On Nixon’s Madness:
An Emotional History
Johns Hopkins University Press (2023)
For decades, journalists, critics and scholars have searched for the “real Nixon.” Was he a Red-baiter, a worldly statesman, a war criminal or, in the end, a punchline? The quest to root out the “real Richard Nixon,” the phrase-ripping Hunter S. Thompson wrote, was to unmask the “man behind the masks or maybe to find that there was no mask at all.” On Nixon’s Madness intersects biography, intellectual and cultural history to embrace his elusiveness, his secretiveness and his whirling anger. It is a history of emotions in its attempt to understand Nixon’s affective life in what the French scholar Lucien Febvre described as that “darkness where psychology wrestles with history.” It is a psychohistory not in the classic sense of analytic diagnosis. Instead, this work examines one of Nixon’s ideas—his idea of the “madman theory”—to provide an avenue into understanding his subjectivity, his perspectives and motivations. Nixon saw himself as a man of extremes in tension between dangerous emotions and the need for affective inhibition. He constructed his life around this dialectic as a struggle between secretly hiding his hand and going all in. Publishers Weekly writes, “Jacobson is an astute observer and a graceful writer. This book brings one of America's most enigmatic presidents into sharper focus."
The Saints and the Navigators:
An Storied History of the Early Cold War
(in progress)
The Saints and the Navigators: A Storied History of the Early Cold War gathers the travelogues, diaries and letters of rare Americans who ventured beyond the Iron Curtain to the Soviet Union from the end of World War II through Joseph Stalin’s death and Nikita Khrushchev’s reign, from terror-filled years through the opening of détente. These travelogues were conceived as first-line accounts, written by those few Americans who braved to scout the communist camp, and what Americans saw, how the Soviet Union smelled, the narratives they crafted, what conclusions they drew for their readers tells us a great deal about the sense-making, both figuratively and literally, of their time.