Fifties (51 page)

If the leaders of a nation as powerful as the United States needed, above all, personal confidence—Oliver Wendell Holmes once said of the young Franklin Roosevelt that he had a third-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament—Nixon was ill-prepared for his long journey in American politics. Emotional strength and self-confidence were missing from him. Everything with Nixon was personal. When others disagreed with him, it was as if they wanted to strip away his hard-won veneer of success and reduce him to the unhappy boy he had once been. In political terms that had bitter consequences: He would lash out at others in attacks that seemed to go far beyond the acceptable norms of partisanship; if others struck back at him, he saw himself as a victim. Just beneath the surface of this
modern young politician was a man who, in Bob Taft’s phrase, seemed “to radiate tension and conflict.” He was filled with the resentments of class one would have expected in a New Deal Democrat.

He was a very private man, a true loner, who lacked the instinctive affability and gregariousness of most successful politicians. One thought of him more easily as a strategist than a candidate. He hated meeting ordinary people, shaking their hands, and making small talk with them. He was always awkward at the clubby male bonding of Congress. When he succeeded it was because he worked harder and thought something out more shrewdly than an opponent and, above all, because he was someone who always wanted it more. Nixon had to win. To lose a race meant losing everything—so much was at stake, and it was all so personal. Taft, if not exactly jolly and extroverted, won the admiration of his peers because he was intellectually sterling. Ike inspired other men because of his looks, his athletic ability, his natural charm. Nixon was always the outsider; his television adviser in his successful 1968 presidential campaign, Roger Ailes, once said of him that he had the least control of atmosphere of any politician that Ailes had ever met. By that Ailes meant charisma, the capacity to walk into a room and hold the attention of those assembled there. Even success did not really bring him confidence. There is a 1952 photo that is a testimonial to Nixon’s terrible awkwardness: Nixon, recently nominated for the vice-presidency, had visited Eisenhower at a fishing camp in Colorado. There was Ike in his fishing gear, glowing and looking very much at home; and there was Nixon, who had shown up without any informal clothes, looking absurdly stiff in jacket, suit, and tie. The curriculum vitae for success had never included a list of items to wear for fishing photo opportunities. Years later when he was President, there was a comparable photo of him self-consciously walking on the beach at San Clemente, much as Kennedy had done at Hyannisport—Kennedy had walked barefoot, Nixon was still in streetclothes and shoes.

His childhood was sad. As Stephen Ambrose, one of Nixon’s biographers, pointed out, though the family lived on a farm, the Nixon boys never had a dog or cat or any other kind of pet. Whittier, his hometown, was a small town, founded by Quakers, outside Los Angeles; it was isolated quite deliberately by its religious and civic leaders and was extremely conservative: Typically, when a teacher was hired by the local public school, she had to promise that she did not smoke, and there was a major struggle in town when the first cocktail lounge opened at the Hoover Hotel. Because the town’s
population came mostly from one ethnic group, it was an extremely hierarchical society, with explicit standards of success and failure.

Nixon’s mother, Hannah, was a Milhous, and the Milhouses were a large, affluent, and somewhat snobbish clan, one of the leading families of Whittier. As Nixon’s cousin Jessamyn West, the writer, once noted, the Milhouses thought it rather a pity that for biological reasons there had to be the admission of non-Milhous blood into their family line. Hannah Milhous married Frank Nixon against her family’s wishes. He was not a Quaker, and although he converted, he was still regarded by most of her family as an outsider, louder and more argumentative than a Quaker should be. To make matters worse, Frank, despite a handsome bequest from his wealthy father-in-law, did not make a success at first. He invested in ten acres of a lemon grove. The land was poor: “The hardest piece of soil in Yorba Linda,” said Paul Ryan, a neighbor. “Red clay. You irrigate it but it doesn’t help.” It took a long time for lemon trees to turn a profit; most of the successful citrus farmers in the area had more money, better land, and already established groves, so they could wait for their new trees to grow. Frank had to take a variety of odd jobs to make extra money, and Hannah cooked for boarders. After a decade of backbreaking labor, Frank went bust and sold the land at a loss. “He never made a penny,” said another contemporary, Ralph Shook. “He was a jack-of-all-trades.” He bought a small gas station on the Whittier highway, gradually turned it into a market as well, and finally enjoyed considerable success, albeit success that required the participation of every member of the family. Young Richard had to get up at 4
A.M.
to drive to Los Angeles to buy the fruit and vegetables; Hannah baked ten pies a day. All members of the family had to work in the store. Richard did not mind the early-morning runs to Los Angeles and he liked to do the store’s books, but he was extremely sensitive to social slights. He hated working in the store and waiting on customers—years later, when he was running for President, he would mention those days and how every time he passed a vegetable stand, he felt sympathy for the person who had to pick out the rotten produce.

