Being Nixon: A Man Divided (4 page)

Ola Florence was sad about her boyfriend. “I’m a very emotional person, outgoing. I like being silly, I love dancing,” she said. Ola’s mother “just couldn’t stand Dick,” according to Ola Florence’s younger sister, Dorothy; she thought he was a “two timer.” But Ola Florence couldn’t bring herself to break with Nixon. “We had a stormy relationship, more stormy than most…sometimes he’d be harsh and I’d cry. Then we’d make up,” she said. Angered at his son’s behavior, Frank Nixon took Ola Florence’s side. “He’ll hang himself if he’s not careful!” Ola Florence remembered Frank shouting.

Then, one night in May 1934, a few weeks before graduation—he would sweep all the prizes—Nixon learned that he had won a full
scholarship to Duke Law School, which was just then trying to establish itself in the first rank by attracting top scholars. “The night he found out, oh we had fun that night,” Ola Florence recalled. “He was not only fun, he was joyous, abandoned—the only time I remember him that way. He said it was the best thing that ever happened to him. We rode around in his car and just celebrated.”
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He shared his dreams with her—possibly to become, he dared hope, chief justice at the United States Supreme Court. “I always thought he would achieve something extraordinary in life,” she said, although “never in my wildest dreams did I ever picture him as president of the United States.” Dido also recalled about her Aeneas, “I think I never really knew him.”
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How well did
Nixon, at age twenty-one, know himself? He knew that he could be temperamental, even “caddish,” as he put it in his letter to Ola Florence. He knew that crisis was normal and that the temptation to give up had to be resisted, suppressed, conquered. He learned that a will toward optimism could efface, if not eliminate, pessimism. He learned, perhaps without quite realizing it, that power and control over others were antidotes to feelings of helplessness and isolation. He sensed that he was a clever politician and was relieved that, on stage, his shyness fled. He knew that he had an unrelenting work ethic. He saw himself as morally principled and, aside from occasional expedience, he was. Whittier had very few black students, but Nixon made sure that one of them, a halfback named William Brock, was welcomed into the Orthogonians, at a time that almost all fraternities around the country were racially segregated.

During his senior year, Nixon was required, for a course on Christian philosophy, to write a series of twelve essays on the theme of “What Can I Believe?” Some of the essays were earnest attempts to turn the mystery of faith into social science. In one, Nixon designed an elaborate, largely incomprehensible chart filled with arrows pointing back and forth between categories like “neural energy” and “sensory experiences intelligent adaptation.” He decided that he had
moved beyond the literal Biblical interpretations of his parents, “fundamental Quakers,” but he had trouble articulating what, beyond vague Christian bromides, he did believe.
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Curiously, he seems to have missed the best lesson, taught by Grandmother Milhous, a Quaker who used “plain speech,” addressing her family as “thee” and “thou.” Nixon’s youngest brother, Edward, recalled how their grandmother told her grandchildren not to hate their enemies. “She said, ‘Let them sound off. Let it go in one ear and out the other and settle some place else. Listen and say nothing, that’s the best thing to do,” according to Edward. She compared anger and the desire for revenge to a spring flower that would die out. “Never say, ‘I hate,’ ” said Grandmother Milhous. “Don’t call anyone a liar. You’re not sure and if you are sure why advertise it? Let the lie die. Use silence.”
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Nixon was more heedful of a verse from a Longfellow poem she sent him:

The heights of great men reached and kept

Were not attained by sudden flight

But they while their companions slept

Were toiling upward in the night.
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A
t Princeton and Yale in the early twentieth century, wealthy donors self-consciously celebrated Anglo-Saxon superiority by building collegiate gothic campuses after the model of Oxford and Cambridge.
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Eager to catch up, Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, used a family tobacco fortune to build a turreted dreamland, a stage set for future champions of the race. Finished a few years before Richard Nixon arrived for law school in 1934, the instant-ancient campus was belied only by its sapling trees.

