Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
At twenty-one, having graduated second in his Whittier class of eighty-five, Nixon was poised to make his first footprints on the road to fame.
Richard had announced at the age of twelve that he wanted to be a lawyer one day. His aunt Jane said it was the result of his reading about Teapot Dome, the scandal over corrupt oil deals by government insiders. “I remember Richard lying down on the floor, down on his stomach with the newspapers spread out in front of him. He didn’t like what he was reading. He said, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to be an honest lawyer so things like that can’t happen.’ . . . He was really serious. . . .”3
The account is plausible, for Frank Nixon regularly raged about the “crooked lawyers” involved in Teapot Dome, and another aunt gave him a book glorifying the legal profession. His grandmother had declared, when he was a baby, that his noisy crying marked him out as a future lawyer—or preacher. At college, however, Nixon rejected his mother’s suggestion that he consider going into the church. And the law might be his means to an end—politics. For already, politics fascinated him.
Nixon’s cousin Merle West remembered listening, bored and uncomprehending, when Richard, at the age of seven, stopped on Main Street to extol the virtues of Warren Harding, the Republican candidate in the 1920 presidential election. There too the boy was under the influence of his father, who was soon cursing the “crooked politicians” in the Harding administration involved in Teapot Dome. Frank Nixon, originally a Democrat, had switched to the Republican party after William McKinley stopped to compliment him on his horse. The formative influences on his son were more sophisticated.
Richard Nixon admired Abraham Lincoln the way every American did, but additionally so because his grandmother virtually idolized him. He admired Woodrow Wilson, whom his mother had voted for—against her husband’s wishes—because he tried to keep the United States out of World War I. On his own first day as president Nixon would request that Wilson’s desk be brought to the Oval Office. When told later that it had in fact belonged to Henry Wilson, who had been vice president under Grant, he was reluctant to let the truth be made public.
Nixon’s favorite former president was to be Theodore Roosevelt, who, he believed, combined idealism and pragmatism and “would compromise all over the place” when he wanted something accomplished. He would quote Roosevelt’s speeches time and again, and not least his lines about the “man in the arena” who, if he fails, “fails while daring greatly.”
The first prophecy that Nixon would one day become president is said to have been made by a Yorba Linda Sunday school teacher when he was nine. The story sounds apocryphal, but the source, usually reliable, was his cousin Jessamyn West. His father was soon making the same forecast. By the time Nixon reached college, he was telling students at a meeting that he “wanted to go into politics . . . felt the field was dominated by too many unscrupulous politicians.” He first mentioned the aspiration even earlier, in a school essay written after Arthur’s death: “I would like to study law, and enter politics for an occupation, so that I might be of some good to the people.”
The fall of 1934 found Nixon crossing the continent on a scholarship to Duke University Law School, in North Carolina. Her son’s winning the scholarship had given his mother what she later recalled as “the proudest day of her life,” more so even than the day he became vice president.
The three years at Duke, however, turned out to be a tough, lonely period for the young man. Three thousand miles from home, after years as a shining academic star in his hometown, Nixon found himself up against real competition for the first time. “I don’t believe I can ever stay up top,” he groaned to an acquaintance, then proceeded to work prodigiously hard. To earn extra cash, he also took paying jobs. As did many students, Nixon lived in makeshift accommodations, at one point sharing a cabin in the woods with three other young men.
He was remembered as a solitary figure around campus, sloping around in patched gray flannels and an old purple sweater that he wore day after day. Some remembered decent things Nixon did. In an era when there were few facilities for the disabled, he regularly helped carry a crippled student up the steps to the lecture hall. As a newcomer to the South from California, he was shocked by racial bias and spoke out about the need for change.
