Books like Pat Nixon

While David offers some interesting and important insights about the real Pat – her humor, her grit, and her kindness, the overall picture of Pat as victim of her own life can make the book off-putting. The more I learned about Pat from my research, the less I trusted some of David’s more saccharine statements about her life. Taken with a grain of salt, however, the book offers some interesting stories I did not find elsewhere.  

Out of the myriad of books analyzing presidential marriages, this volume, in my opinion, does the best job of showing an in-depth view of the Nixons’ relationship. Troy acknowledges the stereotypes and caricatures of the couple, puts these misrepresentations in context, and then reveals a much more balanced view of the Nixon marriage. He never forgets that a marriage involves both partners!

Although the sections directly discussing Pat are limited, I found this book very useful. Holt offers a view of another presidential marriage that was contemporaneous and interactive with the Nixons. Mamie was a role model for Pat and Holt was one for me. Holt provided me with a roadmap for dealing with sensitive issues within a marriage and a presidency.

Lady Bird’s diary is worth reading no matter what you are studying. She is insightful, funny, and attentive to her unique perspective as First Lady. In terms of understanding Pat, the diary offers an outsider’s view from someone who understood Pat’s situation personally. The tidbits concerning their first post-election meeting and then subsequent visits provide evidence of Pat’s humor, humility, and kindness.

This collection of essays by pioneering feminist Gloria Steinem introduces the reader to the roots of modern-day feminism and the specific challenges Steinem and others faced to obtain what we consider today to be simple rights.

This book combines history, biography, and sociology, and Steinem captivated me with her clear and concise writing style, wit, and dry sense of humor. In addition to recounting her own experiences (such as her assignment as a reporter to pose as a Playboy bunny), she tells the stories of such varied subjects as First Lady Pat Nixon, Marilyn Monroe, author Alice Walker, and others.

I read this book shortly after it was published in 1983, and I read it again in 2020; both times I was shocked at the every-day indignities women faced routinely, and I was repeatedly encouraged by the bravery of Steneim and others to take on the mostly-male “establishment.”

Steinem reminds… show more.

Lyn Macdonald is my go-to historian for WW1, and I only pick out this volume – she has written one for each year of the war – because if you want a thorough, detailed account of the war you will want to start at the beginning. She is a fine writer, and very readable, and her books are full of extracts from letters and diaries of the men at the front, and their families back home, which give you the genuine, authentic flavour of how people thought and spoke at the time, and allows you to feel you were really there.

Former Congressman William Clay, a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, provides a historical look at Black members in the U.S. Congress from Reconstruction to 1992.

Until the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s Black members of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House had been the highest-ranking Black federal officials. However, we know very little about them. Historians have largely ignored Black members of Congress.

Clay’s book is especially useful because it is partly historical and participant-observation. He chronicles and documents the experiences of America’s first Black congressional representatives who served during Reconstruction.

Readers interested in Black congressional leadership during the 1960s through the early 1990s will glean a lot from Clay’s first-hand perspective on the formation of the Congressional Black Caucus, Richard Nixon, the 1972 National Black Political Convention, and the expansion and maturation of the Black congressional delegation.

This is the story that made me want to be either a reporter or a whistleblower. The trail of this episode from the moments the break-in occurred at Watergate to the resignation of President Nixon show how complex corruption often is. “Getting to the bottom of it” is often never fully achieved in conspiracies, not only as large and sweeping as this one, but of countless others that are much smaller in scale.

Additionally, this is a great example of how the original decision to commit the first corrupt act leads to more and more of it until corruption defines the existence of men and women who started out with good intentions. 

Billy Graham preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ to some 215 million people in more than 185 countries. He once preached to a crowd estimated at 1.1 million people in Seoul, South Korea. What set him apart and contributed to his incredible gifts? 

In this engaging and comprehensive book, William Martin gives readers a better understanding of Graham’s strengths and weaknesses and the all-consuming nature of leading a powerful ministry for over fifty years.

From President Truman to President Trump, the evangelist offered spiritual counsel to these and other world notables. Martin describes the differing relationships Graham had with these leaders, sometimes tinged with regret, especially Graham’s fraught relationship with Richard Nixon. 

President Nixon had many successes and failures during his life, in his book he shares personal details of his celebrations and anguishes, such extremes for anyone to endure. I had the pleasure of meeting President Nixon on his first solo return to the White House in 1987, for a meeting with President Reagan.