RN

by Richard Nixon

  My father’s temper may have been exacerbated by a partial deafness that became almost total as he grew older. There were times I suspected him of provoking a commotion just so he could turn off his hearing aid and watch the drama unfold before him like a silent movie. But it is the love beneath his brusque and bristling exterior that I remember best. When he and my mother came to New York to see me off on the Herter Committee trip to Europe in 1947, Pat and I arranged a special treat for them. He particularly loved musical comedy, and I was able to get the best seats for the Broadway hit Oklahoma! We had to rush from the hotel to the theatre, and on the way he discovered that he had left his hearing aid in his room. He was determined that he would not spoil our evening, and I remember how intently he followed the play and how he laughed and applauded with the rest of the audience so that we would think he was having a good time, even though he could not hear a single word or a single note.

  My father’s interest in politics made him the most enthusiastic follower of my career from its beginnings. My success meant to him that everything he had worked for and believed in was true: that in America, with hard work and determination a man can achieve anything. During the years I was in Congress, I sent home copies of the daily Congressional Record. He read them cover to cover—something that no congressman or senator I knew ever took the time to do. When I was running for Vice President, he wrote a typically straightforward letter to one of the newspapers he had read years before, suggesting that it support me: “This boy is one of five that I raised and they are the finest, I think, in the United States. If you care to give him a lift I would say the Ohio State Journal is still doing some good.”

  Everyone who ever knew my mother was impressed with what a remarkable woman she was. She was born March 7, 1885, in southern Indiana into an Irish Quaker family of nine children. When she was twelve, her father decided to move to a new Quaker settlement in California. They loaded a railroad boxcar with many of their possessions, including horses and saddles, doors, and window frames, and arrived at Whittier in 1897, where my grandfather opened a tree nursery and planted an orange grove. After graduating from Whittier Academy, my mother went on to Whittier College. She loved history and literature, and she majored in languages, concentrating in Latin, Greek, and German. When she met and married my father, she had completed her second year of college. They had five sons and, with the exception of one named for my father, she named us after the early kings of England: Harold, born in 1909; Richard, born in 1913; Francis Donald, born in 1914; Arthur, born in 1918; and Edward, born in 1930.

  My mother was always concerned and active in community affairs, but her most striking quality was a deep sense of privacy. Although she radiated warmth and love for her family, indeed, for all people, she was intensely private in her feelings and emotions. We never had a meal without saying grace, but except for special occasions when each of us boys would be called on to recite a verse from the Bible, these prayers were always silent. She even took literally the injunction from St. Matthew that praying should be done behind closed doors and went into a closet to say her prayers before going to bed at night.

  Often when I had a difficult decision to make or a speech to prepare, or when I was under attack in the press, my mother would say, “I will be thinking of you.” This was her quiet Quaker way of saying, “I will be praying for you”—and it meant infinitely more to me because of its understatement.

  Many people who knew my mother in Whittier referred to her, even during her lifetime, as a Quaker saint. My cousin Jessamyn West recently wrote to me about my mother. She said, “I don’t think of Hannah as a ‘saint.’ Saints, I feel, have a special pipeline to God which provides them a fortitude not given ordinary mortals. Hannah was not ordinary; but she did what she did and was what she was through a strength and lovingness which welled up out of her own good heart and because of her own indomitable character.” The quality that made my mother so special, and that made people want to be close to her, was that although the inner serenity religion gave her shone through, she never wore her religion on her sleeve.

  As a child I spent hours sitting at the piano in our living room picking out tunes. Shortly after I began school, I started taking piano lessons from my Uncle Griffith Milhous. He also taught me the fundamentals of the violin.

  Probably because of Uncle Griffith’s urgings, my parents decided to give my musical abilities a real test. My mother’s sister Jane had studied piano at the Metropolitan School of Music in Indianapolis and was an accomplished performer and teacher. She lived with her own family in Lindsay, another Quaker enclave, in central California. It was decided that I should live with them for half a year and take lessons from her. Right after a family reunion at my grandmother’s house in December 1924, I went home with Aunt Jane and Uncle Harold Beeson and my cousins Alden and Sheldon.

  For six months I took daily piano lessons from Aunt Jane and violin lessons from a teacher in nearby Exeter, and walked a mile and a half each way to school with Alden and Sheldon. I enjoyed studying music, and I was able to memorize quite easily. Even today, more than fifty years later, I still remember some of the music I learned back in Lindsay.

  Playing the piano is a way of expressing oneself that is perhaps even more fulfilling than writing or speaking. In fact, I have always had two great—and still unfulfilled—ambitions: to direct a symphony orchestra and to play an organ in a cathedral. I think that to create great music is one of the highest aspirations man can set for himself.

  My parents came to bring me home in June 1925. Like any twelve-year-old I was happy to see them after what seemed like a very long time. As soon as he saw me alone, my youngest brother, Arthur, greeted me with a solemn kiss on the cheek. I later learned that he had asked my mother if it would be proper for him to kiss me since I had been away. Even at that early age he had acquired our family’s reticence about open displays of affection.

