Most helpful customer reviews
|
|
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great start to the three volume biography, Jun 16 2004
This is the first volume of Ambrose's three volume work detailing the life of Richard Nixon. From childhood to law school to Congress to the Vice-Presidency, the author explores Nixon's character and personality as well as the influences and experiences that made Nixon the complicated and contradictory individual that he was. While the seeds of his destructive personality are clearly present, the reader is struck by the many positive qualities of Nixon. Ambrose paints the portrait of a budding and able politician whose ultimate demise could be foreseen, but need not have happened. This lack of inevitability is explored further in the second volume. This first volume can be found at a reasonable price. It should be noted, however, that the second and third volumes are quite rare and expensive.
|
|
|
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting account, Mar 13 2002
I found this a compelling account of Richard Nixon's life from his early days to his defeat in the election for the Governorship of California in 1962. Ambrose charts Nixon's meteoric rise through Congress and the Senate to the Vice Presidency and narrow defeat at the hands of JFK in the Presidential election.This is a very readable account and the author attempts to be fair to Nixon throughout, despite the fact that Nixon seemed to stimulate extreme reactions in people: either you loved him or hated him. I thought that the best parts of the book were those that dealt with Nixon's years as Eisenhower's Vice President - the difficulties of holding the office for such an ambitious politician, the problems in defining a role for himself and his often difficult relationship with the President are all examined skillfully. I should have perhaps wanted a fuller account of Nixon's early political development - what was his political credo, and upon what was it based? What was the basis of his success as a Congressman, for example? I felt that after reading this volume, Nixon seemd driven primarily by his own massive ambition. But you could say that of a lot of politicians - for example Robert A Caro's analysis of Lyndon Johnson is based on the importance of ambition over principle. But I felt that although ambition was obviously very important, there might have been more to Nixon than that, more even than his (self-perceived) role as a major anti-Communist crusader. If the author felt that those indeed were the main things that made Nixon tick, then fine, but I hoped that some such analysis would have been included. In all, I thought this was a good read - interesting, honest, and shedding light upon one of the most controversial politicians of the last century.
|
|
|
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nixon Finally Gets A Fair Hearing from History..., Aug 4 2001
By A Customer
Like other controversial American politicians such as Bill Clinton and Franklin D. Roosevelt, there was little middle ground concerning how the public felt about Richard M. Nixon. To some Americans, Nixon was the most sleazy and two-faced man in American politics, and they despised him. As Adlai Stevenson, the two-time Democratic presidential candidate said in the fifties, Nixon was the kind of man who "would cut down a redwood tree, then climb on the stump and make a speech for tree conservation". But to other Americans, Nixon was a gutsy fighter from a poor family who had, through sheer hard work and intelligence, climbed up the ladder of success, only to be reviled by the wealthy "limousine liberals" whose success had come because of their family connections, not because they deserved to succeed, as Nixon had done. Not surprisingly, perhaps, books written about Nixon also tend to fall into one of these two categories - the "hatchet jobs" written by historians who obviously dislike Nixon and print every negative thing they can find about him; and the mostly admiring books written by his former aides and supporters who defend his actions and attack his enemies as "hypocrites" who did the same things as Nixon, but just never got caught (partly because they were protected by a liberal news media). Stephen Ambrose, one of America's most prominent historians and a former Nixon critic, nonetheless provides what is probably still the most balanced and fair-minded account of Nixon's dramatic life and career with this book. Published in 1987, "Nixon: The Education of a Politician" follows Nixon from his bleak and rather sad childhood to his two bitter defeats for political office - first to John Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race (a campaign which was so close that Nixon believed until the day he died that Kennedy had "stolen" the election from him) and his devastating loss to Democrat Pat Brown in the 1962 California governor's race - a defeat which led many experts to write off Nixon as a political "dead duck" and has-been. Unlike many of Nixon's previous biographers, Ambrose manages to keep his feelings about Nixon to himself and instead he concentrates on telling a well-written, well-researched account of Nixon's life. As Ambrose writes, Nixon had good reason to be somewhat bitter about his life - his father was one of life's "losers" who seemed to fail at almost everything he did, despite years of backbreaking work. The Nixons were a hard-luck family - oil was discovered on land the Nixons had once owned but sold just before drilling began; two of Nixon's beloved brothers died from tuberculosis while young, causing his mother to put enormous pressure on Richard to be successful in life and make up for the family's loss. By the time Nixon entered college he was a very bright and energetic, but also cold and aloof, young man who had a hard time making friends and having fun - he was always so "serious" and grim-looking, his mother remembered. At Duke University Law School he graduated third in his class, but made almost no friends and was called "gloomy gus" by his classmates for his overly serious and stuffy manner. Nixon would repeat this pattern into his political career - working longer and harder than everyone else, maintaining an intense, serious, and rather cold personality, but also lashing out at his political opponents, even when he didn't have to, thus making many powerful enemies in the press and Democratic Party. After this excellent biography, Ambrose went on to write two more volumes to conclude his study of Nixon's career. However, in my opinion neither of the two succeeding volumes can match this one for writing style, interest, and drama. If you want to read an engrossing account of one of this century's major political leaders, then "Nixon: The Education of a Politician" is still your best choice nearly fifteen years after it was published.
|
|
|
Most recent customer reviews
|
