Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills reads Richard Nixon as a mirror of the nation that voted him into office. Alongside the psychology of the thirty-seventh president and his dealings with others, Pat Nixon and Spiro Agnew among them, Wills studies a nation bogged down in the Vietnam War and split by a cultural divide between young and old, and he sets his findings in moral, economic, intellectual and political context. From some of Nixon's own opinions he draws the contested conclusion that Nixon was in fact a liberal, and he traces how the meanings of conservative and liberal have shifted. The book reaches beyond Nixon to analyze the American political machine, and it earned Wills a place on Nixon's enemies list.

Patrick Collison lists it on his Bookshelf page.