7

How They Got That Way: Nixon

An attempt to put into a single sentence the most important facts about Nixon’s background might read as follows: “Richard Milhous Nixon, a Black Irishman from a poor but pious Quaker family, was brought up in a small town near Hollywood, California.”

As previously noted, Nixon and Rockefeller both had an exceedingly pious upbringing, and they share, as a result, a certain moral fervor which makes those who dislike them, dislike them the more. But in many other ways the circumstances to which they were born were, of course, totally dissimilar.

Rockefeller is mostly English and Dutch. Nixon is mostly Irish, on both sides. He is no ordinary Irish American, to be sure. For one thing, he is not a Catholic. For another, instead of arriving at the time of the potato famine in the nineteenth century, his Irish ancestors arrived in the eighteenth century, when there was hardly any Irish immigration at all. The first Nixon landed in Delaware from Ireland before 1750, and the first Milhous came over from County Kildare even earlier.

Nixon’s Irish blood is not undiluted by this time. But the Irish tend to marry the Irish—Nixon boasted of the Irish blood of his wife, born Thelma Ryan, in the fund speech—and Nixon’s essential Irishness is indisputable.

You only have to look at the man, moreover, to see that he falls into the special category of the “Black Irish”—the Irish whose Iberian bloodlines show through in black hair and dark coloring. The fact that he is Irish—and Black Irish to boot—tells a lot about Nixon. The Black Irish have the reputation of being even more ready to fight at the drop of a hat than most Irish, and anyone who has ever done any experimental pub crawling in New York’s Irish bars will testify that the reputation is justified.¹

Put a clay pipe in Nixon’s mouth and a hod on his shoulder or a shillelagh in his hand, and there, complete with beetling brows and uptilted nose, is the original of the old cartoon stereotype of the fighting Irishman—the Irishman of the draft riots or of Punch’s version of the Sinn Feiner. “I believe in hitting back,” Nixon says, in defense of some of his past excesses. “When someone attacks, my instinct is to strike back.” That is a thoroughly Irish instinct.

But Nixon is a Quaker as well as a Black Irishman. That must be, surely, an uncomfortable combination to live with. On the one hand, the hot Irish “instinct to strike back.” On the other, the teaching of the Society of Friends that violence is abhorrent, that the other cheek must always be turned. The Quakerism of Nixon’s youth was no casual matter, moreover. Both his great-grandmother and his great-great-grandmother on his mother’s side were well-known itinerant lady preachers. Nixon’s maternal grandmother, a determined old lady who wrote inspirational verse and dominated the family in Nixon’s boyhood, was very religious. So was his mother, a charming elderly lady who looks like Whistler’s mother with a ski-jump nose. Both his mother and his grandmother hoped that Richard (they never called him “Dick”) would be a famous preacher like his forebears. The Nixon family, in short, took their religion at least as seriously as the Rockefellers took theirs.

The strange combination—the prim Quaker upbringing and the hot Irish instinct to hit back—is important to an understanding of Nixon. So is the fact that the Nixon family was of the respectable poor.

How poor were the Nixons? The answer seems to be that they were the kind of family who were poor by most standards, but who never thought of themselves as poor. There was serious illness in the family—two Nixon brothers died young—and meeting doctors’ bills was a major problem. Hand-me-downs, hard work, and not much fun—that was the pattern of Nixon’s boyhood. It seems likely that a strong urge to escape from that pattern had something to do with Nixon’s tremendous ambition. “There was a drive to succeed; to survive, almost,” Nixon says, as though survival and success were almost equivalents.

His mother and father, as he also says, certainly had something to do with that drive. His mother is a woman of genuine charm—“Everybody always loved Hannah Nixon” is a phrase you are likely to hear in Whittier, the Nixon home town. Not everybody loved the late Frank Nixon, Nixon’s father. Frank Nixon, who died in 1956, was a cantankerous fellow who suffered from bleeding ulcers most of his life, and who liked nothing better than an argument. He must have been a remarkable fellow in his way. Jessamyn West, author of The Friendly Persuasion and a cousin of Nixon’s, recalls Frank Nixon, who taught Sunday school, as follows:

“Frank was not only the best Sunday school teacher I ever had, he was just about the best teacher. Frank had the prime requisite for teaching: great enthusiasm for his subject; and he always aroused in his pupils a like enthusiasm.… He related his Sunday school lessons to life about us, to politics, local and national. His class was so popular it overflowed the space allotted to it and if I could have attended it a few more years I think I might have become a fair stateswoman myself.”