Yet Nixon was considered somewhat strange, even by those who got on with him. One classmate thought him “shot full of rectitude . . . industrious, reverent, all of that.” A law professor, Lon Fuller, remembered him as “what today we’d call uptight. There was a suggestion of an intellectual inferiority complex.” Bradley Morrah, a contemporary, saw him as “slightly paranoid. . . . He was odd, something of an oddball.” Ethel Farley, one of the few women at Duke, found him “dour and aloof. . . . We disliked his ‘holier than thou’ attitude. He was not unmoral, just amoral. He had no particular ethical system, no strong convictions. . . . He was there to advance himself personally.”
And so he did. In June 1937 Nixon’s entire family—mother, father, two surviving brothers, and eighty-eight-year-old Milhous grandmother—squeezed into a Chevrolet sedan and drove across the country to see him graduated. The oddball had come in third in his class of twenty-six, with an 80.49 average, qualifying for a prestigious national legal honor society. He had, moreover, been president of the Duke Bar Association.
Some thirty years later, when he was president of the United States, the details of a shabbier episode in Nixon’s law school career were examined by a North Carolina newspaper. At the end of their second year Nixon and two friends—Freddie Albrink and Bill Perdue—had broken into the dean’s office.
While the miscreants’ later accounts differ in detail, the raid went more or less as follows: The three tried the door and found it locked. Then, with a helping heave from his accomplices, one of them clambered in through the open transom and let in the others. They rifled desks and file cabinets, found what they were after in a drawer of the dean’s own desk, and made their getaway.
Rumors about the raid circulated on the campus for years. According to the perpetrators, their motive had been to get an advance look at their grades. The dean’s office was late in posting them, and Nixon especially was anxious. (Indeed, as he feared, his grades that year were not as good as he had hoped.) Some later suggested the intruders had more sinister motives: that their purpose was to change the grades, not just to check them. By another report they had broken in earlier, to sneak an early look at examination questions.
The escapade did not weigh on Nixon’s conscience. He would be the first to brag about it, telling a writer during the buildup to the 1960 election that he—as the thinnest of the three—had been the one to go through the window. He had “moved with the finesse of a cat burglar” once inside, he boasted. The incident shows that long, long before the scandal that would cost him the presidency, Richard Nixon was prepared to take a risk for little or no gain.
Unlike the Duke affair, of course, the Watergate burglary was discovered and the subsequent cover-up exposed. Yet even months after the Watergate arrests, when discussing with Haldeman and White House counsel John Dean how to obtain the tax files of political enemies, President Nixon would unhesitatingly suggest a break-in. “There are ways to do it,” he would say into the Oval Office microphones. “Goddamnit, sneak in in the middle of the night. . . .”
In the summer of 1937, as Nixon celebrated his graduation, disgrace was unimaginable. No one then could foresee a day when Duke would turn its back on Richard Nixon. The first occasion was in 1954, when he was vice president and faculty members, objecting that he was an unscrupulous “red-baiter,”4 voted down a plan to award him an honorary doctorate. In 1973, students and some professors would sign a petition calling for his impeachment. Still later there was an uproar over an aborted plan to site the Nixon Library at Duke. N
ixon’s portrait, removed from its place of honor during Watergate, had by that time been consigned to obscurity in a storeroom.
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During his last months at Duke, Nixon started looking for a job. He applied to prestigious New York law firms and to the FBI for a job as an agent, but nothing materialized. Dean Horack, who knew Nixon dreamed of a political career, offered some advice. “Don’t go to New York,” he said. “If you’re interested in politics, go home. Practice law at home. You may not get as much money, but that’s the only way if you want to do anything in the political arena.”
Nixon crammed into his father’s car at the end of the family’s graduation trip and headed back with them to Whittier. Soon he passed the California bar exam and—at his mother’s urging—began work with a family friend, a partner in one of the two established law firms in his hometown. He was twenty-four.
