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Richard Nixon/Frank Gannon Interviews, February 9, 1983 [Day 1 of 9]
interviewer: Frank Gannoninterviewee: Richard Nixon
producer: Ailes Communications, INC.
date: February 9, 1983
minutes: approximately 7 hours
extent: ca. 698kb
summary: This interview, comprising six video tapes, or just over 7 hours, is the first in a series of taped interviews which extend over a total of more than 30 hours. Donated by Jesse Raiford, president of Raiford Communications, the interviews took place nearly a decade after Nixon’s resignation, and were conducted with the benefit of some historical perspective and without media hype. They were conducted by Frank Gannon, special assistant and trusted friend of President Nixon. The first three video tapes contain discussions which mainly relate to Nixon's early life in California, focusing on his family, his childhood friends, and his experiences working at the "Nixon Market". As the interview continues on through tapes 4 - 6, Gannon leads the discussion toward broader topics, including U.S. presidents and foreign leaders, the Great Depression, World War II, VJ Day, the Viet Nam War, and anti-Semitism in Russia. Nixon and Gannon also discuss such topics as the Pumpkin Papers, the Hiss Case, the Checkers speech, and the Hollywood Ten.
repository: Walter J. Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia Libraries (Main Library)
collection: Richard Nixon Interviews
permissions: Contact Media Archives.
Feb. 9, 1983
Day 1, Tape 1
00:02:06
[Frank Gannon]
This is the first in a
series of several tapings which will extend over several months and several
hours with President Nixon. In the subsequent sessions, we'll talk about some
of the domestic and foreign leaders that he's known and get his insights into
their lives and careers. In this first session, we will begin at the beginning
with his early life and political career. To begin at the beginning, do you
have a first conscious memory?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:03:39
[Richard Nixon]
Well, curiously enough,
my first memory is of running. I recall that when I was about three or three-and-a-half
years of age that my mother was driving a horse and buggy, a very fast horse.
She was carrying my younger brother, who was then one, Don, on her lap, and
a neighbor girl, who was about twelve, was holding me. The buggy turned a
corner and the horse took off and the neighbor girl dropped me. I fell out
of the buggy. I got a crease in my scalp, and I jumped up afterwards, and
I was running, running, trying to catch up, because I was afraid to be left
behind. Incidentally, I had a wound from that for many years thereafter. I
wasn't able to part my hair on the left due to the fact that I had about fifteen
stitches down that scalp.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:03:36
[Frank Gannon]
Didn't you - in the 1946
campaign, didn't you -- weren't you going to mention that in a -- in a biography
and didn't your press secretary suggest that you not?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:03:46
[Richard Nixon]
Oh, yes, the suggestion
was made that, Oh, you can't tell them that you got hit in the head
by a carriage or wheel, because they'll think that that's why there's something
wrong with your head.
And so I haven't told that story too often lately.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:04:00
[Frank Gannon]
Didn't - actually, that
did work against Wayne
Morse, didn't it?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:04:04
[Richard Nixon]
Yes, Joe
McCarthy in -- I thought -- one of his attacks that I thought was out
of line -- they weren't all out of line but this one certainly was -- he said, The
trouble with Wayne Morse is that he got kicked in the head by a horse sometime
,
and that was why he was a little nutty.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:04:21
[Frank Gannon]
Your -- in your memoirs,
you wrote about your parents that whoever said that opposites attract was
describing the two of them. We have some photographs of your mother
here. The first one, I think, was taken as a girl in Indiana and the next
one is a group portrait, very characteristic of the times, taken in Whittier,
when she was a teenager, and the last one, I think, is also of her at that
same time. It's remarkable how much she looks like Julie,
I think, in these pictures.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:05:00
[Richard Nixon]
Yes, she does.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:05:03
[Frank Gannon]
Do -- what do you think
of -- what characteristics do you think of when you think of your mother in
that period, in the early years?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:05:14
[Richard Nixon]
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Well, I have said that
she was quite a remarkable woman, and I guess most of us say that about our
mothers and really feel it, and each of them is, each in a different way.
But I think in her case those characteristics that stand out, among many,
are, first, great strength, great kindness. She had a soft manner about her
in her speech and the way she acted. I never recall the time when she raised
her voice in anger about anything, but she could be very, very convincing
in speaking very, very softly about something with which she disapproved.
And in addition to that, she had a great capacity for love which extended
far beyond her husband, whom she loved dearly, her children, for whom she
would do anything. She -- that capacity for love seemed to emanate to everybody,
to her sisters, to those she cared for when my brother was sick, and all of
this made her develop characteristics that some friends used to say -- they
used to tell me, you know, "Hannah", which was her name, "is a Quaker saint".