Despite his brilliance as a teacher, Frank Nixon, to borrow the current cant of sociologists, achieved only “limited success status”—his various attempts to earn a living, as a motorman, lemon grower, and storekeeper, were never really successful. To keep it a going concern, the whole family had to work in the store, which was the family’s main source of income when Nixon was a boy. Hannah was a Milhous, and the Milhouses were among the early arrivals when Whittier was founded in the late nineteenth century. As a member of one of the founding families, Hannah was rather widely regarded in Whittier as having made an unfortunate marriage—which is no doubt one reason why Frank Nixon was so combative. His own “competitive characteristic,” Nixon says, “goes back to my dad.”

The fact that Whittier is not much more than a stone’s throw from Hollywood is also worth noting. Southern California (like Texas or New England or the Deep South, or for that matter any part of the United States you care to name) bequeaths to its native sons certain special attitudes and standards of value, and in southern California Hollywood has a good deal to do with those attitudes and standards. If Nixon had been a native of New Hampshire, say, or Iowa, he might have said essentially what he did say in the famous fund speech, but it seems safe to suppose that he would have said it in a different way.

Nixon’s Irishness, his Quaker upbringing, his family circumstances, and his southern California background are the essential reference points in an attempt to understand the man. To see a little deeper, to get a surer glimpse of what lies beneath the Nixon carapace, it is necessary to go to Whittier, to sense the atmosphere of the place, and to talk to the people who knew the boy who was the father of the man. It is a fascinating experience.

Whittier is a most agreeable place, basking in almost permanent sunshine, marred only occasionally by smog. Founded by Quakers like the Milhous family, it was named after the “good gray poet,” John Greenleaf Whittier. The Quakers are now heavily outnumbered, but there is still a Quakerish smell to the place—it is neat but not gaudy, without slums, without external evidence of great wealth. The architecture is pleasantly typical of what an English lady has called “America’s Lily Cup architecture—use once and throw away.” Everything in the town seems to have been built yesterday, or at most the day before. As throughout southern California, one has the feeling that the past influences the present less than anywhere in the world. The slate has been wiped clean, and what matters is not yesterday, but prosperous today, and even more prosperous tomorrow.

Whittier is small enough so that you can see most of the people who knew Nixon well in a few days. The best friend of his boyhood is a successful automobile dealer who probably makes about twice as much money as the Vice-President, and whose admiration for Nixon is so fervent that his eyes fill with tears when he is talking about him. You can find the boy whom Nixon defeated, in an election for the presidency of the student body of Whittier College, behind the counter of a local clothing shop—a pleasant fellow, who looks a good deal younger than Nixon (and who may well be a good deal happier). Nixon’s mother lives close by, and so do most of the people who taught him at school and college. Talking to such people, that ghost from the past, Nixon the boy, begins to take on flesh and blood, and an oddly interesting boy he turns out to be.

Even the simple, recorded facts of Nixon’s early life tell something about him, of course. His school and college records have a Horatio Alger consistency. In Whittier High School he was first in his class scholastically, a champion debater, and the loser by a hair in a contest for the class presidency (it was the only time in his life Nixon ever lost an election). In Whittier College he was second in his class, president of the student body, a champion debater, and a very bad football player. At Duke University Law School in North Carolina—he went there on a scholarship and was graduated in 1937—he was third in his class, the equivalent of president of the student body, and on the law review.

Obviously the boy Nixon was intelligent—his scholastic record proves it. Obviously he was popular—an unpopular boy is not regularly elected to office by his fellow students. Obviously he had a strong political instinct even then—a boy who is not politically minded does not run for office every chance he gets. But what kind of boy was Richard Nixon really?

Trying to answer that question is a fascinating pastime, rather like that old favorite of children’s birthday parties in which the eager player follows a string around and about and over and under until he comes at last on the hidden prize. For again and again the digger into Nixon’s past comes upon something in the nature of the boy which leads directly, in a flash of recognition, to something in the nature of the man.

Recall, for example, the passage which, aside from the immortal Checkers, most people remember best from the fund speech: “I should say this, that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat, but she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she’d look good in anything.”

