Customer Reviews

One of Us

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Over the last few years I've read 35 presidential biographies, usually using Amazon readers as my guide to picking the best available choice. It's difficult to find a balanced Nixon biography, and I eventually chose Wicker's One of Us, but rating this book is difficult too. First, it's more of a political biography than a retelling of Nixon's life, but Nixon was so driven by politics that this decision doesn't seem to leave much out. Second, Wicker is more interested in describing who Nixon was than he is in telling a straight narrative. Once, he has given the reader the complete picture of Nixon's psyche, Wicker just stops writing. He leaves out Watergate and the last year and a half of Nixon's presidency. I don't know if Wicker felt too close to Watergate or if he just got tired of writing. Third, there have to be more editorial oversights in this book than just about any serious biography I've read. Towards the end of the book, I had the feeling that Wicker or the editor just turned on the spell checker but didn't bother to make sure the correct words were used.

Despite these major criticisms there is a great deal of merit to One of Us. Although there is a fair amount of psycho-babble, Nixon is certainly in the top 5 presidents as far as needing to be explained from a psychological perspective. And Wicker absolutely nails Nixon's personality. The reader gets the absolutely driven, intelligent, paranoia, manipulative Nixon who has a realpolitik approach to ethics and values.

Nixon was the first president who I really grew up in terms of a broad awareness of the issues of the times. Wicker does a great job of capturing America's concerns. We were obsessed with finding communists under every rock. Civil rights and race rights led to code words like law and order, Students got divided into good kids or rock throwers with little in between. With each of these issues Nixon found a way to play to his constituency, "the silent majority", in an often manipulative way that played more to television sound bites than solutions.

Finally, for the Nixon skeptics out there, this book deals well with Nixon's supposed skills at international relations. It shows how the team of Nixon and Kissinger working together while ignoring the advice and consent of the Congress, State Department, or even the CIA led to serious long-term problems in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Cambodia, with missile reduction treaties, and on and on. Wicker's analysis is difficult to dispute, and it is a powerful argument against the sort of power diplomacy used by Nixon and his ilk.

I became interested in Tom Wicker's career as a journalist and used one of his journalism books in teaching journalism class after reading this book, preparatory to writing my first novel. I read SO many Nixon biographies or historical books, and all contained errors, either between each other, or stating impossibilities, or contradicting in a later chapter something that was written in an earlier chapter. Bibliographies and indexes were a mess - and people's sloppy, careless writing and personal issues made nearly all of them a waste of time. I was recommended this book by a political insider at th time (1999) and I got it, and was enthralled because it had the ring of truth. It is not entirely favorable toward President Nixon. It is very well-written and humane, and especially tries to capture the early years of Nixon's upbringing and family. Now, I have the more recent biography by Conrad Black that covers so much in depth (and is highly favorable and full of personal detail). But I think this book shows American journalism at its best. It shows that there were real values, talent and integrity among real journalists, and talented writers like Tom Wicker. This book won't please diehard Nixon fans, and it won't please the angry hippie crew out there looking to hate on Nixon. However, it will please the average reader, especially one looking to learn more about a unique, highly complex man and his times.

Richard Nixon. The mere mention of the name is enough to inspire some of the most mean-spirited, gut reactions. On the other hand, as Mr. Wicker quotes a Nixon associate in his book "you get back out of life what you plow into it." For all of his dark, quirky, idiosyncracies, RN, was in many ways "One of Us."

Tom Wicker paints about as sympathetic and generous portrait of the late 37th president as you are going to get from a liberal New York Times reporter. The book is not without its snide and petty moments. Wicker, for whatever personal or professional reasons, has a field day down-playing the communist infiltration of the government in the Truman administration and describing, rather underwhelmingly, the high drama of the Alger Hiss case.

The key quote, a quote in which the entire premise of the book rests upon, comes from none other than Henry A. Kissinger who poignantly asks "What would he (RN)have been like had somebody loved him?" At this point in the book, it all comes together: Here was an enormously gifted man who, because of his inner doubts and insecurities, destroyed himself from within. Missing, unfortunately, was RN's remarkable comeback to respectability. This book retains a slight flavor of the animous that "establishment liberals" had for the man who came from a decidely lower-middle class/working-poor background; a man who was a self-made man in every sense of the word.

