrs...
...Remley from the newspaper photos several weeks back and pastes her in the jaw...
...Brodie had mastered her sources she would have known that the Daily Diary was a relatively selective document compiled by White House secretaries, telephone operators, and Secret Service agents...
...Then, discussing the I960 election, Mrs...
...Brodie, in turn, speculates that this plaintive letter was written to Hannah Nixon during one of the times when she supposedly returned to her family's home in order to escape the drudgery of life with her husband and sons...
...For good measure Mrs...
...Nearing his seventieth birthday, and after six years of relative seclusion since he resigned the presidency, Nixon is still totem for some and taboo for others-still the man some love, the man some hate, and the man some love to hate...
...Brodie sees in her subject...
...The problem here is that Kandy Stroud was the White Kouse correspondent for Women's Wear Daily...
...Brodie dramatically relates what happened next: Arriving late, she listened from near the open door...
...When first we meet him, he is introduced correctly as "an internist with a special interest in psychosomatic illness, who treated Nixon for 'stress' when he was vice president...
...Hutschnecker was not a psychiatrist...
...Fortunately, Mrs...
...One was a letter, dated January 24, 1924, requesting a job as a delivery boy with the Los Angeles Times...
...In any case, when Nixon finally became president, he found it impossible to distinguish between what was "mine and thine" in the presidential store...
...As evidence she quotes speeches where Nixon told one group at a White House reception that they could have a cup of coffee but couldn't take anything else as a memento of their visit, and another group that they could take anything that wasn't nailed down as a souvenir...
...He was sarcastic, cutting, and caustic...
...She was active in Democratic politics, and had been involved in the Nixon-Voorhis campaign in 1946...
...Are the boys his brothers, kicking and hurting him...
...In 1952 she received a request for a veteran's property exemption from a Richard and Pat Nixon...
...He states that the letter is highly revealing from a psychoanalytic point of view, because biting is one of the most primitive responses we have...
...For each period of Nixon's life she dredges up every old canard and retells it in its most damning form as if it were gospel truth...
...And in words that seem remarkably unenlightened coming from a psychobiographer, Mrs...
...he spoke to his wife, that at 4:48 P.M...
...Bringing this significant litany together for the first time, Mrs...
...From considerable exposure to the extant Nixonalia, I can assert that any new Nixon story must be subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny, particularly anything post-Watergate...
...Writing about the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam in 1972, she states: "Again, death was his ally, this time still more massive killing and mutilation...
...a perverse delight in giving and taking physical and mental punishment...
...There is not time nor space enough to list all the errors and evasions in Mrs...
...A swarm of black thing came out of it...
...Brodie marches her evidence into serried ranks, the deadly pattern emerges...
...She points out that in the "Good Dog Richard" letter, Nixon complains about being kicked...
...Brodie to accept the fact that Dr...
...It is ludicrous to contend that something you did at age 5 will inexorably surface again at age 45...
...Brodie compensates with this portrait of Jackie Kennedy: Her youth, offbeat piquancy, immense haunting eyes, and atypical beauty made her overnight an international sensation...
...We can surmise therefore that the details were not incidental: they reflect an instinctive response which stayed with him long after he had learned that biting was not socially acceptable...
...Nixon's bloodless, loveless marriage...
...She lists the 150 individuals she interviewed...
...It sure seems as if Mrs...
...Trying to establish the point of Nixon's indifference to his wife, Mrs...
...Brodie admits, ' 'What one does not know is whether or not Nixon suffered from an anxiety that the fate helping him was demonic and not divine...
...Then, Nixon's maiden speech in Congress was "to encourage the destruction" of the Communist Eisler brothers...
...He kiked me in the side and we started on...
...Nixon: An Emotional Tragedy, found that the former president was a psychopathic personality, orally and anally fixated, and suffering from a severe character disorder...
...to 2:51 P.M...