Now open the 1934 edition of the annual yearbook of Whittier College to page 88, and from it you will see, peering out self-consciously, the faces of the twenty-eight members of the Franklin Society. Every Franklin is clad in the unaccustomed splendor of a tuxedo. Turn the page, and you find the twenty-seven members of the Orthogonian Society, the rivals of the Franklins. Every Orthogonian is dressed in a simple white shirt, sleeves rolled up, collars open over boyish throats. Comparing the two, one cannot help feeling that the Orthogonians are somehow more natural, more likable—if you will, more American—than the aristocratically garbed Franklins.

Among the Orthogonians you recognize the familiar face—the ski-jump nose is there already and the jowls are beginning faintly to appear—of Richard Milhous Nixon, founder and first president of the Orthogonian Society. Most of the Orthogonians, who were on the average poorer than the long-established Franklins, could not afford in those depression years to rent, much less to own, tuxedos. So founder-president Nixon made a virtue of necessity, as he was so often to do as politician Nixon. It was his idea to have the Orthogonians photographed in simple, democratic, open shirts, thus dramatizing the contrast with the hifalutin Franklins.

The parallel between those open shirts and the “respectable Republican cloth coat” is quite obvious, and Nixon himself is well aware of it. When, in the talk reproduced in the appendix, this reporter remarked that he thought he had found the origins of the Republican cloth coat in a Whittier yearbook, Nixon chuckled, with instant recognition: “Sure, sure, the open collars. They were the haves and we were the have nots, see. I was just a freshman then.”

Obviously freshman Nixon shared with politician Nixon an unerring instinct for political symbolism, and an instinct also for turning seeming misfortune to advantage. Or take another example of the sudden sense of recognition which rewards the digger into Nixon’s past. Nixon tried out for football every year at Whittier. He was slight and ill-coordinated, and although in four years he was never late for practice, he never made the team. He was useful chiefly as a kind of tireless, indestructible, animated ninepin for the better players to knock down. “He was a lousy player but he sure had guts,” recalls the automobile salesman, a Whittier College football star in his day. Once in a long while Nixon would be permitted to play in the last few minutes of a game. When that happened, recalls a classmate who was football linesman at the time, “I always got out the five-yard penalty marker. Dick was so eager that I knew he’d be offside just about every play.”

Nixon has unquestionably been “offside” more than once in his subsequent career. This is not the place to recite the case against Nixon—that will come in the next chapter. The purpose here is to try to understand the kind of man Nixon is by trying to understand the kind of boy he was. One thing that was true of Nixon the boy, as it is of Nixon the man, is a curious ambivalence, a sort of inner contradiction, between that drive and overeagerness which took him “offside just about every play” and a highly moral, even a moralistic, attitude. Is it the Black Irishman and the Quaker in him? Or is it his cantankerous father and his gently pious mother, alternately triumphing?

The interested reader can find echoes of this internal contradiction in some of the letters from his classmates printed in the appendix. Here, for example, is a classmate who recalled charges that Nixon as a politician had used “questionable tactics”: “He was a man of such high ambition, and a man capable of pursuing his ambition with such intensity, that I could the more easily believe that he would and could do whatever was necessary to attain the goal he had set for himself. However, I have serious doubts whether he himself did those things, because I got the impression of Richard, in college, that he had very high morals and was motivated largely by a very high sense of duty.”

Nothing more irritates Nixon’s enemies, especially the more cynical and sophisticated, than the “very high morals” and the “very high sense of duty.” It was the “holier-than-thou” note in the famous fund speech which infuriated such people more than anything else in the speech. The first sentence, with its overtones of injured righteousness, set the tone: “My fellow Americans, I come before you tonight as a candidate for the vice-presidency and as a man whose honesty and integrity have been questioned.”

His enemies are convinced—just as the first John D. Rockefeller’s enemies were convinced—that Nixon’s high moral outlook is sheer hypocrisy. But remember those lady preachers who were Nixon’s forebears, and remember his mother, who hoped that little Richard would be a preacher, too. Remember the moralistic atmosphere of the Nixon household, which is suggested by a story of Nixon as a little boy which his mother tells with pride. It was at the time of the Teapot Dome scandals, and little Richard, a great newspaper reader even then, was sprawled in front of the fire reading about the awful goings on in Washington. He turned to her and announced: “I know what I want to be when I grow up—an honest lawyer who doesn’t cheat people but helps them.”