Even though the gas station and market became increasingly successful, the Nixons had slipped socially by Milhous standards. Frank Nixon began to avoid Milhous family gatherings, and Richard Nixon was acutely aware of how his father had fallen in the eyes of in-laws and the local community in this closed and rigid little universe. Frank Nixon, under the best of conditions a difficult man with a volatile temper, became angrier than ever. Aware of how his
father reacted to slights from his in-laws, Richard learned to recognize when a particularly dark spell was coming on, and he would warn his brothers to avoid any confrontations with him. Frank Nixon remained combative and suspicious throughout his life. (At his son’s inauguration as Vice-President of the United States, he complained that he would not wear the requisite white tails: “I am not going to wear these blasted things.”) When the oil boom struck the region, neighboring farmers sold their land and oil was found there. Frank refused handsome offers for his land, hoping that oil would be found—but in his case, of course, it was not. Hannah, a gentle but strong-willed Quaker woman, accepted the hard times without a word of complaint. She was, as Nixon would refer to her later, “a saint,” but a controlling saint at that. She never raised her voice, but it was she who set the norms and the goals for the children. Two of her children died from tuberculosis, which created an aura of even greater sadness in the house. Richard Nixon, the eldest of the three surviving children and self-evidently the most intelligent and talented, felt a great burden to succeed and validate the family’s sacrifices. After Harold, his older brother, died, Hannah Nixon noted, “From that time on it seemed that Richard was trying to be
three
sons in one, striving even harder than before to make up to his father and me for our loss.... Unconsciously, too, I think that Richard may have felt a kind of guilt that Harold and Arthur were dead and that he was alive.” As a child, Richard was usually remembered as either working or studying, trying to achieve, trying to live up to his mother’s expectations of him. “He always carried such a weight,” his mother once said of him. There were, she thought, too many burdens; there was too much hardship for someone so young. She wished that he and his brothers had been able to have more fun. Old friends who knew the family, including Paul Smith, Nixon’s professor at Whittier College, were fascinated by the vastly disparate characters of the two parents: Frank, with his anger and rage, Hannah, with her beatific gentleness and quiet, unbending sense of purpose. To her, a Milhous was still special and her son was a Milhous, destined to be extremely successful and yet highly moral. The effect of that on Nixon, Smith thought, was powerful: He was a young man caught between his father’s rage and sense of injustice and his mother’s high moral purpose, ambition, and concern for correct behavior. In Smith’s view, this was the key to his character—his inability to reconcile the two sides. Certainly, it was Hannah who sent him off to school in starched shirts every day when none of the other children wore them, Hannah who insisted from the beginning
that the teachers and other children call him
Richard,
not Dick, and Hannah who during the Checkers episode, when Ike had not yet made up his mind, sent the general a telegram saying that Richard was honest and clean, signing it, “one who has known Richard longer than anyone. his mother Hannah Nixon.”

In high school, he had none of the qualities that make boys popular—charm, looks, athletic prowess—so he worked harder, earning if not the liking of his peers, at least their respect. In elections for class offices, he almost always won, because he seemed to have given so much of himself. That was to set a pattern: In both college and law school, he was largely regarded as a lonely, immensely competent striver; yet at both Whittier, the local college, and Duke Law School, he was nonetheless elected student-body president.

