a childhood marked by moral convention and material deprivation, in order to accommodate formation of political philosophy, stern ambition, and effective political behavior. To put it another way: Did the man apply life lessons to shaping his political experience, or did exigencies of responding to the wash of experience shape the political man? That is the focus of this research.
Analysis and explanation of Richard Nixon's political career became something of a cottage industry during the last three decades of the 20th century. While one senses in the multiple biographies of Nixon an authorial impatience to get to the business of explicating the Nixon presidency, the fact is that Nixon's early political career provides a window onto how American political life is structured and how political opportunity shapes political careers. Equally, as psychoanalyst Abrahamsen demonstrates in his diagnostic psychohistory of Nixon, a personal background marked by deprivation and the experience of struggle may reveal something about the manner in which an individual is
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