The Arrogance of Power Read Online Free

undertaken here to prejudge the man, but rather to point up an inherent difficulty faced by anyone who strives to write about him. In many ways Nixon has left his biographers much more to work with than most politicians. His autobiographical work is massive and illuminating, as are the books produced by those who knew him well. Some of those writers, however, are themselves prone to lying; their number includes convicted perjurers. Then there is the unique bounty of the White House tapes. They are priceless raw material, but they too are shot through with Nixonian lies—not all of them easy to identify even now.
    Truth is always elusive for a biographer. It is generally more accessible, though, in the smaller body of material left behind by leaders considered to have been fundamentally honest—a Truman, a Ford, or a Carter—than in the extensive record that is the legacy of a man known to have been a chronic liar. To travel Richard Nixon’s life requires, more than for most subjects, a careful passage through a minefield of lies, lies of varying degrees of seriousness, lies self-serving but in the end self-defeating.
    John Ehrlichman made his observation that Nixon may have lost touch with the truth in 1978, when Nixon’s two-volume autobiography was published. He referred in particular to what the former president had written about his own family. “Read that description of his family,” Ehrlichman told the writer Paul Theroux. “They’re all perfect, right? But what man can say his family’s perfect? Those people are human . . . he makes them into waxwork dummies . . . if he doesn’t come clean about them, how can he come clean about anything else?”
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    The picture of Richard’s boyhood and family life comes down to us, as must most such memories, largely from the family itself and, above all, from the adult Nixon and his mother, Hannah. Their interviews, even the earliest ones, were given with an eye to generating favorable propaganda for a budding politician.
    The acknowledgments page of one early biography, by Bela Kornitzer, gushes with thanks to Nixon and his “great and dedicated” mother. Hannah Nixon cheerfully joined in propagating the yarn about the missed fortune in oil supposedly discovered under the family property after it had been sold. “It’s been a campaign ever since he was born,” she admitted. “All his life, I’ve been his campaigner.” In years to come, incongruous in an otherwise simple decor, a massive, translucent, three-dimensional color photograph of Richard—illuminated at the touch of a button—hung in her house.
    For his part, Nixon forever extolled Hannah’s virtues, which included her pie-making ability—reporters noted that the pies he claimed his mother had gotten up at 5:00 A . M . to bake changed from apple to lemon, and from lemon to cherry, as he moved from one rally to another. Aides were struck by how often Nixon spoke of Hannah even when he was not in the public eye. He was still going on about her, tears welling in his eyes, as he approached his eightieth birthday. “My mother taught me about hard work, endurance, and patience. . . . She sacrificed everything for us. She worked like a dog, through pain and tears and you name it. She was so strong because she put it all in God’s hands. She never gave up. . . . I always knew that women were the stronger sex.”
    Hannah Milhous Nixon—Richard was the only one of her sons to bear her maiden name—came from a long line of Quakers. Her ancestors were Germans who migrated first to Ireland, then in the eighteenth century to what was to become Pennsylvania, and then from one community of Friends to another until they finally settled in California. Hannah was one of nine children born to a prosperous rancher and his wife. Her father’s generation was a tight-knit family of