Kasey Pipes (MA in Government ’99) returned to the JHU Center for Advanced Governmental Studies to discuss his latest book publication: After the Fall: The Remarkable Comeback of Richard Nixon (Regnery History: 2019).
Kasey has made a major contribution in this area of Nixon scholarship as there have been very few books that have dealt with Nixon in his post-presidency. In part, there is not much scholarship on this time period because the Nixon family owns Nixon’s post-presidential papers, but gave Kasey unprecedented access to them.
The result is a riveting book that reveals new information and insight into how Nixon made his remarkable comeback to re-emerge on the political scene as an elder statesman-like figure. Kasey argues in his book that Nixon was far more active and successful in his post-presidency than many realize and that he set the model for post-presidential life that subsequent presidents have since followed.
Nixon also had a huge impact on foreign policy in his post-presidency, encouraging Reagan to leverage SDI in his negotiations with Gorbachev, helping to save US-China relations after Tiananmen Square (and bluntly telling the Chinese what a crisis they had created), and advising Clinton on how to work with Yeltsin.
Since leaving JHU, he has had a successful career, publishing Ike’s Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality in 2007. That book was an amazon.com national bestseller and hailed by The Wall Street Journal as “a highly readable and credible account of Eisenhower’s struggle with race and civil rights.”
Kasey is a Norris Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College and the co-founder of the issues management firm Corley Pipes and partner at the public affairs firm High Water Strategies. He was a former White House speechwriter for President Geroge W. Bush and also an adviser and speechwriter for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was chief author as well of the 2004 National Republican Party Platform. Kasey lives in Fort Worth, Texas with his wife and three children. Kasey acknowledged how much his time at JHU’s MA in Government Program helped him in many of his accomplishments.