...Brodie is positively rhapsodic when she describes JFK as a man of formidable natural gifts, who brought intellectuals swarming into his camp as had Franklin Roosevelt, and who charmed even the most cynical of reporters...
...Gant look like Captain Kangaroo...
...And if she leaves you depressed reading about how banal poor Pat Nixon is and how badly she is ignored by her husband, Mrs...
...Brodie's book...
...Expressions of this kind of response appear in his adult behavior...
...The other was the o "Good Dog" letter-a grade school composition exercise in which the students were told to pretend they were dogs whose masters were away from home, and to write him asking him to come back...
...Drew Pearson somehow "indirectly" learned of this incident and ran it in his column...
...At San Clemente, on July 6, 1972, for example, this president who had written with such emotion on the right to privacy seems not to have minded someone noting in a file that from 2:50 P.M...
...Here, as Mrs...
...Although Mrs Brodie quotes from the Nixon memoirs regarding this campaign, sht neglects to mention this new and devastatingly inconvenient fact...
...The fifteen minutes in the pool area would have been the daily afternoon swim the Nixons always took together in San Clemente...
...They suspected everyone, including Rose, Steve Bull, and me...
...Eli Chesen (President Nixon's Psychiatric Profile: A Psycho-dynamic-Genetic Interpretation) concluded that Nixon was a compulsive obsessive...
...Brodie is sometimes just wrong about them...
...Apart from being uncritical of her sources, Mrs...
...For example, she writes that "Rebozo accompanied Nixon to the hospital when he had viral pneumonia injuly 1973...
...It is difficult for Mrs...
...Brodie relies on the accumulative impact of scores of stories, anecdotes, and quoted sources...
...But Mrs...
...her footnotes require 35 pages of closely printed double columns...
...Nixon's staff this is powerful stuff...
...Tying things together, Mrs...
...Two examples will serve to illustrate her approach...
...her bibliography fills six pages of miniscule type...
...in preparation for his 1969 inaugural address Nixon read TR's, Wilson's, FDR's, and JFK's inaugurals and told his speechwriter that the theme of each "was to kick hell out of someone else and tell the American people they're great...
...Brodie is trying to tell us something here...
...The footnote cites a page in Tbf breaking of a President, a rather bizarre compilation of Watergate material by Marvin Miller, a California Nixon-phobe, published in 1975...
...Remley was standing...
...Remley went to hear him...
...Can't you just see it, as the seat belts were fastened and the tray tables locked securely in their upright positions and it sunk in that he was somewhere out there on his own doing God knows what...
...She quotes "Kandy Stroud, on Pat Nixon's staff' as saying, "She gave so much and got so little of what was really meaningful to a woman...
...Lean, athletic, handsome, a shock of boyish hair falling over his forehead, his cool gray eyes crinkling at the corners when he grinned, he caused palpable excitement among the women in every gathering, and his appearance on motorcades sent girls into paroxysms of shrieking and jumping...
...Fortunately the world compensates for people like the Nixons with people like the Kennedys...
...One Saturday the boys went hunting...
...In a sudden fit of rage he walked over and slapped her...
...Fred Buzhardt by now was dead and unable to defend himself...
...Arnold Hutschnecker...
...and of his opponents in 1972 he said, "They got the hell kicked out of them in the election...
...Nixon, she says, started and encouraged the CIA movement to destroy Fidel Castro and his brother Raul as well...
...Brodie herself supplies the psychoanalytical diagnosis that Dr...
...The thread of fratricide, as unraveled by Mrs...
...Remley knew from the papers that Nixon had just purchased a large new home in Washington, she knew he didn't qualify and therefore rejected his application...
...Remley and Nixon "near the open door" as he and his friends walk out...
...after the 1962 gubernatorial defeat in California, he told reporters, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore...
...Brodie makes it sound as if Nixon blamed Buzhardt for the erasure, but here is what Nixon actually wrote in his memoirs: Haig told me that Garment and Buzhardt were completely panicked by the discovery of the 18 1/2-minute gap...
