The Nixons did not start without resources. For all his reservations about Frank, Hannah’s father advanced him three thousand dollars—the equivalent of some fifty-two thousand dollars today—to build their first home and start the lemon grove at Yorba Linda, thirty miles from Los Angeles.
The lemons never did flourish, in part because the land was unsuitable, in part because Frank Nixon refused to take advice on how to improve it. Over the years he took on other work, and Hannah worked in the SunKist fruit-packing plant. Life for her was hard not least because the life she had left behind when she married Frank had been, by contrast, so comfortable. She could and sometimes did, moreover, return for a while to the comfort of her parents’ home.
Boyhood hardships, the grown Nixon was to say, meant Harold having to forgo having a pony because the money went toward groceries and shoes for the younger siblings. Richard claimed he yearned for “an automatic train, not an electric train, but just one that would wind up,” but never got one. (Hannah, however, said the boys did get an electric train, a luxury toy in those days.) Their father owned not only a tractor, a necessity on the land, but also a car, as early as 1919. In Yorba Linda, where many families struggled to make ends meet, the Nixons were seen by neighbors as “well-to-do,” even “just a shade above what you might want to call the middle-income bracket.”
Matters improved materially in 1922, when just after Richard’s ninth birthday the Nixons gave up on the lemon grove, sold the land, borrowed five thousand dollars—about fifty-one thousand at today’s values—from the bank, and moved to Whittier to start a grocery and gas station business. Home was now a modest house behind the store with a living room, kitchen, and one bedroom downstairs and another bedroom over the garage for the children. Hannah prepared her famous pies at a kitchen table covered with an oilcloth. Neatly ironed antimacassars shielded upholstered chairs in the living room, and an upright piano stood in the corner. Hannah liked to play it, and by the age of three, we are told by the Nixon Library, little Richard could pick out a simple tune.
“My father,” Nixon recalled in middle age, “was a scrappy, belligerent fighter, with a quick, wide-ranging raw intellect. He left me with a respect for learning and hard work, and the will to keep fighting no matter what the odds. . . . My father had an Irish quickness both to anger and to mirth. It was his temper that impressed me most as a small child. He had tempestuous arguments with my brothers Harold and Don. . . . He was a strict and stern disciplinarian. . . .”
Frank Nixon had been beaten as a child, and he in turn used the ruler and the strap on his sons. Was Richard a target of his punishment? Mostly, he claimed that while his brothers were beaten, he dodged the strap by following the rules. Other times, he said he too got strapped and, “Father would spank us sometimes; my mother never.” Other memories paint a darker picture, of not only a violent, punitive father but also of a mother not the sweet creature she has been portrayed.
Once, when Harold was being whipped by his father, his screams could be heard in nearby houses. The boys’ playmates, who feared getting a Frank Nixon thrashing themselves, thought him “an awful rough guy.” A family friend said he was “hard . . . beastly . . . like an animal.” Once, when he caught Richard and one of his brothers swimming in a nearby canal, he hauled them out and then threw them back in again, hollering, “You like water? Have some more of it!” Richard’s cousin Jessamyn West, later a prominent writer, witnessed the incident with her aunt Elizabeth. Fearing the boys would drown, the aunt screamed, “You’ll kill them, Frank! You’ll kill them!”
Jessamyn West recalled her own father’s shock when, in later years, the Nixon boys spoke bitterly about Frank Nixon in front of others. “They could be so cruel, so loud-mouthed, so critical of their father. . . . [My father] couldn’t understand it, unless they got it when they were young and now they were paying their father back.”
Richard himself never spoke of such tensions. “It is the love beneath his brusque and bristling exterior that I remember best,” he said of Frank Nixon. Likewise, he never mentioned any friction between his father and mother. Yet Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, the psychotherapist Nixon consulted for many years, had a harsh impression of the marriage, one he could have received only from his patient. “Nixon’s father was brutal and cruel,” he said in 1976. “[He] brutalized the mother, and this is of enormous importance.” Nixon was still alive at the time, and Hutschnecker offered no details.*
Richard himself never spoke ill of his mother, whom he called “the gentlest, most considerate woman.” Some friends described her as a “wonderful . . . kind, gentle-spoken” woman with “the quiet stillness of a nun, saying little in a low, sweet voice.” Yet Hannah’s personality generated its own tensions. “She had a temper too,” said her youngest son, Edward, “but controlled. She knew how to throttle my dad if he was hurting one of us unintentionally. . . .”
