A True Gentlewoman (article)

This is a small piece of personal reminiscence, and not an intimate one. My aunt, Martha Wolfenstein, knew Fawn Brodie better than I did. They became acquainted through their husbands, Nathan Leites and Bernard Brodie, both of whom were affiliated with the RAND Corporation. By the time I joined the political science faculty at UCLA in 1965,

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Martha and Nathan had divorced. Martha, who was one of the sustaining presences and major intellectual influences in my life, came to spend the summers here in Los Angeles. Through her, I met Fawn and Bernard, at about the same time that (at her suggestion) I read No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith and Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South.

Fawn was a McKay, and the McKays were, so to speak, Mormon aristocracy. Hence, she was to the manor born; whether or not for this reason, she carried herself with an almost regal composure. Tall and straight, with dark hair and a strikingly handsome face, she had an unmistakable dignity. But she was also a rebel. No Man Knows My History exposed Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, as a conscious fraud, and this led to her excommunication. So I suppose one might think of her as royalty in exile; of course, that is just where she wanted to be—in exile in America. She was, more than most people I have known, deeply American, rooted in the country and its history. Taking these features in combination, one understands the focus of her work: the biography of great men, including fathers of the Republic. This includes in a certain way the biography of Nixon, whom she viewed as betraying the fiduciary responsibilities of his high office.

The Brodies lived in a beautiful, characteristically southern California house lodged high up in the Santa Monica Mountains in Pacific Palisades. Table talk at that time was largely political, shaped by racial conflict and the war in Vietnam. About the latter, I remember one moment in particular. Government propaganda was aimed at creating an Us-Them inter-group dynamic, with the North Vietnamese as Communists who must be defeated lest the dominos fall. Fawn, working her way through this ideological miasma, concluded that Ho Chi Minh was a founding father of his country and that the Vietnamese struggle was more like the American Revolution than a Communist threat to the Free World. In other words, she was not fooled by governmental misleadership; the template for her critical intelligence was the American experience.

As her published work shows, Fawn was an assiduous researcher. Most of all, however, I think she was a puzzle solver. Either in the data she collected or data that lay close to hand, she would find things that didn’t fit together, or that led elsewhere, or that called for explanation. She would communicate about her work this way, as a thought process and a puzzling out of things. Hence, in listening to her, one was led into her world and taken along as a member of her hunting party.

Fawn Brodie was perhaps the most forthright person I have known. In her, there was nothing wasted and nothing in excess.

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