Nixon's Enemies

By Kenneth Franklin Kurz

Book Overview

Nixon's adversarial nature was his greatest political asset. Such early campaign opponents as Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas fell prey to his mudslinging and Red-baiting scare tactics. During... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0737300000
• ISBN13: 9780737300000
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Lowell House
• Length: 326 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 1.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Nixon, our forgotten president

Ken Kurtz is an excpetional historian! And a wonderful professor!

The Old Saying was Right -- "Even Paranoids have Enemies."

If one is interested solely in the political career of Richard Nixon, then this would be the book to get. That which we learn about Nixon's life before politics and after Watergate was only mentioned as it pertained to his days in office. Kurz was remarkably evenhanded as he described a politician who had some tremendous strengths, and some even greater weaknesses. In fact through most of the book, Kurz almost seemed to have some genuine warmth for his subject. It was something of a surprise to see Kurz reveal near the end that he had rooted against Nixon when the President's troubles were mounting.Nixon was convinced that there was a vast copnspiracy of liberals aligned against him. On the one hand, this should have been hard to believe given that Nixon's domestic policies were hardly right wing except for where domestic communism was concerned. On the other hand, Nixon really had generated a lot of antipathy because of his heavy-handed tactics in dealing with his rivals.Kurz was occasionally a little repetitious, but at least part of that was due to the complexities of telling a detailed story that spanned several decades. Overall, this book was informative and hard to put down. It was a fine piece of work.