Richard Milhous Nixon:
The Rise of An American Politician
Roger Morris
National Book Award Silver Medalist
Finalist, National Critics Circle Award for Biography
New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”
“Massive…powerful…absorbing. It will no longer be possible to damn or defend Mr. Nixon without reference to this great locomotive of a work.”
– Kevin Starr, the New York Times Book Review
Accolades
“A major intellectual event in the art of biography … The sweep and style are at times breathtaking. His prose is literate and controlled, a throwback to how good English and American biographers used to write…He gives splendid backdrops … argues convincingly… (yet] is no apologist … he presents a rich and balanced series of portraits in a multifaceted biography of this complex man… no question that this volume approaches a grand social history of postwar America.”
— Presidential Quarterly
“A massive, powerful biography, absorbing in its research and in its skillful use of anecdote and illustrative detail … It will no longer be possible to damn or defend Mr. Nixon without reference to this great locomotive of a work … Like John Morely on Gladstone or Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. on Franklin D. Roosevelt… Mr. Morris’s biography is filled with hundreds of moments in which the reader is tempted to say, ‘Now I understand Richard Nixon.’ I am not talking here of psychoanalytic understanding or of a political or ideological response. I mean an intuitive leap –even if empathy wars with distaste– into the inner landscape of another’s existence… Mr. Morris has exhaustively established the human story … illuminating, for better or worse, defenders or critics, the public man. The setting… is richly harvested by Mr. Morris … Nixon’s courtship of Patricia Ryan has all the power of a realist novel. ..Mr. Morris allows none of these early details to obscure his narrative’s honesty or to sentimentalize it … (and] recounts much that is new. [This biography] will continue to be read as long as there are those who understand that to fathom Richard Milhous Nixon and his career is to come close, very close, to the inner landscape of middle class America. The composer John Adams understood this in his opera “Nixon in China.” So does Roger Morris.”
— Kevin Starr, New York Times Book Review
“The most detailed and authoritative reconstruction of Nixon’s career we have ever had… a keen understanding of Nixon as a representative American.”
— Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Roger Morris is that rare and precious thing in our public life, a former government official who actually gave up his job on a matter of principle … Morris’s monumental new account of Nixon’s early years…is elegantly written, meticulously researched, richly textured –and devastating… the wealth of details and the judicious skill with which he uses them… makes this book unique among Nixon biographies.”
— Geoffrey Ward, USA Today
“Monumental…fresh revelations … Morris writes with a breathtaking sweep … telling the Nixon story with a power and coherence it has never assumed before, …reveals how much this supremely enigmatic politician has shaped and been shaped by our times … Makes it all come chillingly alive.”
— Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
“A stunning piece of work –the most thorough and sensitive account of Nixon’s youth and early career, and the most revealing portrait of the man, anyone has yet written, a masterpiece of re-construction”
— Alan Brinkley, The New Republic
“No word, not even ‘exhaustive,’ can describe the scope of his research… After reading Morris’ book… it is possible to say, ‘So that’s what drove Nixon’… In chapter after chapter of Morris’ biography, Nixon jumps off the page, a real and vibrant character.”
— Steve Weinberg, Kansas City Star
“A captivating account of the emergence of Richard Nixon as a national political figure… elegantly crafted and measured in its judgments, this book… reveals Nixon as infinitely more complex, and considerably more interesting, than either his friends or foes have supposed.”
— Medal Citation, National Book Awards
“…An accomplished historian [gives] an informed and evocative depiction…contributes significantly to our understanding.”
— Detroit Free Press
“The richest account [yet] of Nixon’s roots and of his path to national power… Morris is particularly good at showing how the young Nixon waged the campaigns that gained him the unenviable nickname of Tricky Dick… In narrative force and scholarship, Morris’s Nixon is a worthy companion to Robert Caro’s LBJ.”
— Chicago Sun-Times
“Morris does for Nixon what Caro is doing for Lyndon Johnson.”
— Robert Sherrill, Washington Post Book World
“…how is it possible to see this man anew in all his unfathomable complexity? But Roger Morris has done so… Morris paints his elusive subject with definitive strokes … Forget everything you’ve ever known, or thought you’ve known, about Richard Nixon. Start here, from scratch. Morris has given us the real new Nixon — a three-dimensional personality that will spark empathy even in his severest critics, without excusing his conduct or explaining away his puzzling contradictions… Morris has strip-mined the best available source material [and] his spadework has such depth that the old material blended with new findings and rendered in a graceful narrative style, yields something entirely new-minted.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer
“This brilliant study of Nixon on the rise … maintains throughout the narrative an even balance, eschewing what in less objective chronicles would have been an irrepressible urge to wax splenetic over some of Nixon’s most heinous acts … Of all the books on this couple [Richard and Pat] … none has succeeded so well in analyzing their relationship … Scattered throughout this fascinating study are a number of illuminating anecdotes … A compelling biography.”
— The Miami Herald
“Morris neither simplifies nor vilifies his subject. Painting on the widest of canvasses, he is superb at describing the interior political reality… succeeds brilliantly in bringing all the various Nixons we have known into sharp and disturbing focus. In doing so, it reveals more about our political selves than many may want to know.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“A rich lode of new details and insights… has plumbed the depths of the Nixon psyche.”
— St. Petersburg Times
“Exhaustive…rich…detailed description of the politics and double dealing.”
— Atlanta Journal and Constitution
“Drawing on a massive array of sources, Morris writes critically of Nixon [but] is no prosecutor. Of hostility there is none. Nor is there admiration ‘ But through a thousand pages… tell[s] (the Nixon story] from all angles, from behind the scenes, from countless sources … and [does] justice to the sad transformation of Patricia Ryan Nixon from a sprightly woman of independence to the political wife who knew her place… Look forward to reading the projected second and third volumes.”
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Roger Morris 