Fighting Quaker

(See Cover)

"Step right up, folks," the barkers were calling. "Hurree, hurree, hurree!" The Ferris wheel was turning, the roller coaster swooped down its artificial abysses, and the piccalilli was waiting to be judged. But the most up-to-date attraction at the Illinois State Fair last week was a good-looking, dark-haired young man with a manner both aggressive and modest, and a personality to delight any political barker. He seemed to have everything--a fine TV manner, an attractive family, a good war record, deep sincerity and religious faith, a Horatio Alger-like career, which had led him into notable accomplishments on two major campaign issues: corruption and Communism. He was Richard Milhous (pronounced mill house) Nixon, Republican nominee for Vice President.

Nixon (himself once a barker for a "carnie" wheel) had come to Springfield to compete with the Democrats' star attraction, Adlai Stevenson, on his own home grounds. In a broiling sun, Dick Nixon spoke to 9,000 Illinois Republicans. He proved himself no great orator but a hard-hitting performer.

"Adlai Stevenson owes his nomination not to the people but to the bosses," he cried. "Just yesterday he has sat in as an ex-officio member of Harry Truman's cabinet . . . The voice will be that of Stevenson, but the hand will be that of Harry Truman." This charge, said Nixon, would surely be called unfair, but there was a simple way for Stevenson to refute it: "I challenge him to be specific and tell the American people in plain English wherein he disagrees with the Truman-A.D.A. program . . . The people have had enough of his fancy-striped-pants language, meaning all things to all people. They want Stevenson to get down to brass tacks . . ."

Next day it was Stevenson's turn. As usual, he gave a good performance. His English, however, was more polished than plain, and he sidestepped Nixon's specific questions on whether or not he favors Acheson's foreign policy, the Brannan Plan, federal seizure of the tidelands. Comparing Alben Barkley, 74, to Richard Nixon, 39, Stevenson remarked: "The Republican Party is the party which makes even its young men seem old. The Democratic Party is the party which makes even its old men seem young."

Childhood: Dishpan Hands. Dick Nixon hardly seems like an old man, but he is old for his years. He was born in Yorba Linda, near Los Angeles, where his parents had a lemon grove. They wished it had been oranges--which were the promissory golden fruit that had helped attract Dick's maternal grandfather, Quaker Franklin Milhous, to California from his home in Butlerville, Ind. In 1897 he had loaded lumber, doors, windows, cows and horses on a freight car and set out for the promised land. At a Quaker church party, his daughter Hannah met Francis Anthony Nixon, who had also come out from the Middle West. She married him two years later. Their second son, Dick, worked in the lemon grove as a youngster, chopping weeds and caring for the trees. The grove itself turned out to be a lemon. The family moved to Whittier and set up Nixon's Market, a general store and filling station, which is still going strong today. (Nixon's parents, still hale & hearty, have left the store to be managed by their third son, Don.)

Young Dick was a bright student. He made his debating debut in the seventh grade on a boys' team upholding, against the girls, the affirmative of "Resolved, that insects are more beneficial than harmful." In characteristic fashion (he still does his own painstaking research on legislation and speeches), young Nixon went to an entomologist uncle and assembled a formidable body of benign facts about the insect world. The girls' team was routed.

Nixon's mother was firm about church (three times on Sundays and once at midweek). Nixon played the piano for Sunday school, still plays occasionally to relax ("I'm'not as good as President Truman"). He worked his way through Whittier College (present enrollment: 1,200), mostly by helping out in the family store as cashier and delivery boy. Occasionally he helped his mother do the dishes. She recalls: "Richard always pulled the blinds down tight so that people wouldn't see him with his hands in a dishpan."

Mrs. Nixon repaired and pressed the clothes for the whole family, worked in the store during the day, and at night thriftily emptied the shelves of fruit that might spoil in another day and baked it into pies, which she put on sale in the morning. Occasionally she would catch shoplifters, but, instead of turning them over to the police, she would give them a little sermon, always aware that the disgrace of an arrest would hurt their families. Her son reflects that feeling. "Even when I was convinced that Hiss was a traitor," says Nixon, "I couldn't help thinking of his family and his friends, and how hard this was on them."

