Portrait of a thin-skinned president

Book review of Richard Nixon: The Life

RICHARD NIXON 

The Life

John A Farrell

Doubleday

737 pages; $35

While writing Richard Nixon: The Life, John A Farrell could not possibly have known who would be president on the day his fine book was published. That it happens to be Donald J Trump is, for him, an extraordinary stroke of luck. To read this biography with an eye only toward the parallels between the two presidents would be lazy and unfair, a disservice to Farrell’s nuanced scholarship.

But the context here is unignorable. The similarities between Nixon and Trump leap off the page like crickets.

There is, first and most