Day 1, Tape 1
00:06:32
[Frank Gannon]
Did -- I think you wrote
somewhere that were she alive today that she wouldn't support the strong law
and order ethic that underlies a lot of contemporary politics.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:06:46
[Richard Nixon]
She had too much compassion
to do that. That's true. As a matter of fact, I recall an incident at the
time that we had the grocery store, and we were working there and one of our
customers, whose children were good friends of mine in school and of Don's,
my brothers, she found had been shoplifting. And under the circumstances the
sheriff came by, and she mentioned it to him, and he said, "Well, you'll have
to report this." And she says, "I won't do it, because it will be terrible
for her and for her children." So one day when the lady came in and what she
picked up, incidentally, was so small -- it was just a kleptomaniac problem,
because they weren't poor, not by the standards of those days. She had a pound
of butter and a little -- a -- and some eggs and some cheese and she had slipped
it into the bag and she took it out and had it -- checked it through. My mother
followed her out of the car and she said, "I wonder if you would like to pay
me for those things?" The woman burst into tears and said, "Please don't tell
my husband. He would kill me and it will ruin the boys." And my mother said,
"Don't be concerned." She says, "How much do you think you've taken?" And
the woman estimated about seventy-five dollars' worth. She says, "I'll pay
you back." And for the next year she paid her back at five dollars a month
until it was all paid. The boys never heard about it. Her husband didn't hear
about it, and, of course, she didn't continue to come in the store. But that
was the way my mother would do it. She would never enforce the law if some
other way you could work the thing out.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:08:38
[Offscreen voice]
Excuse me, gentlemen.
Could we fix the mike cable just for a second? Keep rolling tape. Go ahead
and fix that mike. That's perfect. If it'll hold, that's perfect. Okay, Frank,
we'll come up to camera two and keep right on going.
Day 1, Day 1, Tape 1
00:09:49
[Frank Gannon]
Your mother was a very
community-minded woman, but she was also intensely private, even, I think,
in her praying.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:09:57
[Richard Nixon]
Oh, she certainly was.
She never believed in wearing religion on her sleeve. We went to church a
great deal, I must say, and she insisted on that, as did my father. I recall,
for example, we used to go to Sunday school and church in the morning on Sunday,
and Christian Endeavor at church in the evening, and then even go to prayer
meeting sometimes in the middle of the week. But, on the other hand, when
it came to praying, first, we always had silent grace at table, except on
occasion she would have each of the boys repeat a verse so that she could
be sure that we were learning our verses. And when she prayed, she would often
go, as the "Bible" indicates you should, into the closet and close the door.
She never prayed publicly.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:10:49
[Frank Gannon]
Your father
-- many of the people who remember him think of his most prominent characteristic
as his temper, and I gather that even in the store you had to sort of insulate
him from the customers.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:10:52
[Richard Nixon]
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Well, he was argumentative.
He was combative. He was competitive. He -- he was a character. There's no
question about that, the very opposite of my mother in that respect. And she
often had to soothe ruffled feathers of customers who came in because my father
would pick arguments with them. He loved to talk about politics, or anything,
for that matter. And she sometimes, when people would come into the store
that he was having a running argument with, one or the others of us would
rush up to wait on that customer to assure my dad didn't get to them. And
that's the way we handled him. But, on the other hand, don't get the wrong
idea about him as a real man. He, too, was remarkable in his way. You know,
he -- my mother understood him. My mother was quite well educated for those
times. She was proficient in Greek and in Latin and in German. She also knew
something about the piano, helped me a bit in that respect. She had been to
college for two years and then got married before finishing. My father only
went through the sixth grade.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:12:11
[Frank Gannon]
We have a photograph here
of him, taken, I think, shortly after he moved to Whittier. He'd had a lot
of interesting jobs before that, hadn't he?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:12:18
[Richard Nixon]
Well, as a matter of fact,
he went only to the sixth grade not because he was dumb, but because his mother
died of tuberculosis when he was about eight or nine years old. And from then
on he was shunted from family to family, and he worked in every kind of a
job. He worked as a streetcar motorman in Columbus, Ohio. He worked in the
wheat fields in Colorado. He worked in the oil fields. He was a excellent
carpenter. As a matter of fact, he built the house that I was born in. He
was the greatest fireplace maker that Yorba Linda or anybody ever had. He
used to make fireplaces for all the people when they were building fireplaces
in their houses. And then, of course he was one who was always ahead of the
times. He bought the first tractor in Yorba Linda, and then he contracted
out to all the others to do work with tractors when others were still using
horses. He was one who bought the first -- built the first service station
and store between Whittier and La Habra when people -- other people didn't
see that this was a real money-maker. So, as I say, we -- I think that the
boys, all of us, inherited from our mother certainly some of her fine characteristics,
but we also inherited from our father some of his characteristics. In my case,
I guess I'd have to credit him with the competitive spirit, with the combativeness,
et cetera.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:13:45
[Frank Gannon]
Didn't he believe strongly
in work, the importance of work, above all else, even to the exclusion of
labor-saving devices?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:13:53
[Richard Nixon]
Oh, yes. Oh, you can say
that again. Not only did he believe in work, but he had worked all his life
himself. That didn't mean that he didn't have concern about people that couldn't
get a job. You know, his bark was much louder than his bite, and while the
tramps would come along, as they did in those days, particularly in the Depression,
my mother always fed them and he always insisted they do a little work. And
his feeling was that if you worked hard, you could get a job and you could
keep it. And as far as labor-saving devices were concerned, you see, in those
years, in the Depression, we weren't too aware of it, of course. But I can
remember very well he said the way to get more jobs is not to have all these
machines that dig ditches, get people out there to dig those ditches, that's
the way to have jobs. So he was -- he would have done very well in India,
where they also oppose labor-saving devices.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:14:53
[Frank Gannon]
Did they have discussions
later on about moving back to Pennsylvania, where I think your mother
had fond memories of a farm and he had very realistic --
Day 1, Tape 1
00:15:03
[Richard Nixon]
Oh, they had discussions
not only of moving to Pennsylvania but just of going to a farm generally.
