NIXON'S HEAD

by Arthur Woodstone ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 1973

Analyzing the behavior of Richard Nixon threatens to replace Mah-Jongg, Bingo, or sex as our most popular indoor game. Gary Wills elevated the quest for the elusive Nixon to new intellectual dimensions awhile back with Nixon Agonistes, more recently Bruce Mazlish contributed a psychohistorical leap forward while In Search of Nixon, and only the other day that oral-compulsive blabbermouth Hubert Humphrey jumped on the shrinkwagon complaining of Mr. Nixon that ""There hasn't been a person who wanted to be alone, by himself, so much since Greta Garbo."" Now Arthur Woodstone, a journalist, joins the players, offering a detailed chrono-psychological profile of our closet President, a sort of checklist of Nixon aberrations -- ranging from the obsessive Hiss investigation in the '40's to the 1956 campaign during which (""a number of sources allege"") Nixon's press paranoia reached such proportions that he punched a tormenting reporter ""on the nose"" to the 1960 Kennedy debates which Nixon undertook because he was afraid of the ""charge that I was afraid"" to that ""last press conference"" after the 1962 California race (Woodstone calls the performance ""a nervous breakdown"") to the later visits to Dr. Hutschnecker for psychiatric help (Woodstone doesn't even bother to use ""alleged"" here -- the doorman saw citizen Nixon enter Hutschnecker's office) to ali those Freudian slips about ""burns"" and ""custard pies"" to the ""full story"" (hitherto untold) of Nixon's overreaction in 1969 when North Korea downed an American reconnaissance plane which triggered his ""psyche like a Fourth of July fireworks display"" (Nixon believed the North Koreans ""had deliberately set out to insult him"") to the bizarre Lincoln Memorial encounter with Vietnam dissenters in 1970. . . . Nixon, in Woodstone's view, is more than a bit unhinged, both a ""political and psychological reactionary. . . an anal-compulsive character"" in the grip of self-hatred and weak-ego anxiety. Mazlish said as much -- and said it with more authority and less of the self-defeating animus which so starkly pervades Woodstone's inventory of Nixon's head.

Pub Date: April 3, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION