Richard M. Nixon

Life was real and life was earnest in the Quaker community of his childhood twenty miles from Los Angeles, which was just about to arise as a colossal and garish city that would influence the world. Young Richard listened to the distant train whistles and the roar of the steam engines in the night, “the sweetest music I’ve ever heard,”¹ and dreamt of the wider world. There was often the scent of citrus groves in the air, but the harsh life of the great ranches and farms and migrant workers, the hucksterism of this early phase of the great trek to California from the East and the Midwest, blended uneasily with the Quakerism of the Nixons and their neighbors. There was little that seemed permanent or even durable, and almost no nearby trace of the long Spanish history in Southern California. Los Angles and its surroundings were just becoming a catchment for the demographic driftwood of America, as New York long had been for Europe.

In Richard Nixon’s youth, the population of Southern California would grow very quickly, and be recognized as some sort of laboratory for America. Bertrand Russell, an unlikely visitor, called it the “ultimate segregation of the unfit,” and Upton Sinclair, the crusading novelist and radical 1934 candidate for governor of California, thought it a paradise of swindlers. The film industry arose and recorded, refracted, foretold human drama and comedy, and dispensed its images of American life to the whole world. Southern California became a precursor of public tastes in many fields, evanescently recruiting vast swaths of America and the world to its fashions and tastes, and repelling many by its insubstantial brazenness.

The Quakers, the Society of Friends, had departed the existing Christian churches in seventeenth-century England, rebelling against the political and religious feuding of the time. The English Reformation seesawed back and forth from the Roman Catholic apostate Henry VIII and his Papist (Mary) and Protestant (Elizabeth) daughters, through Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth, to the officially self-proclaimed Glorious Revolution of 1688. George Fox had started the Society of Friends, taking the name from Christ’s assertion that his “friends” were those who did as he “commanded” (John 15:14). Fox founded an unstructured, quietist church, espousing simple dress and tastes, abstinence, temperance, asceticism, and many prophetic secular causes. These included pacifism and the abolition of capital punishment, slavery, and racial discrimination. It was a contemplative church, where divine inspiration would come to the quiet seeker of it. They were good and courageous and idealistic, if somewhat unworldly, and unexciting people.

Richard Nixon’s Quaker heritage came from his mother’s family, the Milhouses. They had come from the German principalities to England in the seventeenth century and changed their name from Milhausen. They fought with Cromwell in the English Civil War against the Anglo-Catholic King, Charles I. Cromwell rewarded them with land in Ireland, a country Cromwell, for all his Puritanism, suppressed with a severity that must have helped propel the Milhouses into the arms of the Quakers. They emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1729. In 1854, Richard Nixon’s great-grandparents, Joshua and Elizabeth Milhous, joined the move westward and decamped from Pennsylvania to Indiana. Joshua Milhous was the model for the protagonist of the novel The Friendly Persuasion, written by another great-grandchild, Richard Nixon’s cousin, Jessamyn West. Elizabeth Milhous was a famous preacher, whom Richard Nixon well remembered from her later years, including one occasion when she related the miracle of the loaves and fishes with such exuberance that she showered the congregation with her lunch of sardine sandwiches.²

At the end of the 1880s, Richard Nixon’s grandparents, Franklin and Almira Milhous, moved to California. They brought with them their daughter, Hannah, Richard’s mother, born in 1885 and named after an aunt and the biblical mother of Samuel. They joined the colony in Whittier, incorporated in 1887, for which occasion the town adopted a bit of doggerel the poet had written for his grandnephew:³

In a tiny foretaste of what would summarize much of Southern California’s future, as historian Roger Morris wrote in his fine history of Richard Nixon’s early years, what enveloped the Milhous family in Whittier was a “dusty mix of piety and profiteering.”⁴ This mélange of Low Church Christianity and sleazy commercial dealings would be an important component of the heritage bequeathed by circumstances to Richard Milhous Nixon.

The Friends set up their meeting house, and municipal ordinances banned the sale of alcoholic beverages, dance halls, and theaters. One of the earliest inhabitants was Lou Henry, daughter of a local banker, who eventually became Mrs. Herbert Hoover. Franklin and Almira Milhous were joined in Whittier, as the years passed, by two of Franklin’s brothers and two of his sisters, and by his mother. Their evening dinners were very well attended, not only by relatives but by the servants (usually African-Americans, Mexicans, or Indians), who sat with their employers, and even by indigent passersby that Almira invited to join them. This too was part of Richard Nixon’s heritage - an absence of racial, religious, and economic prejudice, and a respect for everyone, regardless of their financial and social standing. There were participatory scriptural readings before dinner.

The first Nixons came to America from Ireland in 1731 and settled in Delaware, moving later to Pennsylvania, and in 1853 to Ohio. Richard Nixon’s great-grandfather volunteered to take the place of a wealthy man in the Grand Army of the Republic during the Civil War and gave his life for Lincoln and the Union at Cemetery Ridge, on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, in 1863. Richard Nixon’s grandfather, Samuel Brady Nixon, was named after a man who, when about to be burned by Indians, seized a papoose and threw it into the conflagration stoked up to consume him, so distracting his executioners that he escaped, running several miles, naked, to elude his pursuers.

The seventeen-year-old Samuel B. Nixon, whose mother died a few months after her husband was killed at Gettysburg, struggled to maintain the family homestead, but it was eventually gaveled down to creditors at a sheriff’s sale, and the young family was parceled out among relatives. Samuel Nixon resettled near Richland, Ohio, married, and had five children. The middle child, Francis Anthony Nixon, Richard Nixon’s father, was born in 1878. Samuel’s wife was afflicted with tuberculosis, which would take a heavy toll on her family, and for two years they moved to West Virginia, and then through the Carolinas and Georgia, in search of a salubrious climate, while Sam worked at odd jobs. Nothing availed and they returned to Ohio, where Richard Nixon’s grandmother died in 1886, aged thirty-four.

Again the Nixon family, in its poverty and bereavement, was dispersed among relatives. Samuel Nixon remarried in 1890 and gathered his family again, but Frank Nixon did not get on with his stepmother, who scolded and thrashed him. He went to school only for a few months, when he was thirteen, and his education was very rudimentary. As a teenager he worked in a brick works and raised his own potatoes, and earned a reputation as a dapper dresser, having smarted under the insults of his classmates for the penury of his wardrobe. In 1896, he encountered the Republican presidential candidate and governor of Ohio, William McKinley, who complimented Nixon on his fine-looking horse.⁶

He returned to Ohio, to Columbus, and worked for the municipal streetcar company. After five years he was promoted to motorman, and suffered frostbitten feet in the winter, as the motormen were in open, unheated cabs, while passengers and conductors traveled in stove-heated comfort. Frank Nixon, rebuffed both by management and his union in his efforts to get the streetcar cabs heated or enclosed, supported a candidate for state senator who promised to provide a legislated solution. Frank organized motormen and others behind the candidate, campaigning tirelessly for him out of hours, despite exhausting work days, and the candidate was elected and pushed through the law. Frank Nixon, who had shown great pluck and ingenuity, quit before he was fired and moved with another motorman to California. He would start again, having known nothing, as he later said, “but struggle and hardship.”

With a letter of introduction from an officer of the Columbus Motormen’s union, he became a streetcar driver on the run from Long Beach to Whittier, and moved into a Quaker boarding house in Whittier. His fellow roomers brought him to their church, and here, at a staid Valentine’s Day festivity in the Christian Endeavor room of the Whittier Friends’ Meeting House, Frank Nixon met Hannah Milhous. It was love at first sight, augmented in Frank’s case by the loneliness of a newcomer far from home, and in Hannah’s by the omnipresence of her numerous family and especially her overbearing father.

The Milhouses, despite their Quakerism, were not above an affectation to social superiority and looked down on Frank Nixon as a rough-at-the-edges drifter. This impression was heightened when Frank was fired by Pacific Electric as a streetcar driver soon before his wedding, for hitting an automobile at a level crossing. But Frank quickly got another job, as a foreman at one of the large local citrus ranches, and he appeased a major Milhous concern by becoming a Quaker.

Frank Nixon and Hannah Milhous were married in a Quaker ceremony in Whittier on June 2, 1908, and moved into a staff cottage on the ranch where Frank worked. After a few months, with Hannah expecting their first child, Frank again retired his job. They moved in with Hannah’s family, and Frank worked for his father-in-law in his plant and tree nursery. This was an awkward arrangement, but while it lasted the couple’s first child, Harold Samuel Nixon, named after a pre-Norman English king and Frank Nixon’s father, was born, in June 1909.

After a brief foray two hundred miles up-country to try to operate an orange grove on a parcel of Frank Milhous’s land, Frank and Hannah Nixon returned and Frank planted a lemon grove on a ten-acre plot he bought on kinfolk terms from his father-in-law at Yorba Linda, fifteen miles from Whittier. At the back of this plot, Frank Nixon used his carpentering skills to build a very simple clapboard bungalow beside the Anaheim ditch, an irrigation and water collection channel.

This little house would become a national historic site, for here Richard Milhous Nixon was born on the cold ninth of January in 1913. He emerged weighing a formidable eleven pounds, with a strong voice and an almost full head of black hair and dark eyebrows, an instant miniature of what he would famously become. (A newborn, tiny version of the adult Richard Nixon is a startling concept.) He was named after Richard the Lion-Heart, brave crusader and king of England from 1189 to 1199.

Richard Nixon was a relatively placid child, serious and studious, and interested in everything. Though not at all effeminate, he liked to play with dolls when he visited families who had little girls. The Nixons kept producing sons; twenty-two months after Richard, Francis Donald Nixon was born. Richard’s first memory was of falling off a horse-drawn buggy, driven by his mother, when it turned a sharp corner. One of the wheels inflicted a long but shallow cut in the middle of Richard’s head, which required extensive stitching. This caused him to brush his hair straight back, unparted, which he did for the rest of his life, and as a youth it gave him a slightly unfashionable appearance.

Frank Nixon pursued his living first as an orange- and then a lemon-grove owner and operator. The countryside was rolling hills and foothills, turning in the east to the Santa Ana Mountains, and beyond them the taller San Bernardinos. There were sagebrush, cactus, and luxuriant wildflowers, but a lot of semi-desert - soil generally too dry to be ideal for citrus fruit. Dust storms occurred occasionally in the summer, and in winter there were usually a few descents into freezing temperatures.

An astonishing amount of pompous surmise and malicious fiction has been written and portrayed in film about Richard Nixon’s upbringing. His mother, though reserved, was affectionate and devoted. His father, though noisy and irascible, was conscientious and not excessively severe. Frank appears to have had the confidence normal for the time in the corrective powers of corporal punishment, but rarely to have had occasion to apply it to Richard. The most frequent cause of such incidents was the boys’ inability to avoid swimming or wading in the Anaheim ditch - or, more grandly, canal - which flowed invitingly by their house through the hot summer, but playing in which was forbidden by law, as well as by parents concerned by its swift current.

Richard Nixon was a rather self-contained little boy, with a round face and big, dark eyes. He enjoyed good health, despite a bout of pneumonia when he was four. He was always well turned out and never misbehaved in the presence of adults. The Nixon family revolved around Hannah, who deeply loved her children, never raised her voice, and instilled her religious faith in her husband and sons. While it was a desperately serious environment, it was stable and emotionally solid. “No one projected warmth and affection more than my mother did,” Richard recalled. “But she never indulged in the present day custom, which I find nauseating, of hugging or kissing her children or others for whom she had great affection.”⁷ Henry Kissinger’s famous rhetorical question of sixty years later - “Can you imagine what this man could have done if he had ever been loved?” - was probably well-intentioned amateur analysis, but it was mistaken. Richard Nixon was always loved by his parents, and by his own family. His personality had some serious foibles, but a noticeable absence of affection from those from whom he most needed it was not the source of them.

Though the Nixons were not prosperous, their means were adequate, their needs few, and Frank fairly steadily bettered his lot by dint of hard work, decade after decade. But in these early days, while the lemon trees slowly grew to full size, Frank had to deploy some of his many secondary skills to supplement his income and meet bills. The Nixon family diet, with its principal staple of cornmeal, was very monotonous. But by 1918, Frank had a tractor and an automobile, and Hannah had some china dishes. She made the children’s clothes herself, and they were handed down from Harold to Richard to Donald and, after 1918, on to Arthur Burdg, the Nixons’ fourth son. (Arthur was also named after a famous old English king; Burdg was grandmother Milhous’s maiden name.)

They were able to hire a helper to take care of the children, whom Hannah would not tolerate to be called a “hired girl” by her sons. She was to be referred to as their “friend,” who was helping them.⁸ The three boys slept in a semi-attic. The house had only one other bedroom, a modest parlor, a dining room and kitchen, and one bathroom, and was heated by a single stove. There was no upholstered furniture and minimal decoration.

Richard Nixon went to the little wooden Yorba Linda school, entering grade one in the autumn of 1919, when he was a few months short of his seventh birthday. He sometimes went barefoot, but carried shoes and socks in a paper bag, and always wore a starched white shirt, black bow tie, and knee pants. He never rumpled or dirtied his clothes, and his mother visited the school early on to admonish the teacher never to call her son anything except Richard. “Dick” was not acceptable. Richard got on well and was such an apt student that he skipped forward to grade three in his second year. In later life, he gave his mother credit for this, for teaching him to read before he set foot in a school.⁹ His prodigious memory, which would become famous, revealed itself early, as he routinely memorized prose passages and poems and recited them for prizes at school and at his church. The Nixon family read poems and stories aloud after dinner, and the family took a daily newspaper and the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, and National Geographic. But there were no books in the home. (Jessamyn West did find there, hidden away, in 1919, a pamphlet on sex education.)

By 1920, Richard Nixon, under his father’s influence, was already interested in politics, and already a Republican. Frank Nixon considered Woodrow Wilson a fuzzy-minded idealist and William Jennings Bryan, the three-time unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate, a wild-eyed radical. He believed the Republicans the party of self-help and rugged individualism and Wilson an international busybody. Hannah, truer to Quaker pacifism than her husband, was impressed by Wilson’s quest for a League of Nations and a durable world peace. In 1920, a rare election in which three of the four candidates for national office ultimately became president, Frank and Richard were delighted that the Republicans, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, defeated the Democrats, James M. Cox and thirty-eight-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt, by a wide margin. (Both presidential candidates were from the Nixons’ native state of Ohio.)