Nixon was dazzled. “For someone accustomed to California architecture and a small college like Whittier, Duke was like a medieval cathedral town. There were spires and towers and stained glass everywhere. Dozens of buildings were set in clusters amid acres of woods and gardens,” he remembered. His awe turned to anxiety when he began counting the Phi Beta Kappa keys on the watch chains of his classmates. Duke had recruited top scholars from Ivy League schools; thirty-two of Nixon’s forty-five classmates were members of the academic honor society. Whittier did not even have a Phi Beta Kappa chapter.

Nixon knew that he would lose his full scholarship if he did not get top grades. He worked alone, avoiding study groups. “I’m a reader, not a buller,” he later explained (he may have used a stronger term than “buller”). In letters home to Ola Florence, he contemplated quitting. One night he poured out his fears to an upperclassman, who
had remarked on the long hours the lonely first-year student seemed to be spending in the library. The upperclassman was consoling. “You don’t have to worry,” he told Nixon. “You have what it takes to learn the law—an iron butt.” At the end of the year, Nixon was third in his class.
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Richard and Ola Florence.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

Nixon lived in a tool shed without heat or plumbing. Breakfast was often a Milky Way candy bar. He wrote longing letters to Ola Florence, which she answered, coolly. Upon returning home for the summer, he called his college flame to announce that he was coming over. She could not see him; there was a boy in her living room. Nixon became agitated. “If I never see you again, it will be too soon,” he swore and slammed down the phone. He was at her house the next day, pretending that nothing had happened. He bragged to her about facing down his intimidating professor, Douglas Maggs, who was renowned for badgering students in his personal injury law class, known as “Torts.” Ola Florence quipped, “Torts, that’s something you cook.” Nixon became pompous and proprietary. “You’re going to have to learn something about law terms now,” he intoned. She dumped him and by Christmas was engaged to the boy in the living room, Gail Jobe. Nixon wrote a few more beseeching letters before giving up. It does not appear that he ever talked to anyone about his rejection.
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By his third year, Nixon’s living situation at Duke had improved, marginally. He lived in an unheated house in the woods with three other men; they shared two brass beds. But the residents of “Whippoorwill Manor,” as they dubbed the one-room shack, seemed to have had some fun. Nixon was teasingly nicknamed “Gloomy Gus” (again), but he loosened up. He yelled, jumped, and waved with such abandon at Duke football games that he became something of a stadium character; students would want to sit near him just to see the show. The former college thespian found the occasional outlet for his acting skills—uncharacteristically, as a stand-up comic. At the “Senior Beer Bust,” he stood on a picnic table and gave a deadpan speech about social security—“social insecurity”—in which he intentionally
mangled the facts and mimicked confused bureaucrats. (Nixon was already an anti–New Deal, anti-FDR Republican.) He was so entertaining that for days afterward, in the cafeteria, students would gather around and cajole him to give a funny speech. He shyly begged off; he had no more jokes.
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At Duke, Nixon also showed his tender side. One of his classmates, Fred Cady, had been disabled with polio. As students rushed up the stone steps, Nixon stopped to help Cady with his books and his crutches. It became a routine; every day Cady would wait for his friend to help carry him up the steps. Another student, Charles Rhyne, was hospitalized for months with a poisoned arm. Nixon showed up by his bed every night to read his lecture notes. (Many years later, Rhyne would represent Nixon’s faithful secretary, Rose Mary Woods, when she testified before a federal grand jury about the infamous eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the White House tapes.)

