DUKE’S LAW SCHOOL in 1934 was brand-new, but it had almost unlimited financial resources, a magnificent campus, and a determination to become the best law school in the South. The money came from James Buchanan Duke, who had made a fortune in tobacco and left a huge endowment to Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina. The austere little Methodist college took the money, and its benefactor’s name, and almost overnight became a modern, comprehensive university. To attract gifted students to the Law School, in 1934 Duke offered twenty-five scholarships to an incoming class of forty-four. There were twelve professors; Duke kept the student-teacher ratio low to raise the school’s reputation.
Nixon’s letter from Dean Justin Miller, informing him that he had won a scholarship (a $250 full-tuition grant), also warned him that to retain the award in his second and third years he would have to maintain a B average or better.1 When the letter arrived, Hannah said in 1960, it was “the proudest day of my life—yes, even prouder than the day Richard became Vice President. I was in the kitchen, baking pies. . . . The door swung open. Richard had an open letter in his hand. He waved it excitedly. ‘Mother, guess what!’ he exclaimed. ‘I have a scholarship for Duke!’ ”2
He arrived in Durham in September, and was almost immediately beset by a crisis of confidence. For all its virtues, Whittier College was a small, backwater place. Going there from Whittier High was not a big step up—in fact, Nixon did little more than cross the street. Many of his college classmates had also attended Whittier High, and the remainder came from nearby high schools that were also competent but hardly outstanding. The competition had not changed, and Nixon’s impressive success at the college had come with relative ease.
All that changed at Duke. Whittier College could have fit into one small corner of the Duke campus. There were beautiful gardens, lovely walks, spires and towers and stained glass everywhere. To Nixon, “Duke was like a medieval cathedral town.”3 He was three thousand miles from home, clear across the North American continent, the first time he had ever been east of the Rocky Mountains. He was meeting more new people in a day than he met in a year at Whittier, and from all over—the forty-four students in his class came from thirty-seven states. And he was challenged as Whittier could never challenge him. On his first day, he learned that his fellow students called the scholarship program “the meat grinder,” because of the twenty-five awarded scholarships in 1934 only twelve would be renewed in 1935. A B average, it turned out, would not be enough by itself to stay on scholarship.
The competition was intense, far more so than at Whittier. One night in October, studying in the library, Nixon began to doubt that he could ever make it at Duke. He was homesick, overwhelmed by the material thrown at him in the seven courses he was taking, and worried that if he failed to hold his scholarship he would never be able to finish law school. He was so clearly upset that William Adelson, an upperclassman who happened by, asked him, “What’s wrong?”
“I’m scared,” Nixon replied. “I counted thirty-two Phi Beta Kappa keys in my class. I don’t believe I can stay up top in that group.”
“Listen, Nixon,” Adelson rejoined, “you needn’t worry. The fact that you are studying so late yourself shows you don’t mind hard work. You’ve got an iron butt, and that’s the secret of becoming a lawyer.”4
Adelson was right on the mark. Duke used the case-study method—students were required to commit innumerable cases to memory, were expected to be able to give the details and the judgments in litigation of all types. The secrets to success were a strong memory and a willingness to sit in the library for endless hours. Nixon had both.
But it took more than one casual remark, indeed even more than outstanding grades in his first semester, for him to realize that he was capable of competing with the best on a national level. He wrote regularly to Ola Florence. They were “sad letters,” she recalled. “He sounded like he was close to quitting two or three times.”5
His financial situation added greatly to his anxiety. His scholarship was precarious, and he knew that his parents could not pay his tuition. Frank was loaning him $35 per month for his living expenses, and he made another $30 or so per month working in the library—the money came from the National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency. As will be seen, he lived as close to the bone as he possibly could, which was much closer than other poor students, indeed as close as most monks get. In fact, he could have lived more comfortably, had he wished, but he was saving money for a special purpose.