...It's also possible that when he reached her he wasn't engulfed by the usual entourage of hosts, aides, supporters, and reporters which one would expect to surround the Vice President of the United States at a major appearance in his home state...
...Brodie at last wrestles Nixon to the couch...
...Others have felt it...
...To begin with, Mrs...
...Theodore White, friendly to Nixon in 1972, castigated the liberal press for treating Nixon "as if the brand of Cain were on him...
...erasing might have been done accidentally by his lawyer...
...Their dog, Jim, is very old and he will never talk or play with me...
...a press photograph shows him saying to White House physician Dr...
...Nixon's father, the randy satyr who makes W.O...
...Hutschnecker was "called-not altogether incorrectly- 'the President's shrink.'" Then, on page 333, Mrs...
...For one thing, the Remley refusal of Nixon's niggardly and patently unqualified request for a veteran's exemption was printed in Pearson's national column five days before the 1952 presidential election...
...His friends, horrified, hustled him away in the dark...
...Jim and myself went with him...
...Nixon liked the book, and when he was in New York he went to Dr...
...The story is as follows: Vita Remley worked in the Los Angeles County Assessor's office...
...For me, the paradigm of psycho-biography's validity is the treatment of the famous "Good Dog Richard" letter which Nixon wrote on November 23, 1923, when he was almost eleven years old...
...Richard Nixon is no stranger to psycho-biography...
...As Mrs...
...Nixon's furtive attempts to cure his emotional wretchedness through psychotherapy...
...But she does not explain how you keep secret a fund raised entirely from several thousand letters sent through the mails to past contributors...
...Nixon's hatred of his dead brothers and guilt over profiting from their deaths...
...Brodie then raises the obvious question: Did Frank Nixon kick his sons...
...Joseph Kraft wrote that "the pariah smirked his way back into the circle of grace...
...No one who saw it happen, and not one of the friends to whom the unaccountably frightened Mrs...
...What wouldn't you give to have been on Air Force One on that runway in Cairo when they closed the door, revved up the engines, and people suddenly noticed that Richard Nixon wasn't on board...
...Brodie's Nixon, she uses her research to build a straw man and then sets her Freudian dogs on him...
...And unlike some of Nixon's other hangups, this one is his very own: But blame for the more sinister theme of fratricide, running like a lethal shadow through Nixon's life, should not rest with his parents...
...He has been clinically diagnosed by scores of writers who have never met him...
...Brodie describes her research for this book, it sounds impressive...
...Brodie's chronology here, she's on a roll) was to attack Alger Hiss "and also Hiss's brother Donald, who bore the name of Nixon's own brother...
...Whether Frank Nixon kicked his son or not is not as certain as that Nixon felt himself to be kicked around by his father...
...It was a development unique to him, which even now leaves me baffled and anguished...
...Mary Mc-Grory, her worst fears confirmed, wrote that Nixon used the funeral as his "round-trip ticket to respectability" and the way to end "the hated obscurity of his exile in New Jersey...
...Later, however, we are told that Dr...
...Mrs...
...He had a tendency to keep the company of whisky-drinking, fishing, rather masculine-type men, with the exception of Nixon...
...Thus, the one minute conversation would have been a phone call logged by an operator...
...Thus her version of the debate over the PAC endorsement in the 1946 campaign has Nixon snookering poor "nonpunishing and caring" Jerry Voorhis by entrapping him in a classic ploy of guilt by association...
...He continues: The fantasy is full of symbols...
...Abrahamsen exhibits no such hesitancy about interpreting these symbols...
...Most biographers are content to accept this story as indicating Nixon's early maturity and compassion...
...Mrs...
...Is the old and neglectful dog Jim his father, who fails to protect him ? . . . And what should be made of the "black round thing" which, when touched, releases dreadful stingers...
...Young Richard argued against subjecting her to the public humiliation of arrest...
