# The Orthogonians *Richard Nixon and the Politics of Resentment* — Legendary Biographies No. 234 - **Subject:** Richard Milhous Nixon - **Written by:** Vivian Ashcombe - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / American Politics - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 230 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-244-1) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-245-8) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/234-the-orthogonians.html ## About this book Richard Milhous Nixon was born on January 9, 1913, in a house his father built in Yorba Linda, California, and died in New York on April 22, 1994. He was the 36th Vice President of the United States, the 37th President, and the only person to resign the office. He opened relations with China, ended American ground involvement in Vietnam, signed the first strategic arms limitation treaty, created the Environmental Protection Agency, ended the draft, and ran a criminal conspiracy out of the Oval Office that he recorded himself committing. The argument everyone has about Nixon — the two-Nixons argument — only survives because people keep trying to separate them. Vivian Ashcombe's biography refuses the split. There is one operating method, learned early and never abandoned: build the circuit outside the institution, tell nobody who does not have to know, and assume the people who would stop you are not acting in good faith. In July 1971 that method produced the greatest diplomatic reversal of the century, executed under a cover story about a stomach complaint. In September 1971 it produced two men with a camera in a psychiatrist's office in Beverly Hills. The book begins where the method does, at Whittier College in 1930, where a student who had not been asked into the campus club founded a rival one, counted the people who had been left out, named them the Orthogonians, gave them a song, and won. Sixteen of its twenty-two chapters cover the fifty-nine years in which the man was assembled; six cover the burglary, the cover-up, the tapes and the resignation. The scandal is the end of the story and it is not the story. He installed the taping system himself, in secret, at his own expense, kept it running for two and a half years, and would not destroy the reels when they destroyed him, because he believed the record would clear him. It did not. It made him the most documented consciousness in the history of the presidency, and this book is written from it. ## Contents 1. Yorba Linda 2. Two Brothers 3. The Orthogonians 4. Duke And The Navy 5. The Twelfth District 6. Hiss 7. The Pink Lady 8. Checkers 9. The Vice President 10. Sixty 11. The Wilderness 12. The Chennault Affair 13. The Silent Majority 14. Cambodia 15. China 16. The Plumbers 17. Forty-Nine States 18. The Cancer 19. The Tapes 20. August Nine 21. The Pardon And The Interview 22. Saddle River ## Questions **Who is The Orthogonians about?** Richard Milhous Nixon. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Orthogonians — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,356 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 71,000 words, 22 chapters, 230 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Vivian Ashcombe spent twenty years as a foreign correspondent before she started writing books. She reported from Moscow, Jerusalem, and Kyiv for the Financial Times and The Atlantic, with stretches embedded in Tehran and Damascus. Her biographies trace power and the people who hold it. Drawing on decades of notebook-shorthand and archival research, her books examine the intersection of public policy and private influence. In her biographies, including The Consulate, The Moscow Exile, and The Pont de l'Alma Tunnel, she reconstructs historical events through meticulous primary-source analysis. She lives in south London, where she spends her spare time restoring mid-century furniture and volunteering at a local community archive.