Informazioni generali

Data di nascita: 1935-11-16
Sesso: female
Nazionalità: USA
Luogo di nascita: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Luogo di residenza: Washington, D.C., USA
Istruzione: Wellesley College
Attività lavorative: journalist
author
biographer
book reviewer
Organizzazioni: The Atlantic Monthly
The New Yorker
Public Broadcasting Service
Breve biografia: Elizabeth Drew, née Brenner, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of Estelle and William J. Brenner, a furniture manufacturer. She attended Wellesley College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1957 with a BA in political science. Her first job in journalism was with Congressional Quarterly in 1959. She was the Washington correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly from 1967 to 1973, and The New Yorker from 1973 to 1992. She made regular appearances on "Agronsky and Company" on PBS television and hosted her own interview program, "Thirty Minutes With..." between 1971 and 1973, for which she won an Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award. Drew was a panelist for "Meet the Press" on NBC-TV for many years and made frequent appearances on the PBS News Hour and other radio and television programs. In 1984, she moderated the debate between the Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination.

She is the author of 14 books, including Washington Journal: The Events of 1973-74 (1975), which grew out of her reporting on the Watergate scandal; On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (1994); Citizen McCain (2002); George W. Bush's Washington (2004); and Richard M. Nixon (2007). She gave the prestigious Knight Lecture at Stanford University in 1997.
Drew is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. She is a former director of the Council on Foreign Relations. She married J. Patterson Drew in 1964, and after his death in 1970, she remarried to David Webster in 1981.

Utenti

Recensioni

Richard M. Nixon: The American Presidents Series… di Elizabeth Drew

It was to me a questionable decision to assign the Nixon volume in this series to professional Nixon hater Drew, who made her name with her tenaciously vicious reporting of the Watergate affair. Still, she knows where the bodies are buried, and history has in the main justified a great deal of the furor over the scandal. Drew dismisses domestic policy in a short chapter saying that Nixon was uninterested in it, aside from attempting to crush dissent over the war,. and mostly delegated it to John Ehrlichman. That means that the book's thrust is dominated by foreign policy, principally the Viet Nam drawdown and, of course, Watergate. Both of these accounts are well-drawn short histories of complex events. She appends an interesting coda describing the Nix's attempts, pretty successful ones at that, to reinvent himself as a foreign policy sage in his retirement years, evincing only limited agreement with his suitability for the role. Throughout runs the theme of how Nixon's psychological and character problems, exacerbated by drunkenness, made him unsuitable for the office.… (altro)

Segnalato

Big_Bang_Gorilla | 1 altra recensione | Apr 13, 2023 |

Washington journal: The events of 1973-1974 di Elizabeth Drew

Drew's book was a trip down memory lane. I was a college student and anti-Nixon. I remember the Ervin hearings and all the furor in 1973-74 around the Watergate break in and cover up.. This was all before cable and 24 hour news channels. I have to admit that I do make comparisons with the Nixon and Trump administrations. What Drew's book reminded me was that there still was support for Nixon around the country and in Washington. I enjoyed the book---it is a great reference for those wanting to know about Watergate and Nixon's last days as President. It's also a cautionary tale for our politics now...… (altro)

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writemoves | 1 altra recensione | Jul 16, 2017 |

Washington Journal: The Events of 1973-1974 di Elizabeth Drew

Elizabeth Drew's "Washington Journal" is such an amazing achievement. She just spent her time talking to back benchers of the House and Senate, and wrote incisively and well of the struggles and the back and forth of the debate over Watergate.

Lot of half forgotten names in here - the wonderful Peter Rodino, who stood up and chaired the House Judiciary Committee with grace and dignity and horse sense.

And Charles Sandman who defended the President to the bitter end wtih wit and passion and intelligence. This is historical stuff, debate framing stuff. A lot of this will be quoted by historians and politicians for as long as the Republic stands.

Is Impeachment a legal or a political process? To Drew it's both - and she shows both sides eloquently and well.

Just to see how the House and Senate struggle towards consensus on this most difficult issue is worth the price of admission. A group of very human and fallible men and women sat down and looked this stuff over and dickered and dithered and came out the other side. And the nation stood.

A great story told well by a great journalist. Recommended… (altro)

Segnalato

magicians_nephew | 1 altra recensione | Aug 8, 2014 |

Richard M. Nixon: The American Presidents Series… di Elizabeth Drew

Elizabeth Drew brought considerable experience as a political journalist and author to this biography of Richard Nixon, her contribution to the American Presidents series that was edited by Arthur Schlesinger. Her account is accurate in its factual details, and manages to cover in ~150 pages most of the major points (both high and low) of Nixon's professional life. This she does by drawing heavily on four recent biographies of Nixon, and many other secondary sources, as revealed by her frequent bibliographic citations.

However, her view of Richard Nixon is unmistakably partisan. Indeed, the man that emerges from her portrait is perhaps smart and talented, yet cynical, unprincipled, manipulative, conniving, foul-mouthed, racist, suspicious, paranoid, remote, unloved, lonely, and haunted. His much - vaunted political skills and foreign policy acumen are largely dismissed, as is his attempt to remake himself into an elder statesman after his resignation. Even Nixon's foreign policy successes (the opening to China, arms control) are viewed with a jaundiced eye. In another writer's hands, the same material would reveal a resilient, visionary man who (whatever his character flaws, and notwithstanding Nixon's expansion of the brutal war in southeast Asia) overcame his own past as a red-baiting opportunist to establish ties with his nation's two chief international rivals, and who (unlike many of today's Republicans) saw government as a means by which the lives of ordinary Americans might be improved. One might also consider whether his political downfall and resignation resulted as much from overzealous and inexperienced aides as from his own actions.

The point is that what one sees in this complex, divisive figure is strongly influenced by one's predilections and prejudices. Drew is too opinionated about her subject to view him with the dispassion of mature historical scholarship. The problem is not that she has a strong point of view and asserts it, but rather, that her account never raises the possibility of alternative viewpoints. In an NPR interview, Drew reportedly stated that she wrote this book to counter the growing nostalgia for the Nixon presidency. Her agenda is evident throughout. Overall, this book is factually accurate, but a more nuanced and dispassionate account would have been more credible from a scholarly standpoint.

Readers familiar with any of the previous Nixon biographies, of which there are many, will find few revelations in Drew's book. One such relevation may be the unsupported allegation (previously revealed in Anthony Summers' The Arrogance of Power) that Nixon was taking excessive (unprescribed) doses of Dilantin as an anti-anxiety agent -- the evidence is weak enough that it's hard to see why Drew considers it worth repeating, unless to sully the name of her subject. Another revelation (borrowed from Summers' book and elsewhere) is the direct evidence that Nixon secretly sabotaged Pres. Johnson's Vietnam peace talks in 1968 by urging South Vietnam's President Thieu to withdraw -- thereby helping his own candidacy for president. That this latter action is considered literally treasonous by some legal scholars, oddly, goes unmentioned in Drew's book.

As a brief introduction to Richard Nixon, Elizabeth Drew's book is serviceable, but a less partisan work would have better served the purposes of Schlesinger's presidental series. What's more, the author's sometimes awkward prose would have benefitted from some aggressive editing. Nevertheless, Drew's portrait implicitly offers a clear answer to the rhetorical question with which she closes her book, that being whether this "most peculiar and haunted of presidents was fit to occupy the most powerful office in the nation." Future historians may note this work as evidence of how divisive and controversial Richard Nixon remained 33 years after the end of his 5.5 year presidency.… (altro)