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One of Us : Richard Nixon and the American Dream
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One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream

Average customer rating:

RN: One of us; "the silent majority."
a tough book to rate
Now really. . .
An excellent and concise account of Nixon's Vietnam War
policy discussions during the nixon administration

One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream
Tom Wicker
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Similar Items:

The Real War
Nixon Reconsidered
President Nixon: Alone in the White House

ASIN: 0394550668
Release Date: 1991-02-27

Book Description

From his seemingly "poor boy makes good" childhood to his college years, this piercing, perceptive examination of the people, places, and events that shaped the character of Richard Nixon gives the reader a rare and a fair glimpse of the forces that shaped him.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Customer Reviews:

RN: One of us; "the silent majority." .......2007-02-19

Richard Nixon. The mere mention of the name is enough to inspire some of the most mean-spirited, gut reactions. On the other hand, as Mr. Wicker quotes a Nixon associate in his book "you get back out of life what you plow into it." For all of his dark, quirky, idiosyncracies, RN, was in many ways "One of Us."

Tom Wicker paints about as sympathetic and generous portrait of the late 37th president as you are going to get from a liberal New York Times reporter. The book is not without its snide and petty moments. Wicker, for whatever personal or professional reasons, has a field day down-playing the communist infiltration of the government in the Truman administration and describing, rather underwhelmingly, the high drama of the Alger Hiss case.

The key quote, a quote in which the entire premise of the book rests upon, comes from none other than Henry A. Kissinger who poignantly asks "What would he (RN)have been like had somebody loved him?" At this point in the book, it all comes together: Here was an enormously gifted man who, because of his inner doubts and insecurities, destroyed himself from within. Missing, unfortunately, was RN's remarkable comeback to respectability. This book retains a slight flavor of the animous that "establishment liberals" had for the man who came from a decidely lower-middle class/working-poor background; a man who was a self-made man in every sense of the word.

At times Wicker's attempt at amateur psychologist is agonizing. How can he possibly know what he knows re: RN's motivations, thoughts, desires, secrets, fears, etc. But to be fair, The Old Man was so uncomfortable with himself, so quirky and ill-at-ease "an introvert in an extrovert's" world, as he described himself, perhaps the only way to get your head around the man is to put him on the couch. I think that Fawn Brodie, who wrote a pscyo-babble biography of RN and Thomas Jefferson was hardly a source to be consulted. Notwithstanding, comments from Nixon relatives Lucille Parsons, Jessamyn and Merle West are highly insightful. It is, however, very unfortunate that Wicker is not more generous in his treatment of RN's parents, particularly his Quaker mother and the influence he had on her life. Father Frank Nixon is made to look like nothing more than a loud-mouth lout; Hannah is portrayed as this taciturn, cold, unfeeling mother who could not find it in her heart to express emotion. In short, I think Wicker has been watching too much Oprah, because not everyone feels the need to show their soul bare-naked to the world. Especially those of RN's generation and ethnic/religous group. Outward signs of affection were not the norm. Yet Wicker, instead of appreciating the diversity of the human condition, chooses to pathologize Mrs. Nixon's behavior (he does a good job on Pat in this regard as well).

Jonathan Aitken's biography Nixon: A Life gives a fuller, more balanced and nuanced portrait of the impact pacifist Hannah Nixon had on her precocious son, as well as a better balanced account of who Frank Nixon was and why he was the way he was. Wicker's analyses of Nixon's parents, and of Nixon himself, are too simplistic and, at times, just plain mean.

a tough book to rate.......2005-10-28

Over the last few years I've read 35 presidential biographies, usually using Amazon readers as my guide to picking the best available choice. It's difficult to find a balanced Nixon biography, and I eventually chose Wicker's One of Us, but rating this book is difficult too. First, it's more of a political biography than a retelling of Nixon's life, but Nixon was so driven by politics that this decision doesn't seem to leave much out. Second, Wicker is more interested in describing who Nixon was than he is in telling a straight narrative. Once, he has given the reader the complete picture of Nixon's psyche, Wicker just stops writing. He leaves out Watergate and the last year and a half of Nixon's presidency. I don't know if Wicker felt too close to Watergate or if he just got tired of writing. Third, there have to be more editorial oversights in this book than just about any serious biography I've read. Towards the end of the book, I had the feeling that Wicker or the editor just turned on the spell checker but didn't bother to make sure the correct words were used.