Money just did not matter to him. Had he wanted to make money, he could have stayed in Whittier and expanded the family business. Nor did he care very much about what money could buy—he would just as soon have a five-cent candy bar for breakfast as a fifteen-cent platter of eggs, he was indifferent as to his clothes, could not have cared less about his living accommodations, and could get along very well without the relaxation of an expensive date. He wanted only one thing out of Duke, a good law degree, and he got it.
AS A LAW STUDENT, Nixon’s chief characteristic was his willingness to work. A classmate recorded, “Some of us might fudge on the hours we worked at the library. Nixon never would. He was a copybook kind of guy without being obnoxious about it.” Bill Perdue, who roomed with Nixon from January 1935 until they graduated, said, “Nixon had a quality of intensity in him, worked hard, pretty intense guy—he had a sense of privacy and not terribly strong on humor.” Professor Lon Fuller said Nixon was competent, “though not terribly imaginative or profound. And he was what today we’d call uptight—there was the suggestion of an intellectual inferiority complex.”6 Whatever the cause, a classmate put it bluntly when he called Nixon “the hardest-working man I ever met.”7
Anxiety and pessimism drove him to work ever harder, but sometimes, nevertheless, he was close to despair. “I’ll never learn the law,” he complained. “There is too much of it.”8 The challenge seemed too great. “I had never been faced with such an overwhelming mass of material.” He complained enough, and looked sufficiently downcast, to earn the nickname “Gloomy Gus.”
The name had another meaning, classmate Lyman Brownfield recalled. “There was a comic strip character by that name who was always puncturing people’s fanciful balloons, bringing them down to earth. That was Nixon.”9 Another student remembered Nixon as “a very studious individual—almost fearfully so. I can see him sitting in the law library hunched over a book, seldom even looking up. He never smiled. . . . Even on Saturday nights, he was in the library, studying.10
“He never smiled.” What an extraordinary thing for a young man who actually 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. But so seldom did he allow himself to feel good about himself that “he never smiled,” and his classmates at Duke, like those back in Whittier, nicknamed him “Gloomy Gus.” The art of studying is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of a chair, and Nixon had not traveled across the continent to indulge himself in feeling good or counting his blessings. He stayed in his chair, his head down, eyes riveted on the printed page. He did not have time to look up and flash a grin of acknowledgment at a fellow student passing by.
The work paid off. At the Christmas break in 1934, he was maintaining an A average and stood near the top of the class. For the holiday, he joined his younger brother Don—who was attending Guilford Preparatory School in North Carolina—to drive to New York, their first visit to the city. They had saved money for the vacation, which was primarily a shopping expedition. As Hannah told the story, “The two boys . . . pooled their money, and they bought something for which they had also saved a long time—a fur piece for me. It was my first.”11
Nixon had not only saved, he had sacrificed for that gift. For living quarters, he had moved into an abandoned toolshed in the woods near campus. A maintenance man found him there, studying, in an eight-by-twelve-foot shed, lined with corrugated cardboard. There was a bed but no stove. Amazed, the maintenance man asked, “You mean you’re going to school and can’t afford a room? You’ll freeze to death.”
“I’ll manage all right if you don’t run me out,” Nixon replied. Thinking to himself, “This boy must want an education real bad,” the maintenance man decided not to report him.12
To Nixon, there was no sacrifice involved in this Spartan style of life. He was indifferent to creature comforts. He really did not care what he ate, so long as it would sustain life, nor where he slept, so long as he could get enough sleep to be alert in class and the library, nor what he wore, so long as it did not excite comment. He did not regard student poverty as either romantic or crushing; he did not particularly like it, but he did not particularly mind it either.
Following Christmas vacation, Nixon took a room at $5 per month, which he shared with Bill Perdue. He got up each day at 5 A.M., studied until classes began, worked afternoons in the library at menial jobs paying thirty-five cents an hour, and studied again in the evening until midnight or later.