Hannah, who had had more access to rudimentary culture than her husband, detected a musical talent, and specifically an aptitude for the piano, in Richard. The family had an elementary upright piano, and Hannah forced Richard to practice, against his wishes, every afternoon. He never learned to read music, but he did memorize a good many pieces of classical music and rendered them with confidence and often with gusto, without consulting the score, which would have been incomprehensible to him.

Yorba Linda grew rapidly, and there were soon many young people for Richard to play with. He blended well into the group, though always retaining, as he would his entire life, the standoffish manner and odd formality of dress that amused humorists and caricaturists decades later. And he spent an inordinate amount of time reading. Harold and Donald Nixon were playful, gregarious boys. Richard got by, but was more serious and very bookish. Where his social qualities seemed to emerge most unselfconsciously was in the affection and interest he always showed for his little brother Arthur. He played with him as a baby and pushed him around the neighborhood in an improvised pram, an adapted children’s wagon. Arthur grew up a quiet and serious child, like Richard, less affable than Harold and Donald.

By late 1919, Frank Nixon’s inability to afford the fertilizer needed to encourage his lemon trees in the semi-arid ground caused him to give up being a lemon farmer. He moved on to the next in the succession of California’s get-rich resources, oil, which was pumped at many places in the area. He became a field worker for Union Oil. At the same time, Hannah took a job in the local Sunkist lemon packinghouse - work regarded as being above that done by the mainly Mexican pickers in the groves. Hannah was a sorter and packer, and sometimes brought Richard or Donald with her to act as sweepers. Richard found it literally nauseating work, because the sound and movement of the lemon-packing machinery aggravated his motion sickness. Richard and Donald also worked in the summers of 1920 and 1921 as pickers in the bean fields, twelve hours for one dollar, and Richard acquired a life-long revulsion for string beans.

In May 1922, Frank Nixon sold the little house he had built in Yorba Linda, and his failed lemon grove with its stunted trees, for less than he had paid his father-in-law for it, and, with a Milhous guarantee for a five-thousand-dollar loan, set up a gas station on Whittier Boulevard in East Whittier. Frank believed that his father-in-law had lied to him about the condition and prospects of the Yorba Linda lemon grove, and Richard dutifully adhered to his father’s line that his grandfather had misled and exploited him.¹⁰

The Milhous reservations about Frank Nixon as a rough and abrasive man had not much abated, other than with Hannah, and there arose against it a Nixon view that the Milhouses were condescending snobs and exploiters. Hannah straddled this schism with the implacable and silent dignity of a devout Quaker. There were frequent family gatherings at the Milhous home in Whittier, which most of the Nixons found excruciating. Frank dodged them when he could.

It is not the case, as has often been claimed, including by Richard Nixon, that oil was ever discovered on Frank Nixon’s land, though he did look at possible gas station locations where oil was subsequently discovered. These were difficult years for young Richard Nixon, and he did not look back on them with much pleasure, other than his respect for the strong characters of his parents; he had a tendency to exaggerate the stark, Dickensian realities of their existence: income had to match expenses or disaster impended. All the family worked hard, every day.

By the time he put in for that nomination, and long before, Nixon had settled on a political career, probably by the time he was reading about the 1920 election. What seemed to please and relax him that summer day in 1970 was the contemplation of how far he had come and how much he had achieved, whatever the war protesters, who then, just after the Cambodia incursion in 1970, were surging through the streets of many cities, might think of it.

Nixon did not consider his remarkable rise to the summit of modern history to be a series of accidents. He considered it a triumph of his willpower, intermittently blessed and facilitated by the God he worshipped, but whose omnipotence and unpredictability frightened him. Some combination of a fierce determination to better his lot and a piercing fear, a terror, that he was aspiring to too much, was already perceptible in Nixon as a boy, and it became more disruptive to his equanimity as he aged, until all was reconciled in his brilliant final years. Only Nixon could resolve it, in the serenity that can come to some people only after immense tumult. His tumult would be immense.

Whittier was a metropolis compared with Yorba Linda, despite the enforced reticence of the Quakers. (When there was an impromptu dance at the high school at the end of 1919 celebrating the return of First World War veterans, the school principal had been excoriated from the pulpit and by the school board.)¹² The earth was richer and the botany less scrubby than at Yorba Linda. Walnut and olive trees, as well as fruit trees, abounded. Whittier College had a fine hillside campus, and the town, by California standards, had a deserved air of durability. In the spring, the perfumed scent of orange blossoms was overpowering.

Where Yorba Linda was a raw subdivision, with people attracted from all over to try their hands at some aspect of the citrus business, Whittier had more of the instances of an American city, including a Mexican district, Jimtown. The Mexicans were day laborers in Whittier, but retired to Jimtown, or even to the seething Gomorrah of Los Angeles, at night. In nearby Anaheim, the municipal swimming pool was drained and refilled after the one day of the week when Mexicans were allowed into it.¹³

Frank Nixon again built the family home, adjacent to his gas station. The boys’ bedroom was above the garage, reached by an outside staircase. This became a sort of clubhouse, and there were social gatherings with musical accompaniment from Richard on the piano, and other diversions. The straitened circumstances of Yorba Linda had given way to a few upholstered chairs and antimacassars.

Frank Nixon had finally, in his early forties, found a commercially winning formula. There was no other gas station for miles around, and the automobile was a proliferating novelty, especially in such a mobile, socially fluid place as Southern California. Frank offered a whole line of automotive products, tires and so forth, and as a person with high craft skills and considerable mechanical experience he mastered minor repairs. Soon local farmers began leaving produce with Frank Nixon to be sold to passersby.

His integrity was conceded by everyone and his service station swiftly was transmuted into a general store. Both Frank and Hannah Nixon were indulgent with shoppers who were financially distressed. They granted credit easily, and would not hear of discriminating against African-Americans, Mexicans, Indians, Roman Catholics, or, as far as there were any in Whittier, Jews. They even, at Richard’s very strong urging, declined to expose a shoplifter and allowed her discreetly to repay, over a generous period, the balance owed for what she had taken.

The threads of the Nixons’ lives were oddly united when Frank bought the old Friends’ church, as the Quakers moved to a larger one, and turned that into a general store. Soon Hannah, a talented cook, especially of favored American fruit pies, was selling baked goods, and Frank stocked a wide range of wares, even Hannah’s knitted goods. Frank added butchering to his long line of talents, and became the quintessential versatile shopkeeper, working in an apron. The Nixon boys helped out in the store and gas station, and, like that of most of the country, the family’s standard of living began to rise through the twenties.

Frank Nixon engaged most customers in political debate, which was a popular feature of his emporium for those who enjoyed his boisterous personality, but many sought out Hannah or one of the older boys at the cash register so as not to have an acrimonious and prolonged exchange with Frank. Frank had read Ida Tarbell’s 1904 attack on the near monopoly exercised by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, and he refused to sell Standard products. This may be taken as the beginning of Richard Nixon’s long, and heartily reciprocated, skepticism about the Rockefeller family.

Frank Nixon preached more flamboyantly than ever to his Sunday school classes. Politically, he departed the Republicans for the Progressives in 1924, when Senators Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin and Burton K. Wheeler of Montana ran a national campaign against Calvin Coolidge’s Republicans and the bitterly divided Democrats (split between the anti-Prohibitionists, led by the Roman Catholic governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith, and the Prohibitionists, led by future California senator, and Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law, William G. McAdoo). La Follette came third, but carried Wisconsin and took almost 20 percent of the country-wide vote. (The Democratic nominee, John W. Davis, took as his vice-presidential nominee Charles Bryan, the brother of three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.)

Richard Nixon was an outstanding student and moved effortlessly through the school system. For grade seven, in order to pursue piano studies more ambitiously, Richard moved two hundred miles to stay with Hannah’s sister, Jane Beeson, who had studied at the Indianapolis Conservatory of Music and gave him lessons every day. He walked a mile and a half to the Sunnyside School, and added violin lessons to his piano studies. These, still based entirely on rote, as it became almost a matter of pride to him not to learn how to read music, broadened into Chopin, Brahms, Bach, and other sophisticated composers. He returned to Whittier in June 1925 and to the East Whittier elementary school in September.

The Nixons continued to have a stable and normal family life. Much has been made of a letter Richard wrote his mother when he was ten, subscribing himself “your good dog, Richard.” Read in context, it was a humorous effort at ingratiation, and the fantastic imputations of the boy’s derangement, neurotic personality, and abuse by his mother are nonsense. Hannah showed it decades later to an interviewer as “just another sign of her son’s intelligence.”¹⁴

The Nixons’ was, for a time, a happier house than the more cramped homestead in Yorba Linda had been. But in July 1925, the first of several dark shadows fell over the family with the inexplicable illness of the littlest of them, Arthur. He came down with constant headaches, indigestion, lack of appetite, listlessness, and fatigue. The doctor was called after a few days, and Arthur was moved into the main house. The first time Richard saw his father cry was after a medical visit during which Frank was told that his son might not survive. There has never been a satisfactory medical explanation of Arthur’s ailment, but officially it was a result of encephalitis or tubercular meningitis, possibly provoked by a schoolyard stone-throwing accident.

Prayer meetings were held for Arthur in the Friends’ church in Whittier. The illness was inexorable, and the little boy died on August 10, 1925, aged seven. He was buried near his grandfather, Franklin Milhous. Richard “slipped into a big chair and sat staring into space, silent and dry-eyed in the undemonstrative way in which, because of his choked, deep feeling, he was always to face tragedy.”¹⁵ He wasn’t dry-eyed for long. “For weeks after Arthur’s funeral, there was not a day that I did not think about him and cry. For the first time, I learned what death was like and what it meant.” Hannah thought that Richard redoubled his determination to make his parents proud of him. “Now his need to succeed became even stronger.”¹⁶

An important part of American history was presaged in his valedictory address to the East Whittier elementary school. He had been president and “outstanding member” of the eighth grade class, and wrote a little piece about himself in which he said he would graduate from Whittier High School and Columbia University law school, then enter politics “so that I might be of some good to the people.”

Richard said that his father “half-believed that Arthur’s death represented some kind of divine displeasure” at the family’s commercial preoccupations, and he closed his gas station and general store on Sundays forever. With Frank taking the lead, the family’s religious devotions became more fervent than before. He arose in the contemplative Quaker sessions where the congregation was invited to speak of their religious insights. The Nixons attended four services on Sunday, and another during the week. Richard Nixon started to play the piano at church services. Frank also began to frequent the great evangelists of Los Angeles. He took his sons to hear Billy Sunday, who gesticulated wildly and roared against the evils of drink, sexual dissolution, and gambling, and held vast audiences spellbound by the power and exertions of his fire-and-brimstone sermons.

Another great evangelist in the mid-twenties was Aimee Semple McPherson. Originally from Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada, she fetched up in Los Angeles in the early twenties, almost penniless, but already an experienced touring evangelical. As Sister Aimee, she started to pull radio audiences for her claims of divine revelation, and in 1924 founded her own radio station. In these days before any regulation of the airwaves, her technique was to start broadcasting at the bottom of the dial and gradually alter her station’s wavelength, going right across the dial, poaching listeners as she went, and concluding with a colossal market share. She prospered so greatly she was able to build the five-thousand-seat Angelus Temple. A fetching woman, exiguously dressed, she sang well, accompanied by full orchestras and choirs, and conducted faith-healings and morality plays in which she chased a satanic beast around the stage with a pitchfork. They were splendid entertainments, but her fortunes began to decline when she was accused, though in 1927 exonerated of the charge, of staging her own kidnapping.

Frank also took the Nixons to see Aimee’s great, and slightly less exotic, rival, Robert Shuler of the Trinity Methodist Church. He eventually had an even larger radio audience than Sister Aimee, and terrorized Los Angeles politicians he judged to be morally deficient, driving a mayor and several other prominent officials from office. Another radio revivalist, who conducted crusades in Africa and Asia on motorcycles, was Paul Rader. It was at one of his meetings in Los Angeles in 1926 that the thirteen-year-old Richard Nixon went through a public conversion and spiritual reawakening.

His older brother, Harold, did not take to this pious regime quite as convincingly. A carefree, easygoing, amiable lad, Harold liked girls and parties and a rebuilt Ford Model T. His parents decided that he was insufficiently God-fearing and sent him off to evangelist Dwight L. Moody’s spartan and fire-breathing Mount Hermon School for Boys, in rural Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1926. Frank was now prosperous enough to afford such a luxury, but Harold was not a natural candidate or happy arrival at such a place.

Richard, who had comported himself a good deal more soberly, was sent to a nearby high school, Fullerton Union. Given the restraints under which he had been raised, it was a wonder that Richard Nixon was progressing through his teens as a well-adjusted young man, despite the inexpressible sadness of Arthur. The Nixons were now economically in the middle class and Richard was an excellent student, socially awkward but serviceable, in a loving if perfervidly pious family.

Richard now went to school on the school bus, which he disliked because of the lack of cleanliness and body odor of many of the students. This became so bothersome to him that in 1927 he moved to live during the week with an aunt in Fullerton, returning to Whittier to work in the store on Friday evening and Saturday. He was always well turned out in neatly pressed gray flannels, and brushed his teeth so strenuously that it was a substitute for mouthwash.

He was a very strong student, who worked while his classmates relaxed. He studied with fierce determination, forcing himself to succeed whether he possessed any liking or aptitude for the subjects or not. He did like English and history and did not find it burdensome to commit large swatches of famous prose or historic facts to memory. But even in geometry, he applied himself until he knew enough to do well, despite his intense lack of interest in the subject.

He forced himself to become a capable public speaker, overcoming his innate shyness by writing out what he considered, after meticulous redrafting, an excellent speech, committing it entirely to memory, and then practicing rendering it in as natural a way as he could simulate. It was laborious, but, as with much that he achieved in his life, his doggedness and implacability brought success. His forensic efforts were assisted by his generally goodnatured debates with his loquacious and outspoken father. As Richard grew and learned, he became a steadily worthier challenger in argument for Frank, and rather than these exchanges being contentious, they tended to bring the two closer together.

Richard had played soccer at East Whittier. At Fullerton, he changed to football and developed what was to become a lifelong passion for the sport. He was now a somewhat full-figured young man, being about five feet, seven inches in height and carrying a weight of about a hundred and fifty pounds, on his way to five-eleven and about one hundred and sixty-five pounds as an adult. He turned out for every practice, but was only on the B team and saw little action. He wasn’t fast or well-coordinated, but he was game and fearless, and never gave up. He had an encyclopedic knowledge, then and always after, for football statistics.

