Chapter 1Yorba Linda

Foreword

I have spent most of my working life in countries where losing power is fatal.

In Moscow I watched men calculate, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely, what would happen to their families if the arrangement they were part of came apart. In Jerusalem I watched a prime minister survive by never once conceding that survival was in question. In Kyiv, in the winter of 2022, I watched a government that was given three days by every serious analyst in the world decide, without any visible deliberation, to stay in the building. I have been shot at twice and detained once and I have never in twenty years met a politician who did not, at some level he could not have described, believe that the people opposite him were coming to destroy him.

So Richard Nixon was not, to me, an exotic case. He was a familiar one in an unfamiliar country.

What is unfamiliar is what happened to him. He lost, and he was not killed, and he was not imprisoned, and he was not exiled, and he did not have to leave the country or change his name. He went home to a house on a cliff in California with a government-funded staff and a pension he nearly lost and a leg that nearly killed him, and he wrote nine books, and twenty years later a Democratic president took his telephone calls about Russia. From the outside, from the vantage of the places I have reported from, that is the most extraordinary fact about the entire affair, and Americans, who have been arguing about the details for fifty years, almost never mention it.

I came to this book by a route that had nothing to do with any of that. In August 2013 the National Archives in Maryland released three hundred and forty more hours of the Nixon White House tapes and described the release as the final installment. I read the notice in London, on a slow afternoon between assignments, and what caught me was not the content. It was the arithmetic. Three thousand seven hundred hours recorded. Something like two thousand seven hundred released. A thousand hours still held back, and the release described as final anyway, and no one much noticing the discrepancy.

I have spent my career trying to get governments to give me documents. What I could not stop thinking about was that this particular government had not had to be forced. The documents existed because the subject had made them. He had installed the machinery himself, at his own expense, in secret, and he had kept it running for two and a half years, and when it destroyed him he still would not burn the reels. There is no other case like it in the modern history of executive power. Every leader I have ever covered would have understood immediately why you do not do this. Nixon did it on purpose, and the reason he did it is the reason he is worth a book.

He believed the record would clear him.

That belief is not vanity, or not only vanity. It is the belief of a man who has decided, early and permanently, that he is being judged by people who are not applying the rules honestly, and that his only defense is the evidence. It is the belief of the boy at the counter of a failing grocery store watching his father explain, again, that the oil was found on the land after they sold it. It is the belief of the student who was not asked into the club and built another one. It is the belief of the congressman who proved that Alger Hiss had lied, in public, against the entire weight of official opinion, and was hated more afterward, not less. Every stage of the life documented in this book taught the same lesson, and by 1971 he had learned it so thoroughly that he wired his own office.

The thesis of this book is that the two Nixons everybody argues about are one man, and that the argument only stays alive because people keep trying to separate them. The president who opened China and the president who ordered the Fielding break-in are not a statesman and a criminal sharing a body. They are one method, applied to two problems. Build the circuit outside the institution. Tell nobody who does not have to know. 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 by a man flying to Peking under a cover story about a stomach complaint. In September 1971 the same method produced two men with a camera in a psychiatrist's office in Beverly Hills. Nobody in the White House experienced these as different kinds of operation, and the tapes show they did not discuss them as different kinds of operation, and any account that treats one as the achievement and the other as the aberration has already decided the question it is pretending to ask.

I should say what this book is not. It is not a Watergate book. Six of its twenty-two chapters cover the burglary, the cover-up, the tapes and the resignation, which is roughly the proportion those events occupy in the life, and the other sixteen cover the fifty-nine years in which the man was assembled. The scandal is the end of the story and it is not the story. A book that begins in June 1972 cannot explain why anyone thought the operation was worth running, and the reason it was worth running was decided in Yorba Linda and at Whittier College and in a Baltimore office in the autumn of 1945.

It is also not a prosecution. The record convicts him without assistance. What the record does not do, and what I have tried not to do, is patronize him. He was, by a distance, the most intelligent man in most of the rooms he entered. He was a serious strategist with a genuine and unfashionable feel for the way great powers actually behave. He ended the draft, opened China, signed the first strategic arms limitation treaty, created the Environmental Protection Agency, and presided over the fastest school desegregation in American history while campaigning against it. He was also small, and frightened, and vindictive to a degree that his own staff found difficult to manage, and he authorized crimes, and he lied to the country for two years about what he had done, and none of that is in tension with the rest. It is the same man doing what the same man did.

A word on method. Everything in this book comes from the documentary record: the tapes and their transcripts, the papers at Yorba Linda and at College Park, court filings, committee transcripts, contemporaneous journalism, and the memoirs of the participants, which I have used with the suspicion that memoirs deserve. I have conducted no interviews. Where an account rests on a single self-interested witness I have said so in the text. Where the record is contested I have given both versions rather than choosing the one that reads better. Where the record simply stops, which happens more often than the literature admits, I have said that too, because a biography that never admits ignorance is telling you something about its author rather than its subject.