On Sundays, Nixon attended church in Duke’s vast gothic chapel. He was bothered that neither of the regular ministers, a Methodist and a Quaker, ever discussed race relations. Nixon observed that the blacks in Durham lived in a separate and unequal world, waiting on tables and working in the factories, speaking only when spoken to. Other students from outside the South were bothered by the strict segregation, but only Nixon spoke out about it, recalled several of his classmates, one of whom noted, “He looked upon the issue as a moral issue and condemned it as such.”
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Over the Christmas holiday during his final year, Nixon, along with two of the other top law students, drove to New York to look for jobs as Wall Street lawyers. Nixon recalled anxiously waiting in the lobby of one of the venerable firms, Sullivan and Cromwell, noticing the thickness of the oriental rugs and the glow from the wood-paneled walls. Years later, Nixon could vividly summon the feelings of rejection. “I knew that these firms were virtually closed shops, which hired only from the establishment elite of the Ivy League law schools, but I thought it would be worth a try,” he recalled. “I must
have looked pretty scruffy sitting in those plush polished mahogany and leather reception rooms in my one good suit.”
^6
,
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The summer of
1937 found Nixon back home in Whittier, living over his parents’ garage. He was morose, his family recalled. He applied to become an FBI agent and never heard back, possibly because of a bureaucratic snafu.
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Finally, his mother got him a job working at a local law firm, Wingert and Bewley.
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Nixon wrote up wills for the prosperous families living on the hill. He occasionally and uncomfortably handled their divorces. “This good-looking girl, beautiful really, began talking to me about her intimate marriage problems,” Nixon later recalled to journalist Stewart Alsop. “Were you embarrassed?” asked Alsop. “Embarrassed! I turned fifteen colors of the rainbow,” Nixon replied.
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Nixon struggled. He became entangled in a nasty malpractice action after he made a mistake filing a deed; the firm had to settle the case for twice Nixon’s salary. He started a small business freezing orange juice, and it failed, costing Nixon his first year’s savings. He still felt the condescension of the Franklins. The senior partner’s wife, Judith Wingert, recalled that the Nixons were “lower middle class,” their grocery someplace where “you stopped on your way back from the golf course.”
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Whittier was very conservative—despite the Depression, the town refused to take New Deal money from Washington to create jobs because, the town council decreed, public relief was “Bolshevik.”
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Drinking, dancing, and card playing were proscribed by the Quakers. Some of the Whittier men were hardly Quakerish in their intolerance; when a saloon had opened in town in the late 1880s, some locals burned it down and beat the proprietors with ax handles.
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Strict moralism notwithstanding, southern Californians had a soft spot for show business and theater, even in straitlaced Whittier. The film industry was well-rooted in Hollywood by the 1930s, and the Spanish Catholic heritage of pageantry had seeped into religious revivalism.
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At the Angelus Temple (from the Roman Catholic devotion commemorating the Incarnation), Sister Aimee staged “theatrical sermons.” In Whittier, there was an amateur theater company, and in 1937, Nixon decided to try out for a part in a drama called
The Dark Tower
. At the audition, Nixon read for the role of Barry Jones, who according to the play was a “faintly collegiate, eager, blushing youth of twenty-four.” The lead role of Daphne would be “a tall, dark, sullen beauty of twenty, wearing a dress of great chic and an air of permanent resentment.” The girl trying out for the part of Daphne was named Pat Ryan. Nixon had never seen her before, and he thought he knew everyone in town. She had a mass of red-gold hair, high cheekbones, and (weighing about twenty pounds more than she would as First Lady) a curvy figure. “I could not take my eyes away from her,” Nixon recalled. “For me it was a case of love at first sight.”

Pat Ryan was well known by the boys she taught at Whittier High. “She was so sexy you can’t imagine,” recalled one of them, Robert Blake (later an ambassador in the Nixon administration). “She wore tight sweaters, unlike the old bags around town. When she walked down the hall, we’d go around the corner and whistle.”
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Interviewed in 1950, her English professor at the University of Southern California recalled:

