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

Fawn McKay Brodiewas an American 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 biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement.
Raised in Utah in a respected, if impoverished, family who were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), Fawn McKay drifted away from Mormonism during her years of graduate work at the University of Chicago and married Bernard Brodie, an academic who became a national defense expert; they had three children.