CHAPTER 16

Politics as a Profession—Johnsons and Nixons

Rebekah Baines and Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr.

Compare father and son: the same pale skin, the same slicked-back hair, the same bulbous nose, the same enormous ears, the same penetrating eyes and tight mouth. Both over a slender six feet. Both walked angled forward, the same confident strut, the loping strides. Their clothes, cowboy or cosmopolitan, were cut with care. Imagine them in action, their “treatment” enveloping whoever must be convinced, constituent or congressman, one long arm over his shoulders, the other hand grasping his suit lapel or the strap of his overalls, chin lowered to chest, eyes narrowed, nose almost in the face of the prey, yet a slight conspiratorial smile, “We know we can count on you…. We need you to come through.” This was the picture of Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. and his son Lyndon Baines Johnson, each viewed at the age of, say, thirty-five or so, both professional politicians in midcareer. Lyndon Johnson didn’t merely resemble his father physically. In his childhood he wanted nothing more than to be like him. Yet after Sam lost everything, proving he had more scruples than sense, it all changed. Finally, near the end of Sam’s life, there was a welcome reconciliation.

The Hill Country was in the blood of both. However, Sam’s political and business ambitions never really went beyond it. Lyndon’s would encompass not only the whole of Texas but the nation—and ultimately the entire world. At the end, Lyndon too was undone, but not by anything so trivial as the fall of cotton prices. Lyndon’s fall was that of a giant, brought down as the world watched.

Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., born on October 11, 1877, the first son after four girls, was his father’s special joy. Bright “Little Sam” grew up listening to the older Sam, who had known boom and bust, swapping Civil War stories with his neighbors and sharing their plight as small farmers and ranchers unequally ranged against the domination of “the interests.” Populist politics was in his blood, but also enterprise. Sam earned a teaching certificate and taught for several years. In 1904 he won a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, the first of his six successive terms in the legislature. At least in appearance he seemed the prototypical Lone Star State lawmaker of the old school. Robert Dallek describes Sam as “six foot two, with coal black hair, a big Stetson hat, hand-tooled boots, into which he stuck his pants.” He was convivial, a hearty backslapper, and was a frequent patron of the Congress Avenue bars in wide-open Austin. Biographer Robert Caro writes that Sam also frequented the lively street’s bordellos. Ubiquitous lobbyists “dispensed the ‘three Bs’ favored by legislators—beefsteak, bourbon, and blondes.” But everyone soon discovered what Sam’s father already knew. His son was different. He paid his own way for everything.

Many of the causes that Sam Johnson Jr. championed were hardly popular with the powerful—the eight-hour day, pure food and drugs, taxing corporations, equitable justice, regulating utility rates—the whole litany of Lone Star liberalism. Politics came first, but Sam was hardly averse to making money. He expanded his ranch, bought and sold livestock, invested in real estate, and traded in high-risk commodities futures. When the bottom dropped out of the market, and he was all but wiped out, he started all over again.

One of those who admired him was his predecessor in the legislature, a highly literate lawyer named Joseph Wilson Baines, who was down on his luck. The Baines heritage of learning and piety originated in Scotland and was transported almost seamlessly to the New World. The Reverend George Washington Baines, who brought the family from North Carolina to Texas, was a highly regarded Baptist minister who became president of Baylor University. Of his six sons, none excelled in so many areas as Joseph. A lay preacher and pillar of his church and community, he served in the Civil War, taught school, put out a newspaper, and by the 1870s was a very successful lawyer. He was named Texas secretary of state at least in part because of his writing talents. He had married the agreeable daughter of a country physician when she was not yet fifteen, which raised only a few eyebrows at that time and place.

It was twelve years before they had their first child, on June 26, 1881, a girl who grew up to look much like her mother. They named her Rebekah, after the wife of Isaac in the Old Testament. Joseph taught Rebekah to read and appreciate the works of great writers and poets, to love the natural world, and to pursue a life committed to others. She went on to Baylor, one of few Texas women in those days to pursue higher education. Thrilled, as Doris Kearns writes, by her father’s “eloquent speeches on the rights and duties of mankind” in the state legislature, she was stunned when somehow he lost his bid to be elected to Congress.

Disaster followed defeat. Joseph Wilson Baines had made one serious lapse that had gone bad—a land speculation involving overgenerous rentals to tenant farmers. The droughts devastated their crops. Hoping to stay at Baylor, Rebekah gave elocution lessons, taught English to the German-speaking residents of Fredricksburg, and wrote articles about Hill Country happenings as a “stringer” for major Texas newspapers. She hoped someday to make her living as a writer. Baines suggested to his daughter that Sam Johnson might be an interesting subject for an interview.