It was less than six months after Harold was shipped off to Dwight Moody’s seminarian boot camp that the next gruesome shadow came down on the Nixon family. Harold was sent home in April 1927 with a chest condition that was feared, accurately, to be tuberculosis. A heartbreaking drama ensued, with little doubt of the outcome, protracted though it would be. The inexorable, gradual decline of Harold Nixon would go on for nearly six years.

Frank would not consider a public clinic, as this would make him a dependent of the state. He again stretched his personal resources to send his eldest son to an expensive sanatorium in the San Gabriel Mountains. From here, after a few months, Harold was moved to a rural cabin with supposedly salubrious air. Harold had several remissions but ignored medical advice. He was an amateur aviator and indulged himself in this activity, which was dangerous to tubercular cases, and even took a job spraying citrus groves with insecticide, a very unhealthy occupation for anyone with any pulmonary condition. A year after his return from school, Harold was taken in tow by Hannah and they went to Prescott, Arizona, counting on dry desert air and Hannah’s strict watchfulness to protect Harold from his own careless exuberance.

Prescott was an air spa, and a tourist attraction because of its Wild West entertainments. But there was a discreet community for sufferers of tuberculosis and asthma. Hannah rented a cabin and took in three other tubercular young men, caring for them all as thoroughly as for Harold. Everything had to be repeatedly sterilized, many times a day, as no one knew how the disease was transmitted, and Hannah had no assistance lugging groceries for five up the hill from town. Frank, Richard, and Don remained in Whittier but traveled the four hundred miles to Prescott at least once a month in Frank’s 1924 Packard (a luxury car, albeit a used one). It was a fourteen-hour trip each way. Relatives minded the store as the Nixons faced this new emergency with their customary courage and stoicism.

Richard spent the summers of 1928 and 1929 in Prescott and contributed to the family income with a variety of jobs, including janitor in a posh country club, plucking chickens in a poultry shop, and serving very successfully and even lucratively as a barker at Prescott’s Wild West carnival in July. Prescott, apart from the tubercular sections, was a wealthy town, and Richard Nixon had perhaps his first up-close glimpse of rich people, just as the fabulously wealthy decade of the twenties wound noisily to a spectacular climax.

Needed in his father’s business, Richard moved in September 1928 back from Fullerton Union to Whittier Union, which his parents had considered morally unsuitable for Richard and Harold two years before. Richard would now embark on a more onerous regime than he had ever imagined, but he bore up under it once again, uncomplainingly. He became the vegetables manager of his father’s business, and got up every morning at 4 A.M., drove (which he was licensed to do at age fifteen) in a dilapidated truck into the Seventh Street market in Los Angeles, selected, haggled for, and brought back the produce, then washed and displayed it, before putting in a full school day.

Richard never complained and did his job with great skill, but as with many other things that he had to do in his youth, he hated it and never after drove “by a vegetable stand without feeling sorry for the guy who picks out the rotten apples.”¹⁷ Under these influences, Richard Nixon developed a concern for his weight and diet that never deserted him. His weight would be almost constant, and not at all excessive, from his late teens into his eighties.

He did maintain his interest in debating and in 1929 won a Whittier oratorical contest sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. He would have a long and complicated relationship with this newspaper, starting with his unsuccessful application for a job there as an office boy in 1924. His theme in the oratory contest was the limit of rights, and he endorsed Lincoln’s assertion that there can be “no individual rights against the best interests of society.” This was to have some interesting echoes in his own career. He won the same contest again in 1930, with an even more impassioned invocation of America’s “incomparable Constitution.” He even ascribed to the Constitution curative powers for emulators, purporting to find the “amazing” rise of Latin America illustrative of the peerless exportability of the American system. Latin America was, of course, a cesspool of corruption, despotism, and backwardness, and it is not clear whether Nixon believed any of what he was saying on the subject or was merely exploiting the unworldly chauvinism of his audience.

He was brought up in the belief that America was a divinely blessed country that had discovered and proclaimed the secret of successful self-government. He would perceive relatively early in his adult life the limits of public tolerance and clean government within America, and in the world the impotence of the good example. And he would apply these lessons to American public and foreign policy when finally able to do so. These, and not the irony of his early enthusiasm for the safeguards of the Constitution (as some of his detractors have claimed), were the real omens of his collegiate efforts at political oratory.

Richard Nixon’s success in the Times oratory contest was the principal factor that caused the Whittier Union faculty and senior class to run him against the faculty-approved candidate of the junior class for the position of student body president, in the spring of 1929. Nixon appeared to be the favorite, but the race was shaken up by the rare Whittier phenomenon of an unofficial third candidate, a fine athlete and captain of the basketball team. Nixon was cast as a machine politician and the junior class candidate as a sort of patsy for the senior candidate. Nixon was not a natural or relaxed campaigner, and his chief opponent, the grassroots renegade Robert Logue, was. Indeed, Logue was all that Nixon was not: tall, attractive to women, a fine athlete, and a good student to whom everything appeared to come easily. He won election by a good majority, having not seemed especially to want it, almost accepting a spontaneous draft of students who were tired of having their executive selected for them by “bosses.” It was, in several respects, an object lesson for the young Nixon.

He was never under the illusion that he was particularly popular, other than in small groups that got to know him well. He was always wary of a type of person who seemed naturally graceful and lucky, and he thought the world was frequently unjust, as such felicitous people kept popping up to overturn what he had worked with great self-discipline to achieve. In later years and higher offices, some would think this paranoia, but it was a realistic appreciation of his limitations and of the caprices of electoral life. At his elementary school, he was selected by an electorate whose criteria for election he could easily address. As he prepared to leave secondary school, it was already more complicated.

Nixon knew well enough the fears and ambitions of the average person, and he could project his own ordinariness of circumstance. He sometimes seemed dogmatic or humorless, but rarely pompous. But lacking the quality of natural attraction was what made him vulnerable as a candidate and even as an office-holder embroiled in controversy, and was what made his ultimate attainments in his chosen career so astounding. He was vulnerable, but ultimately unstoppable. In the vortex between these two qualities there would be great drama and national controversy many years later, and for a whole generation.

Nixon never acknowledged that the Whittier Union setback hurt him, but it could not fail to have been humiliating. The rest of the senior class slate won; it was a personal rejection, very clearly, by the great majority of his peers. It was a little like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s not being named a full prefect at his prestigious private school by his legendary rector, Dr. Endicott Peabody. Roosevelt claimed to his parents that the honor had been rendered meaningless by nepotism, as Peabody had appointed his own nephew. But in fact Roosevelt, who was much more the natural politician than Nixon but in small groups was undermined by his own charm - so facile that, before he became a powerful man, it appeared somewhat dishonest - was also deeply offended.¹⁸

As a consolation prize for Nixon, the faculty exercised its right to name him student body general manager. For the first of many times, Nixon used a position to do favors for people, to get mundane tasks, cumulatively important, done properly. He sold advertising in the yearbook and positioned himself to be helpful to many students in many ways. Here he was very efficient and ultimately much better appreciated than when he had been perceived as a lackey of the faculty overreaching for the highest post in student government.

In an even more spectacular and embarrassing fiasco than the election, Nixon played Aeneas in a reenactment of Virgil’s Aeneid, which the school ambitiously staged on the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Rome’s greatest poet. Nixon had an ill-fitting costume and was completely unrehearsed apart from his lines, and the love scene with Dido, involving an energetic and prolonged embrace, replete with passionate dialogue, brought down the house in brickbats and catcalls. It was a horrifying experience, but it got Nixon over his initial embarrassment and into an innocent and long-running romance with Dido, Ola Florence Welch.

She was a very popular, attractive girl, the daughter of Whittier’s deputy chief of police. Thanks to Ola, Nixon, who now called himself Dick, concluded high school in a blaze of glory. After a month-long fever - during which his mother, who was back in Whittier to have yet another child at the age of forty-five, had his course work sent over from the school - Nixon graduated third in a class of 207. He seemed a popular enough youth, after all, not gregarious, but well adjusted and well appreciated, and happy in the manner of doting teenagers.

There is nothing to support the claims of those who purport to find in the collegiate Dick Nixon a monster in the making. His upbringing had been rather joyless; he had had to work very hard and his father was difficult. It was a relentlessly serious life and nothing came easily to him. But he was a good student, a good worker in a wide range of challengingly dull jobs; he was very responsible, and had got on well with his classmates in the end.

The Harvard Club of California rated him the “best all-round student” at Whittier Union. This comported an invitation to apply for a tuition grant to Harvard. Nixon claims in his memoirs that there also was a prospect of a similar scholarship from Yale. Instead he went to Whittier College, where his mother had attended (but didn’t finish, as marriage and a brief time as a school teacher, which didn’t require a degree, intervened). Frank Milhous had left each of his grandchildren a $250 bequest for university tuition, and this would effectively defray all the costs of higher learning in Whittier.

The reason Nixon always gave for passing on Harvard and Yale was that Harold’s illness, a new child in the family, and the requirement for him to be an alternate head of the family business to his father, prevented him from going three thousand miles away and generating substantial expenses. This is plausible, and his parents, who thought Harold had been led morally astray by Whittier Union high school, were probably not enchanted at the thought of bundling off the seventeen-year-old Richard to such sophisticated places, so far away, at the final spike of the Jazz and Prohibition Age.

His life might have been a little less charged with fears and resentments of the Eastern Establishment if he had accepted such an honor. When Nixon did come to grips with the empowered alumni of the Ivy League in the great law firms and corporations of the East, it was always an uneasy arrangement. Harvard or Yale, and wherever he had gone in graduate school, might have given him a less fearful and abrasive insight into that milieu and forged him some relationships that would have made the peaks of his career less lonely, and his many successes easier for him to celebrate.

The Orthogonians soon adopted as campus adviser the college’s football coach, Wallace “Chief” Newman, replacing the English lecturer who originally held the position but found the “Beans and Brawn” group less than convivial. Newman, a partial North American Indian from the La Jolla Reservation and a tough leader of the football team, would be a lifelong friend and strong formative influence on Richard Nixon. Their relations would flower despite Nixon’s ineptitude as a football player and would endure all the tumult of Nixon’s unique career. They would be friends to the end.

Here again is a slight parallel to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s relations with Dr. Peabody. Roosevelt had craved more recognition from Peabody than the Doctor was happy to give to him as a thrusting schoolboy. But Peabody ceased to withhold it as Roosevelt achieved and retained the nation’s highest office. Newman was not prepared to exaggerate Nixon’s athletic prowess while he was at Whittier. But he admired Nixon’s determination and was happy to be his friend as Nixon followed the same path as Roosevelt, and after.²⁰

Chief Newman was a large and swarthy man who had been a star football player at the University of Southern California. He came to Whittier in 1929, attracted some good football talent, and made the small college a greater football force than its numbers could normally assure. He was a tough coach, sparing in congratulation and consolation, who told his players they had to be “angry, terribly angry” about losing. “I think that I admired him more and learned more from him than from any man I have ever known outside my father,” Nixon would write in his memoirs.²¹

Nixon was such a dedicated player there was great affection for him on the team and among its fans. He was not talented, but gave it all he could and never shrank from the terrible pounding he received in practice and when he got into games. (He said that his “only athletic trophy” was a porcelain bridge he got after taking an elbow in the mouth in a basketball game.) Toward the end of football games that weren’t close, regardless of which team was winning, a chant would go up in the stands: “We want Nixon! Put Nixon in!” He became a folk hero, as improbable athletes do (the British national ski-jumper Eddie “the Eagle,” the erratic baseball pitcher known in the nineties as “Wild Thing,” and so forth). A huge ovation would greet his appearance in the game, and his teammates would try to make him look good, setting him up for yardage gains or touchdowns.

Nixon became more jocular in his university days than at any other time. In March 1931 he staged a pretended coup d’état for the benefit of the college newspaper, Quaker Campus, purporting to abolish chapel and impeach the student body president. It was a popular lark. He studied English, French, European history, algebra, and, in something of an irony, journalism. He had an active extracurricular and social life, but studied as much as was necessary to be on top of all subjects, frequently until after one o’clock in the morning. He still arose at 4 A.M. to drive into Los Angeles, buy vegetables, and come back and wash them and set them out. As an adult, he was not a sound sleeper, and as a teenager he seemed able to get by on only a few hours of sleep most nights. His campus days were overwhelmingly purposeful. He never appeared to have a spare minute and was always between classes, clubs, sports, or campus hobbies.

He took up as a debater where he had left off at high school and had a distinguished career as a collegiate debater. Frank let the Whittier debating team drive all over California in his Packard to debate with other universities in the early thirties. Here Richard Nixon acquired some of the phrases he would make tiresomely familiar decades later: “Let me make one thing perfectly clear,” etc. This tendency to repetition of the banal, and his slightly jerky physical gestures, caused caricaturists, as well as his opponents, to underestimate him. He was a crafty debater, sometimes pulling out what was really a blank piece of paper and claiming to quote an authoritative source. Though in debating as in other spheres, Richard Nixon was more concerned with winning than with sportsmanship, as Chief Newman counseled, there is no evidence from this or subsequent stages of his career that he was completely unscrupulous; he was merely cynical at the margins. But this would lead to serious public relations problems in the real world.

Richard was back in Prescott in the summer of 1932 with his mother and Harold and little Edward. It was a punishing time for all the Nixons. Frank and Donald held the fort in the business, which continued to be profitable even as the Depression worsened, since Frank was selling only essential goods, with carefully shaved margins and only family labor. The family had two cars and a truck, and Richard did not have to rent a dinner jacket for college formal evenings - he owned one, a criterion separating the bourgeoisie from the working class in the thirties. If Harold could have been saved by more expensive medical treatment, the Nixons would have managed it.

Frank Nixon had hard-scrabbled a long way economically for a man who attended school only for a few months and whose parents had been destitute. But the United States, the great promised land that had gained the admiration, or at least the curiosity, of the whole world and had attracted millions of the oppressed and deprived of other countries from their proverbially teeming shores, was on the verge of economic collapse. For the first time since the Civil War, there were machine-gun emplacements at the entrances and corners of the great public buildings of Washington for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration on March 4, 1933.