  A short time after we returned to Whittier, Arthur complained of a headache. The family doctor thought it was flu and ordered him to bed. Arthur’s condition deteriorated quickly, and the doctor was unable to find the cause. He prescribed a series of tests, including a spinal tap. After that most painful of tests had been taken, I remember my father coming downstairs. It was the first time I had ever seen him cry. He said, “The doctors are afraid that the little darling is going to die.”

  Because Arthur required constant care and attention, Don and I were sent to stay with my Aunt Carrie Wildermuth in Fullerton. Just before we left, we went upstairs to see our brother. He had asked for one of his favorite dishes, tomato gravy on toast; we brought some up with us, and I remember how much he enjoyed it. Two days later he died.

  The doctor said that it was tubercular encephalitis, but those words were too big, too cold, and too impersonal for us to grasp or understand. My father, who had been keeping the service station open on Sundays to accommodate the increasing weekend traffic on Whittier Boulevard, half believed that Arthur’s death represented some kind of divine displeasure, and he never again opened the station or the market on a Sunday.

  For weeks after Arthur’s funeral there was not a day that I did not think about him and cry. For the first time I had learned what death was like and what it meant.

  As a freshman in college I wrote a short essay about Arthur for an English composition course. I described the photograph of Arthur that my mother always kept in our living room, and I wrote, “Let me tell you, in a few words, something of my brother as I remember him.”

  The first two or three years of my baby brother’s life are rather indistinct in my memory for I was engrossed in the first years of my grammar school education. However, there were certain things concerned with my little brother’s early development which did impress me. For example, I remember how his eyes changed from their original baby-blue to an almost black shade; how his hair, blond at first, became dark brown; how his mouth, toothless for five months, was filled with tiny, white teeth which, by the way, were exc
eedingly sharp when applied on soft fingers or toes which happened to get within their reach; how those little incoherent sounds of his finally developed into words and then into sentences; and how he learned to roll over, then to crawl, and finally to walk.

  Although I do not remember many incidents connected with my brother’s early childhood, there were some which made a clear imprint on my mind. There was one time when he was asked to be a ring bearer at a wedding. I remember how my mother had to work with him for hours to get him to do it, because he disliked walking with the little flower girl. Another time, when he was about five years old, he showed the world that he was a man by getting some cigarettes out of our store and secretly smoking them back of the house. Unfortunately for him, one of our gossipy neighbors happened to see him, and she promptly informed my mother. I have disliked that neighbor from that time. . . .

  Again, I shall never forget how he disliked wearing “sticky” wool suits. As soon as he was able to read, he used to search the mail order catalogues for suits which weren’t “sticky.” . . .

  There is a growing tendency among college students to let their childhood beliefs be forgotten. Especially we find this true when we speak of the Divine Creator and his plans for us. I thought that I would also become that way, but I find that it is almost impossible for me to do so. Two days before my brother’s death, he called my mother into the room. He put his arms around her and said that he wanted to pray before he went to sleep. Then, with closed eyes, he repeated that age-old child’s prayer which ends with those simple yet beautiful words:

  “If I should die before I awake, I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to take.”

  There is a grave out now in the hills, but, like the picture, it contains only the bodily image of my brother.

  And so when I am tired and worried, and am almost ready to quit trying to live as I should, I look up and see the picture of a little boy with sparkling eyes, and curly hair; I remember the childlike prayer; I pray that it may prove true for me as it did for my brother Arthur.

  My oldest brother Harold’s long bout with tuberculosis began several years before Arthur died, but it continued for more than ten years. It was especially hard for us to accept because he had always had such a robust enjoyment of life. He was tall and handsome with blue eyes and blond hair. At one point he grew a moustache that made him look quite rakish. In high school he had a stripped-down Model T Ford that he raced with his friends.

  It was during Harold’s long illness that my mother showed the depth of her character and faith. In those days, TB was almost always incurable, and the long, losing fight left its tragic mark on our whole family. First, Harold went to an expensive private sanatorium, and then he spent a few months in a cottage in the Antelope Valley in California, which is considerably drier than the Whittier area.

  Finally, my mother decided to take him to live in Prescott, Arizona, which was supposed to be excellent for tubercular cures because of its dry climate and high elevation. She stayed with Harold in Prescott for almost three years. To make ends meet, she took care of three other bedridden patients. She cooked and cleaned, gave them bed baths and alcohol rubs, and did everything that a nurse does for a patient. Later, as she heard that one by one each had died, I could tell that she felt their deaths as deeply as if they had been her own sons’.

  In addition to the wrenching physical and emotional strain of nursing, the very fact of separation from the rest of us was very hard on my mother. My father regularly made the fourteen-hour drive to Prescott with Don and me during Christmas and spring vacations, and we spent part of our summers there. During those two summers in Prescott, I worked at any odd job I could find. I was a janitor at a swimming pool, and once I helped pluck and dress frying chickens for a butcher shop. I also worked as a carnival barker at the Frontier Days festival that is still celebrated in Prescott every July.

