CHAPTER 1 Lives of Great Men Remind Us In May of 1929, the Latin Club of Whittier High School celebrated Virgil''s two thousandth birthday with a banquet and a production of the story of Aeneas and Dido from the Aeneid. The students wore togas and ate with their hands; the dry California hills passed for ancient Rome. Richard Nixon, the top student in the club, played Aeneas, Trojan hero and founder of Rome, and a girl named Ola Florence Welch played Dido, queen of Carthage. Virgil''s Aeneid imagines the ill-­fated romance of Aeneas and Dido. Dido is under the sway of Juno, who stands for domesticity and marital fidelity. Aeneas is ruled by Venus, goddess of passionate, sexual love. Dido beds Aeneas and regards herself as married. Aeneas, rather coldly, abandons Dido to fulfill his greater destiny.

("To Italy I must go. There is the fatherland I must love.") Bereft, Dido throws herself on a funeral pyre, the gods'' reckoning for her hapless devotion. It is doubtful that Nixon, age sixteen, was pondering the complexity of human nature and the vagaries of passion and commitment as he took the stage in the Whittier High gym. He had other worries. His feet hurt. It had taken both Latin teachers several minutes to tug the size-­9 silver boots over Nixon''s size-­11 feet. "The hour on stage in them was agony beyond belief and almost beyond endurance," Nixon recalled.

Worse, Nixon was supposed to take Dido in his arms, on stage, in public. He had never kissed a girl before, or even close--­Whittier was an upright Quaker town and Nixon was bashful. When Aeneas in his toga and too-­small boots awkwardly reached out to embrace Dido, the student audience, heretofore bored, erupted in catcalls, hoots, and derisive laughter. Cheeks burning, the leading couple had to stop until the clamor died down. Nixon later described the performance as "an unbelievably horrendous experience." As the curtain fell to polite applause, the desperate-­to-­please high school junior volunteered to play the piano to entertain the disgruntled audience. "I''ll do anything to make the party a success," he told one of the Latin teachers. He was humiliated, however, and he lost his temper when one of the teachers criticized his clumsy performance.

Such a painful experience might have ended the thespian ambitions of any high school student (and Nixon did take away a lifelong aversion to wearing boots). But Nixon went on to act in several plays in college, with growing assurance and emotional range. Indeed, in 1952, when Nixon publicly wept after clearing his name from calumny with the so-­called Checkers Speech, his old acting coach, Albert Upton, exclaimed, "That''s my boy! That''s my actor!" Nixon''s dramatic debut was a crisis, but for Richard Nixon, crisis was already normal--­to be expected; endured; even, as time went on, welcomed. Defeat was what one overcame; rejection was to be reversed, if not avenged. Two months before the Latin play, Nixon had been the choice of the Whittier High School faculty to become student body president. Nixon was responsible, dutiful, and attentive to his elders. But at the last moment, another boy, a popular athlete named Robert Logue, had entered as a surprise candidate and won the students'' votes. Nixon, who had been nicknamed "Gloomy Gus" by a few of the girls, had to settle for the position of "administrator," appointed by the faculty.

In photos in the Whittier High yearbook, the Cardinal and White, Logue looks like a tanned Adonis, with a confident smile, cleft chin, and swept-­back blond hair. In his photo, the dark-­haired Nixon looks young and anxious. One of the girls who had voted for Bob Logue was Ola Florence Welch--­Queen Dido. At the time of the election, she had written in her diary, "Oh how I hate Richard Nixon." She had been mortified by her stage embrace with Nixon. "We never practiced it. When we came to do it, it was very awkward and the kids went to pieces. I just about died," she recalled.

But when it was over, after briefly lashing out at his carping teacher, Nixon calmed down and grew purposeful. "He never said a word about the play but he insisted that I must come over and meet his folks immediately," Ola Florence later recounted. Nixon wrote her a letter, apologizing for his "caddish behavior" (getting mad at the teacher) and explaining why, as he put it, he was "so cracked up about you. . . . You are not a boy chaser. You use your brains to good purposes.

You never show your anger to anyone. . . ." He did not say anything about her looks, which, judging from photos, were striking, almost sultry. Ola Florence reconsidered her opinion of Nixon. She decided that the dark-­haired, brooding boy was "really quite handsome" and that he was interesting, articulate, and unusual. They began going steady and remained a couple all through college.