Classmate Brownfield had a 1926 Packard, into which Nixon and eight other students would pile each day for a drive to a boardinghouse where they could eat all they could hold for twenty-five cents. That little trip provided the students with a major outlet for their physical energy. “Every time we collected in the car,” Brownfield remembered, “the group climbed on someone’s back and didn’t let up until we reached the boardinghouse. Sometimes it was Nixon, sometimes it was someone else. . . . Nixon was thoroughly at home in the horseplay and joined in both as subject and tormentor. . . . ”13 He also tried to get in an hour of handball each afternoon, which provided him with an opportunity to take a shower in the locker room.14 Another major form of release from tension came at the Duke football games, where Nixon cheered so loudly he came away hoarse.
NIXON’S CONSISTENT high marks brought attention to him, as did his willingness and ability to speak up in class. For all his private doubts and “Gloomy Gus” fears, he still had that old confidence he had felt as a debater for Whittier when he rose before a group.
One of his professors, Douglas B. Maggs, would deliberately press the students when he called on them to recite. Believing that a lawyer should be able to think under stress, he would raise his voice, pound his desk, ask questions bluntly or even insultingly, and generally try to create tension. Standing up to Maggs was “not easy,” Brownfield remembered. “For the first couple of months I think all who did so felt a little like Christian martyrs facing the lions. Maggs would reduce you to a shambles in class. He’d make you look like an idiot.”
But for Nixon, Maggs’s classroom confrontations were mother’s milk. He would be nervous before the bell rang, Brownfield said, but once he got on his feet to make a point, “I never saw him back down. I remember Nixon standing Maggs off in our freshman torts class.”15 Another student reported that “Dick was obviously just as nervous as anyone else, but, from the first time he recited in any class, I never saw him back down. . . . ”16
IN THE SUMMER of 1935, Nixon and Don drove back across the continent to California to spend the summer working in their father’s store. Nixon also tried to rekindle the romance with Ola, but was as inept as always. Although they had exchanged correspondence through the year, she had been dating Gail Jobe regularly (and would marry him shortly thereafter), and by no means considered herself to be Nixon’s betrothed. But he thought of her as his girl, and even assumed that they would someday get married. He was not, however, willing to go to parties with her friends, or otherwise be the kind of person who appealed to her.
“He came home one time,” she later said of that summer, “and was talking about torts. I said that’s something you cook, and he said, ‘You’re going to have to learn something about the law terms now.’ ”17 Instead of learning law, Ola got rid of Nixon.
Ola’s rejection was Nixon’s only contact with women during his years in law school. He never had a single date at Duke. “There were a few girls I liked and would have enjoyed dating,” he later said, “but I didn’t have the money.” Time was another problem, as was an absence of social graces. A classmate said that Nixon was “stiff and stilted when talking to girls, informal and relaxed with male students.” He seldom joined in the occasional social gatherings. Ethel Farley Hunter found him “dour and aloof, not given to fellowship.” In addition, she said she “found his value system unattractive. . . . He was not unmoral, just amoral. He had no particular ethical system, no strong convictions.” But she also recognized that “he was there to learn skills and advance himself personally.”18
To those ends he continued to devote himself with his monklike dedication through his second year. Beyond the football games and his handball workouts, the only diversion he allowed himself was politics. In the spring of 1936, he ran for president of the Duke Student Bar Association. His opponent was Hale McCown, a popular campus figure who went on to become a member of the Supreme Court of Nebraska. Nixon won easily, according to his classmates because his scholastic ability was superior to McCown’s.
Nixon also found time to serve on the law review, Law and Contemporary Problems, for which he wrote articles including “Changing Rules of Liability in Automobile Accident Litigation.” He continued his job for the NYA in the library. His boss, a Miss Covington, was “a woman with set notions” and no student wanted to work for her—but Nixon had to. Brownfield recalled that “Dick was . . . subjected to a lot of ribbing because of his boss, but during my three years with him I never heard him complain about her. I am always reminded of his school job when I see his self-control and reserve in the face of severe abuses in politics.”19
The work in the library, the research and writing for the Law and Contemporary Problems, and the time taken to campaign for office, all took a toll in Nixon’s second year. His average began to slip. At the end of his first year, he stood third in the class, behind Perdue and Brownfield. But toward the end of his second year, he felt he was in real trouble with his class standing.
