I was able to maintain the grades I needed to keep my scholarship, and I became a member of Duke’s law review, a quarterly journal called Law and Contemporary Problems. My scholarship covered only tuition but I was able to supplement my income by working in the law library and doing research for Dean H. Claude Horack. I even found time for some political activity and was elected president of the Student Bar Association.
My three years at Duke provided an excellent legal background. Despite the fact that we had some intense discussions on the race issue, and while I could not agree with many of my Southern classmates on this subject, I learned in these years to understand and respect them for their patriotism, their pride, and their enormous interest in national issues. After my years at Duke I felt strongly that it was time to bring the South back into the Union.
As the last year at Duke Law School began, I had to think about what I would do after graduation. I expected to finish near the top of my class, but the job market was very bad. The recession of 1937 was about to wipe out what few gains had been made since the Depression began, and good jobs with good salaries were few. During the Christmas vacation of 1936 I decided to go to New York with my classmates Harlan Leathers and William Perdue and try my luck with some of the big law firms there. The only firm that showed any interest in me was Donovan, Leisure, Newton and Lombard. They wrote to me a month after the interview, but by that time I was no longer so keen on the idea of starting out in that cold and expensive city. At least we made use of our time in New York to see some plays—Tobacco Road was one—and to get the only seats we could afford in the upper reaches of the Metropolitan Opera House.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation recruited at Duke. I submitted an application and was called in for an interview. After that I never heard anything further from them. Many years later, when I was Vice President, I saw J. Edgar Hoover at a party at Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s house and mentioned to him that I had once applied for a position as a special agent. He called me a few days later and said that he had looked up the file and found that my application had been approved. Just before the notification was to be mailed their appropriation request for the next year was cut; if it had come through, I might have had a career as a G-man for the FBI.
I decided to return home to Whittier and begin practicing law there. My family, including my eighty-eight-year-old grandmother, drove East for my graduation in June 1937. It was a proud day for them, made more so by the fact that on the day they arrived an announcement was made that I had finished third in my class and had been named a member of the prestigious national legal honor society, the Order of the Coif.
I arrived back in Whittier with good prospects but an uncertain future. First I had to pass the California bar. I would have just six weeks to study for the test for which most candidates allowed over two months; even worse, the three-day exam would include the extensive California code, which we had not studied at all at Duke.
Waiting for the results was an unnerving experience for me and my family. The scuttlebutt was that those who had passed received a simple notice in a regular envelope; those who failed received a large envelope containing all the papers necessary for applying to take the exam again. During the weeks of waiting for the results we eagerly checked the mailbox each day. Then one morning my mother returned from the mailbox in tears, holding the long-awaited envelope. It was a large one, obviously filled with papers. I did not want her to see my distress, so I went into the bathroom and shut the door before opening the envelope. Scuttlebutt notwithstanding, I had passed the exam: the letter was accompanied by voluminous instructions about making arrangements to be sworn in and other technical matters. I walked back to the kitchen and announced the good news.
I got a job in Whittier’s oldest law firm, Wingert and Bewley. The first legal work I did involved the usual estate and divorce cases that fall to many young lawyers. I found the divorce cases unhappy and unsettling. At first I was surprised by some of the intimate matters people argued about, and equally surprised by the fact that they could calmly sit down and tell a stranger, even their lawyer, about them. I always tried to talk my clients into a reconciliation but seldom succeeded.
I enjoyed being a lawyer, and after a year the firm became Wingert, Bewley, and Nixon. Now for the first time I was no longer Frank and Hannah Nixon’s son—I was Mr. Nixon, the new partner in Wingert and Bewley.
Young lawyers trying to get business for their firms are expected to join local clubs, so I began to participate extensively in community affairs. I joined the Kiwanis Club of La Habra and the 20–30 Club, a group for young business and professional men between those ages. By 1941 I had pretty well established myself in the community. I had been elected president of the 20–30 Club, and was president of the Whittier College Alumni Association, president of the Duke University Alumni of California, president of the Orange County Association of Cities, and the youngest member ever chosen for the Whittier College board of trustees. I was approached by several of the town’s Republican leaders about running for the state assembly. I was flattered and interested by this suggestion, but the war intervened.
One day in 1938, Mrs. Lilly Baldwin, the director of the local amateur theatre group, telephoned me to ask if I would like to play the part of a prosecuting attorney in their upcoming production of Ayn Rand’s courtroom drama, The Night of January 16th. I took the part and thoroughly enjoyed this experience in amateur dramatics.
Several months later I went to the casting tryouts for a production of George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott’s play, The Dark Tower. I thought I knew everyone in Whittier, but that night a beautiful and vivacious young woman with titian hair appeared whom I had never seen before. I found I could not take my eyes away from her. This new girl in town was Pat Ryan, and she had just begun teaching at Whittier High School. For me it was a case of love at first sight.
I got a friend to introduce us and then offered them both a ride home. On the way I asked Pat if she would like a date with me. She said, “I’m very busy.” I said, “You shouldn’t say that, because someday I am going to marry you!” We all laughed because it seemed so unlikely at that time. But I wonder whether it was a sixth sense that prompted me to make such an impetuous statement.
