"He Was Buried beside His Wife 10 Months Later"

"Swift succeeds in showing a young couple united by a degree of class resentment and a political understanding of how their apparent ordinariness could spark a sense of sympathetic identification in the mass of voters who would eventually form Nixon’s 'silent majority.' More profoundly, the couple shared what the author calls 'an underlying, no-nonsense melancholy' that derived from 'the sadness of their difficult childhoods.' Their families had been scythed by silicosis and tuberculosis; at times, during their mutual climb and repeated crashes, the Nixons must have imagined they were fighting for air."


In The New York Times, Thomas Mallon reviews Will Swift's Pat and Dick: The Nixons, an Intimate Portrait of a Marriage.