She didn’t get much of a story. Sam’s manners were rough, his language no more literate than that of his back-country neighbors, and he was very “cagey” about answering any specific questions. Yet, despite everything, she sensed something “dashing and dynamic” about him. Most of all, his political credo emulated her father’s. As for Sam, while he wasn’t about to broadcast it, he was absolutely bowled over by the bright and beautiful Rebekah Baines. He had never met anyone like her, a lovely, delicate-looking young lady of quality who actually enjoyed talking about politics. Her slender body was shapely, her eyes a deep blue, her hair ash blonde. Caro describes her as a “soft-spoken, gentle, dreamy-eyed young lady who wore crinolines, and lace, and lovely bonnets.” Rebekah’s daughter would recall her mother’s “flawless, beautiful white skin, protected from the sun.” Soon Sam seemed to be showing up almost daily, on one pretext or another, at the Baineses’, some twenty miles from his isolated cabin on the banks of the Pedernales River. And Rebekah’s father genuinely liked Johnson, viewing him as a young man with promise, and fostered the relationship.

However, in November 1906, Joseph Wilson Baines died. Grief-stricken Rebekah memorialized him as “the dominant force in my life as well as my adored parent, reverenced mentor, and most interesting companion.” Perhaps her distracted state after the death of her father made Rebekah more amenable, but during Sam Johnson’s whirlwind courtship her curiosity about him had turned into something closer to affection. It would be put to the test almost immediately. On August 20, 1907, she became Mrs. Sam Ealy Johnson Jr.

Moving to Sam’s three-room shack—it wasn’t much more than that, although he painted it a bright yellow to cheer her up—wasn’t so much going to a new locality as to a new planet. Everything around her reflected desolation—the cabin itself, the bleak, dusty landscape, her neighbors, raucous farmhands and their wives, no less coarse. Worst of all, when Sam drank he could become uncontrollable. Perhaps he harbored some inner demon.

Yet she coped. Delicate Rebekah loved to cook. Even though there was no electricity, she managed to prepare meals in harvest season for as many as twenty workers at a time. She waged an unrelenting campaign to keep the cabin clean. She never gave up hope for something better, keeping her good china and linens in readiness, should Sam bring back someone prominent from Austin. For all Rebekah’s pretensions, Sam understood that she, whose complaints had been limited to wistful looks and sighs, was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And with all his faults, he was the best company she had.

On an August morning little more than a year after they had married, as Doris Faber puts it, Rebekah “discerned the reason she had been brought forth on this earth.” When she went into labor, the local creeks were rising and Sam was away. His father, who lived nearby, saddled up his horse to bring back a midwife. It was hours before a doctor was able to make his way to the Johnson cabin. “It was daybreak, On Thursday, August 27, 1908,” as Rebekah put it in her rather florid style, “The light came in from the east, bringing a deep stillness … and then there came a sharp compelling cry—the most awesome, happiest sound known to human ears—the cry of a newborn baby, the first child of Sam Ealy and Rebekah Johnson was ‘discovering America.’” After hearing the news, white-bearded old Sam Johnson, oblivious to the weather, mounted his horse and rode wildly from farm to farm, proclaiming, “A U.S. senator was born this morning!”

Rebekah’s focus was on the lower house. She looked into the infant’s eyes and saw at once “the deep purposefulness and true nobility” of her father. Surely this child, a Baines as much as a Johnson, would redeem her dreams and those of her father, ascending one day to the House of Representatives. Of all the first mothers, she is the closest equivalent to Joseph P. Kennedy. She not only wanted her first son to be in politics, she had already decided on the position he was destined to fill. To avoid the plebian sound of “Joe Johnson,” the baby was named for a lawyer friend of Sam’s, W. C. Linden, which Rebekah changed to the more “euphonious” Lyndon.

By the time he was three, little Lyndon Baines Johnson was learning everything from the alphabet to arithmetic from his mother. Even as a baby, Lyndon was so friendly and active, crawling surprisingly great distances, that he had to be constantly watched. At four, in part because of his hyperactive proclivities, he was entered in school early, but his mother always remained at the heart of his education. She even suggested to a teacher that he sit in her lap, as he did at home. Rebekah would have three other children—two girls, one named after her, and a son named Sam Houston, for both his father and the notable Texas hero. But Lyndon would always be special.

When he was five, his father gave the family a most welcome gift. They moved into a more spacious six-room Victorian-style home in Johnson City, closer to Sam’s business and legislative interests in Austin. Although the amenities didn’t yet include indoor plumbing, as Caro describes it, the house featured gingerbread scrollwork on its gables, surrounded by mature shade trees and wisteria. For a time Rebekah also became a kind of “Lady Bountiful,” setting out on a one-woman crusade to bring enlightenment to her neighbors. She founded a literary society, directed plays, taught public speaking, encouraged the social graces, promoted temperance, and even held spelling bees and tutoring sessions for the local children. These activities were augmented by lively discourse at the Johnsons’ dinner table. Lyndon Johnson recalled the atmosphere as warm and loving, his mother very much a hands-on parent, given to hugging and encouraging her children. However, she always held Lyndon to a higher standard than the others, and with him her affection was conditional. So much so that, as Kearns writes, when he fell short of her unrelenting expectations, she would shut him out of her sight until he came around. Yet increasingly she would confide in him. As he grew older, it became perplexing.

In 1918, when Lyndon was ten, his father, after a hiatus to look after business, returned to the legislature. Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. had become more temperate. He drank less, his moods were more consistent than Rebekah’s had become, and his affection was more sustained. As his mother’s expectations for him continued to heighten, Lyndon began to view his father as the more emotionally stable of the two.

In the legislature, Sam found new causes to champion. He fought for pensions for World War I veterans and their widows. He opposed an anti-German “loyalty bill” and the growing power of the Ku Klux Klan, becoming an advocate for tolerance. Nor did he forget his own constituents, pushing for graded roads and better schools. The “Johnson Blue Sky Law” protected consumers from unscrupulous stock salesmen. Whenever possible, there was Lyndon, up in the gallery, following every word. His father was now his closest companion. When Sam came home to campaign, Lyndon would join him in the family’s Model T, going from farm to farm, door to door, cajoling and conversing with everyone in that confidential but forceful Johnson style. It was wonderful being with his father at all his rallies and making the rounds. Lyndon later reminisced to Doris Kearns, “Sometimes I wished it could go on forever.”

Sam’s fall was sudden, and no one bailed him out. In 1919 the price of cotton fell so low that for the second time in his life Sam was wiped out, only now he had a family to support. He lost everything, even his home. Only the charity of relatives provided food and shelter. Deserted by his apprehensive friends and supporters, the best job he could find was as a part-time game warden. Later he was hired as a foreman on the road-building crew that graded the very highway from Austin to Fredericksburg that he had promoted in the legislature. Not surprisingly, he began to drink heavily again. Lyndon became contemptuous of both of his parents. Of what value now were his mother’s pretentions and his father’s high ideals? It was particularly bitter for Lyndon, a dapper dresser and president of his high school’s senior class. Did he, too, lack a regard for reality?

What he needed was a kind of antidote—time to blow off steam. Asserting his independence, he took off with some friends for California, hitchhiking, for a carefree year of vagabond drifting. It also gave him time to think. On the long way home, he had what Kearns describes as a sort of epiphany. He would justify his mother’s love and his father’s respect. But first, to prove his physical strength, he worked as a laborer on a road-building gang. Then he finally agreed to go to college.

If it wasn’t quite Harvard, in 1927 inexpensive Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos, only thirty miles away, seemed a more viable alternative. Now all Rebekah’s mental wheels were again set in motion. She helped Lyndon obtain a job in a criminal lawyer’s office and borrowed money from a sympathetic banker to get him started. Responding to his mother’s supportive letters, Lyndon wrote, “Dearest Mother … You can’t realize the difference in atmosphere after one of your sweet letters…. There is no force that exerts the power over me your letters do.” Working his way through college, Lyndon also worked his way up, developing the skills he would later demonstrate in public life. He would never abandon many of the convictions of his father and grandfather, but he also was a clear-eyed realist, placing ambition above ideology. He cultivated older men who had the power to help him, starting with the president of his college.

Attracting the attention of new President Franklin Roosevelt and Texas Democratic leader Sam Rayburn in what had become his familiar fashion, Lyndon was named to run the New Deal’s National Youth Administration in the Lone Star State. His goal remained elective office. In 1934 he found a second gracious, refined woman to sustain him. He married Claudia Alta Taylor, nicknamed “Lady Bird,” only two months after they met. Rebekah approved.

The following year, Sam Johnson suffered his first heart attack. He was still very weak in 1937. Even as Lyndon feared for his father’s life, he sought out his advice. Their incumbent district congressman had died, and a special election, sure to be hotly contested, would be held to succeed him. Although only twenty-nine, Lyndon was intent on running. There were eight other candidates, all older and more experienced. Lyndon’s campaign, his “Blanco Blitz,” simply outhustled them all. Although it was no more true of Johnson than of the other “eight in the dark,” as he put it, his relentlessly promoted campaign theme had been suggested by his father: “A Vote for Johnson is a Vote for Roosevelt’s Program!”

Despite his condition, Sam was intent on helping, reversing the roles of father and son in prior elections. He summoned sufficient strength to launch his son’s campaign from his own front porch, before an audience including almost every resident of Johnson City. “My father became a young man again,” Lyndon recalled, “[he] looked out into all those faces he knew so well and then he looked at me and I saw tears in his eyes as he told the crowd how terribly proud he was of me and how much hope he had for his country…. There was something in his voice and in his face that day that completely captured the emotions of the crowd.” The applause was sustained. “I looked over at my mother and saw that she, too, was clapping and smiling. It was a proud day for the Johnson family.”

Lyndon’s narrow victory made it no less sweet. Ignoring severe stomach pains, he had campaigned with uncommon vigor. His appendix was removed only forty-eight hours before election day. Lyndon’s mother finally had her congressman, and his father had his son back. A few weeks later, Sam had another massive heart attack. When Lyndon returned for his father’s sixtieth birthday, Sam was in the hospital, under an oxygen tent, but he longed to go home. “Lyndon,” he said, in words that would resonate, “I’m going back to that little house in the hills where the people know when you’re sick and care when you die. You have to help me.” Despite the protests of the medical staff, Lyndon took him home. Two weeks later, on October 23, 1937, Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. died. He was buried in the family graveyard, by the stream and under the trees he loved. Lyndon had to settle his father’s remaining debts, but the debt to his father he could never fully repay—the example of a life committed to public service. In Rebekah’s words, Sam Johnson was “a man who loved his fellow man.”

