Reconsidering No Man Knows My History

Foreword: The Example of Fawn McKay Brodie: A Tribute

Foreword The Example of Fawn McKay Brodie: A Tribute WILLIAM MULDER Fawn McKay Brodie and I were strict contemporaries: We were born in the same year; we met on several occasions; we corresponded ; and once, in June 1978, we shared the same platform with the distinguished Black historian John Hope Franklin at a Phi Beta Kappa ceremony. The Papers ofFawn McKay Brodie, officially so called, which now form part of the special collections at the University of Utah, occupy twenty-five linear feet of shelf space in the Marriott Library. The records of her final work, the Nixon biography, alone fill twenty-nine boxes, evidence of what she called, in the middle of the project, "the enormous swamp known as the Nixon literature . It is like the great swamp of the upper Nile known as the Sudd, which blocked navigation on that river for centuries, and still does. I don't know," she said, "whether I'll ever find my way through the accumulated vegetation in the river of Nixon's life." She did find her way through, as we know, and completed her book one month before she died of what one of her sons has described as a "horribly rapacious" cancer in January 1981. It was her last testament in a life-long scholarly obsession with sifting truth from the lies we tell, consciously or unconsciously, when we manipulate the past. To browse among the Brodie papers is to trace the intellectualjourney of one of the notable women of our time. vii viii Reconsidering No Man Knows My History We catch glimpses of that journey in reminiscences now part of the University of Utah's collective memoirs published as Remembering (1981); in the interviews and correspondence, the notes, records, articles, and reviews that comprise the Brodie collection ; and finally in the major biographies themselves, the published results of all that research: No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet (1945), Thaddeus Stevens, Scourge of the South (1959), The Devil Drives: The Life of Sir Richard Burton (1967), Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974), and Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character (1981). In these we may perceive Fawn's preoccupation with truth and lying, and we detect a pattern of love and envy, attraction and aversion, admiration for and bafflement about the public figures (all of them male, incidentally) she chose to write about. We detect that she had very positive feelings toward Stevens (like him, she felt herself a scourge), toward Jefferson (who nevertheless lived a lie), and toward Burton (whose fascination for Fawn grew out of her editing The City ofthe Saints); ambivalent feelings toward Joseph Smith (by whom she felt betrayed); and finally loathing for Nixon (whose life at one point she called "an obscenity"). Each book began with puzzling questions she felt simply had to be answered, paradoxes that had to be resolved; and each book proved to be controversial because in each Fawn had to take courageous risks. Her husband, Bernard Brodie, a distinguished political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), with whom during a year in Paris she wrote a history of weaponry, From Cross-Bow to H-Bomb, and who also died of cancerjust two years before her own death, used to say of her, "History is alive with mysteries, and Fawn is always in busy pursuit of the answers." In the Brodie papers we can also chronicle her courageous confrontation with a series of establishments: the family, which objected to her marrying a Jew (and at the same time her husband's family objected to his marrying a Mormon); the Mormon establishment , which excommunicated her for heresy; the historical establishment, which, for her suspect method of psychobiography, Foreword ix denied her tenure at UCLA until the chancellor reversed the decision ; and, within that establishment, the "Jefferson establishment ," which called her "intimate history" of him "dirty graffiti on his statue" and led to a memorable debate between Fawn and Gary Wills of the New York Review ofBooks, her high executioner, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 1975. For the record, Fawn's excommunication did not come at her own request, as has been widely believed: when the missionaries arrived with the summons to the bishop's court in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to answer charges of heresy and to defend herself against excommunication, she did not go, "cheerfully admitting...