The unemployment rate was over 30 percent, and there was no direct federal relief, and little help from most of the states. Nearly half the homes and farms of America were encumbered by mortgages and subject to seizure and the eviction of their occupants, sixty million people, at almost any time. Most of the farms of the country were uneconomical in a time of huge farm surpluses and massive dumping into foreign markets. The banking system had collapsed, and the New York Stock Exchange and Chicago Grain Exchange were closed sine die on inauguration day. As the wife of a prominent Federal Reserve trustee (and mother of Richard Nixon’s eventual nemesis and finally admirer, Katharine Graham), Agnes Meyer, wrote in her diary, “Hoover is leaving office to the sound of crashing banks.”²²

Herbert Hoover, a man who had administered European relief programs with great distinction after the First World War and was a very respected secretary of commerce in the Harding and Coolidge administrations, had no idea how to deal with the Great Depression. His policy prescription was the worst that could have been imagined: tax increases, a shrunken money supply, higher tariffs. And no direct relief for the unemployed or the poor. The American people threw Hoover out to bring in Roosevelt in November 1932. In America’s greatest crisis since the Civil War, its greatest president since Lincoln emerged. For a time, even Frank Nixon was an FDR supporter. The underlying Republican majority that had existed since Lincoln’s first election, and which had won fourteen of the last eighteen presidential elections, was dissolved. The country was entering a new political cycle. No one, not even Richard Nixon in his most ambitious thoughts, could imagine he, the overworked and over-serious younger son of angry, noisy Frank Nixon, would help bring the Republicans back to the White House after twenty years, and in the country’s next great crisis, half a generation after that, would introduce a new cycle of restored Republican governance.

When Harold asked for a trip into the San Bernardinos early in 1933, Frank bought a primitive house-trailer and they set off, but had to return after three days because of Harold’s condition. On March 6, 1933, Harold asked Richard to take him to a hardware store so they could buy a cake mixer for their mother’s forty-eighth birthday, which was the following day. On her birthday, Harold asked for his mother and told her that although he wanted more than he could say to get well again, “This is the last time I will see you until we meet in heaven.” Then he died, leaving Richard - summoned home from the college to find the same undertaker who had removed Arthur, and his parents sobbing uncontrollably - to give his mother the birthday present he and Harold had bought. No one who has not experienced such sadness can judge the impact these premature deaths had on Richard Nixon. No one who was not fiercely determined would have persevered through all the travails he did. To some extent, he occasionally intimated, he was fighting a battle for all the Nixons, who he felt had been so wronged in life and death.^a ²³ Harold was buried beside Arthur and their grandfather, Frank Milhous.

Whittier was not a great center of learning by international standards, and the library only had about twenty thousand books, but it offered a good grounding to those who were there to learn. Nixon had a very animated history professor, Paul Smith, who entertained less beatific versions of the motives and actions of the country’s Founding Fathers than had been taught in high school. One of the principal texts was co-authored by Samuel E. Morison and Henry Steele Commager (the latter would be one of Nixon’s most belligerent and inflexible critics at the climax of his career). Nixon developed a taste for historical biography that he never lost, slogging through John Nicolay and John Hay’s ten-volume life of Abraham Lincoln. Nixon did not become a qualified historian at Whittier, but had a vast interest in the subject and steadily absorbed it all his life.

Of the extracurricular activities, apart from football, Nixon’s greatest interest was in drama. This must have helped him overcome his shyness, a condition that afflicts many people who pursue public careers, and it assisted in making his public speaking more animated. He learned how to pitch and modulate his voice, affect a full range of emotions, and even induce false tears. (There is no evidence that he ever had recourse to this last skill in his future career.) This too was a field for which Nixon had a natural aptitude, and his professor thought he might have made it as a full-time actor had that been his ambition.

He continued to be a rigorously practicing Quaker, and some of his friends thought that might ultimately be his career. There is no question of Nixon’s religious sincerity, then or subsequently, but as with acting, religion dovetailed with his political ambitions. The tendency to invoke divine inspiration or at least God-fearing piety in enunciating public policy was very widespread at this time, and the United States generally expected such flourishes from its politicians. From William Jennings Bryan seizing the Democratic leadership in 1896 by warning (the Republicans), “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” to Theodore Roosevelt stalking out of the Republican Convention in 1912 and asseverating, “We stand at Armageddon and we fight for the Lord,” to Woodrow Wilson concluding his war message in 1917, “God helping her [America], can do no other,” to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was about to drive the money-changers “from their high seats in the temple,” at his first inauguration, religion and politics were often blended, and not always very scrupulously.

Hannah Nixon urged upon Richard the life of a clergyman or even missionary, but “he didn’t exactly respond favorably.”²⁴ For all his campus enthusiasms, he never joined the Whittier religious society, one of the most frequented clubs at the college. With the senior class, he took a course called “the Philosophy of Christian Reconstruction,” taught by Dr. J.H. Coffin. It was a challenging presentation of science and revealed Christianity, and caused Richard Nixon to consider and durably settle his views.²⁵ It is clear from essays Nixon wrote that he had fairly conventional Christian views; he believed in God, self-help, the Commandments, the integrity of family and marriage, but he was not deterministic or even, despite frequent religious observance, fervent. He believed in the supernatural powers of Jesus and in at least the concept of resurrection, and he accepted the process of evolution. America was a uniquely blessed country, but no intelligent person who saw the exploitation of unskilled labor and the antics of commercial sharpers at the expense of the unwary in Southern California, as Richard Nixon did, could imagine that America was a morally unoffending country. Nixon had a religion that he clung to and that helped him through many dark nights. He had no notion of proselytizing anyone to a quantum step upward in the perfectibility of the nature of man. He left such extravagant fantasies to the atheistic left.

The relationship between Richard Nixon and Ola Florence Welch flourished, despite differences of politics and personality. The Nixons were militant Republicans and opposed any relief for the unemployed, even though there were now huge numbers of hopeless derelicts in Los Angeles and other large cities. Ola was an enthusiastic Democrat, with a deep admiration for Roosevelt (inaugurated three days before Harold’s death in March 1933), and, like many students in all eras, was gently, and rather ingenuously, socialistic. They managed this, especially as Frank warmed to FDR, but more of a problem were some of Richard’s unutterably gauche social miscues, especially his habit of arriving in his car in front of Ola’s family’s house and announcing his presence and desire for her to come out by honking the horn until she did. He knew her parents did not care for him, and this was his way of avoiding them. It was counterproductive.

She was vivacious and liked to dance, and he was still rather moody, reticent, and a very reluctant dancer, despite his musical talents. Ola was very popular and widely admired, and Richard in person was gentle and thoughtful and intelligent. Like many early romances, it was to some extent the attraction of opposites, and in those times of restraint and in that most circumspect place, their relations never approached the borders of chastity. She, like generations of American voters, learned to overlook his minor abrasions. “Most of the time,” she later said, “I just couldn’t figure him out.”²⁶

At Whittier College, Richard Nixon had been aiming at the position of student president, the office that had eluded him at Whittier Union. Stung, perhaps, by the recurrent charge through most of his career that he was, as Lyndon Johnson would famously claim, a “chronic campaigner,” Nixon recalled that “in college, political battles as such never appealed to me, but I always seemed to get dragged into them to run for some office or another.”²⁷ It was one of the anomalies of Nixon’s personality that he never admitted that he was resistless against the possibility of election, from the age of twelve on, until there were no more offices to seek.

He steadily built his political position at Whittier College. At the end of his first year, he managed to be elected as student council member-at-large. This was a clever choice of route upwards, as there was no defined opponent and he was thus enabled to excel as a councilor. This he shortly did, when some Whittier students caused a collegiate scandal by painting the front of Occidental College on the eve of a big football game between the two, and then muddying the waters by then similarly desecrating their own campus. What they actually painted was innocuous, and they admitted their prank forthrightly, but there was great outrage, as well as the threat of expulsion of the students involved and of Whittier from the athletic conference. Nixon championed the students before the faculty, administration, and student council. Presaging his great talents as an advocate in weightier matters, though only eighteen, he struck upon the device that the students and the college would have the same fate - that expelling the students would be taken as an admission of collective unworthiness by Whittier and would shame the college, cause its banishment from the athletic conference, and result in a serious loss of community athletic grants and student applications. His reasoning prevailed after a discussion of several hours, and he was justly lionized by his fellow students.

He took another vote-winning initiative in 1933, as chairman of the annual bonfire committee. A considerable bonfire was habitually topped off by the chairman contributing, usually from an improper provenance, an outdoor privy. It was a manifestation of the innocent, boosterish scatology of the place and time that Richard Nixon added a cubit to his stature by finding, for the first time in the history of the annual bonfire, a four-hole privy with which he crowned the fire.

Less to his advantage, but much to his credit, Nixon, who never evinced the slightest traditional racial prejudice, sponsored a black student as a member of the Orthogonian Society. There was nothing in this for him; he liked the student and was anti-segregationist. In this, he doubtless owed much to his Quaker heritage. Again, he was successful.

Nixon prepared his own elevation by helping to arrange a complete division of electoral spoils between the Franklins and the Orthogonians. With the two societies voting en bloc, they could alternate student offices in a way that was designed to allow Nixon to serve as president in his final year after an unopposed election. He had again end-run the caprices of electoral politics by a machine electoral fix, while shoring up his own popularity by performing well and thoughtfully in the positions to which he had been elected. It was vintage, methodical Nixon.

As so often happened to Richard Nixon, the unpleasantly unexpected occurred; he was rarely a very lucky politician, which is one of the reasons for his tendency to be morose. A popular, relaxed, attractive, athletic candidate leapt in at the last minute, with some editorial support from the campus newspaper. This development, unlike a similar one four years before, found the Nixon political apparatus more prepared, and Nixon the political tactician was four years cleverer. He waited until late in the campaign and then published his advocacy of the permission for on-campus dances. This was the sort of tactical masterstroke that he would regularly produce in more serious elections. There was a heavy turnout, and although the breakdown of the votes was never revealed, Nixon won and spent his final year at Whittier as president of the student body.

Further, Nixon followed through on his promise and successfully championed the amendment of campus rules to allow for dances, convincing his elders that this would be preferable to having dances take place in morally dubious bars and hotels in neighboring communities (since the Town of Whittier was as priggish as the college) or even, as was in fact usually the case, in the festering metropolis of thirties Los Angeles, world capital of unrepentant wickedness. It was well known to his friends that he wanted a political career, but the greatest ambition Nixon would admit to at this point was to be a congressman. It is impossible that his ambitions, even at this early date, would stop there.

He graduated from Whittier College second in a senior class of eighty-five, in the spring of 1934, aged twenty-one. He did not smoke or drink, was probably a virgin, was a devout churchgoer, and was an upright, resourceful, determined young man, with a very nice girlfriend, whom, it was generally assumed, including by both of them, he would eventually marry. His background was unrelievedly ordinary, but he had already risen above it. He had made the most of a modest education, determined on a political career, and already had acquired many of the arts necessary to make a success of his ambitions. As his father had spent the twenties boot-strapping himself up from penury, Richard Nixon, spurred by the tragic deaths of two of his brothers, had made through his teens, as Chief Newman might put it, a lot of yardage. The college’s annual, Acropolis, featured Nixon: “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 Richard Nixon. Always progressive and with a liberal attitude, he has led us through the year with flying colors.”²⁸ The Orthogonians thought he would be president of the United States.²⁹

At Duke, he helped a severely handicapped student up and down the main stairway of one building every day; his polio-afflicted classmate, Fred Cady, would wait for him and Nixon never failed him. “He never smiled, though he had a very nice smile, and a great deal to smile about. When he allowed himself to smile, he could light up a room. He had good straight, gleaming white teeth, with nice crinkles around his eyes. In repose his heavy jowls sagged and added years to his appearance, but when he smiled the jowls lifted up, dimples appeared, and what had been a slightly sinister appearance, became a glowing one.”³¹

Richard Nixon had an intense year with little pleasure, aside from a Christmas trip with Donald to New York City, his first visit and an inspiring experience. But he came third in his class, of which 40 percent did not get through at all, and had a comparatively relaxed summer in Whittier, apart from his irritation and sadness that the lovely Ola had taken up with someone else. With his usual tenacity, Richard called upon her and wrote to her, but she courteously declined his attentions and married the rival in 1936. In later years, Nixon would downplay the strength of his feelings for Ola, and she never spoke ill of him, while allowing that the man she did marry was “more fun.”

Frank drove his son and a friend back to Duke in September 1935. Roosevelt had got to grips with the Depression; unemployment was down from 33 percent to about 23 percent, and of those, about half were in workfare programs, building public works, roads, parks, power dams, and canals, or occupied in conservation or specialized projects. Almost all the rest were receiving unemployment insurance, as a comprehensive Social Security system had been launched. The Nixons noticed as they drove across the country that the human landscape of America had begun to change. The breadlines and soup kitchens and indigents selling apples and traveling across the country in boxcars had almost disappeared.

Roosevelt had thrown out the failed hypocrisy of Prohibition, and the speakeasies and other appurtenances of the twenties went with it. The entire banking system, which had been on the verge of complete collapse less than three years before, had been reconstructed, and deposits were guaranteed by the federal government. All forms of agriculture now were subsidized to roll back production to useful levels so that prices would rise to a point where farmers could make both ends meet. The government had refinanced all the country’s home and farm mortgages that were in danger of default, and the atmosphere, in emulation of the irrepressible president, was decidedly optimistic. The extreme parties of left and right had fallen back, a trend that was assisted by the assassination of Louisiana governor Huey P. Long, a rollicking populist demagogue, who died from gunshot wounds as the Nixons drove from California to North Carolina.

Richard Nixon had a more varied and confident academic year in 1935-1936. He worked in the law school clinic, which seconded him to the local prosecutor’s office, and gained what would prove invaluable experience at techniques of research and inquisition. He also was asked to write for the law school journal, Law and Contemporary Problems. This was disinterested recognition from the faculty, and, after some trepidation, buoyed his self-confidence. He lived in a rented cottage with three divinity students. One of them was married, and his wife cooked and washed for them all. In the summer of 1936, Nixon remained at Duke, he told his parents, to permit him to write his piece for the law journal, though it may have been to avoid being in Whittier when Ola Florence Welch married another man.

He and two friends became so concerned about their anticipated grades that one night, seeing the transom window above the dean’s door open, they boosted up one of them, who let his comrades in, and they rummaged around and found that they had all passed satisfactorily. They replaced everything, took nothing, damaged nothing, and committed no indiscretions. Yet some Nixonophobes have suggested that this was a foretaste of felonious behavior, and of a propensity for office break-ins.³²

In the autumn of 1936 and for his final year at Duke, he moved in with two friends in a cabin, heated by a wood stove, in the Duke Forest. It had neither running water nor electricity, and it was as spartan accommodation as Richard Nixon had ever had, but it was cheap; they christened it Whippoorwill Manor, and greatly enjoyed themselves. It was the poverty of spartan youth and not of failure or oppression, and many students lived in similar quarters in the Duke Forest, so it was not at all depressing.