Despite her concern for her husband of thirty years, Rebekah could not contain her emotions at her son’s victory, which she tried to put into words: “My darling Boy, Beyond ‘Congratulations, Congressman,’ what can I say to my dear son in this hour of triumphant success? In this as in all the many letters I have written you there is the same theme: I love you; I believe in you; I expect great things of you. How happy it would have made my precious, noble father to know that the first born of his first born would achieve the position he desired! … How dear to me you are you cannot know, my darling boy, my devoted son, my strength and comfort.”

Rebekah lived another twenty years, settling into a small house in Austin, writing a family history, and continuing to write letters to Lyndon. She witnessed his rise to majority leader of the Senate, but nothing could exceed her excitement about his first triumph, before the age of thirty. Rebekah Baines Johnson died on September 8, 1958, at the age of seventy-seven. Her son said of her, “She was quiet and shy, but she was the strongest person I ever knew.” Not everyone would consider her quiet and shy, but of her strength there is no doubt. She was buried next to her husband in the Johnson family cemetery on the grounds of what came to be called the LBJ Ranch. But in her heart she was always a Baines, the daughter of a man whose dream was redeemed by her son.

Hannah Milhous and Francis Anthony Nixon

“My mother was a saint.” Many of those assembled in the East Room of the White House were getting uncomfortable. They had worked for Richard Nixon, and most of them, whatever the excesses of Watergate, remained devoted to him. Flanking him up front, his family fought back tears. It must have been especially painful for them to get through Nixon’s emotional, rambling farewell to his staff and cabinet on this, the final day of his presidency, August 9, 1974.

Eyes moistened when he paid tribute to his contrasting parents. “I remember my old man,” Nixon went on. “I think they would have called him sort of a little man…. You know what he was, he was a streetcar motorman first, and then he was a farmer, and then he had a lemon ranch. It was the poorest lemon ranch in California, I can assure you. He sold it before they found oil on it. And then he was a grocer, but he was a great man. Because he did his job, and every job counts up to the hilt no matter what happens.” In the end, Francis Anthony Nixon was also the most vigorous supporter of his son’s political career. His mother was more concerned with his character.

What had brought two such dissimilar people together? Their families had even less in common. Stephen Ambrose writes of Nixon, “On his father’s side, his progenitors were generally loud, boisterous, emotional, and Methodist. On his mother’s side, they were generally quiet, restrained, unemotional, and Quaker.” To Herbert Parmet, this contrast helps to explain Richard Nixon’s “schizophrenic existence.” He wanted to be like his mother but was fated to be more like his father, only without the bombast. In his memorable 1968 speech accepting the Republican nomination for president, Nixon recalled hearing train whistles at night as a child and dreaming of the faraway places he would like to see. Both parents were there to launch him on the journey. He revered his mother, but it wasn’t in her nature to nurture the driven, calculated path of Richard Nixon’s career. His father was all bluster but bluntly honest, without a calculated bone in his body, which could hardly be said of his son. Frank Nixon was the greater influence because, as biographer Jonathan Aitken writes, he “fired up” his son. Ambrose calls Frank “the most influential teacher in Richard’s life.” To Parmet, Frank was “the driving force” in his family. While acknowledging that “I have never known anyone to work longer and harder,” Richard Nixon stressed his father’s encouragement. It impelled the youth to hurl his 140-pound body against much bigger opponents on the football field and to become a champion debater and student leader.

Ambrose adds, however, that both the Nixon and Milhous families had at least one quality in common: “a penchant for taking risks.” Otherwise, neither would have found their way to the western edge of North America. Frank Nixon’s forebears, Scottish and English as well as Irish, had come to America in the 1730s, settling in Delaware. Demonstrative Methodists, they were also fervent patriots. Nixons fought in both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Frank Nixon’s grandfather was killed at Gettysburg. Eventually, like so many others, the Nixon family moved west.

Francis Anthony Nixon was born in Elk, Ohio, on December 3, 1878. His life might have been very different but for two things—his restless nature and the death of his adored mother when he was only eight. With sickness and poverty taking their toll, Frank’s father, Samuel, struggled to keep two generations of his family together. He remarried, but his sons found their stepmother so indifferent that she was little short of cruel. In his early teens, Frank took off to make his own way in the world. Combativeness and independence would be lifelong characteristics. If challenged, he would fight anyone of any size, not unlike Harry Truman’s father, but he craved success, however it might come.

Frank found work as a streetcar motorman in Columbus, Ohio. Exposed to the elements, he came to hate both the bitter cold and the management’s indifference to their workmen’s plight. Somehow he managed to organize an informal union to put pressure on a candidate for the state senate to introduce legislation to improve conditions. This first Nixonian political campaign was more successful for the constituents than for the candidate. The other motormen did eventually receive both heat and enclosure, but realizing he would be fired, Nixon hit the road again—or, more precisely, the rails. Possessing little more than his train fare, he took off for the perpetual warmth of southern California. It was 1907, and he was already twenty-eight. Once he arrived, fortunately he quickly found work again, even though his new job was still as a motorman. At least “interurban transit” was a line far more scenic and comfortable than his prior route in Columbus. It ran the twenty miles between Los Angeles and the growing town of Whittier, the major western community of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. Frank decided to room in their boardinghouse near the Whittier terminus. The Quakers extended to the lonely newcomer a friendliness he had not previously experienced. Eventually, he joined their faith, in its more animated western version. He also began to frequent their rather proper parties.