Pat’s life deserves a volume of its own, and perhaps someday she will write that volume herself. It is an exceptional story, just as she is an exceptional woman with great independence, keen intelligence, and a warm sense of humor. She was born on March 16, 1912, in the little mining town of Ely, Nevada, and was christened Thelma Catherine Ryan. When she was a year old, her father decided to quit the mines and bring his family to a small ranch about twenty miles southwest of Los Angeles, near Artesia, California. There, the family of seven—her parents, a sister, and three brothers—lived in a house very much like the Nixons’ in nearby Yorba Linda.
She decided to adopt the name her Irish father liked to call her, and became known to everyone as Pat. It is deeply irritating to be burdened with a name you dislike, and when our daughters were born Pat suggested that we give them only one name each, Patricia and Julie, so that they could change them or add to them when they were old enough to decide.
Her mother died of cancer when Pat was only thirteen, and Pat had to take her place, cooking and keeping house for her father and brothers. About the time she graduated from high school the long years in the mine took their toll and her father became ill with silicosis. Pat gave up her plans for college and nursed him until his death two years later. With her father gone and her brothers away at college, she was now completely on her own.
After her father died, Pat continued to live in the family house. She worked part-time as a teller in a bank and began attending classes at Fullerton Junior College. During the summer she heard that an elderly couple she knew was moving to New York and wanted someone to drive them across the country. Much to their surprise, this pretty, young girl asked for the job—and much to her surprise, she got it.
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sp; Pat was completely captivated by New York, and after only a few days she decided to stay there. She became a secretary and then took an X-ray technicians’ course at Seton Hospital, which was run by the Sisters of Charity. She lived in the hospital annex and chauffeured the nuns around town when they went shopping.
Pat’s goal had always been to continue her education, and after two years she returned to Los Angeles and registered at the University of Southern California. She supported herself by working forty hours a week as a research assistant to a professor. For a year she also worked as a salesperson in Bullock’s Wilshire department store, and from time to time she was hired as an extra for crowd scenes in the movies. If you look closely, you can spot her in Becky Sharp and Small Town Girl. Offers of bigger parts and even a career in the movies could not distract her from her education, and she received a B.S. degree with honors from USC in 1937, the same year I graduated from Duke.
Pat’s interest was marketing, and she expected to work for a department store. But jobs were hard to find, and when the opportunity arose to teach business courses at Whittier High School for $190 a month, she jumped at it. She was an immediate hit at the school, charming students and faculty alike. She was faculty adviser for the Student Pep Club and prepared programs for school assemblies and rallies. Because of her interest in dramatics, she decided to audition for the local theatre group. That was where she met the intense young man with the dark curly hair and the prominent nose who could not take his eyes away from her at the tryouts for The Dark Tower.
Pat and I began to see each other regularly. We went ice skating at the new indoor rink near Artesia, swimming at nearby beaches, and skiing in the mountains just outside Los Angeles. We were both movie fans and we often drove up to the large movie theatres in Hollywood. Fortunately Pat also liked football, so we went to as many Whittier and USC games as we could. She met my parents and they both liked her immediately. They were particularly impressed by her obvious strength of character and indomitable spirit.
In 1940 I sent Pat a May basket with an engagement ring set among the flowers. We were married on June 21, at a small family ceremony at the Mission Inn in Riverside, California. For our honeymoon we drove for two weeks through Mexico. We had very little money, so we had stocked up on canned foods in order to avoid the expense of restaurants. After we were on our way, we discovered that our friends had removed the labels from all the cans, and thus every meal became a game of chance. Several times we ended up having pork and beans for breakfast and grapefruit slices for dinner.
Back in Whittier I returned to my law office and Pat returned to teaching. Our life was happy and full of promise. As the 1940 elections approached, I strongly supported Wendell Willkie because, while I favored some of Roosevelt’s domestic programs, particularly Social Security, I opposed his attempt to break the two-term tradition. I even made a couple of speeches for Willkie before small local groups in Whittier.
In 1941 Pat and I saved enough money to take a Caribbean cruise on the United Fruit Company’s freight and passenger ship Ulua. Except for the fact that I was seasick for almost the entire trip, we enjoyed what turned out to be our last vacation for several years. My sharpest recollection of the trip is of the evening of June 22, 1941, when our elderly black steward told us that word had just come over the ship’s radio that Hitler had invaded Russia. We both hoped this would lead to a Russian victory and Hitler’s downfall. I despised Hitler, and despite my disenchantment with Stalin over the Hitler–Stalin pact, had no particular anti-Soviet or anticommunist feelings.
In December 1941, thanks to the recommendations of one of my professors from Duke, David Cavers, I was offered a job with the Office of Price Administration in Washington. The pay was only $3,200 a year, not nearly so much as Pat and I were making together with her teaching and my law practice. But it seemed a good opportunity to go to Washington and observe the working of the government firsthand. I also think that my mother was secretly relieved by this decision. Although it would take me far from Whittier again, she probably thought that if war came I would stay working in the government rather than compromise our Quaker principles by deciding to fight in the armed services.