My mother had the most pleasant, almost mystical, memories of her growing
up on a farm in Indiana. And she remembered all the nice things about it --
the harvest time and the springtime and the snow and so forth -- and she used
to talk about it and dream about it and so forth, because she was twelve years
old before she left Indiana. And so she used to say to my dad, says, "We've
got to go to a farm." And I remember one time we drove clear up to Oregon
looking for a farm. It wasn't just Pennsylvania. That's where they eventually
bought one after I came to Washington. But she wanted to go farm, and my dad
would say, "Hannah, forget it." He says, "I've been on a farm. I know what
it is", and then he would describe the hard work of a farm, the back-breaking
work, having to shovel manure, take care of the horses, et cetera, et cetera,
having to run the risk, of course, of bad weather destroying a crop, you know,
scratching and biting around. He says, "I don't want any part of a farm".
But eventually, of course, she won, as sheusually did. They did go to a farm.
Just as she won on the matter of religion. Now, my mother was a Quaker, as
I think everybody is quite aware of. I referred to her as a Quaker saint,
and my father was a Methodist, but when they married they compromised. They
both became Quakers, of course.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:16:32
[Frank Gannon]
When they went to the
farm, didn't he disconcert visitors by the way he named some of the animals?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:16:39
[Richard Nixon]
Well, yes. He would name
the animals for certain political people that he didn't like, and, under the
circumstances, some of them didn't particularly appreciate that. I think one
was named for Truman
and another one for Stassen
and people like that, as I recall.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:16:57
[Frank Gannon]
This is a -- we have a
photograph here of the house that he built that you were born in. I think
at one point in the 1950 campaign you went back there and commented about
how small -- coming back to it, how small it seemed to you after not having
been there for a while. What are your memories of early life in that house?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:17:15
[Richard Nixon]
It -- it didn't seem small
then. I remember particularly Christmastime. I remember you'd see the fireplace
there, which the old man built, and it was a marvelous fireplace. It threw
out a lot of heat, and I remember -- of course, we believed in Santa Claus
-- and I remember coming down those stairs. We used to sleep upstairs. My
mother and father's room was over on this side of the house, the bedroom in
which I was born, because I was born in that house, and we'd come down and
we'd sit around the fireplace, and it seemed like it was a very big room and
a very nice room. I guess what I remember most about that house, though, was
talking. There was no television then. There was no radio, but did we talk,
evening after evening. And that's one of the reasons, for example, that I
think I got an interest in politics very, very early, because I can even remember
my father berating my mother for having voted for Woodrow
Wilson in 1916. Now, this was much later, about 1920, ' 21, when he then
was saying, "Now, look, you vote the straight Republican ticket", and yet
in 1924 I remember very well that he didn't vote the straight Republican ticket.