She was a quiet girl and pretty. And it always used to disturb me how tired her face was in repose. There seemed to have been plenty of reason for it. As I recall it, if you went into the cafeteria, there was Pat Nixon at the serving counter. An hour later if you went to the library there was Pat Nixon checking out books. And if you came back to the campus that evening there was Pat Nixon working on some student research program. Yet with it
all, she was a good student, alert and interested. She stood out from the empty-headed, overdressed little sorority girls of that era like a good piece of literature on a shelf of paperbacks.
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Nixon wrangled a ride home with the girl and a friend that night, and the next, and the next. On the third night, Nixon asked, “When are you going to give me that date?” Pat Ryan laughed. “Don’t laugh,” said Nixon, pointing a finger at her. “Some day I’m going to marry you.” She was taken aback; the two had barely spoken. When she got home, she told a friend, “I met this guy tonight, who says he is going to marry me.”
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Nixon noticed something deep and kindred about Pat. In one of his first love letters to her, he wrote, “you with the strangely sad but lovely smile.” He pursued; she resisted. She turned him down for dates; he appeared, unannounced, at her door. She more than once locked him outside. She was a little unnerved by his devotion, and he could be impetuous. “Please forgive me for acting like a sorehead when you gently ushered me out the door the other night,” he began one letter. He ended another: “Yes, I know I’m crazy, and that this is old stuff and that I don’t take hints, but you see, Miss Pat, I like you!”

Warily, she agreed to let him drive her into Los Angeles on weekends—often, so she could go on dates with other suitors. Nixon would patiently sit in hotel lobbies, reading a book. She liked to ice skate, so he took her ice skating, and fell down so many times that he was bloody by the end of the evening.

Slowly—very slowly, over the course of two years—Pat allowed herself to know Nixon. She discovered that she had much in common with this clumsy, eager, dreamy, moody young man on her doorstep. Pat Ryan (born Thelma, but she changed her name because she disliked it) came from an even more hardscrabble background; her father made Frank Nixon seem relatively tame. Will Ryan drank and would pick fights with his wife until the children cried out, “Don’t, Daddy, don’t!” He could be cruel. With his drinking buddies, he pretended to auction off little Thelma as a slave. Sitting very straight,
trying not to cry, Thelma feared that her father truly would sell her. Years later, Julie Nixon Eisenhower recalled in her memoir,
Pat Nixon: The Untold Story
:

My mother resolutely buried the unpleasant memories of her childhood. Only once did she admit to me her father’s temper and confrontations with Kate [Pat’s mother]. Then, firmly, so I would know she was speaking her final words on the subject, she said, “I detest temper. I detest scenes. I just can’t be that way. I saw it with my father.” She paused for a moment and added: “And so to avoid scenes or unhappiness, I supposed I accommodated to others.”

Both Pat and Dick were sensitive to the jeers and put-downs of their social “betters.” Pat bitterly recalled a carload of rich college boys hooting at her as she swept trash out of a building while she was working briefly as a house cleaner. Both fantasized about escape. Pat told Nixon that she did not want to be tied down, that she wanted to travel to exotic, far-off places. Nixon, who used to lie in his boyhood bed listening for the train whistle, who had spent hours lying in the grass watching the clouds go by, began calling her “my Irish gypsy” and “Miss Vagabond.” Pat began to soften. “He was handsome in a strong way,” she later told Julie. Nixon had a mellifluous baritone voice, fine for public speaking and stage, and it reached Pat. “He had a wonderful quality in his voice that I have never heard in another man,” she told Julie. She also saw and felt his drive and was not put off by his ambition for power and office. Indeed, she shared it. Her roommates wondered why she put up with this persistent and slightly bumptious suitor. She answered: “He’s going to be President some day.”

All his life,
Nixon was drawn to the sunshine. He was fair-skinned and burned easily, but he liked to walk the beach for hours at a time or to stare out at the sunset. In March of 1940, Richard drove Pat to
Dana Point, a rocky promontory on the Pacific coast south of Los Angeles. Parked in his Oldsmobile, looking out over the long white beach sweeping down the coastline, he proposed marriage. She said yes, though as she later told her daughter Julie, “even as she consented, she was not sure she wanted to marry.”
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