There are eighteen and a half minutes we will never hear. There are roughly a thousand hours still closed. Somewhere in Maryland, in a climate-controlled room, the evidence a president collected against himself is still being catalogued, and every few years another tranche comes out and somebody has to revise a paragraph.

He wanted the record. He got it. This book is written from it.

Vivian Ashcombe London

Chapter 1 · Yorba Linda

Yorba Linda sits on gravel benchland above the Santa Ana River, about thirty miles southeast of Los Angeles, at the eastern edge of what was then Orange County's citrus belt. In 1912 it was barely a place at all. The Janss Investment Company had acquired the land from the rancher Jacob Stern and was selling it off in small farm lots to buyers who wanted orchards; the name on the plat honored the Yorbas, the Californio family whose rancho the ground had been. A citrus town was a bet that water and rail together could turn benchland into money, and the makings arrived in the order a land company's brochure would list them. Pacific Electric tracks reached the townsite in 1910, the end of a branch the interurban ran out through La Habra and Fullerton. A school district was organized in the fall of 1911, its temporary schoolhouse ready for use, except for the seats, by September 12. On August 10, 1912, a Friends church opened with sixty-seven members. In the first years, before the mains were laid, settlers hauled their household water two miles by horse and wagon; the irrigation water ran in a canal of the Anaheim Union Water Company, a concern assembled out of the district's old ditch companies back in 1884, cut along the contour of the hills. The brochures sold the district as citrus land. What the deeds conveyed was benchland, sandy, pebbly, sloping, and colder on winter nights than anyone selling it admitted.

Into this half-made town in 1912 came a thirty-three-year-old former streetcar motorman named Francis Anthony Nixon, called Frank, assembling a house. He had bought eight and a half acres of the tract two years earlier, in 1910, with three thousand dollars lent to him by his father-in-law, and in the early months of 1912 he raised a story-and-a-half Craftsman bungalow on it from a mail-order catalogue, eight hundred dollars is the price the local accounts attach to it, and nine hundred square feet is what he got for the money. Guidebooks have called it a Sears house. The researchers who catalogue America's kit homes have hunted for its pattern through every surviving catalogue, Sears and all the competitors, and never found it, and the maker has never been identified. The best archival account, held by the college he would later attend, says he built it not from a precut kit but from a set of plans bought by post, which would explain the failure to match it, because a plan leaves no inventory behind. The ground is California Historical Landmark 1015. The house itself survives. Downstairs was the bedroom where his second son would be born; upstairs, under the roof, the room his sons would share.

Sixty-five years later, that son opened his memoirs with a single declarative sentence: "I was born in a house my father built." Every word of it was true, and the sentence was the most flattering account of the Yorba Linda years that the record will support. The house was real. The father had built it. Almost nothing else Frank Nixon built there worked.

Frank Nixon was born in December 1878 in Vinton County, Ohio, hill country in the southern part of the state, a son of Samuel Brady Nixon. His mother, Sarah Ann Wadsworth Nixon, died in January 1888, when he was nine. His schooling ended in the sixth grade, his son would say that he had to go to work before he finished it, and for the next two decades he moved from town to town and trade to trade, a hired man wherever he stood, with nothing to sell but his hours. By his mid-twenties he was a motorman on the Columbus streetcars, running an open-vestibule car through Ohio winters with nothing between him and the weather. His feet froze. The frostbite, the family always said, was what finally sent him west: in 1907 he arrived in Los Angeles, and the Pacific Electric hired him onto the Red Cars, on the interurban line between the city and the Quaker colony town of Whittier, the same system whose tracks would reach Yorba Linda three years later.

Whittier was founded twenty years earlier and named for the abolitionist Quaker poet. On Valentine's Day of 1908, in Whittier, the motorman met Hannah Milhous, a twenty-two-year-old student at the Quaker college. Four months later, on June 25, 1908, they married. She left the college two years into her course. He left the Methodists and converted to her Friends meeting.

It is worth setting down plainly what each of them brought to that marriage, because the imbalance never afterward left the family. Hannah Milhous was born on March 7, 1885, near Butlerville, in Jennings County, Indiana, into a family of Quakers who measured their standing in orchards. Her father, Franklin Milhous, was born near Colerain, in Belmont County, Ohio, in 1848, and carried to Jennings County at the age of five; in 1879 he married Almira Park Burdg, who bore him seven children, Hannah among them, and who would outlive him by a quarter century. Franklin was a nurseryman, a man whose trade was the successful cultivation of fruit trees. In 1897, when Hannah was twelve, he moved family and livelihood together to the colony at Whittier, and prospered there. The Milhouses were settled, devout, and comfortable, and their daughter was educated. Frank Nixon at twenty-nine owned no land, no house, and no trade that could not be taken from him by weather. Whatever the Milhouses said of the match, the family recollections on that point were gathered decades later and disagree, the structure of it is in the ledger. When Frank went to buy his ground at Yorba Linda, the money was Milhous money. And the crop he chose to bet it on was the crop his father-in-law had mastered: trees.