Indeed, while the romance was rocky, they would come close to marrying. Aides to President Nixon like to reminisce and joke about Nixon''s oft-­expressed dislike for Ivy Leaguers, particularly graduates of Harvard. In his memoir, H. R. Haldeman, Nixon''s chief of staff, describes the president exclaiming, "None of them in the Cabinet, do you understand? None of those Harvard bastards!" Alexander Butterfield, a presidential assistant, recalled being summoned to the Oval Office after Nixon had somehow heard that the president of Harvard, Derek Bok, was on the White House premises. "What is that son of a bitch doing here?" Nixon demanded. Butterfield explained that Bok was a member of the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, and that Harvard had donated some paintings. "Never again!" cried Nixon.

"How did he get in here in the first place?" John Ehrlichman, another top Nixon aide, recalled that "Nixon used to talk about the Eastern Establishment, but a lot of good people came from Harvard and similar places. He took them on, muttering and chirping all the time, about how deplorable it was, but he took them on and confided in them." Indeed, Theodore White noted that Nixon hired far more Harvard men than all the Harvard men who had been president (the two Adamses, the two Roosevelts, and Kennedy). Nixon chose as his foreign policy adviser a Harvard grad and Harvard professor, Henry Kissinger, and an equally intimidating Harvard professor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as his first domestic policy adviser. This was ironic but actually not surprising. Nixon was smarter, more intellectual, more open to ideas than almost any president who had come before him, including the ones who had gone to Harvard. At graduation from Whittier High in June 1930, Nixon won the Harvard Club of California''s award for outstanding all-­around student, "which will probably irritate many of my friends who did go to Harvard," Nixon recalled a half-­century later. The award entitled Nixon to apply for a tuition scholarship from Harvard (he received a similar offer from Yale).

But Nixon had to stay home. It was the Depression, and there was no money for travel or living expenses. Nixon was not poor, exactly, but his family was cash-­strapped. Frank, his blustery, bullying father, was a rolling stone who had worked a number of low-­paying jobs, including as a trolley car conductor, factory hand, and oil roustabout. His mother Hannah, born to more genteel circumstances, endured lean times with a kind of tense grace. Frank would loudly denounce his bad luck and all who caused it; Hannah would smile sweetly, if a bit grimly, and keep her resentments bottled up. Frank had planted some failing lemon groves in the thin soil of Yorba Linda in 1913, the year Nixon was born. The tiny town to the east of Los Angeles smelled sweetly of orange blossoms in the spring, but in the fall, when the Santa Ana--­the fierce wind the Indians called "Devil''s Breath"--­blew in off the desert, young Nixon could hear rocks bouncing off the side of the little bungalow his father had built.

The dust seeped in everywhere. On many nights, Hannah had to serve a dinner of fried mush. Frank Nixon gave up the citrus groves and started up a gas station and grocery store on the road at the edge of Whittier, a nearby college town nestled amid eucalyptus and palm trees on a steep hillside. In the boom-­and-­bust of California''s Southland of the 1920s, the gas station prospered. There had been enough money to send Richard''s older brother, Harold, back east to Mount Hermon, a Christian boarding school in Massachusetts. Harold Nixon was tall, blond, and handsome. The girls "swooned over him," Richard recalled. Harold was fun-­loving and mischievous, outgoing and popular.

He was a hellraiser and a cut-­up. Richard, as a little boy, was the opposite. He was solemn and fastidious and preferred his own company. His cousin Jessamyn West observed that "he didn''t seem to want to be hugged." He dressed in starched white shirts, and he carried his shoes in a bag when he went barefoot. He complained to his mother that other boys on the school bus smelled. "He was very fussy, always neat," his mother Hannah recalled. "He seemed to carry quite a little weight for a boy of his age.

" If there is a lasting impression of Richard Nixon as a boy, it is one of solitariness. Friends and relatives remember him lying by himself in the grass, staring up at the sky, or wandering past the clusters of playing boys, lost in his own thoughts. He was a stickler for order. His uncle recalled that when the Nixon cousins were playing with a football, young Richard, age eight or so, took away the ball and sat by himself on the porch, insisting that he would give it back only when the others played by the rules. The sad-­faced boy with the unruly shock of black hair s.