His circumstances may have been humble, but Frank Nixon took pains to make himself presentable. Ambrose writes that he was not especially tall, but handsome, well groomed, and lively. He “wore his dark hair slicked down and precisely parted. He had a fine full face, and a strong but not oversized nose and jaw, deep penetrating eyes and a firm mouth.” His sole suit was “very carefully” pressed. Affable but opinionated, he enjoyed conversing. His early foray into politics had reinforced his support for labor and Democratic populism, but he had rather quickly switched to the “sound money” Republicanism of William McKinley. Ambrose observes that Nixon’s “good looks, cheerful grooming, and animated ways drew people to him, but unfortunately his loud and aggressive personality drove many of them away.”

One person he definitely did not drive away was young Hannah Milhous, whom Frank met at a Valentine’s Day party in 1909. She was fascinated, and he was captivated. As for Hannah’s parents, they were neither fascinated nor captivated with this brash, penniless young man who had the look of a “black Irishman.”

The inception of the roundabout Milhous journey to the New World had begun in the mid-1600s. In England, Oliver Cromwell had concluded that these independent Quakers, who relied on the “inner light” of personal guidance, were one sect he couldn’t win over “either with gifts, honors, offices or places.” When some of them finally began to emigrate, the authorities were relieved to be free of such dangerous nonconformists. William Penn established his “holy experiment” in 1682. After the monarchy had been restored, King Charles II was more than willing to repay the debt he owed to Penn’s father by granting vast tracts of land in North America.

The Milhous family was of German descent, originally named Melhausen, and went to England to fight for Cromwell. Their reward was land in Ireland, in Timahoe County. Somehow, there they were converted to Quakerism, renounced their military heritage, and in 1729 sailed to Pennsylvania, where they had obtained 200 fertile acres to farm. In 1805 they moved to Ohio, and in 1854 to Indiana. They were not so much restless as open to new opportunities. Apparently, one pervasive characteristic many retained, although it seems at odds with their faith, was a rather smug self-satisfaction. As one in-law remarked, “The Milhouses thought highly of the Milhouses.”

By the time he was twenty-eight, Franklin Milhous was already a widower with two young children. Within his community and his church he found a worthy second wife. At the age of thirty, an experienced schoolteacher, Almira Park Burdg had seemed destined for spinsterhood. She was plain but very bright, loved poetry, and fortunately was very fond of children. She would bear seven, six of them girls. The third of these daughters, born on March 7, 1885, was named Hannah after a Milhous aunt and the mother of Samuel in the Old Testament. At least in the eyes of most people, Hannah would be no more a beauty than her mother but was certainly her equal in learning, piety, and charity.

Through the Civil War and beyond, social issues were championed more by eastern Quakers, but Almira had no patience with equivocation. She revered Abraham Lincoln and espoused racial and religious toleration. As Richard Nixon recalled, “My grandmother set the standards for the whole family.” Her husband was more fun-loving but in his own way was equally religious. Together they established lifelong values for their nine children, to be perpetuated in following generations.

Franklin Milhous had been expanding the prosperous plant nursery that he had inherited from his father but was always looking for wider opportunities. He was intrigued by a new settlement almost a continent away in California, named for Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The lure of abundant land at low prices, a beneficent climate, orange groves, and an expansive Quaker community already under way was irresistible. In 1897, when Hannah was twelve, her family moved to Whittier in a series of chartered railroad cars, taking with them virtually all of their possessions.

What they found was not quite paradise, but a Quaker church was already in place, and an academy—eventually to become Whittier College—had been founded in 1891. The Milhouses settled into a spacious Victorian house and established their new nursery behind it. In due course a stream of relatives came west to join them, recreating their Indiana community. Richard Nixon wrote of his maternal grandmother, as he would of his mother, “She was always taking care of every tramp who came along the road…. There were Negroes, Indians, and people from Mexico.” If they didn’t mind listening to a Bible verse and solemn prayer, anyone could get a square meal at the Milhous homestead.

Shy, dutiful, bright, and profoundly religious, Hannah Milhous finished grammar school with high grades and went on to the Quaker academy. Ambrose describes the teenaged Hannah as having “a dark, brooding look. Of medium height (five feet, five inches) … She was exceedingly slender, bony in her shoulders and face. She usually did up her long black hair in a knot. Her eyes were dark and deep-set…. All the photographs taken of her during her adolescence show a serious, almost forbidding face.” Morris’s description of the same features is a bit brighter, describing a “gentle young lady of wasp waist and serious countenance, marked by thick raven hair and eyebrows above dark, limpid eyes.”