One Sunday shortly before we were to leave for Washington, Pat and I decided to go to the movies in Hollywood. On the way we stopped for a visit at her sister Neva’s house. When we arrived, Neva’s husband, Marc, said that he had just heard on the radio an unconfirmed report that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I said I was sure that it was just one more of the frequent scare stories we all had been hearing, and we went on to the matinee. Shortly before the film was finished, the theatre manager interrupted with an announcement that all servicemen had been called to their units immediately. When we left the theatre, I saw the headline: Japs Bomb Pearl Harbor. The newsboy held up the paper as I walked over. He said, “We’re at war, mister.”
Early in January 1942 Pat and I drove across the country to a Washington that was now the capital of a nation at war. We found a small apartment nearby in Virginia, and I reported to the OPA office in one of the “temporary” buildings on Independence Avenue a few blocks from the Capitol.
I cannot say that my eight months at OPA were particularly happy ones, but at least they were instructive. I was an assistant attorney for the rationing coordination section, which dealt primarily with rationing rubber and automobile tires. One of the first lessons I learned was how government bureaucrats work. I went to Washington as a P-3 at $3,200 a year. I found that others with lesser academic records and not as much legal experience had come in as P-4s, a step higher, and some even as P-5s, at $4,600 a year. I made no complaints, but I did talk it over with some of the people I knew in personnel. One of my superiors, David Lloyd, who later became one of President Truman’s top advisers, said, “Build a little staff. Request two or three people to assist you, and then we can raise you to a P-5.” I said, “But I don’t need a staff.” “Then you won’t get a promotion,” he replied.
As a junior lawyer in the tire rationing division, I cannot say that I had much effect on OPA. But the experience had an enormous effect on the policies I later developed during my political career.
One impression that stayed with me was that while some career government workers were sincere, dedicated, and able people, others became obsessed with their own power and seemed to delight in kicking people around, particularly those in the private sector. It was hard enough to make rationing work even when we had the incentive of the war and the appeal to patriotism to back it up. I knew that once the war was over, rationing and price control would be almost impossible to enforce, and that the black marketeers, just like the bootleggers during the days of Prohibition, would be the only ones to profit from a continuation of the government-controlled system.
Many men in OPA were able to get draft deferments and spent the war in their offices. Despite my Quaker background and beliefs, I never considered doing this. When I heard that young lawyers were being recruited as officers for the Navy, I talked to Pat about it and applied for a commission. I was sent to the naval officer indoctrination school at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, in August 1942.
After two months at Quonset, where I learned to stand straight and keep my shoes shined, I listed “Ships and Stations” as my first choice for active duty. I expected to be assigned to a battle fleet in the South Pacific or the North Atlantic. I could hardly believe my eyes when I opened my orders and found that I was being sent to the Naval Air Station in Ottumwa, Iowa. When I reported for duty, I found that the station was still under construction. Its uncompleted runway stopped abruptly in the middle of a cornfield. My disappointment with this assignment was soon overcome by the warmth and friendliness of our new neighbors. Pat got a job in town as a bank teller and we settled in for an enjoyable taste of Midwest life.
Just when it began to seem that I might be landlocked in Iowa for the rest of the war, I saw a notice that applications for sea duty would be accepted from officers aged twenty-nin
e or younger. I was exactly twenty-nine, and I sent the application in immediately. Pat was worried about my safety, but she supported my decision to try to play a real part in the war effort.
I received orders to report to San Francisco for assignment overseas, and we went back to Whittier so that I could say goodbye to my family. It was a very painful visit. Although nothing was ever said, I knew that my mother and grandmother were deeply troubled by my decision. In World War I my Uncle Oscar had gone to France with the American Friends Service Committee and worked with the Red Cross as an orderly, tending wounded soldiers on both sides of the lines. I am sure that this was the kind of service they had hoped I would choose. It was a difficult decision for me to make, but I felt that I could not sit back while my country was being attacked. The problem with Quaker pacifism, it seemed to me, was that it could only work if one were fighting a civilized, compassionate enemy. In the face of Hitler and Tojo, pacifism not only failed to stop violence—it actually played into the hands of a barbarous foe and weakened home-front morale.
Family and friends came to see Pat and me off on the train to San Francisco. The Bewleys were there, along with my former secretary, Evlyn Dorn, and her husband, and some friends of Pat’s and mine. My mother and father were there, along with Don and his wife, Clara Jane, and my youngest brother, Eddie, who was now twelve and looked like a carbon copy of me at that age. We all had breakfast at the Harvey House in Union Station. It was a painful meal, full of sad silences beneath the superficially cheerful conversation, and I was relieved when the train was finally announced. As Pat and I stood on the wooden block getting ready to board the train, I turned to take one last look. I think we all realized that we might never see each other again. My mother held her sorrow in, but my father began to sob. Pat and I watched them waving to us while the train pulled slowly out of the station until they disappeared in the distance.
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