Law, a Wife & Washington. When Dick's older brother Harold had TB, Mrs. Nixon took him to Prescott, Ariz., and in the summers, Dick joined them, working as a barker for the wheel of fortune at the Frontier Days Rodeo. He learned the knack of drumming up customers, and his booth became the most popular in the show.

The wheel of Nixon's own fortune carried him from Whittier (he graduated second in his class) to a scholarship at Duke University's law school. He lived with three other students in a shack in a wooded patch a mile and a half from the campus.

After Duke (1937), Nixon practiced law in Whittier, and got a lot of divorce cases, to whose more explicit details he listened with acute embarrassment. He also taught Sunday school, joined the junior chamber of commerce, and acted in a Little Theater group. In Night of January 16, he played a district attorney opposite pretty Pat Ryan, a California redhead who, like Dick, had worked her way through college and was a teacher at the local high school. They were married in 1940. A month after Pearl Harbor, Nixon went to work for the OPA in Washington. Says he: "In OPA I learned respect for the thousands of hard-working Government employees and an equal contempt for most of the political appointees at the top. I saw Government overlapping and Government empire-building firsthand."

Fed up with Washington bureaucracy after eight months, and pining for a more patriotic part, Nixon joined the Navy, asked for sea duty, and was promptly assigned to Ottumwa, Iowa. There he learned nothing about the sea but a good deal about the Midwest. Eventually Nixon wound up as an operations officer with SCAT (South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command), which had the difficult and dangerous task of hauling cargo to the combat zones. He spent 15 months in the South Pacific, once, on Bougainville, was under bombardment for 28 out of 30 nights. Says he: "I got used to it. The only things that really bothered me were lack of sleep and the centipedes."

Back in the U.S., he worked for the Navy as a lawyer, terminating war contracts. During one tour of duty in New York, he watched Dwight Eisenhower's triumphal victory parade, without an inkling that he, an obscure lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, would a few years later be campaigning at the general's side.

Political Debut. In November 1945, a Republican fact-finding committee in California's 12th Congressional District was looking for a candidate, preferably a serviceman, to run against popular Democrat Jerry Voorhis (who had held the seat for ten years). A family friend of the Nixons saw the group's ad in a paper, called Dick, then in Baltimore, and asked him whether he was a Republican. Nixon replied that he had voted for Tom Dewey in 1944. In that case, said the friend, Nixon ought to come home and try for the job. Recalls Nixon: "Voorhis looked impossible to beat. He was intelligent, experienced, came from a well-known family. Why did I take it? I'm a pessimist, but if I figure I've got a chance, I'll fight for it."

Dick and Pat fought hard. Short of cash, they lived in a bare little house in Whittier and were beset by a smelly, cannibalistic brood of minks kept by the people next door (says Nixon: "I've never had any use for minks since then, the Truman variety or any other kind"). Against the advice of professional politicians, Nixon took on his opponent in five public debates before audiences largely favorable to Voorhis. Nixon argued against the evil deeds of the New Deal as effectively as he had urged the good works of the praying mantis and the syrphid fly. He beat Voorhis by 15,592 votes.

In Washington, Nixon banded together with a few other freshmen Congressmen to exchange information on what was going on in their various committees and in Congress as a whole. They soon had 15 members, christened themselves "The Chowder and Marching Club," and met informally (there was usually a bottle of whisky but no chowder on the table; Nixon himself rarely takes a drink). By being well informed and determined, the group became a force in the House. Says one charter member: "Fifteen guys can do a lot with members who know little about a given bill."

