The Arrogance of Power Read online

  According to Charles Colson, the aide who later turned to God and became a lay minister, Nixon had considered converting to Catholicism before the 1972 election, having come to be convinced that Catholics represented “the real America.” To traditional Quakers like his mother, Catholicism is anathema.

  Nixon stopped holding Sunday services at the White House during Watergate and for months did not attend church at all. “Bob,” he confided to Chief of Staff H. R. (“Bob”) Haldeman the day he fired him, “there’s something I’ve never told anybody before, not even you. Every night since I’ve been President, every single night before I’ve gone to bed, I’ve knelt down on my knees beside my bed and prayed to God for guidance.” He told Colson the same thing, recalling later that before making any difficult decisions, he prayed at the table at which Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

  As his resignation approached, Nixon turned for help to a rabbi, Baruch Korff, and attended about two dozen “pastoral sessions.” He had been able to withstand the “vilification and savagery” to which he had been subjected, he explained to Korff, because of the “peace at the center” instilled in him by his Quaker mother. On his last day at the White House, Nixon told Korff he believed he was being “punished by God,” much as his father had felt after Arthur’s death.

  According to Billy Graham, he and Nixon prayed together at San Clemente after the resignation. They discussed the Bible and perused a leather-bound Life of Christ that had belonged to Nixon’s Quaker grandmother. A few months later Watergate Special Prosecution Force attorneys were nonplussed when, having been handed a borrowed Bible to take the oath, the former president whipped out a pen, autographed the Bible as if he were an author at an autograph session, then solemnly handed it back.

  In old age, Nixon said, he regularly consulted his own well-thumbed King James Bible, and his library shelves were crowded with books on religion and philosophy. He still admired Catholicism, having come to believe that ritual and ceremony were essential to religion, yet continued to declare himself a Quaker. “I believe that Richard is an intensely religious man,” his mother said in 1960, “but he shuns even the restrained rituals of his faith. I am sure other Quakers understand my son.” While Nixon’s old church in California spoke up for him after Watergate, most Quaker groups repudiated him.

  Some observers thought that the tenets of the Quaker faith—especially the doctrine that each member of the church has access, individually, to God’s Inner Light—became skewed in Nixon. “We spent a great deal of time arguing about it,” said the Chicago Tribune’s Trohan, “and I tell you frankly: Nixon’s great trouble was his religion. Quakers don’t have anybody to deal with God except themselves, and that can make them loners. He didn’t consult people. . . .”

  Dr. Hutschnecker, the psychotherapist in whom Nixon confided for years, agreed. “He was a victim of the rigidity of his religious training. His indoctrination was that you must help yourself . . . he had been brought up to do everything by himself.” For Hutschnecker, it was Hannah, the mother Nixon obsessed about and called a saint, who was ultimately responsible for that isolating independence. “A saint is someone you cannot pray enough to, improve enough for, beg enough to. He felt he had to prove to his mother that he didn’t need anybody.”

  “Fear,” Hutschnecker came to believe, “was a virus that infected Nixon’s life, that he never recovered from—the fear that he would be regarded as weak. What would Mama think? What would Daddy say? . . . I believe that the image of the saintly but stern face of his mother defeated him more than any other factor. . . . His mother was really his downfall.”

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  One man may have opportunities that others do not . . . what counts is whether the individual used what chances he had.

  —Richard Nixon, 1962

  In 1933 Richard Nixon fought a tough campaign, won a presidency, and subsequently went to jail. The presidency was that of the student body at Whittier College, the liberal arts school in his hometown, and he won it by promising to fight for the removal of a prohibition on student dances. No matter that he himself was no dancer or that his parents thought the ban should continue. “He’s a real smart politician,” said the candidate who lost the election. “He knew what issues to use to get support.”

  The scrape with the law came a few months later, when Nixon and some fellow students snake-danced into town and burst into a movie theater without buying tickets. When the police hauled the group off to jail, Nixon got them out by phoning a Whittier alumnus who happened to be a judge. A year earlier, as chairman of a committee organizing the annual bonfire, he had more than fulfilled the traditional obligations of that post. The chairman was expected to supply a large wooden privy to top the heap. A one- or two-seater privy was considered satisfactory, but Nixon distinguished himself by producing a four-seater. He and a few confederates had broken into a rancher’s premises at night, disconnected the privy from its sewer pipes, and escaped unseen.

  At twenty the man who as president claimed to have had no education was flying high in academe. All his young life he had been an exemplary student. “He absorbed knowledge of any kind like a blotter,” elementary school teacher Mary George remembered. “He just never had to work for knowledge at all. . . .” Nixon would claim he had learned to read before starting first grade. Although Miss George thought not, she did recall wondering, that year, how he managed to read “no less than thirty or forty books, besides doing all of his other work.”

  “My mother spent countless hours,” he wrote by way of explanation in old age, “encouraging me, helping me with homework and challenging me to learn.” When relatives saw a light burning late at the Nixon house, they would say knowingly, “Richard is studying, and Hannah is with him.” His mother said: “Richard always seemed to need me more than the four other sons did. He used to like to have me sit with him when he studied.”