He voted for La
Follette, because he thought La Follette was against the trusts, La Follette
was against big business, that La Follette was for the little man, and he
thought that Coolidge
was too much for the big man. And so he was -- he was -- with all of his talk
of voting the straight party line, he was very independent in his own way.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:18:48
[Frank Gannon]
Given that opposites do
attract, what do you think it was that your mother saw in your father? They
met, I think, at a Valentine's dance and within three months were married,
and yet the differences must have been tremendous at the time. She came from
a very refined, restrained, rooted Quaker family and he was sort of a freewheeling
rambling kind of --
Day 1, Tape 1
00:19:12
[Richard Nixon]
Diamond in the rough.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:19:13
[Frank Gannon]
Yeah, right.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:19:14
[Richard Nixon]
I think she saw in him,
first, that he was a very handsome fellow, vigorous, handsome. He had a lot
of magnetism, and I think that emanated. That affected her to an extent. And
I think another thing that affected her was the fact that she felt that he
really needed her. I mean, my mother had such a heart, you know, and I think
when she realized that this boy hadn't had a mother, and, incidentally, he
hated his stepmother even though she -- and, incidentally, she lived right
near us in -- there in -- near Yorba Linda -- but he didn't like her at all,
and he had never really had much of a chance in life. And he wanted desperately
-- I remember my father always said to each of us, You've got to go on to
school. He says, "I didn't finish. You've got to". And he insisted we go on.
He wanted us to have a better time than he had.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:20:08
[Frank Gannon]
Why didn't he like his
stepmother?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:20:10
[Richard Nixon]
I think it's because stepmothers
are stepmothers. She was somewhat of a disciplinarian. I knew her. She was
married, as a matter of fact, to Doc Marshburn, who was the father of Oscar
Marshburn, who married my mother's youngest sister, and -- quite an interesting
coincidence. I met her. I knew her. I liked her, but she was a very strong
personality, and I just think that my father -- just -- he -- he was probably
independent -- probably as much fault of his as hers.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:20:43
[Frank Gannon]
Was it difficult growing
up around a man
with a -- with a voluble temper?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:20:50
[Richard Nixon]
To an extent, yes, but
-- and if it had not been for my mother, it would have been very difficult.
But insofar as his temper was concerned, I should make it clear that he was
not a violent man. I remember, for example, to show you what a soft touch
he was, we used to love to go barefoot, and in the winter, of course, we couldn't
do that, but just as soon as spring came we would go to my mother and say,
"Can we go barefoot now"? because in school you wore shoes if you had them,
which we did, and she'd say, "Go ask your father", and he'd say, "Go ask your
mother". But finally it was always the old man that gave in. He said, O.K.
Go barefoot. As a matter of fact, he -- he -- while you're not supposed to
-- I suppose they say don't--you fail to use the rod, you spoil the child.
But he was not one who could use that physical punishment as much as others
did. I can't recall it too much.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:22:01
[Frank Gannon]
We have some early family
photographs of you in a chair and some other ones with -- didn't your father
cut your hair? That's a very --
Day 1, Tape 1
00:22:14
[Richard Nixon]
Oh, yes, and, boy, we
hated that.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:22:16
[Frank Gannon]
The bowl look brings that
question to mind.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:22:17
[Richard Nixon]
My father, you know, as
I said, he could do it all, and he was the barber, too. And he not only cut
our hair when we were growing up, but he insisted on continuing to do it even
after there was a barber in town. And I remember I think I got my first, what
we called "store haircut," when I was about eight, nine years old. And I was
glad to have it, because I remember sometimes -- my father had clippers but
sometimes they pulled, and getting a haircut was agony and I just hated to
do it. But he was a good barber. It was a pretty good job he did, I thought
when I looked at those pictures.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:22:55
[Frank Gannon]
We have a couple of other
ones, I think. You had -- there is young Nixon amidst the pumpkins. I think
that's you below and Harold
up above.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:23:06
[Richard Nixon]
That's exactly who it
is, yes. I don't think I've seen that picture before.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:23:10
[Frank Gannon]
The psychologists would
say that the pumpkin papers were prefigured in this photograph.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:23:16
[Richard Nixon]
Oh, yes, they'd figure
some way to - -the psychohistorians would figure that that -- that that had
to have something to do with Whittaker
Chambers hiding the microfilm in pumpkins forty years later.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:23:29
[Frank Gannon]
And this is you and I
guess that's Arthur
on your mother's --
Day 1, Tape 1
00:23:32
[Richard Nixon]
Don. That's Don.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:23:34
[Frank Gannon]
Don
Day 1, Tape 1
00:23:35
[Richard Nixon]
And I am there three and
a half years. Don was two years younger than I. That's right.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:23:39
[Frank Gannon]
She named -- except for
Don, who was named after your father, Francis Donald, didn't she name you
-- she had -- historical--
Day 1, Tape 1
00:23:46
[Richard Nixon]
Always that. Yes, she
had a historical sense and we were all named after the early kings of England,
of course. Harold, obviously, Richard, Edward, and Arthur.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:24:02
[Frank Gannon]
It was a remarkable family.