When he was offered a place on the House Un-American Activities Committee, earnest Dick Nixon had quite a wrestle with himself. On such occasions, he paces up & down, lights one cigarette after another, talks to the ceiling, suddenly whirls around as if he were trying to catch his problem unawares with a new grip. The committee's reputation was low. Its chairman was J. Parnell Thomas, eventually to be indicted and jailed for fraud. Nixon's friend and fellow Congressman, California's Donald Jackson, recalls how Nixon came into his office and started pacing. "He felt the moral obligation to accept," Jackson recalls, "but he asked himself repeatedly, sometimes aloud, if the condemnation of the committee by liberals was sound, if there were the injustices and the irresponsibilities complained of, if the committee could be brought to do a sound job." As Nixon puts it: "Politically it could be the kiss of death, but I figured it was an opportunity as well as a risk, so I took it."

Opportunity came a year and a half later, when a man called Whittaker Chambers testified before the committee that a man called Alger Hiss was a Communist.

The Hiss Case. As Nixon later recalled it, almost all the committee members believed Hiss when he denied Chambers' charges, and the case was almost dropped then & there. Explains Nixon: "I was impressed by Hiss's testimony. But then that night, when I was reading the transcript as a lawyer, I became convinced that he was hiding something. Everything he said was too smooth, too carefully qualified."

Nixon reasoned that if Chambers had known Hiss as well as he said he did, he would know details of Hiss's life and habits that a stranger would not know. In secret session, Nixon drew from Chambers a mass of detailed information about

Hiss. Then Hiss, unaware of what Chambers testified, was asked about certain details of his own life. His facts and Chambers' fell together like tumblers in the lock of a safe.

Most startling was the case of the prothonotary warbler. Chambers remembered that Hiss's hobby was bird watching, and that Hiss had once told him he had seen a prothonotary warbler. Hiss was asked if he had ever seen one. He said he had, and the incident fitted well with Chambers' previous testimony. This was the turning point of the Hiss case. From then on, most of the committee members were convinced that Hiss was lying. After Chambers had produced the microfilms of State Department documents from his famed pumpkin and the Justice Department was fighting with the committee for possession of this new evidence, Nixon--on his way to Panama--hurried back by plane and Coast Guard cutter.

Writes Chambers in Witness: "To [my children] he is always 'Nixie,' the kind and the good, about whom they will tolerate no nonsense. His somewhat martial Quakerism sometimes amused and always heartened me. I have a vivid picture of him in the blackest hour of the Hiss case, standing by the barn and saying in his quietly savage way (he is the kindest of men): 'If the American people understood the real character of Alger Hiss, they would boil him in oil.' "

Do the American people really "understand" about Hiss and about the profound implications of the Hiss case? On this question the man of ordinary common sense may be less confused than many an "intellectual." There is no question that Communists did infiltrate the Government of the U.S., and exercised influence there as well as elsewhere in American life. It is part of Nixon's job to show that if Americans want to rid themselves of Communism and left-wingism at home, they must throw the Democrats out.

Last week the Republican view on this issue was baldly stated by Senator Styles Bridges and Representative Joseph Martin. They wrote: "Throughout the 82nd Congress, the Democratic Administration continued its stubborn resistance to the exposure of Communists, fellow travelers, other subversives and their sympathizers in Government.

"This is part of its long record which coddled Communists at home and appeased them abroad, fought exposure of subversives, employed congressional investigators to whitewash suspects, and permitted Communist spies to enter the country, and even to serve in the Government.

"Such policies gave Russia possession of atomic secrets, built up the Communist menace to the free world, caused the needless sacrifice of American lives in Korea, and put upon us a crushing burden for national defense . . ."

In other words, the Republicans will try to show the tolerance of Communist infiltration issue as a broad and continuing characteristic of the Democratic Party. Part of the Republican ammunition is the failure of Democratic leaders to make certain motions to get themselves off this hook. Secretary Acheson said that he would not turn his back on Alger Hiss. Harry Truman's last word on the Hiss case was to call it a "red herring."

