PART I

 

BEGINNINGS

1
THE QUAKER AND THE MORMON

 

They were born barely thirty miles from each other, in the dry air and open skies of the early-twentieth-century West, before asphalt and strip malls conquered the soil and spirit of the southern California desert. Although Richard Nixon and Jack Anderson would ultimately become fierce antagonists, what is most striking about their early years is not their differences but their similarities. The politician and the reporter both were raised in small Western towns, sons of the struggling working class during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Both men had strict religious upbringings and devout fundamentalist Christian parents. Both signed up for sea duty in the Pacific during World War II and headed afterward to Washington, D.C., to realize their large ambitions. And both would spend the next three decades in the nation’s capital, embroiled in some of the most ferocious political and journalistic brawls of their time.

Yet despite their similar beginnings, the two men had fundamentally different dispositions and responded in wholly different ways to their parallel backgrounds. The effect would produce a clash of personalities and professions that would transcend the usual adversarial relationship between politicians and journalists.

For Richard Milhous Nixon, it began in Yorba Linda, California, a farming village forty miles southeast of Los Angeles. “It wasn’t a town,” a resident recalled. “It was turkey mullein, cactus, rattlesnakes, tumbleweeds and tracks.” And it was there, in his parents’ tiny stove-heated bungalow in January 1913, that the future president was born.

Nixon descended from a long line of Quakers, so named because their religious devotion led them to “tremble at the word of the Lord.” With a heavy emphasis on silence and simplicity, traditional Quakers austerely rejected dancing and other frivolities. But unlike more progressive Friends from back East, whose history of political activism championed pacifism, the Nixon family belonged to a fundamentalist strain that engaged in evangelical revivals. Nixon’s parents “ground into me with the aid of the church,” he later said, “their strictest interpretation” of the “infallibility and literal correctness of the Bible.” Young Richard—his parents eschewed the more familiar “Dick”—went to church four times on Sunday, from morning until evening; he also read from the Bible before going to bed at night: “We never had a meal without grace. Usually it was silent. Sometimes each of us would recite a verse of scripture.” At age thirteen, Richard publicly declared his “personal commitment to Christ and Christian service.”

Richard grew up in Whittier, an insular Quaker town of harsh piety and rigid conformity, devoid of bars, liquor stores, or movie theaters, where village elders instructed female teachers not to go to dances or talk to men on the street. The Nixon family “practiced a stout, unquestioned tribal closeness,” one biographer wrote. “It was a plain, exacting life.” Along with religious orthodoxy, Nixon imbibed something of the Quakers’ interest in politics, though he was less concerned with the social gospel than with political rectitude. At age twelve, Richard read newspaper accounts of the Teapot Dome political scandal in Washington and reportedly vowed, “When I grow up, I’m going to be an honest lawyer so things like that can’t happen.” He won speech contests by extolling patriotic themes and wanted to “enter politics for an occupation so that I might be of some good to the people.” A debating opponent from high school said that Richard “would have made a wonderful missionary, because he was always right, he knew everything. God was on his side.”

Richard was the second of five sons fathered by Francis Nixon, an industrious but often itinerant worker whose success never measured up to his dreams. Orphaned as a child, with only a fourth-grade education, Frank Nixon bounced from job to job—carpenter, butcher, painter, brick-maker, potter, streetcar operator, lemon farmer, grocer—but never let failure dampen his work ethic. “To him playing was daydreaming,” one of his brothers said. Frank’s childhood was undeniably harsh and troubled: his mother died of tuberculosis when he was eight years old; his stepmother beat him; schoolmates bullied him. The result was a volatile personality given to unpredictable rages. “My father was a scrappy, belligerent fighter,” Richard remembered, “a strict and stern disciplinarian.” Others were less polite: “Quarrelsome,” said one of Frank’s siblings. “Nasty,” recalled a niece. “Explosive,” stated a baby-sitter. “A collector of resentments, a chronic shouter,” a family friend wrote. “Hard … beastly … like an animal,” according to an acquaintance. Nixon’s father hit his sons with rulers and straps. “I still remember Uncle Frank … beating [Richard’s older brother] so hard his hollering could be heard all up and down” the block, an onlooker marveled decades later.

Richard’s mother, Hannah Milhous Nixon, was more even-tempered than her rough-hewn husband. “She was considered in Yorba Linda a cultured, refined, educated person from a rather superior family in comparison to Mr. [Frank] Nixon,” a neighbor said. Raised in a pious Quaker family, Hannah pushed her promising second son to work hard, trust in God, and dutifully practice the piano. “Richard was clearly his mother’s favorite,” a contemporary remembered. The future president returned the adulation. “My mother was a saint,” he said tearfully on his last day in the White House. “She will have no books written about her. But she was a saint.” Others considered Hannah Nixon less angelic. “She was a hard character,” one friend of the family said; another called her “cranky and puritanical.” Richard was just seven years old when a classmate saw him with his mother: “She was sitting on the piano bench with a switch in her hand while he was practicing.” Unlike her husband, Hannah usually spared the rod, but she substituted stern lectures that Richard “dreaded far more than my father’s hand.” Nixon reportedly said of his mother, “In her whole life, I never heard her say to me or anyone else ‘I love you.’ ” His doctor, psychotherapist Arnold Hutschnecker, believed that Hannah’s chilly, conditional love failed to nurture her son even while she “completely smothered” him with demands: “A saint is someone who you cannot pray enough to, improve enough for, beg enough to,” the physician pointed out. “The image of the saintly but stern face of his mother defeated him more than any other factor … He wanted his mother to believe him perfect. That was his problem.”

Nixon’s quiet need to be thought perfect was reinforced by the tragic early deaths of two brothers....