Churchill and Nixon

Two biographies for your consideration: if you can only read one, read Churchill.

Nixon, vol. I. (Stephen Ambrose). Ambrose is well-known for his military dramas of WWII (Band of Brothers, etc), but he also wrote biographies of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Nixon is possibly the most vilified president of modern times, a man who normalized relations with China, ended the war in Vietnam, and presided over the Watergate scandal. In his first volume, Ambrose tells the story of a remarkably driven man who was elected to the House at 33 years of age, and became Eisenhower’s vice-president just six years later. Nixon would famously lose the 1960 presidential campaign to JFK, and then manage to also lose a gubernatorial bid in his home state of California in ’62. Amazingly, Nixon would rise from the ashes to win the presidency in 1968, completing a comeback unmatched in American political history. The first of Ambrose’s two-volume biography covers Nixon’s life up to 1963. Nixon is a fine summary of the most polarizing president of the 20^th century, and a helpful guide to the essential diplomatic questions of the 1950s. One of the more interesting sections covers Nixon’s work on the House Committee on Un-American Activities with Whittaker Chambers in exposing Alger Hiss in 1948.

Churchill, (Martin Gilbert). Gilbert is the official biographer of Winston Churchill, and, together with Randolph Churchill, has written a massive multi-volume work of W.S.C. The nice thing about Churchill is that it is a one-volume distillation (tho it still runs close to 1,000 pages) of Gilbert’s larger work. Here you get the essential outline of Churchill’s life, and what a life. Paul Johnson has written a much-lauded new biography of Churchill that runs much swifter 200 or so pages, so Johnson’s work might be the place to start. But I can’t believe Churchill could be described in so little space, since even Gilbert is often forced to cut things down to a bare minimum for his volume. To borrow Tom Wolfe’s phrase, Churchill was indeed a man in full.