I think Jessamyn
West has written about some of the early Milhouses in "The Friendly Persuasion"
. This is a photograph of your great-grandmother, Elizabeth
Milhous.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:24:16
[Richard Nixon]
Who is also Jessamyn West
's great-grandmother. They're the same.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:24:20
[Frank Gannon]
And wasn't she the model
--
Day 1, Tape 1
00:24:21
[Richard Nixon]
See, we're cousins. As
a matter of fact, she was the model for the, for the mother in Friendly Persuasion,
playing opposite Gary
Cooper, you know, in that marvelous movie, which, incidentally, was Mamie
Eisenhower's favorite movie. She saw it, she told me, half a dozen times.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:24:38
[Frank Gannon]
Wasn't -- Elizabeth Milhous
was a Quaker preacher?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:24:42
[Richard Nixon]
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Remarkable, capable, apparently, and very famous. She was a preacher in the Indiana - Iowa area. Now by "Quaker preacher," I should say that the Quakers didn't have preachers in the real sense, but she would -- she was one that had the spirit, as the Quakers would say it. She was moved by the spirit, and she would go from place to place to Quaker meetings and she would speak and she was in much demand. I think one of the favorite family stories, and this is not apocryphal because I've heard it from all the people who knew her, and I knew her, too, because she lived to be ninety - four, and I knew her, and, of course, admired her, too. Anyway, she was scheduled to go on a long train trip in order to do a meeting in another city and because in those days the food on the train was expensive and this and that and the other thing, she made some sardine sandwiches up. And she put them in her cape, one of these long capes, and she rode on the train, and she got very busy preparing her remarks for when she got to the meeting that she didn't get to eat the sardine sandwiches. So she went into the -- right in time to give her sermon and her theme that day was the parable of the loaves and the fishes, and she was very apparently expressive in her gestures. And when she came to the loaves and the fishes, she had had her hands in her cape, she threw out her hands and out came the sardines and the sandwiches over the early -- people right in the front row. So, it was a very graphic illustration before -- I guess some of these modern television preachers would love to have had that one. Incidentally, her eyesight was amazing. My dad used to have his socks, they'd get holes in them, and she insisted that she wanted to darn the socks and she could do it. She didn't have to wear glasses to do so.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:26:47
[Frank Gannon]
This is a photograph of your Grandmother Milhous, who had a very important effect on your life.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:26:56
[Richard Nixon]
You see, the great-grandmother
was on my grandfather's side. This is on my grandmother's side, what I would
say -- and Almira was her name. Everybody called her Aunt Allie. And she,
too, lived to be very old -- ninety-three, ninety-four. I have many vivid
memories of her. She -- she was a poet, not a great poet, but she used to
write me and my brothers and all of her children and so forth on birthdays
often in rhyme, and she -- she took a special interest in me. I don't know
why, but she did. And I recall she'd always give me very special presents
when I graduated. One, for example, I recall when I graduated from the eighth
grade. She gave me a picture of Lincoln and beneath it was the famous Longfellow
poem,
Lives of great men oft
remind us
We can make our
We can make our lives sublime
and, departing, leave behind us
footprints on the sands of time.
Incidentally, I took off
from that, because I was the president of the eighth grade graduating class
and so I gave the class history. I wrote the class history in poetry, myself,
and I concluded it with these lines,
Lives of great men oft remind us
we can make our life that sort,
and, departing, leave behind us
footprints on the tennis court.
Well, some of them didn't appreciate it, but I thought it was a pretty good line. In any event, my grandmother, then, when I graduated from high school, gave me a biography of Gandhi. Of course, she, being a Quaker, that meant a great deal to her and to me, and I read it from cover to cover several times. I graduated from college, and she gave me a leather-bound "Bible", and when I graduated from law school, she gave me a marvelous illustrated "Life of Christ", which Billy Graham says is one of the great classics. But more than that, I think what she meant to me was the fact that her manner and everything -- oh, I perhaps should mention that it wasn't just me, but she was equally good and generous to all of her children. You have to understand. She was the mother of seven herself, and there were two others. I mean, she was the mother of six and there were two others. And, in addition to that, there were all kinds of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. All were treated equally. And I remember Christmas-time she would be there, and we'd always have what we called a family reunion. Incidentally, the old man didn't like to go to those reunions, you know. He was pretty cantankerous about it, but he loved my grandmother, and she liked him, because she understood him, just like my mother did. And at Christmas she would sit there in a lovely velvet dress, I remember, around the Christmas tree. And all of us -- she gave, incidentally, to us on Christmas, every Christmas, five dollars, five dollars in little envelopes that were on the tree, and, of course, that was a fortune in those days. But anyway, she'd sit there and we had presents for her. They were nothing things, but she'd make over those presents as if, "It's just what I wanted". Another thing that was interesting about her -- my grandmother always addressed us with what we call -- we Quakers call -- the "plain speech". She wouldn't say, "Are you going?" She says, "Richard, is