The plan was lemons. Frank cleared his rows on the benchland and set out seedling stock. It took poorly. The soil was sandy and pebbly; frost burned the young trees; blight followed the frost. Frank would not spend on fertilizer, the accounts of the ranch, friendly and unfriendly, agree on that, and while the groves around town came into bearing, his stayed thin. By January 1916 Yorba Linda had an estimated five hundred people and a business district with two packing houses shipping fruit. The Nixon acres never produced a paying crop. The nurseryman's son-in-law, planted on Milhous money, ran a grove that failed in a town where groves succeeded.

The second son arrived in the first winter of the venture, on the night of January 9, 1913, in the downstairs bedroom, during what he would describe in his memoirs as "a record-breaking cold snap in our town of Yorba Linda, California." Yorba Linda, he wrote, "was a farming community of 200 people about thirty miles from Los Angeles, surrounded by avocado and citrus groves and barley, alfalfa, and bean fields." Hannah named her sons, by family tradition, for the kings of England: Harold, born in 1909, before the ranch; then Richard, for the Lionheart; then Arthur, in 1918. Edward, the last, would come in 1930. Only Donald, born in 1914, carried his father's name instead, Francis Donald. The household kept the Friends' disciplines of the time: no liquor, no dancing, no swearing. There was a piano in the ranch house all the same; the Milhous side ran to music and languages.

The childhood Nixon remembered in print was close to idyllic, and the sentence everyone quotes is about leaving. "In the daytime I could see the smoke from the steam engines," he wrote of the rail line beyond the groves. "Sometimes at night I was awakened by the whistle of a train and then I dreamed of the far-off places I wanted to visit someday."

He returned to that whistle for the rest of his life. The fullest packaging came in 1968, in a campaign self-portrait delivered in the third person to a television audience: "He hears the train go by at night and he dreams of faraway places where he'd like to go." A father "who had to go to work before he finished the sixth grade" and "sacrificed everything he had so that his sons could go to college." A "gentle, Quaker mother, with a passionate concern for peace," who "quietly wept when he went to war but she understood why he had to go." It was the story of the family as the family wished it heard, and it was not false; it was selected. The record of the boy himself is thinner, and harder.

It preserves a few things exactly. In 1916, when he was three, he fell from a horse-drawn buggy on a turn and a wheel ran over his head, opening a deep cut in his scalp. "I must have been in shock," he recalled later, "but I managed to get up and run after the buggy while my mother tried to make the horse stop." The wound left a scar along the top of his head, and for the rest of his life he combed his hair straight back to cover it.

It preserves, less exactly, the father's temper. The Anaheim Union canal ran near the ranch, and the Nixon boys swam in it, which was forbidden. What happened when Frank caught them survives only in recollection: neighbors interviewed a half century afterward, for what became the Richard M. Nixon Oral History Project at California State University, Fullerton, described him hauling the boys out of the water and throwing them back in, shouting. The tellings vary with the teller, and no version was written down within fifty years of the event; every major biographer repeats one. The temper itself needs no single anecdote to carry it. The recollections gathered from family, neighbors, and customers, Evan Thomas, among the gentlest of the biographers, records the raps on the head, agree that Frank Nixon argued as other men breathed and blamed his luck on forces outside his own fence line. Hannah did not raise her voice. On this, too, the accounts agree, across sixty years of them: quiet, contemplative, the peacemaker of the house. The boys grew up between the father's noise and the mother's silence, and the silence was the authority. It was also the household's lesson in method, there to be observed daily: of the two kinds of power on display, one shouted and failed, and one said nothing and was obeyed.

In the fall of 1919, the year her father, Franklin Milhous, died in Whittier, Hannah took her second son down to the Yorba Linda grade school, six years old. His first teacher, Mary George, remembered the delivery in an oral history taped for the same project a half century afterward: Hannah's instruction was that he was to be called Richard, never Dick. His teachers moved him up from the second grade to the third; the skip left him a year young in every classroom after.

One classroom document in his own hand survives from boyhood, and it repays reading. On October 25, 1925, for an eighth-grade assignment in East Whittier, the twelve-year-old wrote an autobiography. "I was born on January the ninth, nineteen thirteen in the town of Yorba Linda California," it begins, and the house he had left three years before has grown in the remembering: "a big two story building situated in the southwest part of town." A story and a half, in fact; the boy's arithmetic enlarged what the family had lost. The portraits are a child's, and exact. Harold, the eldest, is light-complexioned, fond of travel and machines. Donald, ten, prefers making things to talking. His mother is "a middle aged woman," from Indiana, who had studied languages. His father is "a very talkative man, liking to talk about politics." The one adventure it records is a tree climbed with a cousin while one of his brothers chopped at the trunk; it "gave us quite a scare but we were not hurt." He notes that he had attended three schools already, that his favorite subjects were history and geography, and, at twelve, in a grocer's family, in a town of orchards, one thing more: "I also like debate."

