Being Nixon: A Man Divided (3 page)

Nixon was caught between his two parents, trying to please both. He sought love from one, then the other; one wonders if he ever really found it from either. “Can you imagine,” asked Henry Kissinger, “what this man would have been like if somebody had loved him?”
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Kissinger was exaggerating for effect, but Nixon’s insecurities seem so profound that he must, as a child, have lacked for some essential assurance. Self-protection, more than nurturing, seems to have been the order of the day in the Nixon household. Young Richard learned to avoid his father’s temper and his hand. (As small boys, Richard and his brothers were not spanked but “thumped,” rapped on the head.)
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Richard watched as his mother intercepted customers in the store before Frank could bombard them with his vehemently held political views. If she didn’t get there in time, she sometimes followed the browbeaten customers out the door, trying to soothe them.
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In his memoirs, Nixon was still abashed by the shouting matches between his father and his brothers that could be heard “all across the neighborhood.” In a rare instance of self-reflection, Nixon wrote, “Perhaps my own aversion to personal confrontations dates back to these early recollections.”
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For a small shy boy, uncertain but eager to please, the space between Frank and Hannah may have felt at times like no man’s land. “They were both explosive persons, one outwardly, one inwardly,” recalled Richard’s niece (brother Don’s daughter), Lawrene Nixon Anfinson. “My grandmother exploded inwardly, kept it all in, but was very quiet and gave everybody the silent treatment, which just killed them, because she was so sweet. If she became angry you better watch out….She kept at it for days, maybe, and nobody could talk to her.”
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Nixon may have learned by watching his mother deal with his father. “She would say, ‘That’s right Frank, that’s right Frank,’ ” recalled Nixon’s cousin, Sheldon Beeson. “But at the same time, you knew she was sort of scheming as to how she could kind of smooth things over and do it some other way.”
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Years later, as a husband and father, Nixon would not abide conflict in his own home. He always wanted to hear up-beat music, symphonies
and show tunes, even through dinner and wanted to hear only cheerful conversation. Acutely sensitive to moods, he would abruptly and insistently end any family conflict by saying, “Oh, there’s no problem.” He never raised his voice and left all discipline to his wife, Pat. “My father doesn’t like arguments,” recalled his daughter Julie in 1972. “He wants to be an optimist.”
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It is perhaps unsurprising that, as a high school student, Nixon brought home Dale Carnegie’s relentlessly positivist
How to Win Friends and Influence People
and suggested to his family that they “all read it together.”
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Nixon learned how to fight back against his father’s bullying in a sort of abstracted, lawyer-like way. Animated and boisterous, Frank was often on his soapbox, in his store, at Sunday School, in his parlor. A precocious newspaper reader, socially but not intellectually reticent, young Richard began discussing politics with his father when he was still in grade school. His opinions began to overcome his shyness. As a second grader in 1920, Richard would sometimes lecture bewildered young children on the candidates in the upcoming national election. Over time, he found he could outsmart his father by scoring debating points.
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Frank Nixon was a Republican with a deep populist streak. He identified with the “little man” and was drawn by the hurt or angry crowd. California in the 1920s was a paradise of sunshine and fragrance, but it was filling up with dispossessed Okies from the Dust Bowl. The influx disturbed a middle class grown fearful of Reds and labor agitators. Revivalism was in the air. After Arthur’s death, Frank took his grieving sons (but not Hannah, who shunned public religiosity) to come-to-Jesus meetings in Los Angeles. The Nixon boys were swept along with the five thousand congregants at “Sister” Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple—L.A.’s first megachurch—to accept Salvation. It was young Richard’s first, unforgettable exposure to a mass audience moved by the power of righteous fulmination.

