Me and My Shadow: Living with Richard Nixon

In “Me and My Shadow: Living With Richard Nixon,” Thomas Mallon draws on decades of his written and spoken considerations of the political figure who has dominated his imagination more than any other. The talk, accompanied by dozens of photographs, reconstructs the four years of the Nixon presidency that the Class of 1973 lived through at Brown, and explores the university’s unique connections to the Watergate scandal, through such alumni as E. Howard Hunt and Charles Colson. But mostly it seeks to understand Mallon’s own appalled sympathy for (and sometimes even identification with) Nixon, from the time of the Kennedy-Nixon election of 1960, when he was nine years old, through the writing of his novel about Nixon and Watergate, and finally on to the tumultuous politics of the present moment. “The personal is political” was an idea that had great currency during the Class of ’73’s time at Brown. “Me and My Shadow” demonstrates that the political is also deeply personal.
October 14, 2023
Brown University