thee going?" and "Is this thine?" She did that with everybody she met, including people that were strangers. Then in the next generation my mother with her sisters always broke into the plain speech whenever they were talking on telephone. It was always very interesting to me to hear them say -- she'd say, "Martha," or "Jane," or whatever sister might be calling, "I just thought that this thing of mine was very good", and so forth and so on. And then we got down to our generation, and we didn't use it at all. My mother, for example, never used the plain speech with her children. She did with her sisters, and, of course, my grandmother with everybody. So, it seems like a nothing thing at the moment, but it is a pleasant memory now. Another thing I remember about her, though. You know, she was a very devout pacifist, as a good Quaker should be, but I remember often on a Sunday my grandmother would ask one of us to drive her to Sawtel, which was the veterans' hospital way across town. It took about an hour to get there, and she would pack some goodies -- oh, cakes that she had baked and cookies and that sort of thing, and she'd spend a couple of hours over there going among the wounded soldiers and so forth -- this, of course, was after World War I -- and reading to them, writing letters for them, and so forth. While she didn't -- while she hated war, she loved those that had to fight.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:31:53
[Frank Gannon]
Wasn't it her use of plain
speech or the use of plain speech amongst herselves and the -- and her --
and the sisters that convinced you that -- many years later during the Hiss
case -- that Chambers was telling the truth about part of his memories
of Hiss?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:32:33
[Richard Nixon]
One of the factors that
did, yes. See, the difficulty in the Hiss-Chambers case, when we were at that
stage, when we were attempting to decide or to prove that Hiss knew Chambers,
after his denied having known him, was that although we had had from him --
I prepared an enormous number of questions to Chambers about everything he
knew about Hiss, and he was able to say, for example, describe all of the
houses that Hiss had lived in, describe the cars, describe his family, describe
his wife's blushing when she was excited, and so forth and so on. But the
problem was whether or not Chambers could have known all those things and
didn't know them indept -- by -- independently. The problem was whether or
not Chambers could not have studied Hiss' life and then told us about all
those things without ever having known Hiss himself. But I recall one time
when I went up to the Chambers farm, we were sitting out on the porch looking
over the -- his cattle, which he was very proud of, and Mrs.
Chambers -- it was a very hot day -- brought us out some cold lemonade.
And as we were drinking it, I asked him to tell me a little more about the
background of Mrs. Hiss. And I mentioned - happened to mention in passing
that I was a Quaker, and he said to me -- he snapped his fingers. He said,
"Priscilla
was a Quaker". Let me say that again. I remember that I happened -- when I
went up to see him, I mentioned that I was a Quaker and he said, you know,
Priscilla Hiss was a Quaker, too. And then he snapped his finger, and he says,
"That reminds me of something. She always used the plain speech". Or "She
quite often used the plain speech when she was talking to Alger". And I thought
for a moment that the way he said it -- I mean, he could have -- others could
have told him that -- that Mrs. Hiss, being a Quaker, sometimes used the plain
speech when she was talking to her husband, but the way he said it, so spontaneously
-- that -- he's talking about a man he knows, not somebody he's read about.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:34:32
[Frank Gannon]
The Quaker families at
that time, too, were sort of extended families in that when you -- for example,
when you wanted to take music lessons, or when your parents wanted to encourage
your music lessons, you went and stayed with Aunt Jane
in Lindsay.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:34:55
[Richard Nixon]
Yes. Well, let me say
that when you speak of an extended family, you're right. First, it was a very
big family, and my first music lessons actually were from my uncle
Griffith, who was my mother's half-brother. He was the -- he was the--the
oldest, and a marvelous man, and I took lessons from him by the time I was
seven years of age. As a matter of fact, I've got to do a little puffing here.
My mother
recalls that I -- I played by ear, which I did, before I ever took any lessons.
And I remember the first song I ever played was "Joy to the World", the Christmas
carol. Well, after she'd heard a little of that playing by ear, I could pick
out tunes and so forth, she had uncle Griff give me lessons in piano and violin.
And then when I was in the seventh grade, aunt Jane, who was a very accomplished
pianist, as was uncle Griffith, came down to the Christmas reunion, as a matter
of fact, and she heard me play a couple of pieces and says, "Richard, these
-- it's -- you have got to come up and have lessons". She spoke to my father
and mother about it, and so I went back with her and Alden
and Sheldon,
her children, and my uncle
Harold, her husband. It was a great trip going back. I remember -- I remember
it particularly for a rather curious reason. It's the first time I ever saw
snow. At least I had seen it on the mountains before from Yorba Linda, because
that was a -- a marvelous place in those days. You -- before the days of smog,
you could see the snow in wintertime on Mount Baldy, and you could see Catalina,
if you got up on one of the little hills, off in the distance, twenty-five
miles away. But I had never been in snow and we got out of the cars. We went
over the Tehachapi, and I played in the snow there and I was really excited,
and I said, "Golly, this is fun"! And Alden said to me, rather sternly, he
says, "We don't say 'golly' in our house". And I thought I'd been raised rather
strictly, but when I got up there to the Beesons, believe me, it was strict.
