Product Description

To his conservative supporters in the 1940s, he was a populist everyman. To intellectuals of the 1950s, he was Tricky Dick. To 1960s radicals, a shadowy conspirator. To Washington reporters, a clever spin doctor. To Middle Americans, a scapegoat. To psychologists, a paranoiac. To foreign policy hands, a statesman. To recent historians, an unlikely liberal. Drawing on new archival research as well as novels, movies, cartoons, and songs, Nixon’s Shadow rediscovers these competing views of our most controversial president and shows how each took hold in the American imagination.

Uniquely image-conscious among postwar politicians, Richard Nixon pioneered new methods of shaping his public persona. But often his ploys backfired, revealing only how much politicians rely on the manipulation of their images. After Nixon’s half-century on the national stage – and after the colorful parade of "New Nixons" so brilliantly described here – it has become impossible to discuss politics without asking the questions he brought to the fore: What is the politician’s "real" character? What image is he trying to project?

This fascinating book reveals not just what Nixon did but, more importantly, what he meant.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1085937 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-06
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this aptly named study, Greenberg, a Bancroft Prize winner who also collaborated with Bob Woodward on The Agenda, sedulously avoids value judgments about the effectiveness of Richard Nixon's policies, offering instead a kaleidoscopic view of the man's many images: as Tricky Dick, as conspirator, as victim, as statesman, among others. Borrowing Woodward's device of calibrating his subjects through the eyes of others, Greenberg presents the opinions of Nixon loyalists, Nixon haters, pundits from the left and right, mainstream historians, revisionist historians, psychobiographers, the Washington press corps and members of the foreign policy establishment. According to Greenberg, this retrospective shows Nixon to have been the first postmodern president, the first whose image was purposefully manipulated for political reasons and without regard to accomplishments. The author also argues that the key to understanding Nixon is not in "discarding the many images of him... but [in] gathering and assembling them into a strange, irregular, mosaic." But with an impressive number of viewpoints sampled, hundreds of sources quoted and even TV shows Laugh-In and Saturday Night Live plumbed for Nixon references, readers may find the citations overwhelming. Still, for sheer drama, Nixon's career remains worthy of review, from his red-baiting 1950 Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, his involvement in the Alger Hiss perjury case and the infamous "Checkers" speech to the Khrushchev kitchen debate, his China policy and the political drama of the century, Watergate. Greenberg's thoroughly researched book, despite its faults, brightly illuminates the passionate public responses that swirled around one of the most controversial politicians of our times. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Nixon haters, Nixon apologists, and would-be Nixon explainers here receive in Greenberg what has long been needed: an impartial umpire. This is not a biography; instead, Greenberg analyzes what biographers, journalists, historians, and artists have to say about the deeds, dastardly and otherwise, of Richard Milhous Nixon. Greenberg unpacks this commentary the old-fashioned way, by arraigning a writer's assumptions and biases. He parallels this with smart analysis of Nixon's career-long efforts to shape his own image--to his critics the surest evidence of Tricky Dick's unprincipled phoniness, but to Greenberg a case study in a politician's spin-control. Working off the superheated rhetoric produced by Vietnam, radical protest, and Watergate, Greenberg's appraisals produce much discernment and subtle bemusement at Nixon's ever-malleable reputation. There will always be a New Nixon, it seems, whether it's Nixon the crypto-liberal (to historian Joan Hoff); Nixon the epitome of a corrupt, imperial system (to the New Left); or Nixon, "one of us" (to journalist Tom Wicker). An impressively balanced work. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A rich work full of lessons and implications... Thought-provoking from start to finish." -- Kirkus Reviews

"Greenberg's appraisals produce much discernment and subtle bemusement at Nixon's ever-malleable reputation. … An impressively balanced work." -- Booklist

"I am hard-pressed to think of a book on politics as bracing and original as this ... strikingly compelling portrait." -- Jeff Greenfield, The Washington Monthly

"The story of Nixon's political life and afterlife... describ[ed] with care and intelligence." -- The American Prospect

"[A] vibrant account of Richard Nixon as a cultural icon ... reveals Nixon's complex personas as no chronological biography has done." -- Library Journal

A brilliant book full of fresh insight and analysis by one of the most original young minds among professional historians. -- Bob Woodward

This is must reading for anyone interested in 20th-century American politics. -- Robert Dallek, author of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963

Customer Reviews

Brilliant!
Nixon's Shadow sheds light on Nixon's life and legacy--and it opens up a fascinating world on the civic life of the United States. It's one of the best books I've read in a long, long time.

What I love about most this book is that it tells Nixon's story through the eyes of his critics and the lens of his detractors. In doing so, Greenberg opens up a whole new way, really, of thinking about our politics. The book marks a major contribution to the Nixon literature as well as a shrewd, detailed portrait of the rise of image-making in 20th century America.

By focusing on the forces that led to Nixon's rise and fall, Greenberg shows us how images in politics aren't simply products created by a candidate--they are, in fact, the result of complex forces in our culture and our politics. This book goes to the heart of our civic life. It is one of the most fascinating take our politics that I've ever had the pleasure to read--and one of the best-written non-fiction books to come down the pike in recent memory.

The Three (Four and Five) Faces of Dick Nixon
Was Richard Nixon the second coming of Hitler or the last great liberal president? Or, most likely, the greatest transformation artist since Lon Chaney? With all the spinning by Nixon and his foes, it may be impossible to ever definitively answer who our 37th president was. David Greenberg's compelling book tracks the many colors of this iconic chameleon. The first couple of chapters do a solid job recounting the Tricky Dicky days, kicked off by the warm (?), conniving (?), populist (?) Checkers speech-- Nixon's first great rebound. But it isn't until the Watergate and post-Watergate chapters that the book really takes off with fresh, provocative insights.

Greenberg escorts us down the twisted passageways of Nixon's psyche, recounting the many news, historical and entertainment sources that painted Nixon as an emotional cripple whose psychotic manipulations and paranoid rants wracked our nation's trust in government. Was that the real Nixon? The following section reviews the media sources, often prompted by the Nixon PR machine, that attempted to recast the by then ex-president as a great statesman who opened up China and held out an olive branch to the Soviets. Perhaps most suprising, and riveting, is the chapter that discusses the revisionist historians who paint Nixon's as the great liberal in conservative clothing-- the man who took the "Great Society" to new heights, shepherding legislation that integrated schools, bettered the lives of Native Americans, and expanded social programs for the poor.

Greenberg while refusing to swallow any of these images whole, uses his keen eye to find the credible core of each Nixonian persona. This is a memorable history that questions history itself, a book that asks-- is it possible to objectively capture any figure from history?

An impressive and engaging read
Seldom does one find such a readable, enlightening treatment of a subject so many of us believe we know so well. Nixon's Shadow documents, in a most engaging fashion, the genesis of a significant change in American political culture. One has not studied Nixon, or modern American political history, until one understands Nixon's many images. Greenberg breaks this ground in fascinating and well-organized detail. The guy can write, too.