This issue presents Stevenson with one of his most delicate and difficult problems. The problem is further complicated by the fact that Stevenson himself made a deposition in support of Hiss's good reputation when they were acquainted in Washington which was used by the Hiss defense. Stevenson's friends think this action can be defended, and the Republicans will doubtless try to make sure that the Democrats are kept busy defending it. So far, Stevenson has made no effort to change the Truman-Acheson line. Two weeks ago he called for resistance to Communism abroad, and at the same time derided "the pursuit of phantoms among ourselves."

Nixon says: "It's up to Stevenson. If he concedes the gravity of the domestic-Communist problem he can take the Hiss issue right out of the campaign. But if he sticks to the line [ the "phantoms among ourselves"], the Hiss case will be very much an issue. Stevenson is vulnerable, not on a basis of loyalty, but certainly on the basis of judgment."

Since Nixon has been one of the most effective harriers of Communism in the U.S., he is inevitably compared to Joe McCarthy. Some of the anti-anti-Communists have made the mistake of calling Nixon "another McCarthy." There is nothing McCarthyesque about Nixon's methods. He has laid down and followed two rules: 1) "There must be no charge without evidence to support it"; 2) "a charge that is false can harm our case more than it can help." Nixon has been advocating a change of rules to give more protection to people arraigned before congressional committees.

To the Senate. Largely as a result of Nixon's work on the Hiss case, a group of young California Republicans urged him to run for the Senate in 1950. Campaigning vigorously against the Democrats' Actress-Politician Helen Gahagan Douglas, Nixon toured the state in a station wagon, while Mrs. Douglas used a helicopter. Nixon developed a memorable ploy against her, obviously a major addition to Lifemanship.* He audibly and publicly worried about her health and, as a friend describes it, "He'd get a real sad look on his face whenever he bumped into her and say, 'It's awfully hard on a woman, this campaigning.' " He beat her by 680,947 votes.

In the Senate he has fought Government corruption by backing legislation to i) waive the statute of limitations on corruption cases; 2) enable federal grand juries to investigate without waiting for permission from the courts or the Justice Department; 3) make it an offense for a Government employee to accept gifts from a political party.

At Home. Nixon is a hard worker, never goes to the movies, rarely allows himself a weekend trip. Once, when he promised his two daughters (Patricia, 6, and Julie, 4) a picnic on a hot day, they wound up in his air-conditioned Senate office. Nixon just misses being handsome (he has fat cheeks and a duckbill nose), but he is what women call "nice-looking"; he gives an impression of earnest freshness.

The Nixons live in a spick & span, two-story white brick house at Spring Valley, a Washington suburb. Nixon no longer does the dishes, and is generally bad at fixing things around the house, but (after his strict Navy training) always neatly hangs up his clothes. Pat Nixon is a good and enthusiastic campaigner, and .so is the rest of the family (although Julie has lately taken a dislike to photographers). During Nixon's senatorial campaign, when all the Nixons were on TV, Julie thoughtfully picked her tiny nose in full view of the TV camera. Said her father: "Julie honey, you have either just won or lost me the election."

"It isn't as if I were running for office myself," said Nixon in Denver last week. "I am out here to help General Eisenhower get elected." No passive running mate, Nixon has been conferring with Eisenhower steadily during recent weeks, has offered firm and sometimes critical suggestions on how the campaign should be run. Nixon himself is preparing to travel up & down the land, particularly to places that Eisenhower will not cover. Nixon will go to New Hampshire this week, also intends to campaign in Republican Maine--a state, like a woman, he thinks, should never have the feeling of being taken for granted.

Nixon's main theme will be the main Republican theme: the need for a change. He will ask Americans to stop traveling the Democrats' route, and get on another train where the engineer has a firmer grip on the throttle, clearer ideas of where he is going.

Back home in Whittier last week, the folks were confident. Said Frank Nixon: "With Eisenhower and him together, they'll make things snap. They'll win--I don't care if he is my boy."

* A form of social jujitsu invented by British Humorist Stephen Potter (TIME, June 4, 1951). For news of another promising Potter disciple, see BUSINESS.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.