When Richard Nixon battled for the presidency in 1968, he did so with the knowledge that, should he win, he would face the looming question of how to extract the United States from its disastrous war in Vietnam. It was on a beach that summer that Nixon disclosed to his chief aide, H. R. Haldeman, one of his most notorious, risky gambits: the madman theory.In On Nixon's Madness: An Emotional History (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Zachary Jonathan Jacobson examines the enigmatic president through this theory of Nixon’s own invention. With strategic force and nuclear bluffing, Nixon attempted to coerce his foreign adversaries through sheer unpredictability. As his national security advisor Henry Kissinger noted, Nixon’s strategy resembled a poker game in which he “push[ed] so many chips into the pot” that the United States’ foes would think the president had gone “crazy.”From Vietnam, Pakistan, and India to the greater Middle East, Nixon applied this madman theory. Foreign relations were not a steady march toward peaceful coexistence but rather an ongoing test of mettle. Nixon saw the Cold War as he saw his life, as a series of ordeals that demanded great risk and grand gestures. For decades, journalists, critics, and scholars have searched for the real Nixon behind these acts. Was he a Red-baiter, a worldly statesman, a war criminal or, in the end, a punchline?Jacobson combines biography and intellectual and cultural history to understand the emotional life of Richard Nixon, exploring how the former president struggled between great effusions of feeling and great inhibition, how he winced at the notion of his reputation for rage, and how he used that ill repute to his advantage.Andrew O. Pace is a historian of moral dilemmas of US foreign relations and an adjunct professor of history at Salt Lake Community College. He is a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network and is currently working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at apace24@slcc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Who was Harry Smith? Was he an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter? Was he a charlatan? A genius? Was he a moocher, a schmuck, a bum? As John Szwed's Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith (FSG, 2023) reveals, Smith was all of these and more. Best known for editing The Anthology of American Folk Music, Smith was also a pioneer in experimental film who Jonas Mekas considered one of the leading lights of the New American Cinema. He created paintings that attempted to transcribe bebop recordings. He acted as mysticism consultant on the 1967 effort to levitate the Pentagon. But he also spent years living in poverty, in SROs, at the Chelsea Hotel, or at the apartments of famous friends like Allen Ginsberg. The story of Harry Smith is thus also a story of a vanished New York Bohemia that mixed high and low, the street and the gallery, the Bowery and MOMA, to create one of the most remarkable outpourings of cultural production this country has even seen. And Smith was at the center of it all.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The first biography of Henry VIII’s court fool William Somer, a legendary entertainer and one of the most intriguing figures of the Tudor ageIn some portraits of Henry VIII there appears another, striking figure—a gaunt and morose-looking man with a shaved head and, in one case, a monkey on his shoulder. This is William or "Will" Somer, the king’s fool, a celebrated wit who reportedly could raise Henry’s spirits and spent many hours with him, often alone. Was Somer an “artificial fool,” a cunning comic who could speak freely in front of the king, or a “natural fool,” someone with intellectual disabilities, like many other members of the profession? And what role did he play in the tumultuous and violent Tudor era? Fool is the first biography of Somer—and perhaps the first of a Renaissance fool.After his death, Somer disappeared behind his legend, and historians struggled to separate myth from reality. In Fool: In Search of Henry VIII's Closest Man (Princeton UP, 2023), Peter K. Andersson pieces together the fullest picture yet of an enigmatic and unusual man with a very strange job. Somer’s story provides new insights into how fools lived and what exactly they did for a living, how monarchs and courtiers related to commoners and people with disabilities, and whether aspects of the Renaissance fool live on in the modern comedian. But most of all, we learn how a commoner without property or education managed to become the court’s chief mascot and a continuous presence at the center of Tudor power from the 1530s to the reign of Elizabeth I.Looking beyond stereotypes of the man in motley, Fool reveals a little-known world, surprising and disturbing, when comedy was something crueler and more unpleasant than we like to think.Peter K. Andersson is senior lecturer in history at Örebro University in Sweden. He is the author of Streetlife in Late Victorian London and Silent History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly shaped the law: Constance Baker Motley” (CNN). Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hairdresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP’s Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary.Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (Knopf Doubleday, 2023) captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country. Burnished with an extraordinary wealth of research, award-winning, esteemed Civil Rights and legal historian and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Tomiko Brown-Nagin brings Motley to life in these pages. Brown-Nagin compels us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions–how do the historically marginalized access the corridors of power? What is the price of the ticket? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice? In Civil Rights Queen, she dramatically fills out the picture of some of the most profound judicial and societal change made in twentieth-century America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In my talk with Barry Gewen on his 2020 book, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (W. W. Norton, 2020), we explore the disparate influences that shaped Kissinger as both an intellectual and as a practitioner of power. Our conversation touches on Kissinger’s upbringing in a German-Jewish community in Bavaria at the time of Hitler’s rise to power and pivots to an understanding of Kissinger’s Realism as his pessimistic yet unwavering approach to foreign affairs and exigencies like the balance of power. In his committed opposition to the Wilsonian creed—the missionary idea of America’s role in the world—Kissinger was decidedly in the camp of the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, a fellow German-Jewish immigrant and mentor of sorts. Barry Gewen, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review, deserves to be heard, and his book deserves to be read, for his judicious, textured appraisal of Kissinger. His Kissinger is neither a war criminal nor a diplomatic magician but one guided by the stern maxim that order is prior to justice in the affairs of an ever-perilous world. Our talk closes with Gewen’s assessment of Kissinger’s thinking on the present-day foreign-policy challenges for the U.S. of China and the Russia-Ukraine war.Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Thy Power, O Liberty, make strong the weak,And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak.At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley published the first book in English by a person of African descent and the third book of poetry by a North American Woman. She was a poet but also a political actor and celebrity – the most famous African in North America and Europe during the era of the American Revolution. George Washington wrote to her. Thomas Jefferson ridiculed her. In The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (FSG, 2023) – a joint exercise in history and literary criticism, Dr. David Waldstreicher writes that Wheatley is “Homer and Odysseus and the slaves and the women they knew or imagined. She aimed for the universal without forgetting who was suffering most and why.” Reading Wheatley’s poetry in historical context reveals the extent to which the American Revolution both strengthened and limited black slavery – and also how Wheatley herself affected the debates about American slavery and independence.Mastering the Bible, Greek and Latin translations, and the works of Pope and Milton, Wheatley composed elegies for local elites, celebrated political events, and praised warriors. Despite her skill, knowledge, and fame, she often had to write indirectly about subjects that mattered deeply to her – race, slavery, and discontent with British rule. During a period in which writing was central to political conversation, she used her verse to lampoon, question, and assert the injustice of her enslaved condition. As Waldstreicher demonstrates, Wheatley wrote about events and people – turning what was available and acceptable for a person in her position into poetry that could be read for its art – but also subversively for its political ideas. He concludes that her work proves that the story of the American revolution and Phillis Wheatley are inextricably joined – and that story is one of “resilience and creativity, of antislavery and antiracist possibilities, and of backlash and loss, dreams dashed and deferred.” Dr. David Waldstreicher is distinguished professor of history, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research interests include U.S. cultural and political history, colonial and early US, African American history, slaver, and antislavery. He is the author of Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (Hill and Wang) and Runaway American: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). His public facing writing includes contributions to The New York Times Book Review, the Boston Review, and The Atlantic.Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

There was a time when French people put up picture of Marshal Philippe Petain on their walls. He is a figure of immeasurable stature to the country of France. Victor of Verdun, a one-time minister of war, and finally, a traitor to his country. Or was he? Did Petain allow the stain of collaboration to tarnish his reputation, or did he use his figure to guard the French people from worse Nazi atrocities during the Vichy era? The answer to those questions would divide France in the years following World War II. The trial of Petain, which took place during a humid July in 1945, would leave some venerating the figure of Petain while others looked upon him as betrayer of the French people.Professor Julian Jackson, is professor emeritus of history with Queen Mary University of London. His latest work is France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain published by Harvard University Press in 2023, covers the political trial of Marshal Petain for treason. Dr. Jackson has authored an award-winning biography of Charles de Gaulle and other works on the history of modern France including his next work an exploration of the life of Andre Gide.Rick Northrop is an ex-journalist and undergraduate student in Calgary, Alberta Canada. He can be reached at rnorthrop2001@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Carl Ernst’s and Mbaye Lo’s new book I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America (UNC Press, 2023) is a fascinating and rivetting book that offers the most authoritative account to date of the life and Arabic writings of Omar Ibn Said, a scholar from what is today Senegal who was sold to slavery in the early 19th century and brought to Southern US. Moreover, this path paving book offers critical correctives to dominant perceptions of Said’s remarkable life narrative. Rather than understand Omar Ibn Said as a Muslim slave who had made peace with his new life in the US or had even converted to Christianity, Ernst and Lo demonstrate the deep imprints of Islam and Islamicate knowledge traditions in Omar Ibn Said’s varied writings such as his reflections on his life and his letters. This book, written in lyrical and engaging prose, makes available for the first time comprehensive translations of Omar Ibn Said’s Arabic writings into English. It also makes a compelling and convincing case for taking seriously Arabic texts from Africa as part of world literature.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

On today’s podcast, we are changing things up a bit. Instead of interviewing the author of a recent book, I am interviewing another podcaster about their recent narrative podcast season. So, today, I’m interviewing Joel Anderson, staff writer at Slate, co-host of Hang Up and Listen, and the host of Seasons 3, 6, and, most recently, 8 of Slow Burn. On this episode, I chop it up with Joel about Season 8 of Slow Burn, titled, Becoming Justice Thomas. Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Kevin Landis's One Public: New York’s Public Theater in the Era of Oskar Eustis (Methuen Drama, 2022) tells the story of the remarkable first 17 years (2005-2022) of Oskar Eustis's tenure as the Artistic Director of The Public, the theatre sometimes called America's de facto national theatre. But it is not a book about Eustis. Instead, it is a book about the hundreds of artists and administrators who, guided by Eustis's leadership, create extraordinary theatre at The Public's Astor Place headquarters, at the Delacorte in Central Park, and in touring productions around the city and across the country. A central organizing principle in the book is the contradiction (and Eustis is not afraid of contradiction) between the theatre's left-wing, Marxian ambitions and the reality that it exists in a hyper-capitalist country with little public support for the arts. Is it possible to keep tickets affordable, salaries liveable, and the work on stage exciting? If The Public hasn't figured out how to do all three, it isn't for lack of trying, and One Public provides detailed case studies of a series of attempts live up to this theatre's inspiring, impossible, necessary ideals.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography