![]() McKay was one of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, one of the ruling bodies of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints (LDS). Her grandfather, on her mother’s side, was the president of Brigham Young University, the theological center of Mormonism, and her uncle David O. She had grown up devoutly Mormon in a small hamlet outside Ogden, Utah. ![]() In 1977, I knew only vaguely that there was a dark cloud in Fawn Brodie’s life. But Brodie’s thoughts were profoundly insightful and immensely useful to the enterprise. Of course, this outrageous breach of security would surely have gotten me fired, had Frost known about it. ![]() Each night after the tapings near San Clemente, I would take the transcripts of the day’s proceedings to her home in Pacific Palisades so that she might counsel me, and I in turn Frost, about how the television prosecution of the former president might dig deeper and become more revealing. Obsessed as I was with getting to the inner core of Nixon’s personality, and determined to get Frost to focus on that mystery, I made this estimable writer into my secret adviser. When I was David Frost’s Watergate adviser for the Nixon Interviews in 1977, I carried on a secret communication with the best-selling author Fawn Brodie, who was then toward the end of her life and working on her intimate “psychobiography” of Richard Nixon. ![]()
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