Lecture Date: March 20, 2018
The Parrish Snead Franklin Simpson, PLC Lecture
With his jowls and ski-jump nose, divisive politics, and distinctive mode of speech, the only U.S. president to resign in disgrace needs little introduction: Richard Nixon is an American icon. But what lies beyond the caricature? How did a gifted young idealist evolve into a corrupt political gut-fighter? Why does he stir such passion, 50 years after his astonishing comeback clinched the White House amid the chaos of 1968? And what lessons does the story of Nixon’s fall from grace teach us, as President Trump meets fierce opposition and investigative scrutiny today? In Richard Nixon: The Life, said National Public Radio, author John A. Farrell succeeds at “humanizing” Nixon without excusing his transgressions – and offers gripping new looks at Nixon’s conduct of the Vietnam War, his undermining of the civil rights movement, the politics of polarization, and the behavior that led to Watergate.
Speaker: John A. Farrell
John Aloysius Farrell is a graduate of the University of Virginia and a prize-winning biographer and newspaperman. He covered every presidential campaign from 1976 through 2012, two wars and the troubles in Northern Ireland, and worked on the vaunted Spotlight team at The Boston Globe. He has also driven an ice cream truck, dug ditches, shined shoes, cared for the animals in a medical laboratory, labored on an Israeli kibbutz and served as a gallery guard at the Masters golf tournament.
In 2001 he published Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century, a biography of the late Speaker of the House which won the Hardeman prize for the best book on Congress. Farrell's biography of the great American defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow: Attorney For The Damned, won the 2012 Los Angeles Times book award for the best biography of the year. His latest work is Richard Nixon: The Life, which The Washington Post called “the best one volume, cradle-to-grave biography” of the elusive 37th president