Analyzing Our 37th President

...Physical abuse was only one of Frank's child-rearing tools: he also relied on deprivation, especially of money...

...Having heard her present her findings and consider the responses of historians and psychoanalysts, I can vouch for this study's trustworthiness-the controversy over the Jefferson book and Brodie's theoretical framework in general notwithstanding...

...The outlines of the early years are familiar: An explosive father goaded his five boys toward success while a saintly mother reminded them of proper words and deeds...

...The patient work of historians and biographers may serve to rediscover it and underline it, but it has always been said by a contemporary, and usually with distinction...

...I judged it ironic that the work had apparently been excluded for asserting that one of the revered creators of American freedom was not celibate during the second half of his life, and that his longtime affair with a slave was reflected in his ambiguous attitude toward race and slavery...

...She is surprised at the huge number of unnecessary falsehoods Nixon told-which served no purpose other than indulging a penchant for falsehood-and asserts, I think correctly, that no one before her has attempted to document the evolution of his lying...

...I have long believed that the definitive judgment on a President is almost always written during his life or in the first obituaries...

...In defending her effort at delineating Richard Nixon, Brodie says...

...Richard, now the eldest, Donald and Edward survived...

...By contrast, Brodie makes a major contribution to understanding our 37th President's mendacity through the use of psychoanalytic methods...

...To Brodie's credit, just as the ego psychologists' focus on adaptive qualities transcended the doctrinaire Freudian emphasis on blind instinct, she moves out of the household into the community...

...All have had trouble telling the truth...

...And the fact is that applying psychoanalytic principles to history, as Brodie does, has frequently not only been misunderstood but unfairly dismissed by the conventional guardians of our past...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History, San Francisco State University On a visit to Monticello several years ago, I looked in vain through the many biographies for Fawn Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History...

...He had no emotional invol-ment in the truth...

...The evidence is not as plentiful for Hannah as for Frank (a problem frequently encountered when a mother's influence must be documented for a psychoanalytic explanation...

...Brodie's is the fullest account we are likely to have of Frank and Hannah Nixon's household and its role in forming Richard's character...

...He feared being unworthy and felt unloved and unlovable...

...she died less than a month after delivering the manuscript...

...But he didn 't care...

...Another challenge to the Whittier stronghold was the surrounding spirited and spontaneous Chicano society, a precursor of the Caribbean where Nixon loved to vacation and where he would find his best friend, BebeRebozo...

...In exploring this facet of his personality, she handles the pathology of Nixon's lying better than any previous biographer without resorting to jargon...

...She researched Nixon for years, scrutinizing the former President's writings and interviewing over 70 of his contemporaries (though not Nixon himself...

...Any shorthand summary here, any quotation however apt (e.g...

...Of Hannah Nixon, with her Quaker background and calm, quiet manner, Brodie tells us that a case can be made for "the depressed, or abandoning, or domineering mother, as hidden aspects of the saintly and caring mother...

...But it seems clear that Frank Nixon's example led his son to believe that power came through fear...

...And, of course, he met Pat on stage...

...Still, the latter two-thirds surpasses the early chapters, for Brodie's talents as a narrative historian are considerable...

...Instances of Hannah making Richard feel that she valued him are eclipsed by the stronger picture of a woman who, like her husband, could communicate neither trust nor love to her sons...

...Her love seemed tentative and conditional, reinforcing the rage, hatred and desire to inflict and undergo punishment that crop up in Nixon's later life...

...Moreover, as she details his mature years her earlier analysis of his childhood unobtrusively asserts itself...

...two brothers died of tuberculos is-harold, the eldest, at 24 and Arthur, second-youngest, at five...

...Since the threat of punishment, or seeing it inflicted on others, can create extraordinary fantasies (for example, a confusion of punishment with love) young Richard's thinking may have been affected in several difficult-to-observe ways...

...Objectivity is their goal...

...Most of Brodie's book is devoted to Nixon's political career, though the Presidential years and after receive little attention...

...Pushing beyond what we already know, Brodie shows how Frank Nixon was inconsistent in meting out discipline and in arguments that arose...

...Yet it is there, in stories from Nixon's childhood and in his adult behavior and testimony...

...The negative reaction to psycho history can be partly explained by noting that, until recently, most American historians have rejected theory for the practice of history...

...Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character is Brodie's fifth biography, and unfortunately her last...

...Nixon lied to gain love, to shore up his grandiose fantasies, to bolster his ever-wavering sense of identity") may detract from her multifaceted story buttressed by the careful presentation of evidence...

...The discovery of oil shook the fortress and clearly affected its best-known citizen, who always connected America with the idea of wealth...

...In her analysis, Nixon's own close scrapes with death and the demise of his two brothers were not unrelated to the Christmas carpet bombing of North Vietnam-or the plans for assassinating Fidel and Raoul Castro, or even his feelings toward the passing of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, which set the stage for his own Presidency...

...Their task, as they see it, is simply to march to the archives, gather the evidence, and record the story that emerges from their labors...

...As a sort of eulogy to Fawn Brodie, I would close by saying that I believe her intelligent and sensitive application of psychoanalytic theory to her discoveries confers distinction on the portrait she has rendered...

...Her conclusion is: "Nixon certainly knew right from wrong, or at least legal from illegal and truth from falsehood...

...In addition to lying and absent love, a third motif of Brodie's is the presence of death...

...The little talks she gave on upright behavior and her abandoning of Richard to care for his ailing brothers at critical junctures in his childhood, although less obvious, were no less damaging than Frank's temper...

...Nixon has been studied in the context of a traditional ideology (by Garry Wills), in terms of a the changing relationship between the Presidency and the press (by Barry D. Karl), as well as in a number of other useful ways of looking at the man...

...Yet these approaches, too, leave us ill-prepared to delve into the quip from the London Spectator quoted by Brodie in the opening line of her biography, to the effect that George Washington could not tell a lie and Richard Nixon could not tell the truth...

...Quaker Whittier is characterized as "a small walled town resisting the enemy with its bastions of decorum and constrictions of the spirit, providing for some inner peace but bringing Nixon only a sense of strangulation...

...Farther away from home, yet still influential, was Hollywood, home of the celebrities Nixon "always liked to see," to use his own words...

...He punished his sons severely if he observed disobedience, but Richard was chastised least because he was cleverest at explaining himself...

...Even more ambitious writers have rejected the insights of psycho history, content to leave the inner lives of major figures untouched...

...Indeed, some professional historians ridiculed Brodie's Jefferson so hyperbolically that an onlooker would have had to conclude something larger was at issue, especially since Brodie's work has on the whole been praised for being cautious, restrained and carefully reasoned...

...Some of her best portrayals are of Nixon's adversaries...

...As has been pointed out, though, their academic training and experience makes for a skewed perspective...

...She calls her own work "a summary of discoveries" that is indebted to the writings of others (most notably Nixon), rather than a definitive judgment...