Frank Nixon had already lost his transit job due to an accident and was working as a foreman in a neighboring citrus orchard. He did not view Hannah as plain. She was shy, but also warm, intelligent, and altogether wonderful. As Aitken adds, Frank “saw beauty in her tranquil face, whose high cheekbones and intense, greenish-brown eyes fell away to … the Milhous ski-jump nose.” Richard Nixon would resemble his mother in at least this feature. Frank started seeing Hannah virtually every night. Her parents were appalled. This audacious outsider offered nothing—no education, no culture, no profession, no family, no future. He seemed little more than a common laborer. But Hannah could be stubborn, and nothing would dissuade her. She had never been in love before, but she knew what it was, and brought her parents to a reluctant acceptance.

The Milhouses would always consider that Hannah had married beneath herself and her family. Forty-four years later, Frank Nixon’s opinion, too, remained unaltered, affirming, “I knew I had picked the very best. And I haven’t changed my mind.” After only four months of what was probably as much a campaign as a courtship, on June 2, 1908, in the East Whittier Friends Church, twenty-three-year-old Hannah Milhous married twenty-nine-year-old Frank Nixon. Four months later Hannah was pregnant.

It must be said that Hannah’s father, however he felt, was generous. The Milhouses invited Hannah home, and Frank was even given a job by his father-in-law. In June 1909, after a lengthy labor, Hannah gave birth to a boy whom the couple named Harold Samuel Nixon. At the end of 1911, always sensitive about living off the largess of others, Frank decided to plant his own lemon grove in the nearby town of Yorba Linda, on land owned by the Milhous family. Here, he built a sturdy clapboard house that still stands. The Nixons became a popular young couple in the town. Even with her baby to care for, Hannah was very active in the Women’s Club. Frank taught Quaker Sunday School with Methodist fervor and served on the school board. Unfortunately, although the family lived as frugally as possible, there was no way to make the enterprise profitable. The soil was simply too sandy, the lemons of poor quality. Stubbornly, they persisted.

Hannah became pregnant again. On January 13, 1913, after enduring another difficult, protracted labor, she gave birth to the couple’s second child, a healthy eleven-pound boy with brown eyes and black hair. They named him Richard Milhous Nixon. Soon relatives were contrasting quiet Harold with noisy Richard. The Nixons would have three more children, all boys—Francis Donald in 1914, Arthur Burdg in 1918, and Edward Calvert, rather a surprise, in 1930. When Richard was nine and toiling with his older brother and parents in the grove, his father finally gave it up.

However, there had been a close call with success. In 1919 oil was found nearby, a potential boon for the Nixons. Soon there was a small-scale boom. Speculators offered him $45,000 for his property. He turned them down—if there really was oil on his property, he wanted it. Hannah, perhaps on a hunch, suggested that they buy land at Santa Fe Springs, where oil was eventually found. Instead, they stayed put, where no oil was discovered. In 1922, when Frank finally sold out, it was for a fraction of what he had been offered three years before. For once, frugal Frank took out a loan, probably vouched for by his in-laws, and opened a gas station in a good location in Whittier. Bringing in and selling the produce of surrounding farmers led to a full-service grocery store, open for extended hours. For several years it was actually a success, but the family was rarely able even to eat together. No one worked harder than Hannah, who had once studied classical languages and literature. Now she rose before dawn to bake dozens of pies, one of the store’s most popular products, and then waited on trade until dark. Everyone worked.

Sometimes Frank would become angry even with customers, or strike out suddenly with his own sons, settling the issue with his own strap. His anger would then dissipate quickly like a summer storm. Richard was rarely the victim of these outbursts. He had learned to gauge his father’s moods, viewing them from a safe distance. Decades later, Nixon reflected on his father’s volatility. “Perhaps my own aversion to personal confrontations,” he observed, “dates back to these early recollections.”

Hannah, whose strongest admonition was “hush,” had a different approach, a sort of escalating nonviolence. Richard recalled that her tongue was never sharp when she was upset with a son’s behavior, “but she would sit you down and she would talk very quietly. Then when you got through you had been through an emotional experience.” Richard did not view her as lacking in warmth. He always, as Ambrose writes, “turned instinctively to his mother.” As a boy, he “liked to have her sit with him when he read, and otherwise be with her.”

Starting grade school in 1918, Richard demonstrated ability and orderly effort from the very beginning. He loved sports but lacked the talent or size to really excel at them. Encouraged by his mother, he enjoyed reading, music, and the sort of poetry he heard from her. “He was interested in things way beyond the grasp of a boy his age,” she recalled. “He was thoughtful and serious. He always carried such a weight.”

As they grew, Harold and Don, spontaneous and gregarious, reflected their father’s more attractive qualities. Arthur, then the youngest son, a reflective loner, was more reticent to show affection. In the summer of 1925, he suddenly fell ill, suffering headaches, indigestion, and exhaustion. The eventual diagnosis was tubercular encephalitis. Neither physicians nor prayer could save him. After a sustained bedside vigil, he died. Richard had never before seen his father cry. Hannah grieved for the rest of her life. Now, according to his mother, Richard’s “need to succeed became even stronger.”