  Harold’s illness continued to drag on. He became so thin it was almost painful to look at him. He was terribly unhappy and homesick in Prescott, so it was finally decided to let him come home, hoping that the familiar surroundings would compensate for the damper climate. He had a desperate will to live and refused to comply with the doctor’s orders that he stay in bed. It was especially painful for us all because Harold was still so full of hope and had so much life in him. We kept hoping against hope that some mental lift might start him on the way back to physical recovery. When he said that he would like to go through the San Bernardino Mountains to see the desert, my father dropped everything to make plans for the trip. He rented one of the first house trailers on the market—a wooden structure built on a Reo truck chassis—and spent hours with Harold planning their route and their itinerary.

  We saw them off one morning, expecting them to be gone for almost a month. They were back three days later. Harold had had another hemorrhage, and despite his insistence that they go on, my father knew that Harold would not be able to stand the rigors of living in the trailer. Harold told me that he was nevertheless glad they had taken even this short trip. I can still remember his voice when he described the beauty of the wild flowers in the foothills and the striking sight of snow in the mountains. I sensed that he knew this was the last time he would ever see them.

  On March 6, 1933, Harold asked me to drive him downtown. He had seen an ad for a new kind of electric cake mixer he wanted to give our mother for her birthday the next day. He barely had the strength to walk with me into the hardware store. We had them wrap the mixer as a birthday present, and we hid it at home at the top of a closet.

  The next morning he said that we should postpone giving our presents to mother until that night because he did not feel well and wanted to rest. About three hours later I was studying in the college library when I received a message to come home. When I got there, I saw a hearse parked in front of the house. My parents were crying uncontrollably as the undertaker carried out Harold’s body. My mother said that right after I left for school Harold asked her to put her arms around him and hold him very close. He had never been particularly religious, but he looked at her and said, “This is the last time I will see you, until we meet in heaven.” He died an hour later. That night I got the cake mixer out and gave it to my mother and told her that it was Harold’s gift to her.

  I loved my parents equally but in very different ways, just as they were very different people. My father was a scrappy, belligerent fighter with a quick, wide-ranging raw intellect. He left me a respect for learning and hard work, and the will to keep fighting no matter what the odds. My mother loved me completely and selflessly, and her special legacy was a quiet, inner peace, and the determination never to despair.

  Three words describe my life in Whittier: family, church, and school.

  The Milhous family was one of the oldest in the town, and counting sisters and cousins and aunts, it included scores of people. It was a matriarchy headed, first, by my great-grandmother Elizabeth Price Milhous. This remarkable woman, along with a forebear of hers, was the model for Eliza Cope Birdwell in Jessamyn West’s charming novel The Friendly Persuasion. She died in 1923 at the age of ninety-six, when I was only ten, but I can remember her well.

  My grandmother, Almira Burdg Milhous, lived to be ninety-four. At our traditional Christmas family reunions at her house she sat regally in her best red velvet dress as all the grandchildren brought their very modest presents to her. She praised them all equally, remarking that each was something she had particularly wanted. She seemed to take a special interest in me, and she wrote me verses on my birthday and on other special occasions. On my thirteenth birthday, in 1926, she gave me a framed picture of Lincoln with the words from Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life” in her own handwriting beneath it: “Lives of great men oft remind us/We can make our lives sublime,/And departing, leave behind us/Footprints on the sands of time.” I hung the picture above my bed at home, and to this day it is one of my fondest possessions. When I was in college my grandmother gave me a biography of Gandhi, which I read from cover t
o cover. Gandhi’s concept of peaceful change and passive resistance appealed to her, and she had a deep Quaker opposition to any racial or religious prejudice.

  Grandmother Milhous belonged to the generation of Quakers who used the plain speech. She would say, “Is thee going today?” or “Is this thine?” or “What are thy wishes?” I loved to listen when my mother and my aunts, none of whom used the plain speech in their own homes, would slip back into it while talking with her or with each other.

  I grew up in a religious environment that was at once unusually strict and unusually tolerant. My mother and her family belonged to a branch of the Friends Church that had ministers, choirs, and virtually all the symbols of other Protestant denominations. The differences were the absence of water baptism and communion, and the heavy Quaker emphasis on silent prayer. My father had converted to Quakerism from his own rather robust Methodism at the time of his marriage, and he had the typical enthusiasm of a convert for his new religion. Our family went to church four times on Sunday—Sunday school, the regular morning service, Christian Endeavor in the late afternoon, and another service in the evening—and to Wednesday night services as well. During my high school and college years I also played the piano for various church services each week. My mother gave me a Bible when I graduated from eighth grade, and I never went to bed at night without reading a few verses.

  Even the extensive religious activities of the Friends meetings in Yorba Linda and Whittier were not enough to satisfy my parents. They were both fascinated by the evangelists and revivalists of those times, and often we drove to Los Angeles to hear Aimee Semple McPherson at the Angelus Temple and Bob Shuler, her great competitor, at the Trinity Methodist Church.