Once again, after he became acclimatized to where he was, Richard Nixon got on well with his mates. He was called Gloomy Gus, not because he was dejected, but because he was practical and dour of appearance with his dark and jowly features and persistent beard, and he tended to bring others down to earth with a humorous abruptness. Nixon became so demonstrative and noisy at Duke football games, he was part of the crowd attraction. He lost himself completely in the games and shouted uninhibitedly until he was hoarse. It was presumably more of a psychological displacement for him even than whatever motivates most sports fans to identify so strongly with the outcome of sporting matches.

True to his previous pattern, Nixon, without appearing to most people to have ardently sought the office, consented to run for the presidency of his law school bar association in 1936 for the 1937 year. He stood for election with his handicapped friend, Fred Cady, running with him as secretary, on a platform of promising to get the bar to focus on employment prospects for law graduates. It was hardly an original theme in the thirties, but it worked, and they were easily elected, giving Nixon student office at all four levels of his formal education, from eighth grade to law school. The election gave him a physical office on campus, which enabled him to wash and change there, rather than in the howling and primitive discomfort of Whippoorwill Manor.

There weren’t many girls in the law faculty, and Nixon didn’t seem to be much involved with other departments of the university, so he had no romantic life in his Duke years that anyone remembers. Johnny Long and Les Brown, who went on to great success in the big band era, were Duke undergraduates then, and Nixon sometimes attended their performances, but mainly he studied.

In the spring of 1937, he suddenly stood up on a picnic table at a class celebration and improvised a hilarious talk on Social Security, praising the values of insecurity in an absurdly pompous, mock-professorial way. It was an unprecedented and probably unique effort, and reduced his friends to helpless laughter. But he rarely was so spontaneous and was generally thought to be intelligent and kind, but reserved and wary; a puzzle, as he would remain.

Richard Nixon did strenuously dissent from the prevailing southern disparagement of African-Americans. He was shocked at the endemic bigotry of the South, but he developed some sympathy he had not felt before for the South’s sense of victimhood after the defeat by the North and the corrupt and repressive occupation of the South by the Union Army and the infamous carpetbaggers. This was still verdant in the mind of every Southerner sixty years later, even to Nixon’s contemporaries.

Nixon and two of his friends were back in New York at Christmas 1936, seeking employment after graduation. Though well-regarded, Duke’s was a new law school and there was huge demand for places in the great New York firms. Richard Nixon cooled his heels unsuccessfully at Sullivan & Cromwell, where John Foster Dulles was the managing partner.^b ³³ He would be back, twelve years later, and the reception would be much warmer.

They went to plays and to the Metropolitan Opera House, but Nixon got no job offers. In February 1937, Nixon, in his law student presidential role at Duke, received J. Edgar Hoover’s assistant, who was recruiting for the FBI. He put in for a position, but again without success. And again, he would be back in touch with Hoover eventually, but not as a supplicant.

His entire family, including his indomitable eighty-eight-year-old grandmother, Almira Milhous, drove east for his graduation, and they all crowded back into Frank’s car for the long trip home. Nixon had done well at Duke, but he had not made a breakthrough in permanent friendships, or in developing a more relaxed personality and becoming more comfortable with himself.

Richard Nixon had passionately hoped to escape Whittier and was dejected to find himself, after his prodigies at Duke University and his efforts at job-hunting in New York and at the FBI, back where he started. As head of the Duke student bar association, he had organized a publicity effort for all graduates, using the university’s office to send out stories and photographs to the local newspapers of all graduates. Whittier responded and as a result Nixon was at least something of a local celebrity when he reluctantly returned.

Hannah Nixon had already made overtures to an old Milhous friend, Thomas Bewley, a local lawyer. Bewley, a Whittier College alumnus, inquired of Nixon’s history professor if it would be a “mistake” to offer Richard Nixon a position in his firm, and received the ineffably Quakerish response that it “would not be a mistake.” Bewley then phoned the Nixon store and home repeatedly for four weeks, but elicited no response from the sullen young Richard, back in his old stuffy upstairs bedroom as if his years of work and self-denial in rooming houses and Whippoorwill Manor had been for nothing.

With Bewley still calling in messages every few days, Nixon tried again with the FBI, in Los Angeles, and then decided to take the California bar examination. He started studying late and was worried, as he often was throughout his life, by the thought of failing. A cousin remonstrated with him about his rudeness in not replying to Bewley, and he did meet with the lawyer. After he was rejected again by the FBI, “for lack of aggressiveness,” and passed the bar examinations in September 1937, he joined Wingert and Bewley, in the top (sixth) floor of Whittier’s tallest building, the Bank of America building, at the end of the year.

Whittier had remained an insular, pious, priggish place, where an effort at unionization by Mexican citrus workers was violently suppressed in the early thirties. Jimtown was almost razed by management vigilantes and scabs. Roosevelt’s assisted-work plans were at first rejected, until the virtues of federal funds for sewer improvements were at last recognized.

Wingert and Bewley acted for local oil companies and handled wills and other non-contentious matters. It wasn’t much of a litigation firm and did not touch criminal matters. It represented almost all the principal commercial figures of the town and its surroundings, and would serve Nixon well as a launching pad for his political career. Bored though he was with the work, Nixon applied himself with his inevitable diligence and was the first person in each morning, rarely left for lunch, and put in long hours. At Duke, his standard breakfast had been a Milky Way chocolate bar. While he lived under Hannah’s roof, he got a more nutritious start to the day, but often continued that custom for his lunches as a young lawyer.

Nixon’s first significant case was a disaster that would haunt him for years. He acted for a woman who was owed money by her aunt and uncle, and obtained a two-thousand-dollar lien on their house in consideration of the debt. When the court eventually ordered the sale of the house to cover the debt, Nixon bid the quantum of the debt owed his client without inquiring whether there were other charges on the house. There were, and the holders of those claims appeared and Nixon and Bewley’s client effectively remained unsecured. Bewley was able to arrange another judicial sale and bid a nominal sum, but was outbid, effectively removing the security of the firm’s client, who sued the firm. Bewley, who was the chief defendant, settled the original $2,000 claim for $4,800, a sizable sum to a small law firm in 1938. But that was not the end of it; the original litigants came back to court and dragged it out until 1942. Bewley manfully accepted responsibility for the errors of his firm. Nixon paid the price of inexperience, but his hostile biographers have endlessly excavated the case to claim that it foretold duplicity and dishonesty. It did not, but it may have been the last occasion when Nixon showed less than his usual extreme suspicion of the motives of almost everyone.

Despite this fiasco, Nixon was quickly and durably respected as a barrister and a solicitor. Thorough in preparation and a skillful court tactician and cross-examiner, Nixon soon established himself as one of the county’s most capable lawyers. He could not handle divorce cases, because he did not have, said Bewley, the necessary “bedside manner,” and by his own admission he was severely embarrassed by women’s confessions of sexual misconduct.³⁴

She worked in the upmarket Los Angeles department store Bullock’s at Christmas 1935, and developed a disdain for the pretensions and insensitivities of the idle rich that she never lost.³⁵ These working experiences helped her to adopt education as her university major, and she graduated with honors in the spring of 1937, qualified as a secondary school teacher in commercial subjects. She had registered as an independent voter; her parents had been Democrats.

Casting about for a suitable position, she applied as a teacher at Whittier Union, and was enthusiastically engaged to teach typing, book-keeping, stenography, and basic business methods, starting in September 1937. After New York and Los Angeles, Whittier, though a metropolis compared with Artesia, was a severe change. It was an intensely self-obsessed community, and a glamorous young woman did not swim like a fish in the sea of dowdy Whittierites. But Pat had developed a formula for dealing with older people who might feel themselves upstaged by a young person: she was outwardly deferential, courteous, and unaffected, neither standoffish nor effusive, showing the self-possession she had had since her childhood, but inwardly she was disdainful of self-important people.

When she became a prominent public person with her husband, she was widely disparaged by his critics as a rather wooden figure, of the type later depicted as a colorless Stepford wife, or, at best, Betty in the movie send-up of the fifties, Pleasantville. But she was a person of high intelligence and strong character, and her critics were rarely her peers. Few women in American history have had a greater challenge in retaining their dignity through tremendous upheavals than she faced in her public life, and she would bear up under heavy travails with exceptional fortitude.

It was at this point, in early 1938, that Pat encountered the dark, brooding, ambitious, and instantly besotted Richard Nixon. He laid siege to her, dropping by unannounced at her apartment, and not always being admitted, writing her poems, and even a song. He was decisive, and, as in all things, he was persistent. He took to chauffeuring her back and forth to Los Angeles on weekends, but began Sundays with a rousing performance at the college-age Quaker Sunday school, where he was a worthy successor to Frank in his flamboyance and persuasiveness.

At this time Richard Nixon launched his first commercial venture, and, as he came to believe to be the probable destiny of most of his initial efforts, this too was a disaster. There was a surplus of oranges in 1938, and Nixon went with others into the business of freezing orange juice. They founded a company called Citra-Frost, with Nixon as president and counsel. The problem was that they set out to freeze the juice, not a concentrate, and never puzzled out the technical problem. Nixon pitched in, cutting and squeezing oranges after hours, working his heart out to try to save the company. The final gamble was to package the juice in plastic bags, but a refrigerated boxcar of these plastic bags burst, destroying the entire inventory, and Citra-Frost failed.

Nixon lost his own small savings, but aroused resentment in investors that endured a long time.³⁶ This sad episode seemed to cure Nixon of the desire to try to strike it rich. He convinced himself that he wasn’t particularly interested in money, but more likely he resigned himself to not having the natural pecuniary intuition. In this he was like Franklin Roosevelt, who poured inherited money into an endless sequence of hare-brained schemes in the twenties, from a passenger dirigible company to an attempted lobster cartel to talking vending machines, which malfunctioned so often that guards had to be hired to protect the machines from shortchanged customers.³⁷

Nixon opened a branch of the law firm in the nearby town of La Habra, in the back of a derelict hardware store. La Habra was claimed by Robert Ripley’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not! to be a national leader in churches per capita.³⁸ It was, if anything, even sleepier than Whittier. Nixon’s law practice did not flourish there either, but he had already fastened on a new method of elevating himself out of the adhesive tedium of his origins. Without a citrus business to consume his time and savings, he prepared for politics by plunging into the service-club circuit. There was no plethora of riveting or worldly speakers in Whittier and La Habra, and Richard Nixon was a relatively cosmopolitan character. He joined Kiwanis, the local bar, chambers of commerce, alumni associations, and businessmen’s clubs, and campaigned for friends in at least one service club national convention (unsuccessfully),³⁹ making extensive connections and becoming a very sought-after luncheon and dinner speaker.^c

The torrid pursuit of Pat Ryan continued and she became less resistant and coy. They often went to Los Angeles for dinner and to nightclubs and led a double life between L.A. nights and workaday Whittier, including Nixon’s roles as the Whittier Sunday school teacher and assistant city attorney who managed to drive out the town’s one bar. There was one particularly riotous trip to Topsy’s strip joint in East Los Angeles, when a customer singed famous stripper Betty Roland’s bare behind with his cigarette. ⁴⁰ Pat was impressed by Richard’s endless and thoughtful attentions, and found his voice melodious and solicitous. He was, despite the decades of subsequent effort by the caricaturists, a fine-looking man of the dark and enigmatic kind, and he had a burning ambition. Above all, they were both exceptional people in a very dreary place, and they were both determined to break out of it and get on in the world.

Richard introduced Pat to his parents. She found Frank “blustery and inarticulate,” but became popular with Hannah by getting up at 5 A.M. to help her bake her locally popular pies, one of the best profit centers in the Nixon store. They never became particularly intimate, and Hannah convinced herself that Pat was chasing Dick .⁴¹ At first, Pat was more enthused about Dick’s Irish setter, King, than about King’s owner; and she prevailed upon Nixon to have porcelain replace gold in the visible dental work at the front of his mouth. ⁴²

Richard proposed many times and finally succeeded in March 1940 at Dana Point, on a rocky peak above the San Clemente Beach between Los Angeles and San Diego. They were married at the Mission Inn at Riverside, California, on June 21, 1940. Pat, to Hannah’s delight, had officially become a Quaker and there was a Quaker service presided over by the president of Whittier College (of which Dick Nixon, as he was now widely known, had been elected a trustee at the impressive age of twenty-six). Pat would not have a church wedding, because she was, in fact, an agnostic. The principal wedding presents were starting dinnerware from Pat’s brothers and a china dinner service from Frank and Hannah. They used them all through their marriage.⁴³ There were fewer than two dozen guests, only immediate family, including the now ninety-one-year old Almira Milhous, and a very few friends. (In Europe, France capitulated to Germany the next day, leaving the British and their newly elevated leader, Winston Churchill, to face the mighty Nazi war machine almost alone.) The newlyweds left at once on their honeymoon in Mexico in Pat’s Oldsmobile, with two hundred dollars, mostly hers, since Citra-Frost and the acquisition of an engagement ring had depleted Richard’s savings. Pat paid for most of the Oldsmobile and part of the ring. To save money, Dick had taken a bus to Michigan, bought the car, and driven it back to California.⁴⁴ They took baskets of canned goods from the Nixon store to economize on restaurant bills (which were very cheap in Mexico anyway). It was a happy, carefree time; they returned when their money ran out, via the great Boulder Dam (renamed after Herbert Hoover in the post-Roosevelt era).^d ⁴⁵

They lived first in Long Beach, twenty miles of often-congested road from Whittier, where they both worked and he was still ambitious politically, trying to straddle between their ambition and their origins. In a pattern they would maintain throughout their more than fifty years of married life, they moved twice again within a few months, settling for a time in a unit of Frank’s, rent-free, near the East Whittier school. Frank, who had maintained his carpentering skill, built homes on lots that he bought, and sold them at a handsome profit, with the country finally moving out of the Depression under the impulse of huge rearmament expenditures, as war threatened and then broke over East Asia and Western Europe. The young Nixons were not thinking much about the war or the world.

Willkie made a gallant effort, but Roosevelt was the greatest vote-getter and partisan tactician in the country’s history. Near the end of the campaign he turned his returning, pro-fascist ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy, who was expected to endorse Willkie, back into a partisan of his, allegedly by offering to help Kennedy’s sons in their political careers. Then he read letters from a rabbi, a Protestant clergyman, and New York’s Roman Catholic archbishop, Francis Joseph Spellman, as he announced over the radio the first peacetime conscription in the country’s history, which Roosevelt, using Revolutionary War parlance, called a “muster.” Spellman said, “It is better to have force and not need it than to need it and not have it. . . . We must have a peace that is not a choice between slavery and death.”⁴⁶ The Roman Catholic leadership, which had some ability to influence its thirty million coreligionists, gave all that it had for the president; he could not have asked for more. Willkie cut Roosevelt’s 1936 plurality from eleven million to five million votes and ran him a close race in many states, but the president was invincible.

