Nixon Richard Milhous - Richard M. Nixon: a life in full

Table of Contents

ALSO BY CONRAD BLACK

TO BARBARA.
THROUGH GOOD AND BAD TIMES, SHE HAS BEEN MAGNIFICENT.
NO MAN COULD ASK MORE AND FEW COULD HAVE RECEIVED SO MUCH.
SHE IS BEYOND PRAISE AND CRITICISM.

Acknowledgments

My wife, Barbara, has been a constant and patient encouragement in this book, from the first occasions when we both met with Richard Nixon through the composition of it in very distracting circumstances, as I prepared at the same time to deal with serious judicial problems. Without her encouragement, it could not have been written. My agent, Michael Levine, has performed prodigies well beyond what an author has any right to expect from an agent. Doug Pepper of McClelland & Stewart, Anthony Cheetham, (of Quercus), Peter Osnos and Clive Priddle of Public Affairs, and my old friends George (Lord) Weidenfeld and Morton L. Janklow have been indispensable and often tireless in advancing it to publication. Bill Whitworth, an editor of astounding virtuosity, diplomacy, patience, and stamina, has done as much to make this book publishable as he did for my life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a much shorter time. Elizabeth Kribs and her team at M&S, including Heather Sangster, Alex Schultz, and Trena White, have made a great further contribution to polish the manuscript and remove or soften some of my less felicitous tendencies as a writer. Thank you also to Terra Page (typesetter), Scott Richardson (designer), and Scott Sellers (publicist) of M&S. Robert Nedelkoff of the Nixon Presidential Materials Project in College Park, Maryland, has been selfless, tireless, and invaluable in providing access to original documents and arranging photographs. He has shown Job-like patience in receiving telephone calls at home at odd hours, and Samaritanly goodwill in assisting in many vital areas. My very valued and resourceful colleague, Joan Maida, who has worked with me in many things with unfailing ingenuity and good humor for more than fifteen years, has been, yet again, a tremendously efficient and thoughtful collaborator. Adam Daifallah and Edward Saatchi carried out extensive and vital research for me in the latest available material in the vast Nixon and related archives. Among those who have helped and encouraged me from the official Nixon camp are Dimitri Simes of the Nixon Center and John H. Taylor of the Nixon Library and Birthplace. Margaret MacMillan, another friend of many years and an outstanding historian, has been extremely helpful, especially in directing me to some of her sources for her excellent recent book on President Nixons visit to China. Among those who have read parts of the manuscript and made valuable suggestions about it, apart from some already named, are Ronald Genini, Edward L. Greenspan, Alexander Haig, Roger Hertog, George Jonas, Andrew Roberts, Brian Stewart, Peter White, Ken Whyte, and Ezra Zilkha. I tried to incorporate all of their suggestions and am grateful to all of them.

PART I

The Meteoric Rise 1913-1953

One of the Common People 1913-1945

RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON was one of Americas greatest political leaders, and probably its most controversial president. He was both brilliant and strangely awkward, but ultimately and uniquely indestructible. And in his perseverance he made many of his countrymen awkward also, throughout a very long career, and after. He would not go away, and lingers yet.

Like much about Richard Nixon, the circumstances of his early years were nondescript. They were not as modest as those of some presidents, though they were certainly modest. There was almost nothing picturesque about them, little levity, but no degeneracy either; no careening, drunken, abusive adults about, none of the romance of the frontier, and not quite, in southern California around the First World War, the full proverbial wholesomeness of traditional, small-town America.

Life was real and life was earnest in the Quaker community of his childhood twenty miles from Los Angeles, which was just about to arise as a colossal and garish city that would influence the world. Young Richard listened to the distant train whistles and the roar of the steam engines in the night, the sweetest music Ive ever heard, and dreamt of the wider world. There was often the scent of citrus groves in the air, but the harsh life of the great ranches and farms and migrant workers, the hucksterism of this early phase of the great trek to California from the East and the Midwest, blended uneasily with the Quakerism of the Nixons and their neighbors. There was little that seemed permanent or even durable, and almost no nearby trace of the long Spanish history in Southern California. Los Angles and its surroundings were just becoming a catchment for the demographic driftwood of America, as New York long had been for Europe.

And there was nothing to suggest that serious, diligent, well-scrubbed little Richard Nixon would incite the political passions of the United States as no one else has, for more than forty years, or that he would change the history of the world. But, of course, he did.

In Richard Nixons youth, the population of Southern California would grow very quickly, and be recognized as some sort of laboratory for America. Bertrand Russell, an unlikely visitor, called it the ultimate segregation of the unfit, and Upton Sinclair, the crusading novelist and radical 1934 candidate for governor of California, thought it a paradise of swindlers. The film industry arose and recorded, refracted, foretold human drama and comedy, and dispensed its images of American life to the whole world. Southern California became a precursor of public tastes in many fields, evanescently recruiting vast swaths of America and the world to its fashions and tastes, and repelling many by its insubstantial brazenness.

Richard Milhous Nixon grew up close by this surging Babylon with Quaker parents in a Quaker town, Whittier, named after one of Americas leading poets and most illustrious Quakers, John Greenleaf Whittier.

The Quakers, the Society of Friends, had departed the existing Christian churches in seventeenth-century England, rebelling against the political and religious feuding of the time. The English Reformation seesawed back and forth from the Roman Catholic apostate Henry VIII and his Papist (Mary) and Protestant (Elizabeth) daughters, through Cromwells Puritan Commonwealth, to the officially self-proclaimed Glorious Revolution of 1688. George Fox had started the Society of Friends, taking the name from Christs assertion that his friends were those who did as he commanded (John 15:14). Fox founded an unstructured, quietist church, espousing simple dress and tastes, abstinence, temperance, asceticism, and many prophetic secular causes. These included pacifism and the abolition of capital punishment, slavery, and racial discrimination. It was a contemplative church, where divine inspiration would come to the quiet seeker of it. They were good and courageous and idealistic, if somewhat unworldly, and unexciting people.

William Penn brought the Quakers to what became Pennsylvania in 1682, and by the American Revolution a century later, there were fifty thousand of them in the American colonies. The Friends moved west with the rest of the population, establishing communities across the country as the United States spread steadily toward the Pacific.