Garry Wills Nixon Agonistes

Annotation

With a new preface: A ';stunning' analysis of the troubled Republican president by the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg (The New York Times Book Review). In this acclaimed biography that earned him a spot on Nixon's infamous ';enemies list,' Garry Wills takes a thoughtful, in-depth, and often ';very amusing' look at the thirty-seventh US president, and draws some surprising conclusions about a man whose name has become synonymous with scandal and the abuse of power (Kirkus Reviews). Arguing that Nixon was a reflection of the country that elected him, Wills examines not only the psychology of the man himself and his relationships with othersfrom his wife, Pat, to his vice-president, Spiro Agnewbut also the state of the nation at the time, mired in the Vietnam War and experiencing a cultural rift that pitted the young against the old. Putting his findings into moral, economic, intellectual, and political contexts, he ultimately ';paints a broad and provocative landscape of the nation'sand Nixon'stravails' (The New York Times). Simultaneously compassionate and critical, and raising interesting perspectives on the shifting definitions of terms like ';conservative' and ';liberal' over recent decades, Nixon Agonistes is a brilliant and indispensable book from one of America's most acclaimed historians.