The talkative man's politics did not follow a line. Frank had met William McKinley's campaign as a young man in Ohio in 1896 and counted himself a Republican ever after, a Republican who, by the family's accounting, voted for Woodrow Wilson in 1916, for La Follette, the Wisconsin Progressive, in 1924, and, when the time came, for Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. In the other years he voted the ticket. What held constant was not a party but a posture: the small man against the interests, the wage man against the banks, the argument itself as the point. The arena was the dinner table. Visitors to the Yorba Linda house today are shown the table, and the claim that goes with it is Nixon's own: it was there, he said, that he learned to debate.

By 1922 the arithmetic of the ranch was final. Frank had been taking wage work while the grove failed, stretches in the oil fields that were booming in that corner of the county, and the oil fields underlined the joke of his position: other men were being made rich in those years by what lay under ground near his, and nothing lay under his but gravel. He had entered the tract on borrowed money and he left it in parcels, selling in 1922 and again in 1925. The largest piece went to the Yorba Linda school district, which put a grade school on it. The district bought the remainder, the house included, in 1948.

What the family kept from Yorba Linda was a story. "You know what he was?" Nixon said long afterward. "He was a streetcar motorman first, and then he was a farmer, and then he had a lemon ranch. It was the poorest lemon ranch in California, I can assure you. He sold it before they found oil on it." The inventory is accurate. The last sentence is legend. No strike is recorded on the Nixon acres; the reporters and local historians who have gone looking for the lost Nixon oil have called the story what it is; the documented fate of the ground was a schoolyard, not a derrick. But the legend is itself a piece of the record, because it is the form in which the family chose to remember the failure, not as thin soil and frost and unbought fertilizer, but as a fortune that belonged to the Nixons and went to somebody else. Humiliation, told that way, becomes theft. The Nixon boys were raised on the story.

The move came in 1922. Richard was nine. He set it down three years later in the eighth-grade composition, without commentary and with the family's talent for the brave face: "When I was nine years old, we moved from our old home to East Whittier. It was a very big change but I liked it very much."

East Whittier was not the colony town proper but the crossroads east of it, out among the orange groves on the boulevard that ran toward the Milhous side of the family. Frank borrowed money again, this time for a corner lot where Santa Gertrudes Avenue met Whittier Boulevard, on the automobile road filling every year with more automobiles. He put in gasoline pumps. The pumps paid; gasoline was the one crop on the boulevard that did not depend on soil. Groceries followed the gasoline, shelf by shelf, until the sign over the operation read F. A. Nixon, General Merchandise, and the family possessed, for the first time in its history, a going concern.

The store was the family, organized for retail. Hannah rose early to bake pies for the counter, dozens of a good morning, thirty-five cents apiece, in the family's accounting, and kept the books of her own labor in flour and sugar rather than wages. The boys worked after school and would work there through every year of school they had left: stock, counters, pumps. The store's day began before the school's and ended after it. In Richard's high school years the produce would put him on the road to the Los Angeles markets at four in the morning, buying vegetables before class. Frank ran the register and the conversation, and customers took his opinions with their groceries whether they had asked for them or not. It held. It was the first enterprise Frank Nixon had touched that returned more than it took, and it had one feature the lemon ranch lacked, which no one in the family ever stated aloud because it did not need stating: its capital was not weather, and not Milhous money. It was the unpaid labor of everyone who lived above and behind it.

In East Whittier the boy's record began to accumulate the shape it would keep. He had enrolled in the grammar school there on arrival in 1922; he was elected president of his eighth-grade class; in June 1926 he graduated at its head. The composition from that school year had already named the subjects, history, geography, debate, and the store fixed the hours around them. Whatever else the family had carried down from the benchland, the habit of work had survived the thing it was meant to save.

That was the inheritance Yorba Linda left, and it was paid out in two currencies. There was the ledger: a father who had gone from motorman to farmer to failed rancher to grocer, one borrowed stake at a time, and who now held the one asset that could not fail so long as the family worked it without wages. And there was the story, in which the failure had never been failure at all but a swindle by luck, the oil found after the selling, the fortune always one deed away, always in some other man's ground. A boy could learn either lesson at that counter. Neither was ever written down. What was written down, in a twelve-year-old's hand, between shifts, was a preference: history, geography, debate. The second son, aproned after school, weighing vegetables, kept the name his mother had set at the schoolhouse door: Richard, never Dick.