Book Review

Teaching the Declaration of Independence, I found my way years ago to Fawn McKay Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974). First-year seminar was never the same, and I remain indebted. And so it was with particular attention that I read Newell G. Bringhurst's biography. Bringhurst's method, like Brodie's, is psychobiographical, connecting Brodie's Mormon upbringing to her inquiry into Jefferson's life, linking her study of Joseph Smith's fraudulent prophecy, for which she was excommunicated, to her obsession with the Quaker Richard M. Nixon's pathological lies. Critics will note the limits of psychobiography, but as subject, Brodie is irresistible. From a village in Utah, Brodie left to become a liberal Cold War scholar. She collaborated with her husband, Bernard Brodie, defense adviser at the RAND Corporation. She studied psychoanalysis and undertook it herself with Lewis Fielding, whose office was looted by Nixon's operatives in an attempt to smear Daniel Ellsberg, one of Bernard's colleagues at RAND. Brodie was also a reflective, self-aware housewife and mother in the 1950s. She hosted dinner parties for Henry Kissinger and others from RAND and wrote, with Bernard, a weapons history entitled From Crossbow to H-Bomb (1962). Of her five biographies—Joseph Smith, Thaddeus Stevens, Richard F. Burton, Thomas Jefferson, and Richard M. Nixon—four were controversial.

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