Even before the election, won on the promise of peace through strength, Roosevelt had started extending American territorial waters from three to 1,800 miles, and soon after the election he commanded the U.S. Navy to attack any German ship on detection. He also put through his Lend-Lease measure, which offered the British anything they wanted, including 26,000 airplanes, on the theory that they would return what they were “loaned.” As he famously told the press, it was like lending a neighbor a garden hose when his house was on fire. And he embargoed oil and scrap iron to Japan, forcing that country either to desist from its invasion of China and Indochina or attack to the south, as it imported 85 percent of its petroleum and required the scrap for about 70 percent of its steel production. This was an idiosyncratic definition of neutrality, but it was brilliant statesmanship, on the heels of inspired electoral politics.

The Republicans had been founded by Lincoln and others eighty-five years before to fight slavery and secessionism, and had coasted on Lincoln’s coattails for the balance of the nineteenth century. Theodore Roosevelt, an accidental president as a result of the assassination in 1901 of Frank Nixon’s old hero, William McKinley, invented progressive Republicanism. The struggle between the original Roosevelt and the original (William Howard) Taft in 1912 led to the election of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912. The conservative Republicans were back with Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover in the twenties, and had been electorally exterminated by Roosevelt and the Depression. It was now a battered, disoriented party, and Willkie, having no elected office, quickly melted away as a public force and was friendlier with Roosevelt than with the Republican barons of the East or the Midwest.

While he started to think in national political terms, Nixon also devised a new campaign for himself. The man who had married Dick and Pat, William Mendenhall, had come under fire as president of Whittier College because he had slowed the reforms of his predecessor, Walter Dexter, the president with whom Nixon had worked as an undergraduate. It was a miniature Roosevelt-Taft breach, and Nixon canvassed the other trustees, making himself conspicuously available. Mendenhall faced down the trustees for a time, and Nixon never overtly opposed him. Mendenhall was forced out in 1943, but by that time Nixon was literally thousands of miles away. As with the incumbent state assemblyman, Nixon was restlessly seeking an office, though the presidency of Whittier College would only have been a stepping stone.

Nixon had already begun campaigning for the state assemblyman post again, as well as for the city attorney’s post in La Habra. In May 1941, he got himself elected president of the Association of Northern Orange County Cities, a group of nine municipalities comprising most of the targeted state assembly district, and president of the Young Republicans. He was just twenty-eight, and his ambitions could not be contained indefinitely. His wife gave him a ceramic knight on a charger as a birthday present, and would generally encourage, at least in the early years, his political ambitions, even though she joined him in trying to mislead posterity by saying there was “no talk of politics” before the war.⁴⁷

Between them, they were making nearly five thousand dollars per year. In 1940, half the men and two-thirds of the working women in the United States earned less than one thousand dollars per year. In a country of 132 million, only 48,000 taxpayers made more than twenty-five hundred dollars per year, which was perhaps fifteen to twenty times as much in the purchasing power of sixty-five years later.⁴⁸ The young Nixons had risen swiftly out of poverty, Pat with no help from her improvident and deceased parents. And they celebrated their first anniversary by motoring to New Orleans and taking a Caribbean cruise. The shipboard part was not a howling success, because Dick was a terrible sailor and was confined to his cabin with seasickness most of the time, a condition aggravated by the odor of bunker fuel from the nearby engines. The ship was a tired tramp steamer of the United Fruit Company.

The visual highlight, unfortunately not recorded in photographs, was a costume party that the men attended in drag - “Dick as a Grecian lady . . . sheet, turban, brooch, bosom, etc.” The ship docked at Colon, Panama, which Pat judged to be “the most immoral spot in the world,”⁴⁹ and then in Havana, where Nixon wondered about opening a law office, such was his desperation to emancipate himself from Whittier. Pat had already given Whittier Union notice that she would not be back in the fall. Nixon would regale audiences many times with his indelible recollection of having had “oysters Rockefeller” for dinner when they disembarked at New Orleans.

While they were on their cruise, they learned that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. Nixon had not, until now, given much thought to foreign affairs, though he later said that he had favored the republicans in the Spanish Civil War, because of a press campaign against Francisco Franco, and had initially preferred Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement of the dictators to Churchill’s robust attitude.

In March 1942, after just two months at the OPA, he was promoted to the uneuphonious post of acting chief of interpretations in the Rubber Branch. Despite the absurd bureaucratese, this was an important position, especially for a man in his twenties, and Nixon devised a new flowchart to deal with these responsibilities. He became the OPA’s resident expert at dealing with the agency’s voluminous correspondence, and devised new systems for other branches, including gasoline and sugar. He was praised by his supervisors: “splendid . . . bright . . . great capacity for work . . . a real plugger,” etc.⁵¹ In the summer he received a full-grade promotion and a 20 percent pay raise, and became acting chief of the entire Rationing Coordination Unit. Almost everything was rationed, and in a wartime civilian population of over 120 million people, this was an important and onerous job.

The Nixons took a brief driving vacation to Charleston in April, with a stop to show Pat the campus at Duke. Nixon became a sort of itinerant troubleshooter, going to problem areas personally and taking charge, setting up in Boston for a week in June 1942. He took Pat on this trip too, and managed a few days off near Kennebunkport. It was very pleasant, but like millions of young couples all over the world, they would expect few replications of such carefree leisure for several years.

On returning from Boston, or other field trips, he would work even harder than usual to clear up what had accumulated in his absence. Another comprehensive report that he had written, streamlining and grouping together all the regulations governing automobiles (tires, gasoline, etc.), was left for consideration while he was in Boston. When he returned, he found that it had fallen victim to bureaucratic envy and backbiting, and some of its proposals had already been appropriated and put forward by others.

Nixon had already decided to leave the OPA and join the navy. He could certainly have dodged the war if he had wished, as he had a double exemption. He was excused as a cradle Quaker with two Quaker parents and a Quaker education through to his undergraduate degree. And as an OPA executive, he was in a draft-immune position. Nixon found the work uncongenial, though important, and he resented the meddlesome fervor of federal officials, which he thought bordered on sadistic harassment of ordinary people.

The whole administration, from the president down, was very preoccupied to avoid war profiteering, which had been invoked by the isolationists in the thirties as one of the motives for entering the First World War. Nixon was opposed to anyone ripping off the country for private gain or overcharging the taxpayer as the nation fought for its life and thousands of young Americans died most weeks in combat in the armed forces. But he resented the efforts of leftist colleagues to badger small businessmen to reduce their profits. Most of the OPA lawyers came from professional backgrounds and had no sympathy or regard for small businessmen. Richard Nixon, of course, had an entirely different formation and perspective.

In his memoirs, Nixon records that one of his superiors told him to request a staff, and then it would be possible to promote him. When Nixon said he didn’t need a staff, he was advised that he could do without a promotion too. He wrote of the OPA and other regulators they they “were obsessed with their own power . . . and seemed to delight in kicking other people around.”⁵² He transformed his brief sojourn in the OPA into a sort of non-elective Mr. Smith Goes to Washington odyssey. He never forgot the nature of the federal civil service, and the will to dominate and restrict and interfere that he saw there. This too would be the stuff of a lot of good political oratory over many years.

There may have been also a political consideration. Since Nixon had his heart set on a career in politics, he would have reasoned that sitting out the war in the office that rationed everything, including profits, and, for millions of people, incomes, would not be a great postwar vote winner. The United States has always liked veterans politically, and lionized war heroes. In all but two of the fifteen presidential elections from 1824 to 1880, at least one of the major parties had put up a candidate best known as a senior military officer (including Andrew Jackson, W.H. Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and U.S. Grant). A postwar candidate whose campaign photograph depicts him in a uniform has a public relations and oratorical advantage. An endless number of reflections can begin “When I was in the air force,” or “when I was on Corregidor,” or whatever. (Nixon’s specialty was “I learned in the foxholes of the South Pacific . . .” - a considerable liberty, though unlike Lyndon Johnson, Joseph McCarthy, and others, he did not glamorize his war service.)

Most likely, Nixon was influenced chiefly by patriotism. He loved his country, he hated the Nazis, and was as livid as all Americans at the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor and throughout the Western and Central Pacific, and he wanted to serve because it was the right thing to do. As a lawyer and government regulatory administrator, he could reasonably assume that he would be an officer candidate, and had no reason to doubt that he could have a successful tour in the armed forces. He had begun to feel out of place in a Washington swarming with uniformed men. And Pat later said, “I would have felt mighty uncomfortable if Dick hadn’t done his part.”⁵³

He chose the navy, though the reason is not obvious, since he was, as his Caribbean holiday the year before had demonstrated, prone to seasickness. Being a Californian, he may have thought of the navy as the senior service, and the scuttlebutt in his milieu in Washington was that the navy needed lawyers for seagoing administrative tasks in the larger ships, especially aircraft carriers.

Richard Nixon said goodbye to his wife at Washington’s Union Station on August 17, entrained for Providence, Rhode Island, and at nearby Quonset Point joined the Naval Training School. It was a two-month course, and Nixon found the physical training rigorous and the navigation instruction a challenge, but he tucked into it with his usual unflinching self-discipline. Obligatory target practice, at which he was unsuccessful, was the first time he had ever held a gun. Nixon got on well and even helped one of his friends make his bed every day.⁵⁴ He corresponded faithfully with Pat, who addressed him affectionately in their delightfully romantic and tasteful exchanges as “Plum.” They even managed a two-day rendezvous in New York. Pat had joined the OPA five days after Dick had left Washington, becoming an assistant business analyst.

Lieutenant Nixon had requested “ships and stations” as a work category in the navy. But there was something in the character and ineluctable destiny of Richard Nixon that would make a dashing posting difficult to obtain. Even if he was already accustomed to such disappointments, he was astounded to be posted on graduation to an initial-pilot-training airfield in Ottumwa, Iowa, with only 225 men, and, as he wrote in his memoirs, “a runway that stopped abruptly in the middle of a cornfield.” Pat gave up her new OPA job and they were together again, in a modest off-base apartment. This was more pedestrian, after working in the shadows of the United States Capitol in an important position, than Nixon could have imagined, but he was a dogged man, and he and his wife had learned long before that the path to their ambitions was blocked by the banal and the implausible as well as by more conventional adversity. (It remains a mystery why the navy was operating an airstrip in landlocked Iowa, but Nixon guessed it was a patronage gift to an Iowa congressman.) At least he had a crisp officer’s uniform in the world’s largest navy.

This rustication lasted seven months. Pat worked as a bank teller and “didn’t care much for those coffee socials with navy wives.”⁵⁵ Dick then liberated them from the bowels of Iowa and moved a good deal closer to the combat zone. He responded to a notice asking for applications for sea duty, and was ordered to report to San Francisco in May 1943 for reassignment to the South Pacific. His mother and his grandmother, the ageless (ninety-three in fact) Almira, were disappointed at his abandonment of greater principles. His parents and brothers and his law partner, Tom Bewley, saw Pat and him off at the station in Los Angeles, and after two weeks in a small hotel in San Francisco, he finally did take leave of his wife and sailed on May 31, 1943, on the President Monroe for Espiritu Santo, in the New Hebrides. Pat could not face Whittier, and remained in San Francisco, becoming a corresponding secretary with the Office of Civilian Defense and later working for the Kafkaesque-titled Committee for Congested Production Areas, and then, also in San Francisco, like a homing pigeon, for the OPA as a price economist, the Nixons’ third tour with this ubiquitous bureaucracy.

There were nine officers in the same shipboard room, with triple bunks, and one of them, but not Nixon, was constantly seasick. He wrote Pat a letter each day, although they would all be delivered at once, and spent his waking hours playing poker. His cabin mate, James Stewart, taught him how to play, and the strategy never to bid unless he believed, on the odds and his reading of the other players, that he had a winning hand. This would be a great revenue source for Nixon; he proved a remarkably adept player, quiet, expressionless, always calculating odds, and shrewdly judging the nature of the other players. He started to win on the President Monroe, and continued to throughout his time in the Pacific. (Stewart said Nixon didn’t smoke or drink, read the Bible a lot, and told him he had never slept with anyone except Pat.)⁵⁶

Even in the South Pacific, Nixon wasn’t catapulted into a role that created an obvious opportunity for heroism. He was naval passenger control officer for the South Pacific Air Transport Command, which was technically under the direction of the U.S. Marines. It was an important logistical operation, moving marines forward and around General Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific theater. The tide of battle had turned in this region with the repulse of the Japanese at Guadalcanal, a bitter and often desperate struggle that raged for almost eight months before the Japanese were finally forced off the island, in the Solomons group north of Australia, in February 1943.

This was the end of the Japanese threat to Australia, and after the great American naval victory at Midway in June 1942, and as Roosevelt’s colossal naval and aircraft rearmament program stoked up, MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz in the Central Pacific theater were able to bypass Japanese islands and move relatively swiftly northwest from the Solomon Islands and due west from Midway, island-hopping toward the Philippines and the home islands of Japan. As the Japanese were driven out of Guadalcanal, the British finally defeated the Germans in Egypt, the Russians snapped shut their great trap at Stalingrad, and the Americans and British took over French North Africa. By the time Nixon got to the New Hebrides, the Russians had defeated the Germans in the great tank battle of Kursk and forced the Wehrmacht into permanent retreat, the British and Americans had expelled the enemy from Africa and captured Sicily, and Mussolini had been deposed and imprisoned and then rescued and set up as a puppet leader in German-occupied northern Italy. In the first seven months of 1943, the Germans had lost over a million soldiers, killed or captured, the Italians had collapsed, and the Americans had established decisive naval superiority in the Pacific.

Nixon was just behind the swiftly moving front lines, and while he didn’t see much direct combat, his role was extremely important and there is no doubt that he performed excellently. He was thorough, enterprising, solicitous of the wounded and the war-weary, very popular with all the many servicemen he came in touch with, and, when necessary, physically courageous. He wasn’t allowed the opportunity for a glorious war, but he did have a very admirable and useful one.

