The Arrogance of Power Read Online Free Page A

“thee and thou”-ing Quakers, staunch in adherence to tradition, stern in their discipline, and so fiercely clannish that they conceded only reluctantly the biological necessity of marrying outside the Milhous bloodline.
    Hannah was regarded as a quiet, dutiful daughter, who talked of becoming a teacher until, at the age of twenty-three, she dropped out of college to marry Frank Nixon. Frank, then twenty-nine, was of humbler stock. He was one of five children of an impoverished Ohio family, Methodists with combined English, Irish, and Scots roots. He had left school at fourteen to earn a living wherever he could find it. When he was twenty-seven, a job as an omnibus motorman ended after he suffered frostbite while driving at night on an open platform. He led fellow workers in a struggle for better conditions, then left for the warmer climate of Southern California. He roomed in a boardinghouse run by Quakers where, at a Quaker Valentine’s party in 1908, he met Hannah Milhous and wooed and wed her in less than four months.
    The bride not only was “marrying below her station,” as one local put it, but—as a woman who had never once gone out with a man before—had fallen for a fellow who, by his own boast, was currently seeing five girls at once. Frank was to be remembered as a “hot man,” a pincher and a squeezer offemales, a “horny bastard,” according to a local lawyer, who would later give up dancing because he became “instantly aroused . . . when his arms went around a woman.”
    Hannah married Frank in the face of her parents’ opposition. Her teenage sister Olive, reflecting the outrage of the family and local Quakers, carved the words “Hannah is a bad girl” on a pepper tree in the yard. Relations eventually improved, however. Hannah’s father provided the couple with a parcel of land to launch them, and the babies soon started to arrive.
    There were to be five children, all boys: Harold, born a year after the wedding; Richard, born during a freak cold snap four years later; Donald in 1915; Arthur in 1918; and Edward—a surprise late arrival—in 1930, when Hannah was forty-five. All but Donald were named after English kings of history or legend. In Richard’s case, Hannah was to explain, she had in mind King Richard the Lionheart, warrior hero of the Crusades.
    As Hannah recounted it, it was tough growing up in the Nixon family. She recalled having had nothing to serve but cornmeal, night after night. Richard once told a reporter of “going to bed many nights after eating only a slice of bread covered with tomato sauce, of knowing what hunger was.” “We were poor,” he said on another occasion. “We had very little.” On other occasions he came closer to the probable truth. “It’s been said our family was poor,” he told the columnist Stewart Alsop, “but we never thought of ourselves as poor. We always had enough to eat, and we never had to depend on anyone else.”
    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