...It would take many books-and Fawn Brodie's posthumously published Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character" isn't one of them-to begin to answer that question...
...The resulting youngster adapted but was forever warped-cursed to a cold, secret, calculating adult life of taking punishment while awaiting the chance to give it back...
...As a Book of the Month Club selection, Mrs...
...Mrs...
...Your good dog RICHARD Professor Barber suggests this letter was written "ata time when his mother was away with Harold"-although a simple command of the chronology indicates that his brother Harold's illness did not appear until years later...
...Brodie's book begins inching toward the remainder stores, Richard Nixon seems once again on the verge of a fiery re-entry into the political atmosphere...
...I felt pain all over...
...In Mrs...
...The actual facts surrounding the "Good Dog Richard" letter, however, are amusingly straightforward...
...James David Barber (The Presidential Character) slotted Nixon as an "active-negative" type with the accompanying character traits of deviousness, secretiveness, and the tendency to fly off the handle in the face of overwhelming odds...
...Time and again, her most telling points turn out to come from the same few books that are either overtly unfriendly (e.g., William Costello's seminal The Facts About Nixon) or marginally eccentric (e.g., Traphes Bryant's Dog Days at the White House...
...Brodie has harder evidence...
...Through the days and nights of his life," Jimmy Breslin noted, "his diaries showed he spent a half-hour, at the most up to an hour, a day with his wife...
...It is a very bad book: the bitter legacy of a determined and passionate woman...
...She recounts a dream that Nixon mentioned in his personal tape-recorded diary and adds, "Sharing a dream is dangerous, as Nixon must certainly have recognized in therapy.'' Therapy...
...Hutschnecker so unoblig-ingly failed to provide: "We may assume that the doctor noted Nixon's 'neurotic hangups,' but these he cannot discuss...
...Hutschnecker was a Park Avenue internist who wrote a book called The Will to Live, which enjoyed considerable success in the early 1950s...
...One might begin by saying that Nixon has combined success with survivability while exhibiting apparent disregard for the approval-and even for the opinion- of the political and media establishment...
...Lest any stone of innuendo be left unturned, Mrs...
...His problem with entitlement-"My father owns it, therefore I am entitled to it," translated into "I have been elected president, therefore I am entitled to it"-had never properly been resolved when he was very young...
...Brodie sees it as containing five elements: a history of lying from his earliest youth...
...Then there were the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Edward Kennedy's removal from the 1972 political scene by the events at Chappaquiddick...
...There were no cameras or newsmen to catch the happening, and Mrs...
...Brodie is equally insinuative and misleading in her treatment of the relationship between Nixon and Dr...
...Nixon instantly recognizes Mrs...
...Brodie asserts without proof that Nixon purposely arranged to go to Moscow in 1959 in order to bait Khrushchev and so demonstrate his ability to stand up to Communist leaders...
...She writes, without citation, that "one woman in the White House said he had 'the most beautiful eyes in Washington.' " And she cites no less an authority than Dan Rather as saying that Rebozo was "one of the most sensual men he had ever seen.'' In order to explain away the fact that Rebozo was widely known as a man-about-town and was frequently seen in the company of attractive women, she turns to "the sensitive Jules Witcover," who saw this socializing "as a facade, and thought of Rebozo as being 'like Nixon, a loner and introvert.'" Finally, Mrs...
...Sometimes he was so brutally indifferent I wept for her...
...In fact, it was decided that oral history material was so unreliable that, unless it could be independently corroborated, it would not be used in the Nixon memoirs...
...It is worth reprinting in full: My Dear Master: The two boys that you left with me are very bad to me...
...While going through the woods one of the boys triped and fell on me...
...Brodie implies existed between the two men, the tenderness conveyed here would seem to support her intimation...
...I started to run and as both my eyes were swelled shut I fell into a pond...
...So there they are: face to face...
...There is no question that the circumstances of an individual's childhood, family, and upbringing, can and do play vital parts in adult outlook and behavior...