He started out supporting the logistics for the Bougainville action, the island MacArthur went to when it was decided to bypass Rabaul, where the Japanese had 250,000 soldiers who were left stranded as the lines moved past them northwestward. Nixon was only a couple of hundred miles from where Lieutenant John F. Kennedy commanded his torpedo boat against a fast Japanese nighttime resupply mission in the Blackett Strait in August 1943.

Like Dick, Pat wrote every day, and they both numbered their envelopes. Almost all her letters began “Dear [or Dearest] Plum.” She sent him expensive (five-dollar) pajamas, parcels of books, and often kissed her letters, leaving lipstick on them. The depth of their feeling for each other was obvious and often beautifully expressed. Dick wrote an astonishing number of letters, to all his family members and his old law dean and many friends, and read every day from a family Bible he brought with him, as well as avidly devouring the books Pat sent, including works by Karl Marx and Guy de Maupassant (whom Nixon judged the greatest short story writer in any language). He moved from Espiritu Santo to New Caledonia to Guadalcanal to Vella Lavella through the fall of 1943.

Even here, close to combat, Nixon felt out of the main action and denied the possibility to excel. He watched carefully the progress of other men in publicly prominent positions, including the thirty-four-year-old president of the University of Arkansas, J. William Fulbright (later U.S. senator in 1944), and the thirty-five-year-old governor of Minnesota, Harold Stassen, whose transport as a lieutenant Nixon arranged.⁵⁷ Nixon kept a diary and was able to read so extensively because he had a good deal of idle time, when there were not emergency arrivals of wounded men from the combat islands, or overwhelming quantities of supplies moving forward. His diary included aphorisms he liked, and evidences of popular taste. Some phrases struck him as apposite in themselves (Tennyson’s “The most virtuous hearts have a touch of hell’s own fire in them”),⁵⁸ and some were interesting expressions of general sentiment that he would remember to pitch to when the occasion arose.

In December 1943, Nixon’s request for command and to get closer to the action was granted, and he moved up to Bougainville. There were still mopping-up actions going on at the island, and these were always difficult with the Japanese, who generally preferred to be killed by their enemies rather than captured. Nixon was head of the air transport operation - again, a serious responsibility in a combat zone. He claimed to his wife, not altogether truthfully, that the greatest danger was the poisonous centipedes, though they were large and nasty.

In March 1944, he moved up again, to Green Island, which had been largely occupied by New Zealanders in fierce fighting. They were bombed several times by the Japanese. This was where Nixon took refuge in what he later described, a bit histrionically, as “foxholes,” though he was, if anything, needlessly self-conscious about his war experiences. (This was quite a difference with the then commander-in-chief, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who on the strength of a VIP tour of the western front and to the Royal Navy’s home base and the Italian high command in 1918, claimed to have seen more of the First World War than any other American.)

Nixon’s most graphic view of war was watching a flak-damaged B-29, arriving from having bombed Rabaul and unable to put down its landing gear, seem to come in safely, slide down the runway, and then strike a bulldozer and blow up. “I can still see the wedding ring on the charred hand of one of the crewmen when I carried his body from the twisted wreckage,” he wrote.⁵⁹

When the traffic was heavy, Nixon, who could have confined himself to giving orders, took off his shirt, donned his pith helmet - a touch of swank (like Livingston and Stanley) - and mucked in with the men to load and unload aircraft as quickly as possible. He was always ingenious and generous at finding refreshment for exhausted aircrews. Nixon commanded units of about twenty, and they were always a diverse cross-section of America - every region, economic stratum, religion, and ethnic group (except African-American, because the armed forces were not integrated).

He was known to thousands of men in transport and bomber and fighter aircrews as Nick, and his commissary was known as “Nick’s” and was famous for the “coldest pineapple juice in the South Pacific.” He took an exceptional interest in his men, listened to their problems, advised them on letters home, requested special leave for them, and was a beloved figure, to his own unit and well beyond it. He could find or lay hands on almost any piece of equipment, and developed an intimate knowledge of the vast logistical and supply apparatus of the Pacific war effort. He even managed to get a couple of stuffed koala bears from New Zealand, which he sent home to Pat, who kept them all her life. He was like Henry Fonda’s film portrayal of the capable and thoughtful Mister Roberts, his comrades would independently state many years later. ⁶⁰

Nixon’s talents at poker, especially five-stud, became legendary, but not from any braggadocio of his. He played poker every free occasion, and even passed up a small dinner with Colonel Charles Lindbergh, despite his interest in celebrities, to make a pre-scheduled poker game engagement with fellow officers.⁶¹ He famously drew a royal flush on one occasion, and, even more famously, bluffed a senior officer out of $1,500 with a pair of twos.⁶² He sent some of his winnings back to his old law office to pay for the disastrous home foreclosure case with which he began his practice, and to pay back some of the investors in Citra-Frost. Richard Nixon never forgot a slight, but he did not forget a debt either.

When Nixon was ordered home for promotion, his men gave him a boisterous and heartfelt farewell party. He returned to the United States with two battle stars and a ringing citation of commendation from his commanding officer. He flew to Guadalcanal, then Midway, then Pearl Harbor. At Midway, in the middle of the night, he took advantage of the stop to go for a stroll and looked at the military cemetery adjacent to the airfield, with row on row of dead young men, and reflected on “the ultimate futility of war and the terrible reality of the loss that lies behind it.”⁶³ He went by ship from Pearl Harbor to San Diego, and had a joyous reunion with Pat at the San Diego airport, where she had flown to meet him. Pat ran “fifty yards at breakneck speed and threw her arms around me.”⁶⁴

He had three weeks’ leave, spent mainly in Whittier, where he gave service club and church luncheon speeches about his war experiences, while Pat returned to her job in San Francisco. He appeared to his Whittier friends to be more affable and relaxed and confident than they remembered him. He made himself conspicuously available to Republican notables in Orange County for the congressional nomination to run against five-term congressman Jeremiah “Jerry” Voorhis.

Nixon resumed his naval career as base administrative officer of the Alameda Naval Air Station. He would later disparagingly describe himself as “chief janitor.” A note from the base commander - “Lieutenant Nixon, has my desk been dusted this morning?” - particularly incensed him, though it greatly amused his wife.⁶⁵ In January 1945, Nixon was transferred back to Philadelphia, and then to New York, to negotiate the termination of war contracts. They lived in small, short-lease apartments and in New York frequented the Metropolitan Opera House. They learned of President Roosevelt’s death while dining in a restaurant in Philadelphia, and Nixon had his first glimpse of a man he would come to know very well, the Allied commander in Western Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as the general’s tickertape parade passed beneath Nixon’s twentieth-story office window on Church Street in lower Manhattan, in May.

Nixon was promoted lieutenant commander in October 1945, and received a warm letter of commendation from the secretary of the navy, James V. Forrestal, for “meritorious service, tireless effort and devotion to country.”⁶⁶ He closed out his naval service with more legal work unwinding war purchase contracts, in Middle River, Maryland, just east of Baltimore on Chesapeake Bay. He agreed to stay on in the navy until New Year’s Day, 1946, and corresponded with the unofficial elders of the Republican Party in the Whittier area about the congressional nomination. This was another trial balloon like his effort to become the state assemblyman, or the president of Whittier College, but in the first case he was hoping the incumbent would retire, and in the second that the incumbent (who had married him a few months before) would be forced out. Neither event occurred until two years later, when Nixon was away. There was no nominee against Voorhis, and the previous Republican candidate had been completely lackluster. Someone had to run against him, and Richard Nixon, almost thirty-three, was a much more prepossessing figure, especially in uniform and combat decorations, than had been the ambitious but hesitant youth of five years before, prior to his and America’s great trial of war.

This was true, but Roosevelt had done nothing to prepare his chosen successor, Harry S Truman, to take in hand all the threads of government, and after fifteen years of economic and military struggle, the country was in no mood for continued rationing and the oppressive spirit of collective sacrifice. The controls were pretty well eliminated by the end of 1945 (by contrast, rationing in Britain continued into the fifties), and the peacetime economy absorbed the demobilized servicemen well without an early spike in inflation. Yet industrial disputes abounded, as labor felt it had been short-changed, the public quickly tired of any waiting lines and shortages, and Truman, a plainspoken, natty, smallish man with a Missouri twang, presented a startling contrast to the patrician and overpowering personality of his predecessor. Problems of availability of housing, new cars, and appliances, a lack of variety of food, the nerve-wracking discussion of the power of atomic weapons, the swiftly rising tensions with the Russians, and most of all the sense that it was time for a change and that Truman was not up to his great task, depressed the popularity of the Democrats.

It was not long before the most fantastic fears and recriminations were bandied about concerning the Russians and communism. At a strategic level, it soon became clear that Stalin had shredded the Yalta agreement. Truman moved to assist anti-communist forces in Greece and to reinforce Turkey. Churchill, now British opposition leader, speaking in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, spoke of an “Iron Curtain” between “Stettin in the Baltic and Trieste in the Adriatic.”

A unique combination of factors quickly conjoined to make anti-communism a fiery tonic for American voters. The administration, recognizing the Soviet threat to Western Europe and the strength of the Chinese Communists in the civil war in that country, was prepared to stoke up anti-communist sentiment to ensure political support for what was soon identified as a policy of containment of the Soviet Union and international communism. The Republicans were even more offended by communists than the Democrats, and had the added bonus of being able to accuse Roosevelt and his entourage of having been duped by Stalin.

This malicious historical revisionism was abetted by the disgruntlement of the British imperialists, out of office and watching helplessly as the Labour government of Clement Attlee sloughed off large chunks of the Empire: India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Palestine. The British Tories around Churchill (who was personally quite careful about what he said and wrote about Roosevelt) had great credibility in the world after their outstanding bravery and perseverance in the war, and suggestions that the U.S. administration had been too friendly with Russia were warmly received and amplified in the United States by the Republicans.

The facts were a good deal more complicated. Roosevelt had not wished to demarcate occupation zones in Germany before the war ended, because he correctly judged that the Germans would resist a good deal more fiercely in the east than in the west and that the Western Allies had a chance to occupy almost all the country, including Berlin. The British voted with the Russians at the European Advisory Commission (EAC) to divide pre-war Germany into three nearly equal occupation zones. This was a considerable triumph for British diplomacy, because the British had many fewer divisions engaged in the theater than the Americans and Russians and had been afraid that the occupation zones would be proportionate to forces deployed in Germany.

This division of postwar Germany was agreed among the Allies in February 1944, four months before the Normandy landings, about which the British civilian and military leaders were a good deal less optimistic than the Americans. The occupation zones were imposed on the 1939 map of Germany, because the EAC (the American and Russian ambassadors to Britain and the third-ranking official in the British Foreign Office) were not informed of the secret agreement at the Teheran Conference in December 1943 that the western borders of the U.S.S.R. and Poland would both be moved two hundred miles to the west. This effectively delivered Poland to Russian occupation, but, coupled with the physical flight of eight million Germans westward to escape the Russian armies, it brought Germany from Central Europe into Western Europe.

Churchill himself had explicitly signed over Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria to the Russians, and had split Yugoslavia with them and taken Greece for the British sphere of influence, when he visited Stalin in October 1944. These arrangements reflected military realities, but they had nothing to do with Roosevelt, who requested that no such agreements be made.

In the weeks after Roosevelt’s death (on April 12, 1945), as the American, British, Canadian, and French armies poured into and through Germany, Churchill beseeched Truman to take Berlin. Truman referred the matter to the chairman of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, General George C. Marshall, who consulted the theater commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower took the position that he would naturally carry out orders, but did not see why Western Allied soldiers should be lost taking territory that was committed by the EAC agreement to Russian occupation. This was a reasonable view, but less explicable is Eisenhower’s professed lack of interest in taking Berlin, which he expressed directly to Stalin on March 31 (he was authorized to communicate directly with the Soviet high command). Another unexplained issue in Eisenhower’s career was his failure to take Prague, and at least the Bohemian part of Czechoslovakia.

Eisenhower was very concerned not to blunder into direct conflict with the vast Soviet military forces as the Allies approached each other, squeezing the dying Nazi regime between them. Eisenhower had a considerable regard for his ability to negotiate with the Russians, based on his visit to Stalin just before he returned to his hero’s welcome in the United States. He had proved his qualities as a soldier-diplomat dealing with such testy comrades as British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, an anti-American gamecock; the imperious and inflexible Free French leader, General Charles de Gaulle, and the bombastic but effective U.S. Third Army commander, General George S. Patton. There is, in some of Eisenhower’s reflections, then and subsequently, the hint that he felt he could have done a better job of working things out with his wartime Russian comrades-in-arms than did Roosevelt and Truman and their entourages. None of these historic personalities were self-effacing egos.

Roosevelt had hoped that an atomic monopoly in America’s hands, the prospect of durably pacifying Germany, a country the Soviet leadership naturally feared (this was the only reason he entertained his Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau’s absurd plan for the pastoralization of Germany), and the inducement of massive economic assistance might persuade Stalin to honor his commitments to democracy in Eastern Europe. Stalin swiftly disabused Truman.

Churchill quickly rewrote history, consigning the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe to the vortex between a dying Roosevelt and an inexperienced Truman. Eisenhower wrote his war memoirs and confined himself to the German zonal agreement, ducking his strategic lack of interest in Berlin and not mentioning Prague. Truman, when his time came, implicitly blamed the failure to take Berlin on Eisenhower. Churchill, Eisenhower, and Truman all knew better than to try to take the Yalta Myth of a Roosevelt capitulation too far, and observed an uneasy truce of the memoirists, sparing each other and Roosevelt direct attack.

But in this historical standoff and increasingly frenzied international atmosphere, the mischief-makers were free to operate, and the Republicans soon had a group of wild conspiracy theorists as their most vocal spokesmen, claiming a Red fifth column was lurking everywhere and communism was like a virus that could strike down the innocent of America in their beds, or could infect them almost through their breakfast cereal. There were Reds under the bed and lurking behind every bush that wasn’t already burning. There would be a sequence of events, especially the Soviet development of an atomic bomb, revelations of extensive Russian espionage activity, the blockade of West Berlin, necessitating its supply by air, and the communist takeovers of Czechoslovakia and China, that inflamed hysterical anti-communist sentiment in the United States.

Richard Nixon was not slow to grasp the potential for this line of attack, though he was always careful to stay well clear of the most rabid imputations of treason to distinguished Democrats. Others, who should have known better, were not so careful. The Roman Catholic hierarchy’s chief authority on communism in America, Father John Cronin of Georgetown University, warned that the fifth column (a phrase of Franco’s junta associate, General Emilio Mola, in the Spanish Civil War) was numerous and active throughout the United States. The head of the American Chamber of Commerce, John J. Sullivan, declared in 1946 that “we will have to set up . . . firing squads in every . . . city and town in the country . . . and liquidate the Reds and Pink Benedict Arnolds.”⁶⁸ There would soon be radio and television programs suggesting that anyone’s neighbor or relative could be, and might well be, a communist agent. A febrile atmosphere was created as the wartime goodwill between the Soviet Union and the West evaporated in a few months. This rising Cold War militancy was useful to help keep America’s guard up and come completely out of isolation, but it was an insalubrious political climate for all other purposes.

In 1945 Nixon had only a hint of some of this, but without the anti-Red tide having nearly crested, he sensed that the Republican hour, after four consecutive defeats at the hands of Roosevelt, and eight straight defeats in congressional elections, was coming, and that he could catch history at its turning. He was braced by the camaraderie he had enjoyed in the navy, alarmed by what he had seen of the regulatory mentality at the OPA, and fortified by some of the deep thinking he had done in the South Pacific about the tragedy of war and how America could take its place in the world.

Politically, California was, as in all things, a complicated place, with thousands of people flowing into the state every week, and a mecca to all the most exotic and extreme varieties of American political eccentricity. The longtime king of California politics, Senator Hiram W. Johnson, had died on the day of the release of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, after twenty-eight years as U.S. senator from California, following six years as governor. He had been Theodore Roosevelt’s running mate as Progressive candidate for vice president in 1912, when they bolted from the bosses of the Taft-dominated Republicans. He is at least folklorically credited with delivering California, by a narrow margin, and thereby the election, to Woodrow Wilson in 1916, because he felt he had been slighted by the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes.

Johnson had been an FDR supporter while Roosevelt was using western Progressives to overcome southern Democrats and conservative Republicans to put his New Deal measures through. But Johnson was a raving isolationist, who publicly claimed that Hitler had “got the better” of his exchange with Roosevelt in 1939 (when Roosevelt had asked Hitler to forswear any aggressive designs on thirty countries in Europe and the Middle East⁶⁹). By this time, Roosevelt had ditched the isolationists and was relying on southern Democrats - who had a strong pro-British and -French tradition going back to the Civil War, and favored a strong defense as a matter of principle - to put his rearmament program through. Roosevelt thus managed the strategic coup of completing the rout of one enemy, unemployment and Depression, by preparing to defeat the next enemy, and arming to face the aggressive foreign dictators.

Roosevelt referred to Johnson sarcastically in his election addresses of 1940 - and a year later, after Pearl Harbor, when Johnson came to the White House, a correspondent wrote that he saw him “stalk across the little stone stage of the portico, and all the ghosts of isolationism seemed to stalk with him.”⁷⁰ He had been a progressive governor and senator in his time, but, politically speaking, the name died before the man.

The governor of California, as of 1942, and political strongman of the state, was the sturdy and almost bipartisan liberal Republican Earl Warren. When Johnson died, Warren named William Knowland, the son of Warren’s great patron and owner of the Oakland Tribune, Joseph Knowland, to fill Johnson’s unexpired term in the Senate. Bluff, hearty, and uncomplicated, William Knowland had the booming confidence of inherited position, and benefited from the patronage of the much more substantial and esteemed Warren. These two and Nixon would play a minuet for control of the California Republican Party and the power it conferred nationally. For a time, all would seem to win. In the end, Warren was twenty-two years older than Nixon, and Knowland a good deal less intelligent and motivated, but they would all make some history.

As Richard Nixon set out on his quest for a congressional seat in his usual methodical manner, claiming to be drafted by the leading Republicans in his district while in fact ardently wooing them, he felt a seismic change coming. Sixteen of California’s twenty-five congressional seats were held by Democrats, elected in wartime, in November 1944, on the magic carpet of Roosevelt’s coattails, a week after the Battle of Leyte Gulf (the greatest naval victory since Trafalgar). Many must by now be vulnerable.

Nixon’s old patron and landlord, Whittier’s premier financier and man of influence, Herman Perry, local head of the Bank of America, started touting Nixon as the local congressional candidate in September 1945. He wrote Nixon “to ask if you would like to be a candidate for Congress on the Republican ticket in 1946. Jerry Voorhis expects to run. Registration is about fifty-fifty. The Republicans are gaining. Please airmail me your response if you are interested.”⁷¹ Dick and Pat discussed it for two days and concluded on his part that it was exactly what he wanted to do, and on hers that it was the best passport out of the rubesville environment that she had spent more than fifteen years trying to escape. Nixon telephoned Perry (airmail being insufficiently expressive of the keenness of his ambition) on October 1, 1945, to say he was “honored” and wished to run. He and Pat were concerned not to spend their ten thousand dollars of savings accumulated during the war from her many consecutive jobs and his poker winnings, and Perry implied that if Nixon was the one, he could assure the money. Herman Perry and his friends were becoming awfully tired of Jerry Voorhis.

Horace Jeremiah Voorhis was in many ways an admirable public servant. He was an evangelical Episcopalian, from a wealthy midwestern family, who after he graduated from Yale became a factory worker and a YMCA relief officer in Germany, and operated an orphanage in Wyoming. He married a social worker and at the end of the storied twenties, in whose hedonistic spirit he had never participated, he and his father consecrated much of the family’s fortune to the Voorhis School for homeless boys near Pomona, twelve miles from Whittier. He ran the school himself, taught and coached the boys, took a graduate degree at Claremont College close by, and helped turn some of the smaller ranches into cooperatives, trying to improve working conditions and giving them a better chance against the giant ranches that dominated the area.

Voorhis subscribed to muckraking author Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign for governor against incumbent Frank Merriam in 1934. The core of Sinclair’s program was that the state should buy or rent California’s unused manufacturing capacity and allow the unemployed to produce for their own needs there. As economics, it was nonsense, but it aroused huge alarm in all monied and bourgeois circles of the state. Sinclair was sandbagged by the combined efforts of the big film studios - who ran extensive newsreels of shifty people with un-American pro-fusions of facial hair and East European accents, endorsing Sinclair as the Soviet candidate - and other large industries; the Republicans joined with the conservative Democrats. A huge war chest was built up for Merriam. Louis B. Mayer led the informal resistance to Sinclair. He organized a virtual press boycott and a cascade of phony polls showing a Merriam landslide, and even arranged for a splinter candidate to divide Sinclair’s vote. Merriam won by 260,000 votes, with the third candidate taking about 300,000. It was a textbook case in how to win an election by the lowest means short of physical intimidation of campaign workers and massive tampering with the ballots.⁷²

Voorhis had been so disgusted by the EPIC debacle that he defected from the Socialist Party and became an orthodox Democrat and in 1936 secured the nomination of that party for the Twelfth District, which included Whittier, as well as his own school. It was not a difficult race, because Roosevelt carried forty-six of the forty-eight states, and swept California with 67 percent of the vote and a plurality of 930,000.

Jerry Voorhis was a conscientious and hardworking congressman, championing the interests of the migrant workers and the many poor people in the district as best he could. The Republicans got into the habit of putting up inept reactionaries and tyros against him, with the result that Voorhis was reelected with the national Democratic majority four times through 1944 and became somewhat complacent about his incumbency. Not only was the national, postwar mood changing; the demographics of his district were changing. Poverty was alleviated and middle class suburbs spread into the district. In 1941, redistricting had stripped out the heavily labor areas that had voted overwhelmingly for Voorhis. And after 1945, Roosevelt was gone from the leadership of his party. Most important, there was a chance that the unsuspecting Voorhis would be facing a candidate unlike any he had faced before.

The Roosevelt administration had sought out Voorhis to be a moderating influence on the witch-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee, generally known as HUAC. The chairman was a Red-baiting Texas congressman, Martin Dies, a protégé of Roosevelt’s first vice president, John Nance Garner, and his long-serving House Speaker, Sam Rayburn. But Dies in 1937 had attacked Frank Murphy, the governor of Michigan and future attorney general and Supreme Court justice, whereupon Roosevelt canceled federal public works contracts in his district. When Dies revealed this to the press, who raised it at one of FDR’s informal press conferences, the president replied, “Ho, hum.”⁷³ Dies’s antics were among the reasons that when Roosevelt went for a third term he didn’t take Garner with him. Roosevelt could generally prevent HUAC from getting out of control, but by 1946 he was gone and the Red Scare was flaming up to a tremendous conflagration. Dies was still there and the administration Democrats had no idea what a firestorm was coming. In these circumstances, Jerry Voorhis had a lot hanging out, and Richard Nixon, if given the opportunity, would make the most of it. Influential columnist Drew Pearson wrote that Voorhis was “so kindly and altruistic, he defeats his own purposes.”⁷⁴

Where Voorhis had been particularly effective, in revealing and causing the cancellation of a sweetheart lease by Standard Oil of the Elk Hills oil reserve in California, in May 1943, he had served the public interest, but in a way that wasn’t obvious to the average voter. He did seriously arouse the oil companies, who had the means to be a financial influence in California elections.

For good measure, Voorhis had attacked the large insurance companies as monopolies, antagonized the oil companies again by militating against transfer to the states of offshore oil rights (because the states were deemed more indulgent of the oil companies than the federal government), large land developers over assisted housing, utilities by his sponsorship of public power and rate reductions, newspaper publishers and large advertising agencies over tax issues, and the mighty film studios by invariably supporting their underpaid employees in labor disputes.

He also attacked the Bank of America for buying up smaller banks, though there was no absence of banking competition in California. This was again striking close to home, because the Bank of America, founded by A.P. Giannini and built up initially as a bank for Italian-Americans, had been discriminated against by the San Francisco Federal Reserve and assisted by the intervention of Roosevelt personally in the banking crisis of 1933. The bank was pro-Roosevelt and vice versa. Voorhis was getting into very deep water, and he went even further when he tendered a bill to strip the profit out of the Federal Reserve System and give it to the government’s general revenues. This was seen as a swipe at the congressional establishment and the administration, and a potential blow to the stability of the banking system, which had wobbled so badly just a decade before.

For all of these political, demographic, and specific reasons, Jerry Voorhis was much less invulnerable in his district than he imagined. On October 2, 1945, Nixon wrote back to Herman Perry, the day after their phone call, “I feel very strongly that Jerry Voorhis can be beaten, and I’d welcome the opportunity to take a crack at him.” He promised “an aggressive, vigorous campaign.”⁷⁵

One of Herman Perry’s Republican friends, Roy Day, set up what he called the Committee of 100, an organization of reasonably representative Twelfth District Republicans determined to find the best candidate and get him (presumably) nominated with a minimum of internecine squabbling. The rich suburbs of San Marino, Whittier, and the rural San Gabriels were all represented more or less according to the size of their populations. It was a hapless group of lackluster people that they interviewed, and everyone seemed to assume that Voorhis was very strongly installed in his district. There was a brief attempt to attract General George S. Patton, who was from the district, but he had no interest (and died soon after in a road accident). Day next went after the former Whittier College president, Walter Dexter, who seemed to be ready to take the plunge, but he died four days before meeting Day’s committee.⁷⁶

In his haste to get to California, Nixon got someone with whom he was negotiating a navy contract termination to use his firm’s priority card in buying a trans-continental air ticket - such tickets were hard to come by at this time. He paid the ticket buyer back a week later, but some have professed to find in this the first signs of a penchant for unethical conduct in politics; this is a fairly prissy and hair-shirted interpretation.

On November 2, Nixon met in the University Club of Los Angeles with Perry and Day and a group of influential Twelfth District businessmen: a large automobile dealer, an insurance broker, a rancher - not industrialists, but captains of industry by the standards of Whittier and San Marino. Nixon made a very good impression. He was obviously highly intelligent, motivated, and an attractive candidate apparently in sympathy with their desire for less government, lower taxes, and a hard line with international communism and militant domestic labor unions. There were more work hours lost to strikes in 1946 than in any other year in American history, and inflation was at 20 percent.

Nixon and the other candidates were formally interviewed later that night and Nixon came through as “an electrifying personality.”⁷⁷ Nixon made this favorable impression despite invoking his rather overworked formula of speaking for veterans, as he had “talked to many of them in the foxholes.” Navy lieutenants weren’t normally in foxholes; as the word implied, they were single-occupancy shelters, and conversation at such times tended not to be discursive. Nixon dove into a trench a couple of times under Japanese air attack on Guadalcanal and elsewhere, but it is unlikely that even he discussed politics on those occasions.

One of those who was very impressed was Murray M. Chotiner, already a well-known California Republican organizer, who had been ordered out of Governor Warren’s office for suggesting that Warren should remember political favors. Chotiner was a believer in the school of winning elections by attacking the enemy. He would prove uninhibited and ingenious in these rough political arts. Less satisfactory was Pat’s lunch with the Republican ladies, one of whom criticized her nail polish.⁷⁸

Nixon was formally nominated on December 1 by Day’s committee to enter the Republican primary, with fifty-three of seventy-seven votes at the meeting. Roy Day telephoned him at 2 A.M. to advise him, and he and Pat remained up all night talking about this new venture.⁷⁹ The Los Angeles Times began touting him as an outstanding candidate, and a potential candidate for higher offices. The publisher and proprietor of the Times, Norman Chandler, was a conservative Republican, and his brother-in-law, John T. Garland, was a member of Day’s committee. Nixon determined to visit Republican House leader Joe Martin (one of those mocked by Roosevelt in his “Martin, Barton, and Fish” jibe) to start to develop a line of attack against Voorhis’s voting record (eleven months before the election).

Voorhis would claim that he had met Nixon once before, in 1940 or 1941, and to have been very coldly received by him.⁸⁰ It is not clear that this meeting was quite as Voorhis describes it, since Nixon did not remember it as particularly frosty. He recalled: “He [Voorhis] was highly idealistic. . . . He impressed everyone there and if I had voted in 1936, which I did not, I would have voted for him.”⁸¹

On December 4, 1945, Nixon wrote Day: “I am really hopped up about this deal and I believe we can win.”⁸² Nixon also got one of his fellow officers who knew Harold Stassen, the young Minnesota governor Nixon had met in Bougainville, to write to Stassen and say that Nixon was interested in rounding up liberal votes for the Republicans. Within a few days of his first nomination, Nixon started to put in place a method he would use for nearly fifty years to balance the liberal and conservative Republicans, the heirs of the old Theodore Roosevelt and Taft wings of the Republican Party (currently represented by Stassen and by President Taft’s son, the Republican Senate leader, Robert A. Taft). It was a tightrope that he never fell off, accident-prone though he was in some other respects.

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