The Nixon Character Author(s): Jonathan Aitken Reviewed work(s): Source: Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1, The Nixon Presidency (Winter, 1996), pp. 239-247 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27551562 . Accessed: 05/07/2012 11:37 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Blackwell Publishing and Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Presidential Studies Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org The Nixon Character THE RT. HON. JONATHAN AITKEN, M.P. Nixon Biographer are never Whatever the bad things thatNixon has done in his life, forget that he took in is is so in man. the great moral teachings. That why there much good that see Sometimes the good side of him has been subsumed by political ambition. I could to two that might be going happen but also I have always known that he is guys in one and that the decentQuaker moral side has been there all the time, sometimes creating great tensions1 This perceptive comment on the character of America's thirty-seventh president came from Dr. Paul S. Smith, Richard Nixon's history professor atWhittier College from 1930-33. The judgment reflects the complexity that created those "great tensions" inNixon's was more personality. Yet since Nixon far tortuous in his psychological make-up than the label "two guys in one" would suggest, a study of his character needs to reach into more subtle semantic territory. An artist painting Nixon might use the Italian word chiarascuro (the contrast between darkness and light) to describe the techniques of portraiture needed to capture his sitter. Likewise a biographer, who ideally should strive to be an artist upon oath, needs a methodology of similar ingenuity to catch Nixon on paper. One of the most fascinating glimpses I ever caught of that elusive figure "the real Nixon" came, ironically enough, some time after I had published my biography of him. Six weeks before his death the 81-year-old Nixon was passing through London on the outward leg of his ninth visit to Moscow. On the morning of Saturday, March 5, 1994, he telephoned unexpectedly and asked if I would like to come with him to the theater. The invitation, like his choice of show, seemed out of character, but we duly set off for a theWest End like couple of tourists and settled unrecognized into our seats to see a revival of Rodgers' and Hammerstein's Carousel. As the musical got underway it became apparent that Nixon was word perfect in many of the lines and most of the songs. When the story reached its climax, he seemed to be in the grip of powerful emotions, especially during the famous number "You'll Never Walk Alone" when tears started to trickle down his cheeks. As we walked away from the theater Nixon felt it necessary to provide an explanation for the display of his feelings. He said that Carousel had been the favorite musical of his late wife Pat; that they had seen it many times together; and that he had chosen "You'll Never Walk Alone" as the music for her funeral. After a pause he added that the show's lead male character Billy Bigelow, reminded him of Harold his elder brother who had died of tuberculosis in Nixon's childhood. He added that before Harold had died the family had often gone out for birthday picnics on the beach like the one in Carousel. In two days time, he continued, it would be March 7, the anniversary of Harold's death. This date was also an his mother's birthday. "But she could never bear to celebrate it or even mention it was aman important day in her life again. That was my mother."2 For who normally shunned Nixon's to share these memories was a personalized small talk, urge poignant revealing 239 PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES 240 j QUARTERLY ? reminder that his deep family roots and Quaker upbringing were central to his odyssey which is surely one of the closest twentieth-century approximations to the "Log cabin to White House" legend. Nixon spent his formative childhood years in the house where he was born on January 9, 1913, a rustic clapboard cottage in Yorba Linda, California, which had no electricity, or a running water, telephone inside privy. He had hardscrabble youth made psychologically difficult by a domineering father and emotionally sad by the deaths of two of his brothers, Arthur and Harold. Their medical bills created many financial hardships for the family. One came won a to painful consequence of these when the young Nixon scholarship Harvard University and had to turn it down because his parents could not afford the associated travel costs. Nixon overcame these sorrows and and accommodation early disappointments with the help of two strong pillars of the Milhous matriarchy ?his grandmother Almira and his mother Hannah. These formidable ladies shaped his early character. Grandmother Almira Milhous, a poet and a teacher, was the first to recognize young as a one a Richard gifted child, and the first to say: "That boy will day be leader."3 She disciplined him into the habits of intellectual curiosity, iron application and deep reading of history that stayed with him for the whole of his life. Still more important was the influence of his mother Hannah. Long before her son became famous she was known in her local community of Whittier as "A Quaker Saint." She instilled into him the belief that equality between races and peacemaking between nations were Christ's most important teachings. In return he loved her deeply, but strangely. Time and again in my many hours of conversations with Nixon he spoke movingly about the great debt he owed to his mother for the inspiration and idealism she gave him throughout on one his career, but occasion he added the unexpected information that she had never kissed him. When I expressed surprise Nixon grew quite angry, saying that my comment come might have from "one of those rather pathetic Freudian psychiatrists" and added: "My more a mother could communicate far than others could with lot of sloppy talk and even more sloppy kissing and hugging. I can never remember her saying to any of us 1 love you' ?She didn't have to!"4 Although buttoned up inhibition may have been part of the Nixon heritage, this did mean an or not that he was unfeeling unemotional man. Far from it. He put his passion into his politics and it powered him to early stardom. Unknown freshman Congressman at 33. Re-elected unopposed at 35. National celebrity as a result of the Hiss case at 36. Senator at 37. Vice president eleven days after his fortieth birthday. This meteoric ascent more to a owed far zealous mastery of complex issues and a burning intensity to fight the evils of communism than it did to political opportunism. There was plenty of that too, as but he always acknowledged, Nixon would never have risen to the office one heartbeat away from the presidency had it not been for the granite support of his wife Pat, who in many ways was the tougher partner of the marriage. She persuaded him to put their life savings into what at the time seemed the reckless gamble of running for Congress in 1947 a against safe Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis. She nurtured his health through a stress-related breakdown in 1951. It was she so pulled him through the 1952 slush fund crisis, literally dragging him in front of television cameras seconds before the "Checkers" broadcast. Above all, she gave him contented family life with two daughters that created the happier hinterland of his hidden persona ?a generous and loving father and grandfather. Yet his private virtues, considerable though they were, sometimes conflicted with the early pressures of his public career. On the whole Nixon has been unfairly demonized for the alleged political vices of his pre-vice-presidential years. These were said by his opponents THENIXON CHARACTER | 241 to be the ruthless hounding (of Alger Hiss); financial venality in 1952; and amoral campaign methods (against Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas). None of these charges can be made to stick in the light of objective historical analysis. On Hiss, Eisenhower's words to Nixon in 1951, "The thing that impressed me most was that you not only got Hiss, a but you got him fairly," can be regarded as definitive judgment.5 Yet in the other areas Ike was sometimes ambivalent towards his running mate, distancing himself from Nixon in the slush fund crisis until the nation had given an overwhelming "not guilty" verdict after the "Checkers" broadcast and displaying the archetypal military man's distaste for political rhetoric of the type that Nixon occasionally employed when attacking an opponent such as, "She's pink right down to her underwear," one of his less agreeable punch lines when campaigning against Helen Gahagan Douglas in the California Senate race of 1950.