I'm not convinced that Nixon would have survived in office if he'd burned the tapes, but I do believe he would have served out his presidency if he'd never made them in the first place.

With 'Fellow Travelers,' I think I was consciously trying to imagine what my own life as a gay man might have been like if I'd been born exactly 20 years earlier.

The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us,' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.

Thomas Mallon Quotes