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While psychobiography itself is an exercise in doubt, accruing to its discipline questions of methodology and authenticity, the authors of this interesting book set out directly and boldly to encompass just that, a psychoanalytic understanding of the life and behavior of one of the most complex and arresting figures in the political arena of this century.
Besides casting light on the psychodynamics of a contradictory and puzzling figure at the highest political level, this study aims to illuminate the psychological underpinnings of policies and decision-making of political leaders on domestic and international issues. The book starts with Nixon, a month before his death, on a visit to Moscow, bypassing Yeltsin to meet with the ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, perceived as a tyrannical enemy of America, to do battle in a way reminiscent of a former famous confrontation in the same city between Nixon and Khrushchev. It is suggested that Zhirinovsky was paid a substantial sum of money to agree to this “confrontation,” which is what Nixon did best.
Written a few years after Nixon's death, and a quarter-century after the explosive event that defined this President's political career, the book must make up for its distance from immediate history by a convincing accumulation of data from available sources. The authors are well aware of the pitfalls of their task, and are careful to differentiate serious psychobiography based on scholarly research from sensationalist tabloid writing replete with expansive descriptions and pseudopsychological explanations. While two of the coauthors are the psychoanalyst and political historian so active and innovative in political psychology, the idea of this book began from a series of interviews conducted with many intimates of Nixon by the third author, connected with the field of communications.