Nixon's shadow - David Greenberg

To his conservative supporters in 1940s southern California, Richard Nixon was a populist everyman; to liberal intellectuals of the 1950s, he was "Tricky Dick," a devious manipulator; to 1960s radicals, a shadowy conspirator; to the Washington press corps, a pioneering spin doctor; to his loyal Middle Americans, a victim of liberal hatred; to recent historians, an unlikely liberal. Nixon's Shadow rediscovers these competing images of the protean Nixon, showing how each was created and disseminated in American culture and how Nixon's tinkering with his own image often backfired. During Nixon's long tenure on the national stage-and through the succession of "new Nixons" so brilliantly described here-Americans came to realize how thoroughly politics relies on manipulation. Since Nixon, it has become impossible to discuss politics without asking: What is the politician's "real" character? How authentic or inauthentic is he? What image is he trying to project? More than what Nixon did, this fascinating book reveals what Nixon meant.

David Greenberg is a historian of American politics and a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of the prize-winning Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image, among other books. Currently a columnist for Politico, he has been an editor at Slate and the New Republic and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other popular and scholarly publications. He lives with his family in New York City.

A penetrating analysis of how the president's legacy has altered American politics irrevocably.

Enthralling, compulsively readable.

[Greenberg] goes boldly where few men (and fewer liberal historians) have gone before.

I am hard pressed to think of a book on politics as bracing and original as this one.
Jeff Greenfield

A richly informed, attractively written history.

A brilliant book full of fresh insight and analysis by one of the most original young minds among professional historians. The first serious and comprehensive look at Nixon by a writer of the new generation, Nixon's Shadow is thoroughly fair-minded and yet critical. Under the scholarly microscope Nixon again fails to conceal his self-inflicted wounds.

Bob Woodward

Groundbreaking....A landmark in Nixon scholarship.
Robert Dallek, author of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963