For Tuesday, read Matthews, ch. 1-5
The Nixon Puzzles
- In just six years, from 1946 to 1952, he went from a not-very-successful small-town lawyer to vice president.
- Hoff (p. 3) says he was "aprincipled" -- meaning?
- Schoen (pp. 12-15) -- a moderate polarizer?
- His relationship with JFK was "mysterious and inexplicable," said Haldeman (quoted in Matthews, p. 20)
Shortly after resigning, he told former aide Ken Clawson:
What starts the process, really are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. Sometimes it's because you're poor or Irish or Jewish or Catholic or ugly or simply that you are skinny.
But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.
You were a good athlete. But I was not and that was the very reason that I tried and tried and tried. To get the discipline for myself and to show the others that here was a guy who could dish it out and take it. Mostly, I took it.
"But once you learn that you've got to work harder than everybody else it becomes a way of life as you move out of the alley and on your way. In your own mind you have nothing to lose so you take plenty of chances and if you do your homework many of them pay off. It is then you understand, for the first time, that you have the advantage because your competitors can't risk what they have already.
Early Life
Born January 9, 1913, in Yorba Linda in a house that his father built from a kit.School
Nixon at Whittier High
- Nixon went to Fullerton Union High, living with an aunt during sophomore year. He had greater success as a debater.
- At the start of his junior year in September 1928, transferred to Whittier High School. He lost his bid for student body president. He often rose at 4 a.m., to drive the family truck into Los Angeles and purchase vegetables at the market.
- Two of his brothers died. Video at 28:00
- Nixon was offered a tuition grant to attend Harvard, but Harold's illness and his mother's absence meant Richard had to work at the store. He attended Whittier College.
- Nixon played football, mostly as a tackling dummy.
- Nixon did drama and debate.
- Nixon was snubbed by the only fraternity, the Franklins; many of the Franklins were from prominent families, but Nixon was not. He responded by helping to found a new society, the Orthogonian Society.
- After graduating summa cum laude with a BA degree in history in 1934, Nixon received a full scholarship to attend Duke Law. he graduated third in his class in June 1937.
Overview and Politics
- By the standards of the time, Nixon was not deprived. He had a BA and a law degree when less than five percent of people over 25 had graduated from college and when most had not even finished high school.
- California and Progressivism
“You asked me if Teddy Roosevelt is my hero. Not in the sense that Wilson is. I think he was our greatest President of this century. You'll notice, too, that he was the best-educated."Nixon recommended Wilson's essay "Leaders of Men."
The competent leader of men cares little for the interior niceties of other people’s characters: he cares much-everything for the external uses to which they may be put. His will seeks the lines of least resistance; but the whole question with him is a question of the application of force. There are men to be moved: how shall he move them? He supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which that power operates. The power will fail if it be misapplied; it will be misapplied if it be not suitable both in kind and method to the nature of the materials upon which it is spent; but that nature is, after all, only its means. It is the power which dictates, dominates: the materials yield. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.
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