...Thanks to her maiden name, Bouvier, the French counted her peculiarly their own...
...She observes that "Much about this friendship remains obscure but in one respect it was like a good marriage...
...Tkach, 'Take good care of him.'" Given the relationship Mrs...
...If Mrs...
...Brodie writes that "Preoccupation with shoplifting stayed with Nixon, and it infected an astonishing number of his jokes as President...
...There is something almost superhuman about an individual who for thirty years could seek and survive such encounters...
...Mrs...
...The theme of kicking and of being kicked, appears early in Nixon's life, and surfaces repeatedly...
...Brodie so actively despises her subject that she has none of the perspective good biography requires...
...In fact, Fred Buzhardt died of a heart attack on December 16, 1978, eight months after the Nixon book was published...
...Brodie, is an even more fascinating example of her method...
...The degree to which he regressed into a fantasy is abnormal...
...But psychobiography takes this simple tool and beats its subjects to death with it...
...Brodie produces Bob Greene of . Newsday who said, "My own particular thought was that he was one of those guys who has an extremely low sex drive...
...Brodie's discussion of the 18 1/2 -minute gap, she states as absolute fact that Eighteen and one half minutes of a crucial tape he destroyed totally...
...David Abrahamsen, in Nixon vs...
...Brodie throws in Martin Luther King, Jr., George Wallace, the Diem brothers, and the suicides of two of Nixon's early biographers which, she says, "must be added to the list of untimely deaths that touched Nixon's life...
...Brodie introduces Rebozo as "a handsome, unmarried Florida native of Cuban descent who had a reputation for discretion," and notes that "Rebozo had been a beautiful youth, called 'the best looking boy' in his high school yearbook...
...Her whole portrait of Nixon depends on being the sum of its parts, which is why the accuracy of each part is so important...
...But closer examination reveals that she has merely taken a long walk on the wilder side of the anti-Nixon literature...
...That he had come to delight in the slaughter and had no quarrel with God concerning it was clear enough...
...When I got home I was very sore...
...Brodie seems not quite so discriminating, and some of the most important new stories in her book do not stand up to factual scrutiny...
...Nixon was given a copy of the book by California Senator Sheridan Downey, the Democratic incumbent who endorsed Republican Nixon over fellow Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950...
...It was of the self-help genre: Work-related stress was the cause of many psychosomatic ailments, and if people would tap into the vital life forces within them they would be happier and healthier...
...That Richard wrote that he bit one of the boys at an age when a child would normally have passed through this stage long before, reinforces our impression that the oral hostile aggression Richard harbored as an infant had been prolonged beyond the norm and had become fixated...
...more money to spend on him and his education...
...His "second act" in Congress (never mind Mrs...
...And she adds that ' 'Nixon seems to have been willing to risk the kind of gossip that frequently accompanies close friendship with a perennial bachelor, this despite his known public aversion to homosexuals...
...Why is this ? Whv should Nixon excite such extreme emotions...
...Just a fewparagraphs later, these lame pleasantries have become "Nixon's preoccupation with thievery," and Mrs...
...Mrs...
...It is an animal reaction and belongs to the earliest stages of human development...
...As he emerged he recognized her...
...It's a pity Mrs...
...As the sole footnote for this remarkable story attests: "Vita Remley to FB, May 19, 1980...
...That Nixon was ambivalent about the punishment he received as a child is suggested by a comment he once made to Stewart Alsop...
...Remley felt safe enough 28 years later to give this episode to history by relating it to Mrs...
...Besides, Mrs...
...In fact, one of the revelations of the Nixon memoirs was the discovery of a newspaper report that Voorhis had actually been interviewed for thai specific purpose by the organizatior whose endorsement he claimed was unsought and came as a complete surprise to him...
...Several weeks later, Nixon was giving a speech at the Long Beach Civic Auditorium and Mrs...
Vol. 14 • December 1981 • No. 12