At his eighth-grade graduation from East Whittier School, Nixon took the spotlight as class president, “most outstanding” student, and valedictorian. Asked to compose an autobiography, his response was prescient. “My plans for the future … are to finish Whittier High School and College and then to take postgraduate work at Columbia University, New York. I would also like to visit Europe [and] I would like to study law and enter politics for an occupation so that I might be of some good to the people.” Substituting Duke Law School for Columbia, it would unfold in much that way. The previous year, after the Teapot Dome scandal broke, Richard had announced to his mother, “When I get big I’ll be a lawyer they can’t bribe.”

Harold was not only the brother closest to Richard; he was perhaps the best friend he would ever have. Being so different, each respected the abilities of the other. Harold admired Richard’s drive, achievements, and ambition. To Richard, Harold represented all the qualities he lacked—an effortless ease in any company, a cheerful outlook on life, and the ability to live for the moment. In 1927 Harold suddenly became terribly ill. This time the prognosis was clear from the start—tuberculosis. His parents took him to a series of private sanitariums, but his health only declined. Frank had sold land from behind his store to pay for the best in care. Then the family made a hard decision. Hannah would venture to Prescott, Arizona, to a rented cabin. She took in, cooked, and cared for four other tuberculosis patients as well, to pay for her son’s treatments at the local sanitarium. The dry desert climate itself was believed to have curative powers. Frank and his other sons would continue to run the store. For two summers Richard went out to Arizona, whatever the risks to his own health. Frank made the six-hundred-mile round trip as often as he could. The strain was showing on everyone. Contagion might also affect Hannah.

In 1930 she made a welcome surprise trip back to Whittier for Christmas, informing her incredulous husband that at the age of forty-five she was again pregnant, with their fifth and final child, Edward Calvert. Finally, Harold insisted that he and his mother return for good. In 1933, despite the pleas of his parents, he returned to Whittier to pursue, for however long, as normal a life as he could sustain, around everything and everyone dear and familiar to him. He and his mother learned of the deaths, one by one, of each of the other youths she had cared for. As Richard reflected in 1974, it was like the death of four more of her own sons.

One morning, Harold felt very weak, much as Arthur had eight years before. He asked his mother to hold him tight in her arms, telling her, “This is the last time I will see you until we meet in heaven.” When Richard rushed back home from Whittier College, both his parents were crying uncontrollably. Hannah witnessed her twenty-year-old son sink “into a deep, impenetrable silence…. From this time on, it seemed that Richard was trying to be three sons in one, striving even harder than before to make up to his father and me for our loss…. Unconsciously, too, I think Richard may have felt a kind of guilt that Harold and Arthur were dead and that he was alive.”

The striving had started even before Harold’s death. At high school, encouraged by his father at home and his mother in Arizona, Richard continued to excel, particularly in debating and public speaking. He was an acknowledged student leader, although more admired for his competence than truly popular with his classmates. Some even viewed him as a bit devious, and he lost a coveted election for student-body president. He would not lose again for the next thirty years. Gradually he began to unbend a bit and even started to date. As graduation neared, he seemed more genial and relaxed, but never as outgoing as his older brother had been. Harold’s medical expenses had been staggering, and now Frank had another son to support, Hannah’s Christmas surprise. Still, he would always retain his self-respect. When some wealthier parents offered to buy Richard a new suit for his appearance in the state finals of an oratorical contest, Frank was outraged. He wasn’t about to accept charity. He bought the suit himself, although he could ill afford it. “There was never a day I wasn’t proud of him,” Richard reflected.

Third in his class, he received invitations to apply for full-tuition scholarships to Harvard and Yale, but Richard understood how badly he was needed at home. He would go to Whittier College, just as he had planned. A scholarship fund bequeathed by his Milhous grandfather supplied Richard’s tuition. No one complained about nepotism. If Nixon felt regret at missing out on the Ivy League, it was transcended by the excitement of simply going to college.

The Great Depression hurt Frank’s business but it did little to soften his temperament. As Parmet notes, he kept a loaded revolver in the cash register in the event of intruders, even as his wife welcomed one and all to the back door, however limited her larder. Like most other institutions, Whittier College was forced to cut back. Speaking on behalf of the whole student body, Richard questioned some of the cutbacks, even convincing the staid trustees to permit dances on campus. This time he was elected student-body president in a triumphant senior year. Whittier’s president predicted that “Nixon would become one of America’s important, if not greatest, leaders.”

In an essay written for his senior religion course, Nixon had distanced himself from his birthright Quakerism, affirming that he could no longer accept the Bible as literal fact although “I still believe that God is the creator.” Ambrose concludes, “Thereafter, there was nothing approaching a crisis of conscience or belief for Richard Nixon.” His mother understood that he was not destined for preaching or teaching. As far back as eighth grade he had vowed it would be law leading to politics.

Nixon’s graduation was capped by the award of a full-tuition scholarship to Duke Law School. He would have to scrimp and save to meet expenses, but that was nothing new. His father would help out to the extent of his ability. In the glow of graduation, Richard didn’t even mind being called “Nixie” by jocular classmates. Still, he never quite convincingly became a relaxed “regular guy.” In the future he would have many nicknames, from “Gloomy Gus” in law school to “Nick” in the navy. The only one he disdained was “Dick,” although his father often used it.

