Was Richard Nixon actually a madman, or did he just play one? When
Richard Nixon battled for the presidency in 1968, he did so with
the knowledge that, should he win, he would face the looming
question of how to extract the United States from its disastrous
war in Vietnam. It was on a beach that summer that Nixon disclosed
to his chief aide, H. R. Haldeman, one of his most notorious, risky
gambits: the madman theory. In On Nixon's Madness, Zachary Jonathan
Jacobson examines the enigmatic president through this theory of
Nixon's own invention. With strategic force and nuclear bluffing,
Nixon attempted to coerce his foreign adversaries through sheer
unpredictability. As his national security advisor Henry Kissinger
noted, Nixon's strategy resembled a poker game in which he
"push[ed] so many chips into the pot" that the United States' foes
would think the president had gone "crazy." From Vietnam, Pakistan,
and India to the greater Middle East, Nixon applied this madman
theory. Foreign relations were not a steady march toward peaceful
coexistence but rather an ongoing test of mettle. Nixon saw the
Cold War as he saw his life, as a series of ordeals that demanded
great risk and grand gestures. For decades, journalists, critics,
and scholars have searched for the real Nixon behind these acts.
Was he a Red-baiter, a worldly statesman, a war criminal or, in the
end, a punchline? Jacobson combines biography and intellectual and
cultural history to understand the emotional life of Richard Nixon,
exploring how the former president struggled between great
effusions of feeling and great inhibition, how he winced at the
notion of his reputation for rage, and how he used that ill repute
to his advantage.
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