Again and again one catches echoes of that early announcement, with its faintly priggish note of high moral principle. When Nixon was “just a freshman” at Whittier College, the Franklin Society was the only men’s club on the campus, and its comparative handful of members enjoyed all the special delights which such a social monopoly entails. Nixon, whose reputation as a coming man had preceded him from high school, was almost immediately asked to join. He refused—on principle. The Franklins’ social monopoly was, he held, unfair and contrary to the democratic spirit. But having thus acted on principle, he at once became highly practical and competitive and organized, in the Orthogonians, a successful rival club, which must have been quite a trick for a mere freshman.

This succession—a gesture on principle immediately followed by a highly practical and successful subsequent course—is repeated rather often. When Nixon was a young lawyer with OPA at the beginning of the war, he insisted on taking the lowest possible salary. “He reasoned,” writes his chief of the OPA days, Professor Jacob Buescher, “that the boys who were being trained to hit the beaches were paid a lot less.” But having made this noble gesture, it was typical of Nixon that he rapidly ascended from his self-imposed low rung on the bureaucratic ladder.

In college Nixon was a very model boy. He neither smoked nor drank—although by the time he went to law school he had relaxed sufficiently to sip an occasional beer. Aside from the usual nonsense of painting outhouses on rival campuses, and the like, the only youthful escapade his contemporaries recall involved his crawling over the transom to get into the dean’s office in law school. But his purpose was not to booby-trap the dean’s desk, or some such shenanigans. It was to discover, from the dean’s records, where he stood scholastically.

As this episode suggests, those other qualities in Nixon, his “ambition and intensity,” were very much a part of the boy, as they are of the man. As Nixon says, both his parents taught him to try to be “good, not just at one thing, but at everything,” and he certainly tried hard, as he has been trying ever since. And although he was a very bad football player, he was good at almost everything else.

He was a good actor, for example. Dr. Albert Upton, his drama coach, has recalled a play in which Nixon, as a sadly bereft old innkeeper, was to appear alone on the stage, weeping. “I told him, ‘Dick, if you just concentrate real hard on getting a big lump in your throat, I think you can cry real tears.’ He did, too—buckets of tears. I couldn’t help remembering the play when I saw that picture of Dick crying on Senator Knowland’s shoulder. But mind you, Dick is never spurious, he really felt it.”

Again, consider the fund speech. Nixon’s enemies are convinced—and again nothing on earth will dissuade them—that the highly emotional tone of the speech was as spurious as the note of moral virtue. But consider Nixon’s circumstances. Here was an enormously ambitious young man who saw his whole career threatened with total and irrecoverable ruin. Here, too, was the young man with the Quaker upbringing who had told his mother that he wanted to be a “good lawyer who doesn’t cheat,” the young man who had always been regarded in school and college as a paragon of virtue and honor, and had so regarded himself. And here he was, held up before the nation as a scoundrel ready to sell out to a group of wealthy men for a few thousand dollars.

Of course Nixon’s emotion was real—if it had been wholly spurious, Nixon would not have been human. It was the way in which the emotion was conveyed that was spurious—above all, the immortal hamminess of the “little cocker spaniel dog” which “Tricia, the six-year-old, named Checkers.” But Nixon, remember, was brought up almost within shouting distance of Hollywood, and in his part of California hamminess was, and is, a way of life, and a highly respected one.

It is interesting also to re-read the fund speech, as well as other Nixon pronouncements, in light of the fact that Nixon was a college debater. He was more than good at debating—he was brilliant, the champion debater of southern California. Debating was taken seriously at Whittier, as in many western colleges, and being president of the debate team automatically made Nixon a very big man on the campus. The Reverend William Hornaday, now a well-known preacher in Los Angeles, and in those days Nixon’s debating teammate, recalls the advice of Professor Eugene Knox, their debating coach—“Never throw your arms about, keep your elbows close in to your stomach.” When Nixon makes a speech today, it is easy to see him still following that advice.

There are other very evident carry-overs from Nixon the college debater to Nixon the major politician. Hornaday recalls how shrewd and longheaded Nixon was in debate. “He used to pass me little notes, ‘Pour it on at this point,’ or ‘Save your ammunition,’ or ‘Play to the judges, they’re the ones who decide.’” His high-school debating coach, a lady and a Democrat, remembers, “He was so good it kind of disturbed me. He had this ability to kind of slide round an argument, instead of meeting it head on, and he could take any side of a debate.” Those qualities of Nixon, as a youthful debater, are also worth bearing in mind.

