A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both.

Early life
Fawn McKay was the second of five children of Thomas E. Jefferson sold 80000 copies in hardback 270000 copies in paperback and netted Brodie $350000 in royalties—adjusted for inflation more than a million dollars in the early twenty-first century. In an attempt to improve his family's fortunes he developed the notion of golden plates and then the concept of a religious novel the Book of Mormon.

Philipp Rosenberg Brodie's study of Richard Nixon's early career demonstrated a weakness of psychobiography when written by an author who disliked the subject. Fawn McKay Brodie (September 15 1915 – January 10 1981) was a biographer and one of the first female professors of history at UCLA who is best known for Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974) a work of psychobiography and No Man Knows My History (1945) an early and still influential non-hagiographic biography of Joseph Smith Jr. Raised in Utah in a respected if impoveriFawn M. Brodied Latter-day Saint (LDS Church) family Fawn McKay drifted away from Mormonism during her years of graduate work at the University of Chicago and married the ethnically Jewish national defense expert Bernard Brodie with whom Fawn M. Brodie had three children.