Richard Nixon's Evangelical Quaker Heritage

[Nixon] told me one time that he intended to go through his presidential papers by a fireplace; he would go through them one by one, and cull out the things he didn't want history to notice. ... He was going to destroy things, so that what was left to history would be his selective version.

— John Ehrlichman

During his political career, Richard Milhous Nixon would occasionally cite his Quaker heritage when called upon to explain or defend controversial actions. Perhaps the most startling example was in 1971 when, in an interview with the New York Times, he was asked about the bombing of neutral Laos he had secretly authorized during the Vietnam War. Commenting on his action, Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy Nixon told a Times reporter, "I rate myself a deeply committed pacifist, perhaps because of my Quaker heritage from my mother." As president he exercised more raw power than any other of the world's Quakers during the twentieth century, in truth more absolute power than any Quaker in history. This was the same "deeply committed pacifist" whose "Quaker heritage" did not prevent him from enlisting in the navy during World War II and serving in the south Pacific.

Such anomalies might cause some head-scratching among critics, but they did not seem that surprising to those who knew anything about the world of evangelical Friends in the western United States from the 1890s onward. Unfortunately few did — or do. Perhaps the most egregious example was in the biography of Nixon by the much-acclaimed historian Stephen E. Ambrose, author of numerous historical works on a variety of topics. Describing the kind of Quaker meeting that he said Nixon attended, Ambrose had Nixon and the Quakers at his East Whittier Friends Church "[s]itting quietly together ... without intermediary rites, church, creed, or priesthood ... or hymns sung together." There was no written creed at East Whittier, true enough, but the rest of the description was totally inaccurate for Friends churches in California. Other scholars who have described Nixon's Quakerism have not been as oblivious as Ambrose to the realities of Friends' history, their tradition, and practice, but most have been bad enough.

Such mischaracterizations make one wonder why this myopia existed. It was no Nixonian conspiracy. Indeed, a major source of ignorance about his religion is the neglect of the question by most historians. A very small group, Quakers in the United States are sharply and often bitterly divided and have been since the 1820s, nearly a century before Nixon was born. Many of those who have written about him have been natives of the eastern states, have lived there, or have earned advanced degrees in that area of the country; their knowledge of Quakerism has been colored by the brand that they are most familiar with, the eastern, or what Friends call the "unprogrammed," type, in the United States the one with the fewest actual adherents. Hence relatively few historians have been willing to go beyond Nixon's nearly-always-bland comments about Quakerism and probe into what he was saying — or avoiding. The same goes for his mother's, Hannah's, statements about her faith, a primary source for historians' accounts of their religion.

Toward the end of his life, with less political need to avoid reminding people of his Quakerism, Nixon could occasionally be more forthcoming. Always somewhat fearful and wary of those who wrote about him, in 1989 Nixon told Aitken, the only biographer he half-trusted, that the others were "second rate," but that one of them, Stephen Ambrose, was at least "close to the truth when he said, 'The impact of RN's Quaker heritage on his personality has been underestimated.'" Yet, paradoxically Nixon never corrected the public record: in his own memoir, he limited discussion of his own Quaker background to three short paragraphs. He certainly made no effort to indicate how Quakerism had the significant impact on his personality that he implied in his comment to Aitken.

In truth, Nixon's Quakerism differed little from the conventional versions of Christianity that marked the religious commitments of most American politicians. To understand why, the history of the Quaker experience in the United States is instructive. Quakers, or Friends of the Truth and Children of the Light as they were first known, began in seventeenth-century England at the height of the English civil wars. Sparked by the charismatic preacher George Fox, they represented one of the radical sects spawned by the revolution and became notorious for their insistence that Christ spoke to all manners and sorts of people and commanded them to testify to the truth they experienced from their divine Teacher during their silent meetings.

Sometimes they were hardly civil, invading churches — which they derisively called "steeple houses" — to demand that their hearers come out from the apostasy that the church had followed for better than sixteen hundred years. On more than one occasion, they went "naked for a sign" in the streets of English towns to demonstrate that sinners should similarly strip themselves of their wrongdoing in penance before the Lord. They disdained social niceties, such as tipping their hats or bowing and curtseying to their "betters," used "plain language" such as "thee" and "thou" to aristocrats and parents who expected the plural "you" from inferior subordinates such as children, and refused to pay tithes or swear any kind of oath. For the last two offenses, they filled up the jails, children, men, and women indiscriminately, particularly after restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. Just gathering in groups over five in number now amounted to a violation of the law and sent them to jail, but their numbers continued to increase accordingly. Undaunted by legal restrictions on getting together and unlike their opponents and rivals the Baptists, they insisted on meeting openly, even advertising their meetings. They made few distinctions between men and women, allowing both to speak in their meetings. While not at first opposing slavery — it did not exist in England — their insistence on equality led them in that direction rather early.

After 1661, the sect officially insisted that members refuse to participate in "outward wars" with "carnal weapons," a position that, with the group's other peculiar testimonies, emphasized its differences with other Christian groups. The Quaker mentality stressed these differences. Friends saw themselves as differing fundamentally from their worldly neighbors. When members became more prosperous and somewhat...