Helene Drown, a friend so loyal that she usually found no fault in the Nixons, also remembered Hannah’s temper, remarking, “She was not a ‘holy-holy saint.’ ” One neighbor saw her as “cranky and puritanical.” Another thought her “hard . . . pure steel, pure steel.”
Hannah did not leave corporal punishment to her husband. “We never paddled him,” she claimed when discussing Richard with one reporter, while admitting to another, “I may have paddled him a little.” She encouraged one neighbor to spank Richard if he got out of line, and another recalled seeing her seated on the piano stool next to Richard, switch in hand, as he practiced.
“One day,” Nixon’s aide John Sears learned, “Hannah Nixon baked some cookies. Little Richard saw those cookies and ate one of them. And she said, ‘Richard, did you eat that cookie?’ He didn’t know any better than to say yes, and she beat the daylights out of him, or maybe his father did when he came home. But Richard Nixon learned one thing from that: He would probably still have gotten the daylights beaten out of him if he’d said no. But when he’d admitted it! He was now just totally rejected. That was a lifelong lesson to him.”
It was Hannah’s tongue, though, that the boys feared most. “She would just sit you down,” Richard recalled, “and she would talk very, very quietly and then, when you got through, you had been through an emotional experience.” “Tell her to give me a spanking,” little Arthur said once, when he was in trouble, “I can’t stand it, to have her talk to me.”
Arthur’s offense that day was serious; he had been caught smoking cigarettes behind the house—at the age of five!—cigarettes he had taken from his parents’ store. His reason for doing it, Richard thought, was to “show the world he was a man.” Frank and Hannah had been hoping for a daughter when Arthur was born in 1918. When he turned out to be a boy, they at first told his brothers that there “was a little doll over at the hospital for us, a real live doll.” For the first few years of his life they treated him as much like a girl as possible, until poor Arthur begged to have a boy’s haircut.
Another story about Arthur reveals the tenor of the emotional life of the Nixon family. Once, when he was seven and Richard had been away, Arthur rushed to greet him on his return. Then, shyly, he said, “Would it be all right if I kissed you?” This was an event. Arthur had had to ask his mother in advance for permission to kiss his own brother.
Richard Bergholz, former political editor for the Los Angeles Times, once watched Nixon and his mother greeting each other after a long separation. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. . . . Here was a guy who hadn’t seen his mother in . . . I don’t know how long, and all he could do was shake her hand; he couldn’t show any form of affection. It bothered me. . . .”
In old age Richard declared himself “nauseated” by the custom of hugging and kissing children and loved ones. His mother, he said, “could communicate far more than others could with a lot of sloppy talk and even more sloppy kissing and hugging. . . .” She never kissed him, ever.
“In her whole life,” Nixon said of Hannah, “I never heard her say to me or anyone else, ‘I love yo
u.’ ” He said she had not needed to. “No one projected warmth and affection more than my mother. . . . Only one of those rather pathetic Freudian psychiatrists would suggest that her love of privacy made her private even from her sons.” Dr. Hutschnecker, the psychotherapist Nixon trusted with his confidences for years, suggested almost exactly that in interviews for this book. He concluded—again, the basis for that conclusion must certainly have been what his patient told him—that Hannah was “not really close to Richard. . . . No woman ever gave Nixon the support he really needed.”
Hutschnecker thought Nixon “an emotionally deprived child” who grew up to become a “person who regarded love and physical closeness as a diversion that would drain him, deplete him, make him less manly. Love . . . never had priority in Nixon’s life, for he always convinced himself that he didn’t need to be loved as a human being, only respected as a man.”