  Because of his good grades, Nixon was advanced into classes with children older than him. He scored steady As in all subjects except math and geometry. In fifth grade he was top of the class the entire year. At eleven he was devouring the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. At twelve he was sent away for six months to stay with his aunt Jane, a professional music teacher, and came home able to play the Grieg piano sonata. Music aside, however, he proved inept at any work that involved hand-eye coordination. He was hopeless at woodwork or anything that required mechanical aptitude and as an adult was known as a total klutz.

  In 1930, his last year at high school, Nixon won the Harvard Club of California’s award for the “best all-around student” in the state. The prize was a stepping-stone to a Harvard University scholarship, and by one account he was offered one. There was also talk of Yale, but he wound up attending neither. Perhaps the family finances would have been overstretched by an Ivy League tuition, as Nixon explained. Yet, as he also admitted, with Harold’s drawn-out illness, the arrival of new baby Edward, and a shortage of help in the store, he was needed at home.

  So it was that Nixon applied for a Milhous Scholarship to help him attend Whittier College, a scholarship he could hardly fail to win. It was funded by fifty thousand dollars left to Whittier by his own maternal grandfather and specifically designed to pay for the education of Milhous family members. One of Nixon’s uncles supplied his letter of reference. Whittier College was—and is—an entirely respectable seat of learning, but it was not a name to conjure with. “I had dreamed of going to college in the East,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. Once that dream had ended, and for the rest of his life, he indulged an obsession about entitlement and social class.1

  In the early thirties, with the national economy shuddering, most Whittier students were children of the affluent minority in the local community. The majority of young men in this group aspired to join the Franklins, a literary club that had become a pretext for the sorts of dinners and balls at which tuxedos were de rigueur. As one student put it, the F
ranklins were the “aristocrats of the campus.” Even though he was a member of the Milhous family, Nixon was not invited to join the Franklins. He agreed at once, therefore, when asked to help form a rival society. He became president and founding member of a group of students who called themselves the Orthogonians, a name taken from the Greek word meaning “upright.”

  Membership of the Orthogonians was made up, in Nixon’s words, of men who “had to work their way through college.” Most were football players, with skills that Nixon famously aspired to in vain. Though he made the team, he was remembered as having “two left feet” and sat out most games on the bench.

  It was he who chose the society’s French motto, Ecrasons l’infâme, or “Let us crush infamy,” adapted from the philosopher Voltaire’s call to do battle with the Roman Catholic Church. Nixon claimed to have written the society’s song, although according to a contemporary student newspaper account, someone else was actually responsible. Nixon did select its mascot, a wild boar, and its “4 Bs” slogan, standing for Beans, Brains, Brawn, and Bowels. He was also one of those who dreamed up the society’s induction rite, a test of manhood that involved being stripped naked, chastised with a wooden paddle, and digging up the corpse of an animal and eating its decaying flesh. As a founding member Nixon was exempted from this ritual, which was later banned by the college after a student was seriously injured.

  “They were the haves,” Nixon said of the rival Franklins, “and we were the have-nots.” The truth, however, was that by local standards he was perceived as one of the haves. It was not just that he had a scholarship to Whittier. It was that as the Depression tightened its grip, his family’s fortunes actually improved. The grocery never failed to show a profit. His cousin Jessamyn West thought it ludicrous to suggest Richard was poor at that time. “By some,” she said, the Nixons “were considered rich.” Nixon’s first girlfriend, Ola Welch, said in 1996 that she considered the Nixons “middle-class.” Nixon’s principal college professor, Dr. Paul Smith, believed class was a key factor at Whittier in the thirties, in a way that impinged on Nixon in a special way. “His family,” Smith said, “wasn’t looked down upon, but the Frank Nixon family was in no way regarded at the social level of the Milhouses.” The mother’s name stood for something, while his father was just a belligerent fellow who ran a store.

  By Nixon’s junior year, at a time when only a handful of students at Whittier had cars, he was the proud owner—with his cousin—of a 1930 Model A Ford. The vehicle cost $325, more than most students’ annual fees. While the Franklins wore formal dress for group photographs, the Orthogonians posed in open-necked shirts—to signal their everyman status and, as one member put it, “because none of us owned a tux and didn’t have the wherewithal to rent it. . . .” Nixon, however, owned a tuxedo throughout his time at college and in his senior year even owned two.

  Nevertheless the boy with two tuxedos harped on his supposedly humble origins for the rest of his life. James Bassett, Nixon’s press secretary and adviser in the fifties, called it his “poor boy complex.” As a budding vice president Nixon told Bassett that his wife had to tell him which fork to use at dinner. “My dad was a grocer,” he later said, playing up to Hubert Humphrey in a speech. “You came up the pharmacy way.” He urged a law firm colleague to seek out young lawyers who were “not children of the elite but people who had fought to make their way in the world . . . like you and me.” As president Nixon told his cabinet that only he and the secretary of labor, Peter Brennan, had “come from the working class.”