Late that spring of 1936, Nixon, Perdue, and Frederick Albrink were walking past the dean’s office. The grades and class standings were due to be posted, but for some reason there had been a delay. Restless and anxious, the students decided on action. There was a narrow transom above the dean’s door, and although the door was locked, the transom was open. Nixon was the thinnest of the three, so Perdue and Albrink gave him a boost. Once inside, he opened the door; together the students found the key to the dean’s desk drawer and located the records. Nixon learned that he had fallen below third place, that his average was B-plus. They replaced everything and left.
The incident remained unknown until Nixon told it to Bela Kornitzer in 1959.20 In the mid-seventies, after Watergate, it was revived and re-examined—“Nixon’s first breaking and entering”—and a great fuss was made over it. Fawn Brodie, who was full of moral indignation, interviewed Albrink and Perdue about it, but both denied that it had any special significance. “We found the files . . . and looked at them,” Albrink related matter-of-factly. “Didn’t take any . . . didn’t change any. This was night; there was nobody in the building. What the heck!”21
THAT SUMMER, Nixon took the train back to Whittier, where he again worked in the store. In the fall, he moved into a shack in the woods with Albrink, Brownfield, and Perdue. They gave the cabin a fanciful name, Whippoorwill Manor. They had a single room, no electricity, no plumbing, only a sheet-metal stove and an outhouse. There was also a water pump outside. There were two double beds; Albrink and Brownfield shared one, Perdue and Nixon the other. “The first guy up would usually light the paper we kept in the stove,” Albrink recalled. “We’d have heat for about five minutes and then the stove would be too hot to touch for an hour. You had to get dressed and out fast.”
Nixon was up first, often rising an hour before the others so that he could get in the extra study time. “He was always thoughtful,” Brownfield said. “When he’d get up early he’d dress in the cold, so we could use the stove when we got up.” Nixon kept his shaving gear tucked behind some books in the stacks of the law-school library. He shaved in the men’s room. His showers were in the gym, after handball. The roommates bought secondhand textbooks and shared them.22
Nixon’s roommates were southerners who shared their region’s prejudices and outlook. Back at Whittier, Nixon had been responsible for bringing William Brock into the Orthogonians—Brock was a star halfback and the only Negro on campus.23 Segregation in the South, in the years before World War II, was total, unquestioned, observed by all, and none of Nixon’s roommates could understand how on earth he could ever sit down at the same table with a Negro. When he said he had done it often, in his home as well as with the Orthogonians, they were doubly shocked.
For his part, Nixon began to learn, and to some extent to appreciate, the southern point of view, not only on race relations but also on the Civil War. When he came to Duke, Nixon said years later, “I was utterly convinced that Ulysses S. Grant was the best general produced on either side in the Civil War.” But after rooming with Perdue for two years, “I was almost convinced by [his] constant hammering on it that Ulysses S. Grant would be lucky to be about fourth behind Robert E. Lee, Joseph Johnson, and Stonewall Jackson.” He learned from Perdue to call the conflict the War Between the States.24 Nixon also said that although he could not agree with his southern friends on the question of race relations, “I learned in these years to understand and respect them for their patriotism, their pride, and their enormous interest in national issues.”25
He remained adamant on the race question. “He was shocked and disturbed at the prevalent North Carolina treatment of the Negro population as an inferior group,” one classmate recalled. Another remembered his “very strong moral convictions.” Nixon “never let many opportunities go by to express himself on those convictions with a great deal of feeling and finality.” Specifically, he objected to the mistreatment of Negroes. “He looked upon the issue . . . as a moral issue and condemned it very strongly as such, but did not realize the problems that confronted the people of the South in regard to the negro.”26
ALTHOUGH NIXON was president of the Student Bar Association, his position was more honorary than demanding. His responsibilities were to preside over the monthly meeting, which consisted of little more than introducing the speaker. He joined the Iredell fraternity, and did extracurricular work in the local legal clinic, primarily legwork on cases coming up for the district prosecuting attorney. That work was for free, but he added to his income by doing some research for Dean Horack under the auspices of the NYA. Horack and his wife took such a liking to Nixon that they frequently had him over for dinner, usually spaghetti, his favorite meal.27
A free meal was an event worthy of note, as Nixon continued to deny himself all but the bare essentials. Five weeks before graduation he wrote his folks, “The budget for the remainder of the year says that I will need $25. That, I am happy to say will be the last check I’ll be asking for—for good—I hope’28
NIXON’S MATERNAL grandmother, Almira Milhous, helped out from time to time, with a $5 or $10 bill, or a package of food. She sent her grandson a pair of badly needed glasses. In return, he wrote her in early December of 1936 a letter that would melt the heart of any grandmother anywhere.
“At this Christmas season,” he began, “I should like to be sending you a gift which would really express my love for you—but it will probably be several years before I reach such a high financial level—if ever.” So, he explained, he was sending “this Christmas note” in lieu of a present. “You will never know how much I’ve appreciated your rememberances,” he continued. Even more, however, he said he appreciated being a part of her extended family. “Sometimes—in our spare moments, some of us indulge in reminiscing sessions here at school—and the boys are amazed at the remarkable person I describe as my Quaker Grandmother. I myself share their respect.” He signed off, “Your Loving Grandson, Richard Milhous Nixon.”29
FOR CHRISTMAS vacation, Nixon used his savings for a trip to New York City. Bill Perdue went along, as did Harlan Leathers. They were job hunting, and they made the rounds of all the top law firms in the city. Wild Bill Donovan, who later commanded the OSS, was head of one; Herbert Brownell, Jr., who became Eisenhower’s Attorney General, was a member of another; Thomas Dewey was associated with a third. Nixon was most impressed by Sullivan and Cromwell, of which John Foster Dulles was senior partner.
Perdue and Leathers, ranking first and second, got good jobs, but Nixon—ranking third in a small class from an unproved law school—did not. In 1959 Nixon declared, “If they had given me a job I’m sure I would have been there today, a corporation lawyer instead of Vice-President.”30
That is where most of his classmates thought he would end up. “It just never entered our minds,” Albrink said, “that he would make a career in politics.” Another classmate said he thought of Nixon “as the man least likely to succeed in politics.”31 Basil Whitener, who later became a congressman from North Carolina, declared, “Nixon was not outward, but seemed shy. He was friendly in a quiet way. He was no smiler then; quite the contrary. Like most others, I figured he would wind up doing a wonderful job in a big law firm, handling securities or other matters that need the attention of a scholar, not a politician.”32
It was a mark of how completely Nixon had suppressed himself that his classmates could not envision a political future for him. But in truth his ambition to be a leader was stronger than ever; to it he sacrificed his chances with Ola, his own physical comfort, and his recreation and entertainment for three years. He was interested in prestige, power, a leadership role, not the big money a top law firm could give him.
He was so uninterested, in fact, that he almost did not make the job-hunting trip, and only agreed to go at the last minute. Nor did he find New York attractive. To save money, they stayed at the YMCA. Perdue recalled that “in our naïveté we went into a saloon and ordered a sandwich. We waited interminably and found out later they had to send out for the sandwiches.” Small wonder that, in Perdue’s words, “Nixon was not charmed by New York . . . he had a West Coast prejudice.”33
About a month after they returned to Durham, Nixon got a letter from Donovan, Leisure, Newton and Lombard asking if he would return to New York for another interview. “By that time,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “I was no longer so keen on the idea of starting out in that cold and expensive city.”34
Instead, he went to his professors for advice. Lon Fuller recalled, “He said he thought he might go back to Whittier and practice law. I sort of said ho-hum about that. I thought he could do better than that.” Nixon said he had also been thinking of the FBI. “I said I thought he was too good a man for that, too.”35
The FBI was recruiting at Duke, and as Nixon later remarked, “The FBI looked very good to a young lawyer wanting work that year.” He submitted an application and had an interview. He also had Dean Horack write the director, J. Edgar Hoover. Horack went all out. Nixon, he wrote, is “one of the finest young men, both in character and ability, that I have ever had the opportunity of having in my classes. He is a superior student, alert, aggressive, a fine speaker and one who can do an exceptionally good piece of research when called upon to do so.”36
Like Professor Fuller, however, Horack thought Nixon was rather too good for the FBI. But he knew Nixon better than Fuller did, had spent time with him discussing his future, and had a better sense of where Nixon was going, and how to get there. When no job offer from the FBI came through,I Horack called the discouraged Nixon into his office.
“Dick,” he said, “if you’re going to go into politics, go back to your hometown and establish yourself in a law firm.” Nixon decided to do just that.
GRADUATION WAS glorious. Nixon was third in his class and therefore a member of the Order of the Coif, an honorary society. At the Senior Beer Bust, an outdoor party in which the senior class played the faculty at Softball, Nixon astonished his classmates when he caught a Softball in one hand while holding his beer in the other.
He was not accustomed to drinking—he had never touched alcohol at Whittier and had been to only a couple of beer parties at Duke. After three or four beers, he mounted a picnic table and delivered a speech that convulsed his audience, in the process showing a side of himself he had completely suppressed throughout his years at Duke—his acting ability and, of all things, a genuine talent as a humorist.
Brownfield had a vivid memory of the speech. He recalled, “With a completely serious expression, [Nixon] titled his talk ‘Insecurity,’ and he managed to get everything about Social Security so tangled up and backwards that he sounded like Red Skelton.”
Throughout graduation week, Brownfield continued, “every time a group of students found him near a convenient table, they tried to get him to make a funny speech. But . . . he seldom responded.”37 His mother, father, little brother Edward, and Grandmother Milhous—then eighty-eight years old—drove across the country to attend the ceremonies, and he concentrated on showing them around campus, not entertaining. “I’m fundamentally relatively shy,” he explained in 1959 to Stewart Alsop. “It doesn’t come natural to me to be a buddy-buddy boy.” He added, “I can’t really let my hair down with anyone.”
Not even old friends? Alsop asked. “Not even with my family,” Nixon responded. But, he quickly added, there was “one thing people are wrong about—I can have as good a time as anybody.”38 His performance at the Senior Beer Bust proved the point, but it also illustrated how tight a control Nixon kept on himself, how infrequently he would indulge his ability to relax and have fun.
NIXON DROVE BACK to Whittier with his family. He was surprised to learn that the special “prep” course given at USC for law graduates who were scheduled to take the California bar examination had been under way for three months. Despairing of catching up, but determined to try, Nixon went to work. He wrote Horack that he was working harder even than he had at Duke. He caught influenza. “I didn’t miss a day of school due to illness at Duke,” he told Horack, “and the first thing when I get back to Southern California, I catch the flu.”
When Horack wrote him to point out that he had the honor of being the first Duke graduate to take the California bar exam, Nixon replied, “The first graduate to take it has a darn good chance to fail it.” Horack shot back, “They’ll have to flunk them all if they don’t let you by.” In the event, he passed easily. On November 9, 1937, he was sworn in as a practicing attorney before the California Supreme Court.39
HE WAS two months short of his twenty-fifth birthday. His life to date had been an unbroken record of achievement and success. If he was unloved outside his family, he was widely respected. His peers had turned to him for leadership, from his grade-school days through law school, and he had always responded, indeed encouraged them to turn to him. His honesty and sincerity were known and appreciated, to the point that had he been in the used-car business his peers would have flocked to him to buy their vehicles. He had a strong sense of priorities, and never hesitated to put his own career ahead of everything else, but he also had a strong sense of duty. When he sought a job, or had one thrust upon him, he met the responsibilities of the post, without fail and without complaint.