Inside the massive temple, which still stands in L.A.’s Echo Park, there was a room where miraculously healed congregants could leave
their crutches and canes. At the turn of the century, millions of lower-middle-class whites from the all over the country migrated to California seeking good health and personal salvation. The culture they created stressed looking to the future and not to the past, pasting on a sunny smile whatever one’s mood, and earnestly accenting the positive. Still, the dark side sometimes peeked out. In 1926, shortly after Nixon saw the flaming red-haired evangelist in person and began listening to her nightly radio broadcasts, Sister Aimee was caught up in a scandal—accused of staging her own kidnapping. The charges were never proved, but for months the press shrilly sensationalized the story. For the thirteen-year-old Nixon, avid consumer of newspapers, it was an early lesson in the murkiness and malleability of truth.
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Whittier College in
1930 did not, in its Quaker rectitude, allow fraternities (or drinking or dancing on campus), but it did permit “literary societies.” The most select society was known as the Franklins (after the most famous Quaker of them all, Ben Franklin). “We were the socialites,” recalled Hubert Perry, a member of one of Whittier’s ruling families. Perry recounted that Nixon was rejected by the Franklins. Nixon insisted that he had turned down the Franklins.
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The different versions are not insignificant in trying to understand Nixon. There is the insecure Nixon who never got over the social slights of his youth; then there is the resilient Nixon who rose above the snobs and shaped his own persona. Both are the real Nixon: He used anxiety to create strength, but a brittle strength.

Either by choice or necessity, Nixon created a rival power base to the Franklins. He became the first president of a new society called the Orthogonians (Greek, roughly speaking, for “Square Shooters”). “The Orthogonians were the Franklins’ castoffs,” sniffed Perry. Maybe so, but while the Franklins might have a star quarterback, the Orthogonians had most of the linemen. They may not have been the elite, but “Nixon understood there were more of them,” said Perry. Nixon, who immediately began running for student office, was building
a political organization. In the yearbook, the Franklins were photographed wearing tuxedos, while the Orthogonians purposely wore open-neck white shirts.
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Nixon (who owned a tuxedo all four years at Whittier and bought a new one his senior year) knew that there was considerable resentment of the Franklins on campus. “They were the Haves and we were the Have Nots,” Nixon recalled.
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The Depression was settling in, and the poorer students sometimes slipped into the avocado orchards at night to forage for food.
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Nixon wrote a kind of blue-collar manifesto for the Orthogonians. “We were officially dedicated,” Nixon recalled, “to what we called the Four B’s: Beans, Brawn, Brain, and Bowels.”
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By “bowels” Nixon meant guts, which he had when he went out for football. At five-eleven, 145 pounds, he was undersized for a tackle, but he was too uncoordinated and slow-footed to play in the backfield. Mostly he was used as cannon fodder for the first team at practice and sat on the bench during games. He took enormous punishment in practice—“we used him as a punching bag,” said his coach—but won the admiration of his teammates by coming back for more. “Anyone who could take the beating he had to take, the physical beating, was brave,” said Perry.
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The coach of the Whittier Poets was a part–Native American named Wallace Newman, known, inevitably, as “Chief.” A former University of Southern California star who probably should have been coaching in big-time football, Newman made no effort to hide his grudges. He hated losing, disdained quitters, and was loud about it: “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser!” he bellowed to his charges. Nixon worshipped him, understood the large chip on his shoulder, and would, throughout his life, invoke the Chief’s life lessons in grit.
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Nixon was a grind in the library, but more “analytical” than “philosophical,” according to his history and political science teacher, Paul Smith.
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He read Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
and wrote papers with titles like “The Causes of the Fall of Rome” and “The Greatness
of Julius Caesar.” But the essays are turgid and plodding.
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He did not remark upon, perhaps missed altogether, Shakespeare’s lessons about hubris and betrayal.
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On March 7,
1933, Richard, then a twenty-year-old junior, was in the library studying, when he got a note to go home immediately. He found a hearse outside. The undertaker was carrying away Harold’s body. For the first time, Richard saw his father weep. The fair-haired first son had been “the flower of the family,” recalled cousin Jessamyn West. “Why is it,” Frank Nixon asked West, “that the best and the finest of the flock has to be taken?”
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Richard had taken second place to his doomed brother. Harold had been a Boy Scout, but by the time Richard’s turn came, there was no money to buy a uniform.
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Richard would have to find a different way to measure up. Harold’s death had a “deep effect” on Richard, as his mother recalled: “He sank into a deep impenetrable silence. From that time on, it seemed Richard was trying to be three sons in one, striving even harder than before to make up to me and his father for our loss.”
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Within a few weeks of Harold’s death, Nixon plunged into a fierce campaign for student body president. He had been running for the position all along. By his second-to-last year at Whittier, he was the student body vice president, and, thanks partly to his assiduous maneuverings, the outgoing president was an Orthogonian. Just as in high school, the way was clear, or so it seemed.

