The Invincible Quest: The Life of Richard Milhous Nixon - Hardcover

...genuinely magnificent slab of a book...written wit enormous wit, brio and old-fashioned flourish...Not only does Black's book offer a wry and well-informed history of American presidential politics since the 1940s, it also succeeds in giving a splendidly rounded and plausible portrait of its much-despised, ever-controversial subject...splendid, epic, enthralling book - Daily Telegraph (Daily Telegraph)

formidable biographical work...the most intellectual of our modern press barons has succeeded in writing a book that entitles him to be taken seriously as a vivid chronicler of the politics of his own era. It is the sheer sweep and range of Black's research and industry that first compels admiration...he knows how to tell a good story - Sunday Telegraph (Sunday Telegraph)

"The Invincible Quest" is an authoritative biography of one of the most accomplished and controversial political leaders of the 20th century. Beginning with Nixon's birth to Quaker parents in 1913 and ending with his death in 1994, Conrad Black traces Nixon's career, assessing both his achievements and the evolution of popular and historical thinking about him since his death. Nixon rose spectacularly from modest beginnings to become Dwight D. Eisenhower's vice-president in 1952 at the age of just 39. Defeated by John Kennedy in the presidential election of 1960, and humiliated in Californian elections two years later, his political career looked to be finished. But he returned from the wilderness to snatch victory in the presidential election of 1968, and in 1972 was re-elected in one of the biggest landslides in US presidential history. Then came Watergate, the shame of resignation, and the long road to redemption. Drawing on recently opened tapes and documents, and on Black's personal interviews with many of the major players in the Nixon administration, "The Invincible Quest" reveals a new side of Nixon: a man who didn't have the advantage of charisma but was surprisingly self-assured and effective; a man dogged by political scandal yet seemingly unstoppable. Black tells the extraordinary story of Nixon's meteoric rise, scandalous fall and partial rehabilitation in the fast-paced and supremely readable style that characterized his earlier, best-selling work, "Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Champion of Freedom" (2003).