As president, he tried to keep formal dinners short and casual conversations to no more than five minutes. As a law student at Duke, he cheered so wildly at the school's football games that other students would sit nearby just to watch him. Nixon was also a basket of neuroses - painfully shy, socially awkward, short-fused, approval-seeking, clumsy, prone to insomnia and flat-out weird. In 1960, he lost a razor-thin presidential election, and two years later he lost badly in a run for governor of California. He was nearly dumped as Eisenhower's running mate in 19.

After law school, he was passed over by all the prestigious New York firms.

In college, he didn't get into the popular fraternity and he spent two years trying to convince his future wife to go on a first date. In high school, he was beat out for student body president by a more popular kid who entered the race shortly before the election. Richard Nixon learned tenacity from failure. While some worthwhile chapters of Nixon's life are hurried or even ignored - there's too little about the 1960 campaign, almost nothing about Nixon's surprise selection of Spiro Agnew as his running mate in 1968 and nothing at all about Nixon's long post-presidency fight to keep the bulk of the White House tapes from becoming public - no single volume about Nixon's long and interesting life could be so comprehensive. Thomas' 'Being Nixon' is a biography of eloquence and breadth, a whistle-stop tour of Nixon's life that, despite its more than 600 pages, seldom overstays its welcome or wanders off into unnecessary detours. 'One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon' by former New York Times reporter Tim Weiner is a history of Nixon's paranoid White House that draws connections between his handling of the Vietnam War and the illegal domestic spying that brought down his presidency. Former Newsweek editor Evan Thomas' 'Being Nixon: A Man Divided' is a full-life biography - and the new gold standard for a single-volume take on Nixon - that places a significant emphasis on anecdotes and stories that reveal Nixon's complex and neurotic psychological state. The Watergate story is the apex event of two new books that take very different approaches to illuminating Nixon's path.

Being nixon by evan thomas