Nixon was not a natural “buddy.” “I don’t think he had anybody that you would call a close friend,” said Hubert Perry.
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Some regarded him as prickly and cold—“cocksure,” according to one coed who could not see through his defensive veneer.
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He could be edgy and subject to nervous fits and explosions before he went on stage for a play or debate (which he did frequently, notwithstanding his studies and the 4
A.M
. wholesale market run). But he worked at being an enthusiast, cheering himself hoarse from the football bench, constantly organizing rallies and feeds, even handing out sticks of chewing gum.
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He became familiar with the peculiar lonesomeness of a
politician—friend of all, intimate of none. Through hard work and ubiquity, he made himself seem inevitable as student body president. By a bit of political sleight of hand—the trading of some student offices—he thought that he had arranged to run unopposed in May of 1933.

Then, at the last moment, the Franklins entered their own candidate, a charismatic cheerleader named Dick Thompson. The student newspaper turned on Nixon. “It is a likely fact that the students’ choice for next year will be Dick Thompson for student body president,” wrote “Scoop,” the political columnist of the
Quaker Campus
. It was as if the ghost of Bob Logue, his handsome high school nemesis, had appeared to torment “Gloomy Gus.”

Nixon, not for the first or last time, was cast into a defeatist despond. He told a confidante, the mother of his English teacher and drama coach, that he was dropping out of the student body race. He said that he had too many other responsibilities, which was true, if not the whole truth. He did not mention Thompson.

But, as he would throughout his life, Nixon rallied. After a few days, he mustered his courage and his wiles and came up with an opportunistic plan. For some time, students had been agitating to hold dances on campus. The administration, beholden to the board of trustees dominated by the straitlaced Society of Friends, had balked. In his opening campaign speech, Thompson, the suave Franklin, suggested that an old building could be converted into a student center, which, he hinted, might eventually be used for dances. Nixon saw the chance to outflank his opponent. He came right out and proposed campus dances. To appease the administration, Nixon cleverly argued that it would be more wholesome for the school to allow dances on or near campus than to just say no—which would only encourage students to go off to smoke-filled dives in Los Angeles.

Nixon was playing to a larger audience, the “non-orgs,” the students who belonged to no organization. The organization kids, the societies and clubs and teams, already had dances, usually not in honky-tonks but at nearby country clubs or Los Angeles hotels.
Dances on campus for all students were sure to be crowd-pleasers, and so they were. In May 1933, at the end of his junior year, Nixon was elected student body president. He did not hide his pleasure at having outsmarted the Franklins. His smile, which could be surprisingly wide and warm, beamed as he greeted students and handed out sticks of chewing gum in thanks for their support. In August, the Board of Trustees grudgingly lifted its ban on dances, which they decorously described instead as “large social affairs,” and rented out the local Ladies Club, still technically off campus.
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Nixon himself did not know how to dance. Under pressure from Ola Florence, he took some lessons, but he had two left feet. Ola Florence’s friends asked her how she could abide such a “stuffy” boyfriend. But Ola Florence was taken by Nixon. “I thought Dick was wonderful…so strong, so clever, so articulate,” she told a Nixon biographer, Jonathan Aitken. “He wrote me notes which I just couldn’t believe, they had such beautiful words and thoughts.” The two were secretly engaged for a time, though there was “no hanky panky,” recalled Welch.
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But then the romance seemed to cool. There were fights; Nixon began dating other girls, apparently to arouse Ola’s jealousy. She once had to call her parents to pick her up at a dance while Nixon went off with another girl. Welch wondered if her steady had become arrogant, “now that he’s president.” He seemed lonely, solemn, preoccupied.