The Arrogance of Power Read Online Free Page B

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 fivethousand 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.
    â€œMy 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