_____
A few years earlier, during the Christmas holiday, a teenager with a talent for fortune-telling had read Richard Nixon’s palm. “I got quite a shock,” she recalled. “What I saw in his palm was a path of incredibly brilliant success and then the most terrible black cloud like a disaster or accident or something. I told him what I read, but in a toned-down version . . . he was such a serious sort of guy that the full version would have made him distraught. He wouldn’t have known how to cope. . . .”
Perhaps not. As president Nixon would react with real fright when told that a prominent astrologer was predicting an attempt to assassinate him. The youthful Nixon did probably listen politely, however, to Dorothy Welch, the girl who read his palm. For she was the sister of the young woman he was planning to marry.
Richard Nixon was in love.
3
* * *
Sometimes I think I never really knew him, and I was as close to him as anyone . . . he was a mystery.
—Ola Florence Welch, Nixon’s first love
Females and femininity had made Nixon uneasy as early as those childhood days when his mother—disappointed when her baby turned out to be yet another boy—tried to make Arthur look like a girl. Richard would pull down the blinds when he had to do the washing up at home because it was not “man’s work.” At school he was punished for blowing in girls’ faces—after first stuffing his mouth with raw garlic.
Was this something more than the “boys hate girls” and “girls hate boys” phase most children go through? “He used to dislike us girls so!” recalled Harriet Palmer. “He would make horrible faces at us. As a debater his main theme in grammar school and the first years of high school was why he hated girls.”
Harriet had dismissed Nixon as a goody-goody when he stopped her, at thirteen, from going on a roller coaster against her mother’s instructions. Later girls found him “stuffy,” and “too aloof to be much fun.” “He didn’t know how to be personable,” said a contemporary. “I felt a kind of amused affection for him, like ‘Oh, Dick, come off it.’ ” “He didn’t have the glamour about him that attracts the opposite sex,” said another former female student. “He wasn’t sexy.”
Teenage male friends had to push Nixon to come up with dates for social events. A female cousin who was fond of him reported glumly on his reaction, or lack of it, when she got him to take her for a drive. He was “the slowest driver in the world,” and he talked on and on—about politics.
In their last year of high school the daughter of the Whittier police chief, Ola Florence Welch, wrote in her diary, “Oh, how I hate Richard Nixon!” After playing the queen of Carthage to Nixon’s Trojan Prince Aeneas in the 1929 Latin class play, however, she changed her mind. His onstage “tender embrace” had drawn hoots of derision from the audience. Yet that night, before Ola had her makeup off, Nixon delivered the opening lines of their real-life romance. “He insisted,” she remembered, “that I must come and meet his folks immediately.”
Nixon was Ola’s first real date, and she his. They were sixteen and beginning a stormy relationship that was to last more than six years. “I’ve tried to figure out why I’m so cracked about you,” he wrote in the first of a stream of letters. “These are the reasons. You are not a boy chaser. You use your brains to good purposes. You never show your anger to anyone . . . and most of all, ‘You are just you.’ . . . Love from Dick Nixon.”
“Would you think,” Nixon had asked his cousin Merle earlier, “it would be wiser to marry a pretty girl or a smart girl?” In Ola he found a girl who was both intelligent, an A student, almost as active as he in student affairs, and attractive too. Ola, for her part, thought him “the smartest man that ever was . . . tremendously interesting and engrossing”—and “quite handsome” too.
Soon there were trips together to the movies and the beach, walks in the hills, and expeditions in the Ford Nixon shared with Merle. His mother professed to know what went on, or rather did not go on. “He talked not of romance,” she claimed years later, “but about such things as what might have happened if Persia had conquered the Greeks or what might have happened if Plato never lived. At least, this is what I have been told by boys who double-dated with Richard.”
About that time Nixon ventured with Merle into a Los Angeles burlesque joint to watch the bump and grind of “a stripteaser who didn’t strip too far.” His cousin thought him “very normal” so far as girls were concerned, as did Ola, while insisting fifty years later that there had been “no hanky-panky.” She added, though, that he was “never comfortable with women.”
