Description:

Nixon Richard

Single page TLS, 6.75" x 8.75", dated "October 15, 1971" on White House stationery with the embossed seal to top. Signed by Richard Nixon as "RN". Accompanied with the original White House envelope, 7.25" x 5.5".Expected center fold to TLS, else fine.

Richard Nixon, as President, types a very personal thank you letter to Jack Dreyfus. The two had a very long standing friendship. Dreyfus, considered the 2nd most significant money manager of the last century, had contributed heavily to Nixon's campaigns both in 1960, and in 1968 and met frequently with Nixon. This lovely letter written to Jack Dreyfus thanks him for the use his home at Minot Island, in addition to copy of Creed or Chaos which Nixon apparently read while visiting. Minot Island located in Bangor Maine, was one of Dreyfus's personal residences, and a place Nixon would come to visit quite often. Jack has purposely set up his compound to accept helicopters allowing for Presidential visits saying, "We have scraped a piece of land level so that a helicopter can land there".

In Nixon's letter he also reference the book Creed or Chaos, a raging oppositional view about the premise of power, economics, and war, written by Dorothy Sayers.

She concludes in her book “Creed or Chaos” with a discussion of seven of the important dogmas about which she found the most “ignorance and misunderstanding”: God, man, sin, judgment, matter (the material universe), work, and society.The same “ignorance and misunderstanding” exists today, and “Creed or Chaos” offers an excellent starting point for recovering these vital doctrines.

Sayers touches upon cultural wars and believes such debates as “dabbling about on the surface of things. … The people who say that this is a war of economics or of power-politics are only dabbling about on the surface of things. Even those who say it is a war to preserve freedom and justice and faith have gone only half-way to the truth. The real question is what economics and politics are to be used for; whether freedom and justice and faith have any right to be considered at all;at bottom it is a violent and irreconcilable quarrel about the nature of God and the nature of man and the ultimate nature of the universe; it is a war of dogma."

An odd book that would have been read by both men focusing on the need for dogma as a basic necessary structure for leading people (and in the case of her book she focuses on Christian faith) and demonstrates that such a "doctrineless Christianity" is not merely impossible; it's dangerous. Indeed, argues Sayers, if Christians don't steep themselves in doctrine, then the Christian Faith -- and the world outside the Faith -- will descend into chaos.

Given Nixon was President at the time he read this book and requested the copy, it lends one to wonder to what end he was finding this to be of interest. Certainly one question to explore further.

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