The Nixons: A Family Portrait
foreword To The Nixons: A Family Portrait
The complexity of Richard Milhous Nixon is legendary. This book unravels some parts of the mystery with a portrait of the 37th President’s ancestral roots and family life that manages to combine fraternal loyalty with human fascination.
Life as seen from the inside of the Nixon-Milhous families has never before been written. The cast of characters is almost Shakespearean in its historical colour and personal depth. At the beginning of the story in and around the Nixon’s Mom n’ Pop grocery store in rural California, we learn about the versatile but irascible father Frank Nixon and his “rough Appalachian ways”; the still deep love of his wife Hannah, whom neighbours called “a Quaker saint”; the redoubtable poetry loving matriarch of the clan, Almira Milhous; and the charismatic eldest son Harold who died of TB on his mother’s 48th birthday, the second loss in the family as 7-year-old Arthur Nixon also passed away from the same disease.
Ed Nixon and his coauthor Karen Olson capture the poignancy and the passion of these tragedies together with the hardscrabble yet ambitious poverty of the future President’s upbringing. When the Nixon family set off for Dick’s graduation at Duke University in 1937, Ed is amazed by the expenditure on gas for the long drive. “I had never before noticed Mom and Dad spending money on something that was not a necessity,” he writes.
Dick is a good older brother and mentor to his youngest sibling. The age and experience gap between them is bridged by many personal bonds and episodes. From the White House years we get accounts of Tricia’s wedding, rides on Air Force One, official banquets for Arabian princes and Apollo astronauts, and an understanding of the President’s private friendships with Bebe Rebozo, Bob Abplanalp and Gavin Herbert. There is not much on Watergate. The subject is apparently “not important”—surely a euphemism for too painful—for the brothers to discuss.
Despite this and other curious omissions from the Nixonian passion play of personal and political dramas, this book is an enthralling read, full of rare insights into Milhous-Nixon family life. Some of the glimpses are quirky, others unconventional. The end result is a portrait of the 37th President and his roots which goes deeper in intimacy and understanding than the writings of most political commentators.
JONATHAN AITKEN
Jonathan Aitken is a former British Member of Parliament, who served in the Cabinet as Treasury Secretary and Defence Minister. He is the author of Nixon: A Life, which won the Churchill Prize for political biography in 1993.