  His desire to portray himself as such ultimately contributed to a vengeful neurosis. In the White House, Nixon was soon exhorting staff to destroy the “Eastern Establishment.” He recoiled when Robert Bork, who became his solicitor general, was introduced to him as a professor from Yale, one of the universities Nixon had not been able to attend. In a tape-recorded Oval Office conversation he raged against members of the administration who “start sucking around the Georgetown set. . . . They’re disgusting.”

  “The President has said he wants to screw the universities,” a White House contact reported in 1973 to Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, a member of the Joint Chiefs, “especially Harvard, by cutting back research and development money.” Likewise Nixon ordered George Schultz, then running the Office of Management and Budget, to cancel all funding for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “All money stops by Friday. I don’t want a nickel to go to MIT!” Schultz ignored the instruction.

  Nixon flew into a rage when he learned that the president of Harvard, Dr. Derek Bok, was visiting. Told that the professor was a member of the White House Preservation Committee, and that he was meeting with Pat, he was not placated. “He asked me once,” his aide Alexander Butterfield remembered, “ ‘Did one of those dirty bastards ever invite me to his fucking men’s club or his goddamn country club? Not once.’ He was shaking. . . . The hatred was very deep-seated. He didn’t just not like them; he hated them.”

  Even after his resignation Nixon continued to carry on about liberals, intellectuals, and journalists. “They’ll never let up, never,” he told Ken Clawson, his former communications director, “because we were the first threat to them in years. . . . What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid . . . [but] if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change these attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.”

  The irony in Nixon’s obsession with class was that he had himself managed to break into the establishment long before becoming president. By the early sixties he had been welcomed to membership in exclusive Manhattan clubs like the Metropolitan, the Links, and the Recess and had been accepted by two fashionable country clubs, Blind Brook in New York and Baltrusol in New Jersey. In truth Nixon enjoyed consorting with the elite he habitually scorned.

  “He’d love to get people like David Rockefeller in, to call him ‘Mr. President,’ ” recalled William Watts, staff secretary of the National Security Council in the first Nixon presidency. “He loved to have all those real old-core rich around, that had to defer to him. I felt like I was sitting in the throne room. It was very odd.”

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  At Whittier College, ironically, the future conservative president was considered a liberal, and an energetic one. He pushed for changes in old-fashioned rules and for student rights, and he got a black man into the society he had founded. He involved himself in myriad campus activities and was forever working. “Dick lived somewhat abnormally,” a fellow student recalled. “He studied a great deal and worked in the store. It wasn’t uncommon for him to work himself ill.

  “Dick was not universally popular,” said the same contemporary. “He was not what you would call a real friendly guy. Many felt Dick was above them in thinking and that probably he didn’t care to associate with them.” Others thought him “stuck-up,” with “a ruthless cocksureness,” a “wheeler-dealer . . . a big-time operator.” One student, remembering Nixon’s “incredible combination of enthusiasm and energy,” said he “used to wonder if it was wholly genuine and, if not, how much was real and how much was simulated for the benefit of all present.”

  Dr. Albert Upton, who taught Nixon English and literature, urged him to read Tolstoy, and Nixon later claimed to have plowed through most of his massive oeuvre, including War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and much else, during the course of a single summer. Nixon’s favorite was Resurrection, the story of a nobleman’s crisis of conscience when he realizes he is responsible for destroying another person’s life and his decision—after studying God’s laws—to give up his wealth and his position in society so that he can regain his self-respect.

  “He just didn’t do bad things,” Upton said of this perfect student. “It makes you wonder if there wasn’t something wrong.” As the college drama coach, Upton also directed Nixon in several plays in which he displayed “a deep voice and
an old man’s face” beyond his years and an ability to weep to order. “I taught him how to cry,” said Upton. “I told him, ‘Dick, if you just concentrate real hard on getting a big lump in your throat, I think you can cry real tears.’ He did too—buckets of tears. . . . The tears rolled down and dropped off his nose.”

  Nixon starred on the Whittier debating team, traveling with other students—on occasion in a roomy Packard automobile driven by his father—throughout the West. He achieved success by doing his research in advance, changing tactics as the debate developed, and learning to keep his temper in public. Debate was the nearest thing in student life to politics, and some judged him a brilliant public speaker. Others were troubled.

  Years earlier his high school debating coach had been disturbed by Nixon’s “ability to slide round an argument, instead of meeting it head-on. . . . There was something mean in him,” according to Mrs. Clifford Vincent, “mean in the way he put his questions, argued his points.” “To get his point across,” said Mildred Johns, one of his mother’s friends, “he wouldn’t hesitate to twist the truth.”

  A few years later, when Nixon had attained political prominence, a number of people remembered the “dirty debating techniques” of his school days. At Whittier College a fellow student spotted Nixon cheating during a debate. “I remember it well,” said Lois Elliott, the editor of the college newspaper. “I sat in the gallery, and I saw—when Nixon spoke in his rebuttal—that he was quoting from a blank sheet of paper. It was all against regulations and very cunning.”2

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  When he was thirteen, Nixon’s grandmother had given him a picture of Abraham Lincoln and a handwritten verse from Longfellow’s “The Psalm of Life” to hang over his bed: