37th President of the United States; His place in history
by Mel Elfin, Gary Cohen
______________________________________
He thrust himself onto the national scene stage right, a jowly, heavy bearded, upwardly mobile young congressman whose slash-and- burn anticommunist rhetoric and battering-ram political style would quickly earn him a coterie of conservative admirers -- and a long-lingering epithet, "Tricky Dick." He strode across U.S. history for almost a half century, a brilliant, if flawed, protagonist out of a Shakespearean tragedy whose shaky moral compass presaged his inevitable fall. With almost blinding speed, he ascended the Capitol Hill ladder -- from House to Senate to the vice presidency. But his eyes were always riveted on the ultimate prize -- the White House.
Indeed, even in our opportunistic age, the passion with which he sought the presidency was unmatched. Yet once it was his, he allowed his inner demons -- and the rampant zealotry of those around him -- to betray the office in a conspiracy so bold that in the lexicon of politics, its name would become a synonym for scandal. Still, unlike the endings of most great tragedies, this drama was to have a long and redemptive epilogue. By the time he died last week from a devastating stroke at 81, it was clear that Richard Milhous Nixon had finally gained that for which he had struggled so desperately for so long: the esteem of his countrymen. The unindicted coconspirator of Watergate had become a respected elder statesman (story, Page 34).
Driven by more insecurities than most men, it was almost as if Nixon unconsciously felt that he had to fail before he could really succeed. Somehow the disgrace of Watergate washed away most of his unsated ambitions and many of the annoying mannerisms that made the early Nixon such an acquired taste. Gone were the mean-spirited partisanship, the debater's locutions ("I want to make one thing perfectly clear"), the self-pity and the signature V-for-victory gesture so beloved by caricaturists. What remained was the Nixon who for so long was hidden from public view -- the thoughtful man of mature intelligence, verbal skill, prodigious memory and a sure grasp of foreign policy.
Fortunately, Nixon survived long enough to take advantage of the counsel passed along by Herbert Hoover, who also enjoyed greater success after he left the White House than he did while inside. When he was asked by Nixon what was the secret of his political redemption, Hoover, reviled for his passivity at the onset of the Great Depression, replied: "Outlive your enemies."
The beginning. In a sense, having the right kind of enemies launched Nixon in politics. He came to public life at the dawning of the cold war, when rational fears of Soviet expansionism and espionage could help unscrupulous candidates gain comfortable electoral majorities. Nixon needed a hot-button issue like anticommunism because he possessed few of the political graces that would enable future foes like John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey to win affection as well as votes. In a profession in which bantering small talk is the essence of personal exchange, Nixon had little patience for idle chatter. On the stump, his gestures were wooden and his appearance unprepossessing, and he was afflicted with a bad case of what might be called charm- deficiency syndrome. Once, after having stood on a receiving line for hours greeting supporters, he was asked what he was thinking when he shook all those hands. His answer: "I thought I'd like to kick them in the -----."
A virtual cottage industry of historians and psychobiographers has tried to trace the origins of Nixon's tangled personality. If there is a consensus analysis, it focuses on his mother, Hannah Milhous Nixon, a coldly nondemonstrative woman, a devout Quaker who pinched the family's pennies to provide a college fund for her three surviving sons. She urged each to work hard, be serious and grow up and become "somebody." When young Richard was 15, Hannah left him, his brothers and her husband at their modest home in Whittier, Calif., and took her eldest son, Harold -- 3 1/2 years Richard's senior -- to smog free Arizona, where she nursed his chronic tuberculosis. In author Fawn Brodie's book on Nixon, she quotes from a letter the future president wrote to his mother during her absence. The affection-starved boy signed it, "Your good dog, Richard."
Nixon's father, Frank, barely kept the family above the poverty line. When Richard Nixon was just 11, he answered a newspaper ad for an office boy. He plaintively wrote the prospective employer: "I will accept any pay offered." Forty-four years later, Nixon recalled the poverty of his youth: "We had very little ... I wore my brother's shoes, and my brother below me wore mine. We never ate out -- never. We certainly had to learn the value of money." It was a lesson that Nixon, who until he left public life in 1960 never earned more than $35,000 a year, would remember. Even when he was most comfortable financially, he was still nagged by anxieties over money.
"The Dark Tower." He was always a superior student. At Whittier College, where he graduated in 1934, he was second in his class. Three years later, he graduated third in his class at the newly opened Duke Law School, where he had a full-tuition scholarship. His outstanding academic record won Nixon an interview at a New York law firm, but he was told that the best move for a prospective politician was to practice law in his hometown. So in 1937, he joined a Whittier law firm where he was paid by the case. To meet potential clients, Nixon joined the local little theater group. And it was during his appearance as a college student in a production of The Dark Tower that he met a fellow performer -- a tall, slender schoolteacher named Thelma Catherine Ryan who was called "Pat" because she was born around St. Patrick's Day. At first, Hannah Nixon discouraged her son's attention to Pat because she was not a Quaker. But after she agreed to a Quaker ceremony and converted to the faith, they were married on June 21, 1940, in Riverside, Calif. (Mrs. Nixon died of cancer in June 1993.)
The newlyweds settled into a small apartment in Whittier, but with the approach of World War II, Nixon became aware that relatively high-salaried jobs for young lawyers were available in Washington, D.C. So they packed their few belongings into their 1939 Oldsmobile and drove to the capital, where Nixon became a minor bureaucrat in the tire-rationing division of the Office of Price Administration. Although his Quaker pacifism exempted him from the draft, Nixon may have realized that if he envisioned a postwar career in politics, military service would be an absolute necessity. Six months after Pearl Harbor, he applied for a Navy commission and soon found himself in the South Pacific.
After his discharge in 1946, Nixon returned to Whittier to accept an offer from local Republicans: take on Jerry Voorhis, the region's incumbent five-term Democratic congressman, in that fall's election. And thanks to a massive swing that helped the GOP to capture the House for the first time in 16 years -- as well as some mild red-baiting by Nixon -- Voorhis was toppled.
Appointed to the now defunct House Un-American Activities Committee, Nixon exploited the tide of anticommunism then beginning to roil domestic politics. His first target: Alger Hiss. Nixon was largely responsible for arranging the dramatic 1948 confrontation between Hiss, the former top State Department official, and Whittaker Chambers, the confessed ex-Soviet spy who had linked him to an espionage ring. Hiss denied all, but a jury decided he was lying and sent him to jail for perjury. It was a triumph for Nixon.
In 1950, Nixon took advantage of his growing national reputation and the anticommunist backlash stemming from the Korean War to defeat California's liberal Democratic congresswoman, Helen Gahagan Douglas, for the Senate seat. The campaign was vicious. Nixon accused Douglas of "being pink down to her underwear." Tw
