Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man

Garry Wills's political biography Nixon Agonistes is so rich in detail, and with such good judgment and insight permeating every sentence, that you feel like you are in the hands of a master. There are few works of political history that rank at this level, in large part because it is not just a biography of Nixon, but instead uses Nixon as the common thread through which to explore the broader American political and social culture. Wills’s book covers a number of other American political figures too, and his mini-profiles of Dwight Eisenhower, Spiro Agnew, George Wallace, Nelson Rockefeller, and Strom Thurmond are themselves short biographical masterpieces. Wills was also one of the first historians to locate the origins of 1960s radicalism in liberal disillusionment with a Democratic president (JFK), which led enough people to realize the problem wasn’t a person or party, but The System.