But she was a marvelous teacher and I became quite advanced for that age.
I could play Sinding's
Rustle of Spring , which, of course, everybody learns to play who has any
advancement at all, Grieg
, and a few other things.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:37:14
[Frank Gannon]
Weren't you -- I've read somewhere that you were sort of the class cutup there, and that you and one of your cousins did something with a clove of garlic that got you in trouble.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:37:28
[Richard Nixon]
I don't think I recall
that.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:37:33
[Frank Gannon]
I've read that you ate
a clove before going into the class and then breathed on the girl students
next to you.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:37:43
[Richard Nixon]
Well, I think I know what
you mean now. It was -- it was very unpleasant, and, incidentally, I've really
not liked garlic ever since then. As a matter of fact, a little of it goes
a long way.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:37:43
[Frank Gannon]
Aunt -- your aunt
Beth was one of your favorites.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:38:01
[Richard Nixon]
Yes. aunt Beth was younger
than my mother, and she had a marvelous voice. I remember her and my singing,
for example, in church, a beautiful soprano voice. And she was so full of
life and so very pretty and always jolly and fun, always cutting up and so
forth and so on. And I'll never forget that one of the most moving moments
was -- and a very sad moment -- was when she got cancer. And I remember that
she went to all these quacks and one time went clear back in the middle of
the country where somebody had some scheme where you burn it off, and then
she came back and then finally she died and she was so young and so pretty
and so vibrant and left three children. I -- it was a difficult time for us.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:39:00
[Frank Gannon]
The --
Day 1, Tape 1
00:39:01
[Richard Nixon]
Let me say all of my aunts
were something, too. My aunt
Edith, which was the oldest one, my mother's oldest sister, she was married
to uncle
Tim Timberlake, and he was an excellent - what do you call it - the people
that deal with insects? Anyway --
Day 1, Tape 1
00:39:21
[Frank Gannon]
Entomologist.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:39:22
[Richard Nixon]
Entomologist. And they
spent, which meant a great deal to us, they spent some time in Hawaii and
then came back, and then they were at Riverside. And I remember at the family
reunions uncle Tim would come there, and he'd always bring along one of these
nets, and he'd go out and collect butterflies and insects. Everybody thought
he was a little strange. And in our family, too, if I may digress, they thought
he was a little strange for another reason, because he smoked a pipe. Nobody
else smoked. You see, in those days my mother didn't drink or smoke. Neither
did my father and none of my relatives that I know of except uncle Tim. He
smoked a pipe. One year, incidentally, I did do something which my mother
really didn't disapprove of. We had Prince Albert tobacco there in the store,
and I got some. We would sell it, although we wouldn't use it ourselves. And
I got a big can of it and gave it to him for Christmas. But they always made
him smoke his pipe outside. But -- then my -- but he got what was considered
a handsome salary of three hundred dollars a month over at the University
of California experiment station , and my aunt Edith was so generous when
I went to Duke to law school and didn't have any money. Every Christmas she
sent me twenty-five dollars, even though she had three children, and I thought
that was generous. My aunt
Martha, who was the--my--just--the one between Edith and my mother--was
a nurse, a pre--registered nurse, and, after all of her children were grown,
continued to nurse between the time she was seventy and eighty-five years
of age. Enormously competent. My aunt -- mentioned a moment ago aunt
Olive, who's still living. You've met her. Gentle and kind and so forth.
