Word: nixon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Richard Nixon was courting Pat Ryan back in Whittier. Calif., they belonged to a group of young people who held readings of plays and stories. At one of these home entertainments, the featured attraction was Beauty and the Beast, with Dick Nixon starring in the second of the two title roles. A great many of Nixon's adversaries are still convinced that this was perfect type casting...
...animosity toward Nixon harbored by his opponents has long been bitter and somewhat mystifying. In this biography, already distinguished for having drawn the wrath of Chief Justice Earl Warren (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), New York Herald Tribune Reporter Earl Mazo recalls that when Nixon gave the 1954 commencement address at Whittier College, two separate receiving lines were necessary-for those who were ready to shake Nixon's hand and for those who refused to. This book, which is basically friendly toward Nixon, may switch some readers from the non-handshaking to the handshaking column. But most of all, what...
...Cold Fish. Maybe one of Dick Nixon's troubles is that he is too perfect. His God-fearing parents of modest means, the excellence of his record in school, his beginnings as a lawyer in Whittier (known as "Ye Friendly Town"), and his liking for pineapple milk shakes are all almost too good to be true. He has an amazing degree of self-control and neatness-the secretary of his old Whittier law firm recalls that when he came to work, the first thing he did was to take several hundred books off the shelves to dust them...
More serious have been the charges that Nixon is unprincipled, particularly in campaign attacks on opponents. Mazo feels that at times Nixon has "resorted to malignant innuendo"; yet he also makes it plain that Nixon has said no more than other politicians in the heat of a campaign. Possibly Nixon gets blamed more readily because the smooth precision of his speeches always suggests that he knows precisely what he is saying, while the snarls of a Harry Truman, for instance, are often ascribed to a sort of folksy hot temper. Yet Nixon has quite a temper of his own. Once...
...Iron Butt. It was at law school, too, that Nixon earned a fellow student's compliment: "You've got an iron butt, and that's the secret of becoming a lawyer.'' The Mazo biography recalls once again that many who have tried to kick Nixon have only succeeded in stubbing their toes on that iron butt. He has been lucky, but he also managed to escape numerous brushes with political disaster thanks to political skill and courage. Mazo reports, for instance, how in 1956 Eisenhower suggested to Nixon that he might want a Cabinet post...