The tensions in the Nixon family were twice compounded by tragedy. First his brother Arthur died in 1925, when Richard was twelve. The boy was just seven years old, and the cause of his death cannot be determined for certain. The first writer to interview the adult Nixon about it reported that Arthur fell ill after being hit on the head by a rock thrown in the schoolyard. A nurse who tended him also mentioned the incident. Edward Nixon, the surviving brother, remembers hearing about it, as does Richard’s nephew Donald. He recalls that in the fifties, when he was growing up, he was forbidden to throw rocks or earth when playing because, as his father explained, Arthur had died after being “hit by a clod on the back of the head.”
The death certificate, however, attributed Arthur’s death to “encephalitis or tubercular meningitis,” and in later years Richard went with the theory that the root cause was tuberculosis. TB was the scourge of his youth and the health nightmare of his family, having killed his paternal grandmother, an aunt, and a cousin. When Arthur died, according to Hannah, Richard sat in a big chair, “staring into space, silent and dry-eyed in the undemonstrative way in which, because of his choked, deep feeling, he was always to face tragedy.” He said he cried every day for week. Soon TB was to start killing his elder brother, Harold, painfully slowly.
Harold was sixteen when Arthur died. He was handsome, keen on girls, the proud adolescent owner of a stripped-down Model T Ford, and he was not doing well at school. With the grocery and the gas station flourishing, the Nixons decided to send him off to an expensive boarding school in Massachusetts. Harold came back a few months later coughing, in the first stages of his illness.
His father had invited such disaster, Richard claimed after his parents were dead. Frank Nixon had scoffed at safety measures like the pasteurization of milk, insisting that the family drink milk straight from the cow. For a while Richard was seriously ill with undulant fever, a form of brucellosis that can be contracted by consuming animal products. Richard and Don both had TB scares when X rays showed shadows on their lungs.
Harold’s tuberculosis was a family ordeal that lasted six years. Because his father was too proud to send him to a public clinic, he began the first of a series of stays in expensive private sanitoriums. To pay for his care, the Nixons’ comfortable existence was disrupted by costs that Richard remembered as “catastrophic.” Whatever exaggerations may have been made about the family’s earlier days, this period was genuinely difficult. Richard, barely sixteen, regularly rose at 4:00 A.M. to drive the fourteen miles to Los Angeles to buy fruit and vegetables for the store, then returned to set them up in a display, all before leaving for school. Even in the family’s straitened circumstances, he remained fastidious. He insisted that his shirts be perfectly ironed and that his mother check him for halitosis each morning by smelling his breath—“to make sure he would not offend anyone. . . .”
Richard’s work in the store spawned an anecdote suggesting that integrity was not his finest point, even then. “One day,” his cousin Merle West recalled, “when Richard was helping Don in the meat department, making hamburgers, he cut his finger badly and it bled into the meat. Don said they had to throw the bled-on meat away, but Dick said, ‘No way! That’s the freshest-looking meat on the counter. Leave it there. . . .’ ”
Hannah Nixon’s crusade to save Harold took her away from the family for long periods. She hung her hopes on the possibility that his health would improve in the drier climate of Arizona, four hundred miles away, and they traveled there for extended stays over a period of more than two years. Richard, who joined her in the summers of 1928 and 1929, found himself in a community of TB sufferers, sick people drifting about in pajamas and robes, sputum cups in hand. He felt afraid, even of his own brother. Meanwhile he took summer jobs, plucking chickens and working as a pool boy at a posh country club and as a barker at a carnival, where he had his first exposure to gambling. His Quaker mother reportedly turned a blind eye to the latter activity.
In happier days Richard and Harold had fooled visiting salesmen at their father’s store by concocting phony radio advertisements and broadcasting them over a speaker system Harold had rigged up. Richard, a relative remembered, excelled at faking the broadcasts. In Arizona, Harold figured out a method of intercepting a girlfriend’s phone conversations with a rival suitor, which was probably Richard’s first experience of wiretapping.