At times Wicker's attempt at amateur psychologist is agonizing. How can he possibly know what he knows re: RN's motivations, thoughts, desires, secrets, fears, etc. But to be fair, The Old Man was so uncomfortable with himself, so quirky and ill-at-ease "an introvert in an extrovert's" world, as he described himself, perhaps the only way to get your head around the man is to put him on the couch. I think that Fawn Brodie, who wrote a pscyo-babble biography of RN and Thomas Jefferson was hardly a source to be consulted. Notwithstanding, comments from Nixon relatives Lucille Parsons, Jessamyn and Merle West are highly insightful. It is, however, very unfortunate that Wicker is not more generous in his treatment of RN's parents, particularly his Quaker mother and the influence he had on her life. Father Frank Nixon is made to look like nothing more than a loud-mouth lout; Hannah is portrayed as this taciturn, cold, unfeeling mother who could not find it in her heart to express emotion. In short, I think Wicker has been watching too much Oprah, because not everyone feels the need to show their soul bare-naked to the world. Especially those of RN's generation and ethnic/religous group. Outward signs of affection were not the norm. Yet Wicker, instead of appreciating the diversity of the human condition, chooses to pathologize Mrs. Nixon's behavior (he does a good job on Pat in this regard as well).

Jonathan Aitken's biography Nixon: A Life gives a fuller, more balanced and nuanced portrait of the impact pacifist Hannah Nixon had on her precocious son, as well as a better balanced account of who Frank Nixon was and why he was the way he was. Wicker's analyses of Nixon's parents, and of Nixon himself, are too simplistic and, at times, just plain mean.

I was born in the late 60's. Growing up one heard of "Tricky Dick", Woody Allen jokes about the secret service counting the cutlery every time Nixon left the White House. But what of Nixon's domestic achievements and results? EPA, OSHA, Indian rights, abolition of conscription, affirmative action, school integration in the south? Or increasing social security 25% in 1972 and putting it on a COLA.

Thinking that Nixon was a conservative I marvel that he signed a capital gains tax increase. Nixon won the '68 election narrowly. He reached out and brought in or tried to bring in Democrats like Pat Moynihan (achieved) or Scoop Jackson for defence (not succesful).

He must have loved his country or else he would have challenged the 1960 election result.

I highly reccomend this well-written book to all students of history, politics or America.

Tom Wicker, whose career as reporter, Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, and then columnist overlapped Nixon's political career, has thus written a book which though awfully weak as biography has some interest as a kind of weird rehabilitative essay. His quest requires him to minimize Nixon's truly reprehensible behavior as President. Instead, it indicts them. To his credit, Wicker does acknowledge that the growing centralization of power in the hands of the Federal government created a situation in which corruption was inevitable.

Meanwhile, Wicker also betrays rather extensive squeamishness about some of the particulars of Nixon's foreign policy. He argues that Nixon should have gotten out of Vietnam much quicker, should have ditched the Shah of Iran and shouldn't have tilted towards Pakistan during its dispute with India. He bemoans our involvement in the toppling of Salvador Allende in Chile. And he thinks the pace of negotiation with the Soviets should have been quicker. The general case here seems to be that Nixon was okay on the big stuff, thawing out the Cold War, but not quite good enough. That's fairly timid criticism.

It is only on domestic policy that Wicker is completely enamored. He goes so far as to adopt Daniel Patrick Moynihan's assessment that the Nixon Administration was "'the most progressive' of the postwar era." In particular, he likes the way that Nixon used his powers to desegregate Southern schools.

In the end, the quality that Wicker seems to admire most in Nixon is, appropriately enough, the same one that people admire in Bill Clinton : the awesome capacity to sustain political damage and live to fight another day.

where Wicker tries to psychoanalyze Nixon, particularly his paranoia and his willingness to cut ethical corners. Since the book is really more of an essay than a biography, this exercise might have had some limited value had Wicker discussed why it was that people of his ilk, Eastern journalists, had such a hard time loving Nixon. The mere suppositions about the demons that drove Nixon don't have much value on their own. Wicker is absolutely correct, though it's hard to believe he's thought out the implications, that the sheer size and inordinate power of the Cold War presidency and government made corruption and scandal inevitable.

Chapter 14, pp 569-614 of "One of Us" is probably the best account of Richard Nixon's Vietnam War policy that I have read. Most Vietnam books tend to skimp on the latter years of the war, when it was winding down. In general this book is very even-handed and at times surprisingly sympathetic. However, Wicker is also honestly frank in his criticisms of Nixon's Vietnam policy and other aspects of his foreign policy.
The reviewer is the author of "Killed In Action: The life and times of SP4 Stephen H. Warner, draftee, journalist and anti-war activist"

good work on the policies during the nixon adminstration
very clear and concise writing in laymen's terms of some rather complex subject matters. the writier's skill in presenting his ideas clearly are done very well inthis book.