Hornaday, a well-regarded marimba player in his college days, still has a note from Nixon, scrawled in his classbook in a rather childish hand: “You are a great musician, Delyn. But I will remember you as a friend, a brother, and a splendid politician. Yours, Dick Nixon.” Even more than as a debater, it was as a “splendid politician”—perhaps the most successful politician ever to appear on the campus—that Nixon scored most heavily at Whittier. The Whittier yearbook has a full-page picture of Nixon, looking very young and very purposeful, as president of the student body, and below is the paragraph:

“After one of the most successful years the college has ever witnessed, we stop to reminisce, and come to the realization that much of the success was due to the efforts of this very gentleman. Always progressive, and with a liberal attitude, he has led us through the year with flying colors.”

On the opposite page is an account of Nixon’s political triumph: “After a fairly quiet political season, and a campaign in which mudslinging was notably absent, the student body chose its officers for the year. Although political dictators managed to cause as much trouble as possible, Dick Nixon came through the melee unscathed with the title of student-body president. On a platform advocating a new deal for those who enjoy the social niceties, he stormed to his position.”

The “social niceties” were on-campus dances, previously outlawed on that Quaker campus. Nixon disliked dancing then, and dislikes it to this day, but he clearly had a well-developed instinct for the winning issue, even then.

The odd fact is that, although they kept electing him to office, most of his classmates did not think of Nixon as a natural politician at all. “He was the last person in the class I would have picked for a political headline,” one law-school classmate wrote; and another: “I would put him down as the man least likely to succeed in politics.”

Most Americans think of a politician as a “buddy-buddy boy,” to revert to Nixon’s horrible phrase, and Nixon was not then, any more than he is now, a “buddy-buddy boy.” That is another note his contemporaries repeatedly strike in their letters about Nixon. “He was personally somewhat shy.” … “Definitely not an extrovert.” … “Basically aloof, very sure of himself, and very careful to keep people from getting too close to him.” … “He was not what you would call a real friendly guy.” … “He tended somewhat to shyness.”

Yet his classmates liked him. One lady recalls that she “thought Dick Nixon was too stuck-up.” She was an exception; Nixon did not then have the genius he has since displayed for making enemies. But very few of his classmates felt really close to him. In the Whittier yearbook a most revealing cartoon appears. The members of the class are portrayed, in various informal attitudes, chatting and laughing with each other. In the center of the picture, and dominating the composition, is Richard Nixon. The young cartoonist was surprisingly skillful, and the jowls and the ski-jump nose are entirely recognizable. Nixon is neatly dressed, solemn in manner—and totally alone.

But although very few felt close to Nixon, most of his classmates remember him with a respect amounting to awe for his ability and drive, as the letters reproduced in the appendix show. From all this, there emerges at least in rough outline a picture of the kind of boy Nixon was.

There is the genuine Quaker strain, the “very high sense of duty.” There is also, as becomes an instinctive conservative, a certain conventionality of outlook. Nixon, unlike many highly intelligent college boys, was never in any way a rebel. On the contrary, he accepted without any hesitation at all the college-boy values of those days (just as Rockefeller did a few years earlier at Dartmouth). To this day, Nixon has never got over his college-boy admiration for football heroes—football is probably the only subject which really interests him, outside of politics. The club song Nixon wrote for the Orthogonians—his only recorded venture in poesy—is almost a parody of the conventional college song:

All hail the mighty boar,

Our patron saint is he.

Our aims forevermore

In all our deeds must be

To emulate his might,

His bravery and his fight.

Brothers together, we’ll travel on and on

Worthy the name of Orthogonian.

There is also that touch of the ham—a quality most politicians possess, but accentuated in his case by the special hamminess of the southern California atmosphere. There is—especially worth noting—the shrewdness and longheadedness in debate and the brilliant mastery of debating techniques. There is unquestioned ability and first-rate mental equipment. And there is something highly unusual in a politician, a withdrawn quality, a lack of easy warmth, and a loneliness of spirit.

There is the urge to manage, to influence, to lead, and an instinct for the means of doing so. And above all, there is the fierce drive, the eagerness to win that took him “offside on almost every play,” the hunger for success which made Nixon, as one law-school classmate recalled, “the hardest working man I ever met.” This, then, is the basic Nixon. Every one of the characteristics Nixon displayed as a boy is still clearly and visibly present in him. And these characteristics make it possible to understand, if not always to admire, some of the qualities Nixon later displayed as a professional politician.

¹ No doubt it is most unscientific to suppose that those of Irish ancestry have any special characteristics, but, to paraphrase Mr. Bumble on the law, if science believes that, science is an ass.