All the while Richard watched as his mother tended Harold and the other tuberculosis patients she took in as paying guests, emptying bedpans and washing bloody sheets. Death came for Harold in 1933, at home in Whittier, on his mother’s birthday. “Richard sank into a deep, impenetrable silence,” Hannah remembered. “From that time on, it seemed he was trying to be three sons in one, striving even harder than before to make up to his father and me for his loss. . . . I think Richard may have felt a kind of guilt that Harold and Arthur were dead and he was alive.”
Frank Nixon had judged Harold, of all the boys, “the flower of the family.” “Why is it,” he asked Jessamyn West’s father, “that the brightest and strongest, handsomest and best, get taken first?” Jessamyn suspected her cousin Richard had been made to feel “a substitute, a man on the second team.”
When Arthur died, Frank Nixon had decided he was being punished for keeping his store open on the Sabbath, and he closed it on Sundays thereafter. After Harold’s death Hannah vowed never to celebrate her birthday again, and banned parties or presents for the rest of her life. She and Frank accepted their son’s passing as yet another expression of God’s will.
The Nixon children were steeped in religion. Of the two Quaker meeting-houses in their hometown, the family attended the one that followed an evangelical tradition, which had very different practices from the original Quaker concept of silent prayer. Evangelical Quakers were more given to music, singing, and passionate sermons.
“We regularly went to church four times on Sunday,” Richard recalled, “Sunday school and a worship service in the morning, a young people’s meeting called Christian Endeavor, and another worship service in the evening. . . . We never had a meal without grace. Usually it was silent. Sometimes each of us would recite a verse of scripture.” At home, Hannah Nixon preferred her religion quiet. She followed Jesus’ instruction “Enter into thy closet when thou prayest,” actually going into a clothes or broom closet to pray each night. Religion, said her sister Jane, “was just really her life.”
Frank Nixon, the convert from Methodism, was a prominent Sunday school teacher, remembered as a “firebrand” with flaming cheeks and trembling voice. After Arthur’s death he would rise from his seat at the meeting-house to shout, “We must have a reawakening! We have got to get people back to God!” He began driving his family to Los Angeles for revival meetings, and at one of them the thirteen-year-old Richard surged forward with other devotees to commit himself to Christ.
At twenty, however, within months of Harold’s death, Richard was questioning the foundations of his religious faith. “My beliefs are shattered,” he declared in a series of college essays titled “What Can I Believe?” He rejected the infallability of th
e Bible and its miracle stories and drew up a chart that mapped his concept of how factors like “Will” and “Self-Organization” interacted with “Spiritual Energy” and other drives. He concluded that although his thinking was now “revolutionized,” he remained “a believer in God as Creator and in the philosophy of Christ.”
Nixon professed to be a Christian for the rest of his life, but swung from admiration of one church to another. He told Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune, one of the few journalists who became an intimate, that he would not have stayed a Quaker, except for Hannah; instead, he said, he would have become a Presbyterian. In the sixties, when out of office, he was often seen attending the services of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, the conservative minister of The Power of Positive Thinking fame. One of that book’s chapter titles is “I Don’t Believe in Defeat.”
Nixon announced at the start of his presidency that he was going to hold nondenominational services at the White House every Sunday. Billy Graham, spiritual confidant to every president since Truman, was a regular preacher. On a retreat with Graham, Nixon spoke of his youthful “conversion”—presumably a reference to his experience at the Los Angeles revival meeting—and told Graham, “Pray for me. I’m a backslider.”
Presidential aide John Ehrlichman, at that time a committed Christian Scientist, regarded the Sunday services and the Billy Graham connection as “a lot of window dressing.” He maintained that “Nixon was not a motivated Christian. Sometimes he reverted to Quaker beliefs, telling me about his mother’s teachings, and how the Quaker ceremony was very simple, more authentic. Other times he’d say, ‘You know, if I were ever to embrace a religion, it would be Catholicism, because they’re so well disciplined in their dogma, so well defined.’ Nixon picked Claude Brinegar as secretary of transportation because he thought he was a Catholic, though he turned out to be Episcopalian. He told him, ‘I want you to be secretary because I want you to be my liaison with the cardinals.’ That was hilarious, because Brinegar just looked at him and said, ‘Well, the L.A. Rams are my team, Mr. President.’ ”