【ALL OUT: AJ RAVAL】

Editor's note: This is ALL OUT: AJ RAVALthe 37th entry in the writer's project to read one book about each of the U.S. Presidents in the year prior to Election Day 2016. Follow Marcus' progress at the @44in52 Twitter account and the44 in 52 Spreadsheet.

"What the hell is he thinking?" That's a common refrain for anyone who follows politics in 2016. But it's also something millions of Americans spend years wondering about Richard Nixon.

In Being Nixon: A Man Divided, Evan Thomas shows us an enigma shrouded in paranoia. Tricky Dick was a walking study in contradictions. Combative in public, he had a massive inferiority complex in private -- and was surprisingly easily manipulated by the people that surrounded him in the White House.

Here was a man who deplored Ivy Leaguers, but surrounded himself with may Ive League grads. He was torn between trying to be good and giving in to his darker impulses. But above all, Nixon as a man who badly wanted approval.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Nixon comes off as haughty and always suspicious of the potential plots swirling around him. By surrounding himself with men like John Erlichman and H.R. Haldeman, players who enabled Nixon's sense of paranoia, he enabled a shaky conspiracy that spiraled out of control.

That included the hiring of two seemingly incompetent men (E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy), which led directly to the all-important Watergate burglary.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

To delve into Nixon in detail would take a dozen books. But Thomas did a good job of capturing my attention even as my wife and I prepared for a cross-country move (more on that with later books). I consumed this book almost exclusively via audiobook while packing boxes and sifting through what to keep and what to throw out.

I've always been wary of audiobooks; I feel like I miss stuff and just don't ingest everything the way I do when reading visually. With Nixon, that wasn't an issue. Whether it was the bumbling nature of the Watergate burglars or the strange anecdotes of Nixon's life, I found myself tuned in the entire time.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

That's not just Thomas' narrative; it's the subject matter itself. Nixon is fascinating to learn about, from the days when he drove his future wife Pat on dates with other men to the bizarre "frenemies" struggle he had with Henry Kissinger throughout his entire time in the White House.

Things kept happening to Nixon that seemed to feed into his paranoia and sense of worthlessness. The most famous early example was his vetting for VP under Eisenhower in 1952, when he was accused of running a shady slush fund. Even after he gave his well-received "Checkers speech" on live television, Ike still left him twisting in the wind as to whether or not he'd be kept on the ticket.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

And then of course, there were the tapes. (One anecdote gleaned from this whole project: J. Edgar Hoover told Nixon that his predecessor, LBJ, had bugged Air Force One as well as the Oval Office. This fed Nixon's desire to tape everything himself -- even though the plane-bugging turned out to be a lie.)

The drama over these tapes, which helped end his presidency as well as revealing how Nixon was prone to angry outbursts plus racist and anti-Semetic sentiments, is well trod. But listening to the excerpts, even if they were spoken by the narrator of the audiobook and not Nixon himself, the tapes made a deeper impact on me than they would have if I'd read the book visually.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

When these excerpts would come up, I'd pause and just sit there, some random book in my hand waiting to be boxed away, and I'd stare off into space. I was envisioning Nixon slumped at his desk in the Oval Office, staring at Haldeman with pleading eyes to help him figure a way out of whatever mess he was in.

Nixon wasn't without accomplishments, both domestic (he founded the EPA) and foreign (his diplomatic breakthroughs with the Soviets and China were real and lasting). But the mess he made, and the way his own personal failings drove him to professional failures as he was egged on by those around him, is something that sticks with you.

Watergate shaped the nation and, consequently, the elections of the next several presidents. As I read up on them, I'll be more attuned to how the people that surrounded the presidents fed their egos and shaped their administrations, for better and for worse.

Days to read Washington: 16

Days to read Adams: 11Days to read Jefferson: 10Days to read Madison: 13Days to read Monroe: 6Days to read J. Q. Adams: 10Days to read Jackson: 11Days to read Van Buren: 9Days to read Harrison: 6Days to read Tyler: 3Days to read Polk: 8Days to read Taylor: 8Days to read Fillmore: 14Days to read Pierce: 1Days to read Buchanan: 1Days to read Lincoln: 12Days to read Johnson: 8Days to read Grant: 27Days to read Hayes: 1Days to read Garfield: 3Days to read Arthur: 17Days to hear Cleveland: 3Days to read Harrison: 4Days to read McKinley: 5*Days to read T. Roosevelt: 15*Days to read Taft: 13   *Days to read Wilson: 10  *Days to read Harding: 3*Days to read Coolidge: 7*Days to read Hoover: 9*Days to read FDR: 11*Days to read Truman: 14*Days to read Eisenhower: 11*Days to read JFK: 10*Days to read LBJ: 6*Days to read Nixon: 6Days behind schedule: 19