Richard Nixon A Psychobiography [Hardcover]

Vamik D. Volkan is the director of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction and professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia and coauthor of Siblings in the Unconscious and Psychopathology.Norman Itzkowitz is professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University and a member of the International Relations Division of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia. He is coauthor of The Immortal Atatürk: A Psychobiography.Andrew W. Dod is a senior executive with Crescent Communications, an Atlanta based marketing consulting firm.Despite an abundance of literature on Richard Nixon, the man behind the most spectacular crash-and-burn career of modern political history has remained an enigma. What lay behind his obsessive hunger for power and control, his paranoid attacks against enemies real and perceived, his refusal to accept defeat? Why did a man who had achieved so much feel so unfulfilled even at the height of his power? And what drove the president responsible for such triumphs as the opening of relations with China to the depths of the most devastating political scandal in American history?

Richard Nixon: A Psychobiography is the first thoroughgoing psychological portrait of the 37th president, drawing upon telling interviews with Nixon intimates, published and archived materials, while employing a rigorous psychoanalytic methodology. Tracing the development of Nixon's complex psyche, the authors provide new insight not only into his unconscious motivations but also into the way they influenced his political actions, whether shrewd or disastrous.

The authors explore Nixon's difficult upbringing—his mean-spirited, abusive father and often-absent mother; episodic physical trauma and mental deprivation; the tragic deaths of his two brothers; his rejection by the first woman he hoped to marrl�3