Despite these major criticisms there is a great deal of merit to One of Us. Although there is a fair amount of psycho-babble, Nixon is certainly in the top 5 presidents as far as needing to be explained from a psychological perspective. And Wicker absolutely nails Nixon's personality. The reader gets the absolutely driven, intelligent, paranoia, manipulative Nixon who has a realpolitik approach to ethics and values.

Nixon was the first president who I really grew up in terms of a broad awareness of the issues of the times. Wicker does a great job of capturing America's concerns. We were obsessed with finding communists under every rock. Civil rights and race rights led to code words like law and order, Students got divided into good kids or rock throwers with little in between. With each of these issues Nixon found a way to play to his constituency, "the silent majority", in an often manipulative way that played more to television sound bites than solutions.

Finally, for the Nixon skeptics out there, this book deals well with Nixon's supposed skills at international relations. It shows how the team of Nixon and Kissinger working together while ignoring the advice and consent of the Congress, State Department, or even the CIA led to serious long-term problems in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Cambodia, with missile reduction treaties, and on and on. Wicker's analysis is difficult to dispute, and it is a powerful argument against the sort of power diplomacy used by Nixon and his ilk.

Now really. . ........2005-07-08

One of us??? Well, I guess -- if you consider yourself part of a group of square, sex-hating, self-deluded, egomaniacal bores who refer to themselves in the third-person. Actually, that would be unfair to all the self-deluded, sex-hating squares in our midst. 'Cause Richard Nixon was part of nothing other than the squalor of his own mind. When he looked out at the world, what he saw was the inside of his own eyeballs.

Tom Wicker -- the quintessent(is that a word?) liberal panty-waste gets two stars here because of the unintentional humor of the tome. (It is almost 800 pages of tome.) But the humor is more than off-set by the outrage of the book. For it is a historical lie. All the so-called "progressive" achievements of Nixon's time (the EPA, expansion of voting rights and other minority protections, worker safety rules, etc) were accomplished IN SPITE of Dick Nixon, not because of him. They were gifts of that time because of the Congress, the media, and mostly -- oh how far we've come -- because the American people were then in much better touch with their own interests. Nixon, to quote Ed Harris as E.Howard Hunt -- was the darkness reaching out to the darkness, and our own very dark time is still haunted by the vicious hatred of all democratic values unleased by the Whittier Vampire. George W. Bush is much more the child of Nixon, than of his own father.

An excellent and concise account of Nixon's Vietnam War.......2003-11-11

Chapter 14, pp 569-614 of "One of Us" is probably the best account of Richard Nixon's Vietnam War policy that I have read. Most Vietnam books tend to skimp on the latter years of the war, when it was winding down. In general this book is very even-handed and at times surprisingly sympathetic. However, Wicker is also honestly frank in his criticisms of Nixon's Vietnam policy and other aspects of his foreign policy.
The reviewer is the author of "Killed In Action: The life and times of SP4 Stephen H. Warner, draftee, journalist and anti-war activist"

policy discussions during the nixon administration.......2003-09-29

good work on the policies during the nixon adminstration
very clear and concise writing in laymen's terms of some rather complex subject matters. the writier's skill in presenting his ideas clearly are done very well inthis book.

Average customer rating:

One of Us Richard Nixon and the American Dream
Tom Wicker
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000JV999S

Average customer rating:

One of Us : Richard Nixon and the American Dream
Tom Wicker
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000O2LFY4

Average customer rating:

One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream
Tom Wicker
Manufacturer: RANDOM HOUSE
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OL1HES

Average customer rating:

One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream.
Tom Wicker
Manufacturer: 0
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000ICPH5I

Average customer rating:

One of Us Richard Nixon and the American Dream
Tom Wicker
Manufacturer: New York: Random House, 1991
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000NXKK72

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