Recently, I was able to remodel a room in my house as sort of a study. After many months, I was finally able to retrieve the many boxes of books that I had in my library in San Diego.
Paramount among these books was my library on everything Richard Nixon. Along with all of the books written by Richard Nixon, I possess between 40 and 50 books, mostly biographies of Richard Nixon published between the years of 1980 to the present day.
I try to keep things updated. With of course, recent additions include a “Man In Full” by Lord Conrad Black, Nixon and Kissinger by Robert Dallek, and “Nixonland” by Rick Perlstein. Just today, I picked up “The Strong Man” by James Rosen.
I consider one of the most important books in my collection, is “One of Us” by Tom Wicker. I feel that this biography is the most balanced Nixon biography to come out.
One of the great benefits of my library as I do not have to go very far to research papers, articles and the like. Everything is right in my fingertips.
So the purpose of this post isn’t to wax about my library. I’m very interested to find out what is in the Nixon libraries of the contributors and commenters to the New Nixon Blog. What Nixon biography do you feel is the most important?
In the days that I was assistant editor of Checkers, the editor of Checkers, Chris Crain (who really had a fantastic collection of Nixon stuff — the best that I’ve ever seen) had a practice of buying two of every one of the books written by Richard Nixon. He would send one off to New Jersey to get it personally autographed. One of the things I wonder as well is how many among us have books personally autographed by Richard Nixon, and a brief story about how you got the work autographed.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to do…