I finished Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character. On pages 513-514, Brodie states:
"Pat
Nixon told Jessamyn West that in the early years Julie and Tricia could
make their father laugh, and 'he could make them laugh.' The fun, the
laughter, what Pat described as 'the good times,' had long since
disappeared in the relationship between Nixon and his wife. But he did
write her notes. Dianne Sawyer, secretary in the White House, who
accompanied the Nixons to San Clemente in their retirement and remained
there until the memoirs were finished, has said that Nixon wrote many
notes to Pat, which she was privileged to read, although she would not
indicate the number or divulge the nature of the contents. (She has
taken 'a private oath' not to write or give interviews about her
experience, at least while the Nixons are alive.) Publication of these
notes to Pat, or even a description of their feeling and content, may
reveal a tenderness to Nixon which he has otherwise resolutely kept
hidden. In any case the very recourse to notewriting tells us more of
the warping of Nixon's capacity for love."
One thing that this
passage tells me is that nobody can write a fully-orbed biography of
another human being. Fawn Brodie, with all of her speculations about
the psychology of Richard Nixon, cannot capture the full man. Nixon,
after all, wrote many letters to Pat. Brodie may call that "the warping
of Nixon's capacity for love", but the fact that he wrote letters to
his wife may indicate that he did care about her, even though Brodie
tells story after story about how that may not have been the case.
Now
that Richard and Pat Nixon are dead, I wonder how much Diane Sawyer has
chosen to talk about her time working for Nixon. You can read here her responses to the Broadway play, Frost/Nixon,
which later was made into a movie. Someone played her in that. Also,
if I'm not mistaken, ABC News not long ago did a story on Nixon's love
letters to Pat when they were courting. As far as I can remember,
though, Diane Sawyer did not give any indication that she knew much
about the topic of Nixon's letters to Pat. Perhaps she didn't think
that was the time or the place for that!
Now for my overall
impressions of Brodie's book: it was all right. I didn't read anything
earth-shakingly surprising. I'm not sure if any anti-Nixon book can
surpass Anthony Summers' The Arrogance of Power! Summers drew
from Brodie's work and even recommended it, but he had a lot more
stories than she did. Brodie's book has had a mixed reputation: it has
been lauded for its interviews, but it has been criticized for its
psychological speculations, and also for some of the negative things
that it says about Nixon. One criticism that I have read is that Brodie
implies that Nixon had a homosexual relationship with his friend, Bebe
Rebozo. But she did not say that explicitly. She simply said that they
were friends, and that Nixon did not want people to think that he had a
homosexual relationship with Rebozo. She also mentions some of the
homophobic things that Nixon had said. I guess one can draw his or her
own conclusions from that, but Brodie did not go as far as, say, Don
Fulsom, who told about a lady who saw Nixon and Rebozo holding hands
under the table.
Overall, I did find Brodie to be a good writer,
and sometime in the future I may read her biography of Thaddeus Stevens,
the radical Republican who was played by Tommy Lee Jones in the movie Lincoln.