At Duke, to which he won a scholarship for that university’s first law-school class, he finished third in his class, working once again tirelessly, making few friends, above all
achieving.
After graduation he ventured to New York to try the great law firms, but despite his flawless academic record, he could not get across the moat. Typically, when he had applied at Sullivan and Cromwell, New York’s mightiest corporate firm, David Hawkins, the partner in charge of interviewing young men, made note of his “shifty-eyed” manner. (Years later, during Watergate, someone at Sullivan found the notes and, to everyone’s amusement, read them aloud during a partners’ dinner.) Others in his class received offers; Nixon did not. He tried for a job with the FBI but was turned down there as well; he was not considered aggressive enough. If Duke Law School had promised to be an escape from the airless small-town life in Whittier, his postgraduate experiences dashed any such hopes. That was in no small part what drove him so relentlessly in later life: There were men of power in the world who seemed to have gathered in the elite New York law firms, and they would not give someone like him a break. He had wanted to escape Whittier and had failed.

Failing to get a job in New York or Washington, he returned to Whittier, where Hannah had already visited Tom Bewley, the town’s leading lawyer, and called in a chit or two. Richard was less than eager to work for Bewley; nor for that matter was Bewley at all sure he wanted to hire Nixon—he asked Paul Smith, the president of Whittier College, whether it was worthwhile to hire this young man. Richard stayed in Whittier for four years, becoming a partner in Bewley’s firm in two. It was during this period that he met and wed Pat Ryan, an extremely attractive young teacher whose ambitions matched his own; she was trying to escape a childhood of grinding
poverty, infinitely harsher than his own. She taught commercial subjects in the Whittier school system and earned around two thousand dollars a year, which seemed to her a magnificent sum at that time.

They met in February 1938, at a try-out for the Whittier Community Players. (The play called for someone to play the district attorney, and a friend suggested to Nixon that if he played an attorney convincingly onstage, it might help bring in some business.) He was immediately smitten; she was not. When the play opened, he invited his parents to come and take a look at the young woman he hoped to marry. When her son asked what she thought of her, Hannah, a formidable mother who knew a rival when she saw one, could comment only that “she did her part nicely.”

The first two times he asked Pat out, she turned him down, even though she liked his ambition and drive. She tried to fix him up with her roommate, but he spent the entire evening with the roommate talking of nothing but Pat. When she tried to shake him off by pleading she had work, he volunteered to help grade papers with her. When she pretended not to be home, he saw the door bolted and knew she was there. He was nothing if not persistent. At one point he wrote her a letter full of schoolboy gush, which ended, “Yes—I know I’m crazy and that this is old stuff and that I don’t take hints, but you see, Miss Pat, I like you!”

Persistence won out. She had always vowed that she would live a better life than that of her parents. Though she was so attractive that a few years earlier, when she was working in a Los Angeles department store, there had been several offers for her to take screen tests, she was not the kind of young woman to go into the movies. Richard Nixon’s relentless ambition finally overcame her doubts, and whatever else, he had no intention of spending the rest of his life in Whittier—and neither did she. His letter to her at the time of their engagement was filled with their mutual plans: “It is our job to go forth together and accomplish great ends and we shall do it too.” Just before they were married, they decided to buy a car; Nixon found that the least expensive way was for him to take a bus to Detroit, buy the car there, and drive it back. He did, buying the car with money from
her
savings (because she was making four times as much money as he was then). Their wedding ring cost $324.75, which was most of the rest of their combined savings. Their honeymoon was in Mexico, and they carried a suitcase full of canned food to eat for breakfast and lunch, to save money. But while they were dressing to go on their honeymoon, friends opened the luggage and took all
the labels off the cans—so when they opened them, they never knew quite what they were going to eat.

The next year, when he received a letter from a friend in Washington offering him an early job with the Office of Price Administration, it was Pat Nixon who convinced him to take it. They could reinvent themselves in Washington and leave their small-town pasts behind. They had no money or family connections; their only fuel was their own ambition, their willingness to work hard and sacrifice for their future. He went into the Navy during World War Two, and as it was winding down, he wrote her from overseas making it clear that they would not settle down in Whittier: “Too many restrictions etc. A little freedom is far more important than security, don’t you agree?” They would be glad to leave behind familiar landmarks, old friends, even their families. What was familiar was also limiting. They sought the new, modern life-style of the middle class, freed from constraints of geography and background. They were always a little stilted with each other. As he prepared to return from the Navy, he wrote her: “Whether it’s the lobby of the Grand Central or the St. Francis bar—I’m going to walk right up to you and kiss you—but good. Will you mind such a public demonstration?”