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.

I'd have to say that Nixon feels like the public figure who most dominated my life - from the time I went to fourth grade wearing a Nixon-Lodge button in the fall of 1960, through my college years, which overlapped with Kent State, Cambodia, the China trip and all the rest.

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.

Thomas Mallon Quotes