As the pair moved on from school to college, they were increasingly seen as a couple, to the point that friends assumed they would get married. Yet all was not well. It was not just that Ola’s parents disliked Nixon or that her sister thought him “a real pill.” Nor was it only that they argued constantly about politics; she liked Franklin Roosevelt, of whom he disapproved. Ola discovered that the boy she had admired as “so strong, so articulate” had a weaker side. “Deep down,” she reflected recently, “he had this insecure side to him.”
Four years into the relationship, as the couple turned twenty, it began to fall apart. When Nixon was running for president of the student body and became afraid he was going to lose, he became depressed. Then he turned to Ola for support. Once he had won the presidency, though, he treated her shabbily. “He started dating other girls,” she remembered, “and I was left thinking, ‘Maybe now he’s president he’s changed.’ I began to feel that I wasn’t good enough for him.”
“He was so disloyal . . .” said Ola’s sister. “He two-timed her. . . . He would take her to a party and then go home with someone else, so that my mother had to come out and pick Ola Florence up. Mothers don’t like that.” Mrs. Welch, who already disapproved of Nixon because of the imperious way he sounded his car horn when he picked Ola up, now refused to speak to him.
Nixon patched up the rift with a salvo of letters—Ola still kept some three dozen under lock and key as late as 2000—that she considers “so apologetic they would probably fascinate a psychologist.” For a while the couple seemed reconciled, and in 1933, after a friend’s wedding party, Nixon told Ola he loved her. “He had never said that before,” she recalled. “Everything about that night was so beautiful: the flowers, the music, the atmosphere. Dick was really moved. . . . He became soft and tender . . . we sat and talked for hours.
She agreed to marry him that night, and they started saving. “Whenever we had a date and there was some change left over, Dick would pass me a quarter, a dime or whatever it was, saying ‘That’s for the ring.’ ” A measure of the communication between mother and son is that when asked about the relationship years later, Hannah said she thought there had been “nothing to it.”
Soon things went wrong again. Nixon seemed to have no male friends and did not get on with Ola’s girlfriends. They had bitter, frequent quarrels. “He didn’t know how to mix,” she remembered. “His face would cloud. . . . He’d be harsh, and I’d cry.” A friend who knew them thought Nixon “combative rather than conciliatory,” with no warmth. He
exhibited a “nasty temper.”
Nixon went on seeing other young women behind Ola’s back. When they went to a dance together, he ignored her and spent the evening chatting with other men. They fought, and again a humiliated Ola called her mother for a ride home. Then, seizing the opportunity offered by a dance to which the females could invite the males, she took revenge by asking another fellow, a handsome young man from a prosperous family, to be her escort.
From then on, a friend recalled, Ola favored the new man in her life “while keeping Richard on the string.” Yet Nixon went off to law school in the Southeast assuming she was still his girl. He stopped seeing other women altogether and kept a stream of letters—“real love letters,” she remembered—flowing back to California. He was behaving as though marriage to Ola were just a matter of time.
When Nixon arrived home on vacation after a nine-month absence, he called her at once, only to hear Ola reveal that she was now going with the rival of the previous summer. Indeed, she said, the other suitor was at that moment in her living room. Enraged, Nixon shouted, “You’ll never hear from me again!” and slammed down the phone. On the next day, though, he was again talking of marriage; back at law school he went on writing as though nothing had happened. The letters did not stop even six months later, when Ola wrote to tell him she planned to marry the other young man. Nixon finally accepted defeat only two weeks before the wedding.
In all his time at Duke University, even in the months after learning that he had lost Ola forever, Nixon never said a word about her to students he knew well. He did not mention her in early interviews about his personal life. Decades later, when he was president and Ola came to a White House reception with other Whittier alumni, he is said to have behaved as if he did not know who she was. There is a reference to her in his memoirs, but not a hint that this was a woman he once loved and planned to marry.
The Arrogance of Power Page 5