To his southern classmates, he appeared to be “a true liberal.” Brownfield made that judgment, but evidently he had race relations in mind, because he went on to describe a classic middle-of-the-road philosophical stance. Nixon, Brownfield said, “was strongly sympathetic of the rights of the individual, particularly when the individual found himself opposed by the unequal and artificially created force of big government, big society, or big business. However, Dick never felt that an individual could transfer his responsibilities to the government and at the same time keep his freedom.”40
Nixon thought of himself as a conservative Republican; he was strongly anti-FDR. Not for Nixon the armchair socialism that was so popular with many highly educated, highly intelligent young men in the mid-thirties. His views were decidedly conventional; never in any way was he a rebel.
There were large vacuums in his life. He could memorize and summarize with the best anywhere, but there was little originality of thought. He was almost twenty-five years old, but had no women friends, much less the love of a woman he loved. In fact, he had no close friends at all, not even Perdue, with whom he shared a bed for a year and a room for two and one-half years. They hardly saw each other after graduation day and barely corresponded.41
NIXON’S UNWILLINGNESS to let anyone get close to him, and his apparent inability to get close to anyone, has been characteristic of Nixon throughout his life. From grade school to high school to college to law school and then out into the world, he left behind his old associates. His associations came to an end when Nixon no longer had an organizational connection with a person, whether as classmate, or teacher, or associate. When an acquaintance could only be called “a friend from the old days,” Nixon lost interest in him. He had no friends from the old days. By limiting his friendships to men with whom he had a current working relationship, Nixon created a situation in which his friendships were never probing, open, inquisitive. He did not share emotions or spin fantasies, or indulge in the other intimacies of true friendship. Rather, his friendships were more like business meetings or staff seminars or study groups. Nixon used people, rather than responding to them; he hid himself from people, rather than opening himself to friends.
Nixon was twenty-four years old when he left Duke. He knew lots of intelligent people. Yet there was not one person in the world, save his mother, who would have claimed to know him well. He was as much a mystery to his roommates, despite a setting (Whippoorwill Manor) that could not have been more conducive to the spawning of lifelong friendships, as he was to Ola Florence. Moreover, not one of his acquaintances, including his roommates and Ola Florence, ever wanted to know him better. From the woman’s point of view, he was not a person you wanted to hug; from a man’s point of view, he was not the kind of guy you would ask on a backpacking trip.
He had a limited though real capacity to love and be loved, to trust and be trusting, as his relationships with his mother and his grandmother showed. He also had a capacity to joke and have fun and get people to laugh, as his graduation celebration demonstrated. But he suppressed this side of himself, to the point that it almost seemed he had taken a vow to ruthlessly spurn any characteristic that might keep him from achieving his ambitions. He denied himself the pleasure of simple fun and the joy of simple friendship. The time and energy saved he put into his work and career.
But although the young Nixon was not a man people wanted to get close to individually, he was someone with a magnetic appeal for people in groups. Crowds did not frighten him. Perhaps this was because crowds could not expect him to bare his soul before them, nor embarrass him by telling him innermost secrets. Instead, with people in groups he could concentrate on some action that needed to be carried out, an action requiring people to work together to achieve a common objective, whether it be a homecoming dance or arranging for a speaker or a graduation party, and in such activity he was superb. No one was a better organizer or had more energy or got more done than Dick Nixon.
He was a man most comfortable before an audience, most uncomfortable with individuals or a small group. He was a man of obvious leadership ability despite his lack of easy warmth and his loneliness of spirit. He was a man with first-rate mental equipment. Most of all, he was a man with a fierce drive, an eagerness to win, and an insatiable hunger for success.
He had learned all he could at Whittier and Duke. He was ready to launch his career and realize his ambitions, on which he placed no limits whatsoever.
I. Years later Hoover explained to Vice-President Nixon that he had been accepted, but the FBI appropriation was cut before the job could be offered.