Hannah saw her son through Duke and three years of naval service in World War II (which had made her fearful as a mother and uneasy as a pacifist). Nixon emerged as a lieutenant commander. She saw him through marriage, law, and politics—to the very cusp of his presidency. She was won over by her future daughter-in-law, Pat Ryan, when the young woman came by to help prepare the pies Hannah still baked for sale in the store. As it turned out, Pat Nixon would have need of the stoicism and willpower Hannah came to admire.

Frank Nixon was in his glory. He had always loved to follow politics and was even an avid reader of the Congressional Record, but his loyalties fluctuated. He favored Roosevelt in 1932 and opposed him in 1936. Frank’s only permanent affiliation was to what one might call “the Richard Milhous Nixon Party.” His son had run and won election to Congress in 1946, went on to be elected to the Senate, and in 1952 was chosen as Eisenhower’s vice president, his eyes already focused on the ultimate prize. But his father trusted no one, particularly politicians who might subvert his son’s plans. He had hoped Richard would remain a highly publicized senator in the 1950s and then mount his own campaign for president.

Over his strenuous life, Frank Nixon had survived many ailments, including bleeding ulcers, but he appeared healthy enough, not to mention immensely proud (if uncomfortable in his tails) when he and Hannah attended the festivities at Richard’s inauguration as vice president in 1953. Living for a time in retirement on a small farm in York, Pennsylvania, both had become particularly close to their two grandchildren, Julie and Tricia. Frank lived until 1956. He was hospitalized during the Republican National Convention, which that year was held in San Francisco. On August 22, the day for vice presidential balloting, Richard Nixon got a call from the Whittier hospital that his father had suffered a ruptured abdominal artery and was sinking fast. Richard and Pat rushed to see him. As Ambrose writes, “When they arrived … Frank Nixon was in an oxygen tent, in great pain, but still able to talk.” He gasped out, “You get back there, Dick,” fearful of last-minute “funny business” to deny his son’s renomination. Instead, Richard stayed, and they watched it together on television.

Francis Anthony Nixon died at the age of seventy-seven on September 4, 1956. Like Lyndon Johnson’s father, he had asked to be brought home from the hospital to die. During Richard’s last visit, he told his son, “I don’t think I’ll be here in the morning.” Richard replied, “Dad, you’ve got to keep fighting,” and, of course, what he heard back was, “Dick, you keep fighting.” At the restrained Quaker funeral service, the immediate family sat behind a curtain. No photographs were permitted. Frank Nixon might have preferred something more lively.

In his memoirs, Richard Nixon summed up his father’s philosophy succinctly. Beyond his love for Hannah and their sons, it was the one constant in his life. “My father’s interest in politics made him the most enthusiastic follower of my career from the beginning. My success meant to him that everything he had worked for and believed was true: that in America with hard work and determination a man can achieve anything.”

Was the long marriage of Hannah and Frank Nixon happy? Some of their contemporaries suggested that they complemented each other with their different strengths, loud and soft compromising at a livable level. Morris believes that they remained “clearly in love,” with Hannah’s “serenity and devotion seeming to absorb her husband’s volatile bent.” Their marriage survived years of poverty, stress, and wrenching tragedy. Most of all, as Morris writes, “I think she probably had a decisive influence because he practically worshipped her,” from the day she had accepted his overtures. He felt fortunate, a sentiment with which his Milhous in-laws would agree. He was proud of Hannah, even as their neighbors preferred her gentler, more generous nature, just as he took pride in his most successful son. He well understood his own volatility, even if he was sometimes powerless to contain it.

Perhaps the enigma of Richard Nixon is not bound up in having such different parents. In reality, he wasn’t all that much like either. His loud, imprudent, outspoken father’s comments might not always have stood up to logic or reason, but he was completely honest, his family’s “driving force.” His mother was more an inspiration than a determining influence, her family’s heart. Richard admired almost everything about her, but he could do no more than try to emulate her example. She was simplicity herself, her son as complex a personality as has ever served in the presidency.

As she aged, Hannah less stringently contained her emotions, becoming her granddaughters’ favorite babysitter. She was worried about the toll the stress of his office might have on her son. But, as always, she drew strength from her faith. On the day of her son’s second inauguration as vice president, Hannah pressed a personal note into his hand: “You have gone far and we are proud of you always—I know you will keep your relationship with your maker as it should be for after all that, as you must know, is the most important thing in this life.” Morris writes that Nixon “did not read it until he was alone later that night. Deeply moved, he put it in his wallet and carried it throughout his political life.”

Hannah Milhous Nixon did not live quite long enough to witness her son’s supreme triumphs and his ultimate tragedy. She died on September 30, 1967, at the age of eighty-two. Richard Milhous Nixon was wrong. Books would be written about his mother, at least in the context of trying to understand her son. But he was also right. Immensely gifted yet fatally flawed, he was nonetheless the son of a saint.