Fawn M. Brodie - Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character

Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character

Brodie considered a range of subjects for a new biography. Brigham Young was a clear field, but she decided not to “return to old ground.” Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency shortly after she had finished Jefferson, and Brodie had spoken formally to both students and others about the former president. As a liberal Democrat, Brodie had developed a “repellent fascination" for Nixon, a man whom she called “a rattlesnake,” a “plain damn liar,” and a "shabby, pathetic felon." Although Brodie thought Nixon an imposter like Joseph Smith, she did not believe him to be the “charming imposter the Mormon leader was."

Her interest in the former president had a personal basis as well. One of her sons had nearly been drafted in 1969 shortly after Nixon had won election on the promise to end the Vietnam War. (At the last minute, sympathetic physicians had reclassified Bruce Brodie as unfit for military service on the basis of his allergies.)

Also, when Nixon had sought information to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, his operatives had burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding. Ellsberg was a close friend and former RAND associate of Bernard Brodie. Fielding was Fawn Brodie’s long-time therapist. Brodie considered “Nixon the perpetrator of an assault on her privacy.”

Although neither Bernard nor her publisher were enthusiastic about her choice, Brodie began to work on her new project. She resigned her professorship at UCLA in 1977 to devote herself to research, including, for the first time, in oral history collections. Brodie conducted 150 interviews. She tried unsuccessfully to interview Henry Kissinger, whom she knew on a first-name basis—-and Nixon for what she described in a letter to him as “a compassionate and accurate study.” (Nixon did not reply.) Though she could find no evidence, Brodie began to think that he had engaged in a homosexual relationship with his good friend Bebe Rebozo. Her psychoanalyst friends tried to warn her off this topic.