45 years ago today - Jan 29, 1979

Fawn Brodie writes to a friend: "The volume would have been a harsher indictment of Joseph Smith had it not been for [her husband Bernard's] influence. I was angered by the obvious nature of the fraud in his writing of the Book of Mormon; I felt that his revelations all came out of needs of the moment and had nothing to do with God, and I thought the frantic search for wives in the last four years of his life betrayed a libertine nature that was to me at the time quite shocking. My husband kept urging me to look at the man's genius, to explain his successes, and to make sure that the reader understood why so many people loved him, and believed in him. If there is real compassion for Joseph Smith in the book, and I believe there is, it is more the result of the influence of my husband than anyone else." Some Mormons had blamed her non-Mormon husband for the controversial book.