She and uncle
Oscar at seventy-five years of age, while I was president, went way out
to Kenya for a year with the American Friends Service Committee to work in
a hospital out there. Incidentally, I've just thought of one thing about my
uncle Oscar. He, of course, being a Quaker, was a conscientious objector in World
War I, but it wasn't because he was afraid, because he volunteered to
go over with the American Friends Service Committee, and so he went over to
France, and I remember he brought back with him a collection of shells and
grenades and so forth, and I remember that it was in the bedroom that they
had there at the big house, because they were living with my grandmother,
and my brothers and my cousins and I, we used to just revel in going into
the bedrooms and taking up these shells, being informed, of course, that they
were no longer dangerous. But that was as close as we came to World War I.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:42:01
[Offscreen voice]
Excuse me, gentlemen,
one second. Keep rolling tape.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:42:21
[Frank Gannon]
I'm going to ask you again
about music lessons.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:42:27
[Richard Nixon]
Oh, yeah. Fine.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:42:29
[Frank Gannon]
And we've got a film --
a film of your mother talking.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:42:32
[Richard Nixon]
Sure, sure, sure. Sure,
sure.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:42:44
[Offscreen voice]
Frank, are you comfortable
crossing your other leg?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:42:46
[Frank Gannon]
Mm-hmm.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:42:58
[Offscreen voice]
[inaudible]
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:01
[Offscreen voice]
Frank, are we going to
sound on tape next?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:03
[Frank Gannon]
Yes.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:05
[Offscreen voice]
Okay, we are. We'll come
out to you on camera one, and we'll [inaudible]
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:09
[Frank Gannon]
Not -- not right away,
but in a -- in a minute.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:12
[Offscreen voice]
Okay, fine. You can just
carry on, but that's the next item, right?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:15
[Frank Gannon]
Yes.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:19
[Offscreen voice]
All right, sir.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:24
[Offscreen voice]
Stand by, studio. Keep
rolling tape. We come out in ten. [inaudible]
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:30
[Offscreen voice]
Oh, boy. Oh -- wait a minute.
[Action note:
Screen goes black]
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:33
[Offscreen voice]
Wait a minute.
[Action note: Picture returns.]
[Offscreen voice]
[Inaudible] Yes.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:39
[Offscreen voice]
Cancel that order.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:42
[Offscreen voice]
Got it?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:43
[Offscreen voice]
Got it?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:44
[Offscreen voice]
Got it.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:45
[Offscreen voice]
Okay.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:49
[Offscreen voice]
[Inaudible] --ten. Stand by.
[Action note:
Screen goes black]
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:58
[Richard Nixon]
They were quite a bunch
of characters, weren't they?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:43:59
[Frank Gannon]
Yes, they were.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:44:01
[Richard Nixon]
Martin and --
[Action note:
Picture returns]
Day 1, Tape 1
00:44:06
[Frank Gannon]
Eisenhower
used to urge you to refer more to God in your speeches, and yet you resisted.
Why did you do that and how do you think of the -- what is the -- what is
the legacy to you of your early Quaker family background and training?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:44:25
[Richard Nixon]
|
| Video Clip 3,826k |
Well, first, I would say
that Eisenhower mentioned it to me, I don't think, from a crass political
standpoint, but simply because he knew that I had a religious background,
as he did. He felt that I should refer to God in my speeches, as he did, because
it was good politically, and also it was honest. The difficulty was that it
goes clear back to my mother's attitude, and my father's,
too, that while we -- during those early years, and they through all their
years were church goers regularly and tithed and all the things you do if
you're a good Christian, and so forth. We never wore it on the sleeve, and
consequently I just always felt embarrassed, frankly, uneasy. Whenever I would
say, "Use 'God'" -- "Use the word 'God' in a speech to refer to God," and
so forth and so on, it was too familiar. I didn't consider God to be familiar.
I couldn't -- Billy
Graham and I used to have it out on this several times. Billy used to
mention the fact that it was very important to -- for me to emphasize more
my Christian background, and so forth, and I just never could bring myself
to do it. Perhaps it was a mistake. If I had, maybe it would have won a close
election that I lost.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:45:52
[Frank Gannon]
The -- next to religion,
the Quakers place a tremendous importance on education. Whittier College,
I think, was founded the same year that the town was founded. They built the
church and built the college. I think your mother taught you at home before
you went to school, and that that had a great influence on you.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:46:08
[Richard Nixon]
Yes. My mother, as a matter
of fact, taught me to read before I ever went to school, and as a result I
skipped one of the early grades, I think the second grade. And also she influenced
me greatly in the whole area of music, because she could play the piano. She
wasn't, of course, accomplished like my aunt
Jane or my uncle
Griffith. She was not a teacher, but her influence in those early years
was enormous in that respect. My -- as I say, from my father I got that compatitive
- competitive, arguing ability and perhaps a tendency to gesture a bit at
time to time, but from my mother more the dedication to scholarship and an
early start. It's just great to have -- you know, when you stop to think of
what a parent can do for a child, and people say, "Well, get him the best
tutors and ship him off here and there and everything". The best thing a parent
can do to a child, and Mrs. Nixon does this, Pat
does with our two--spend time with them, spend time with them. And that's
carried all down through. Julie
spends hours with her two, Jenny
and the little boy. And Alex.
And Tricia
spends hours with Christopher,
and as a result they're very advanced. I think they do that because they know
their mother did it and they know their grandmother did it.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:47:33
[Frank Gannon]
Your first musical rendering
was "Joy to the World" .
Day 1, Tape 1
00:47:37
[Richard Nixon]
It certainly was. I can
still play it, too. As a matter of fact, I played that by ear. All of my playing
now is by ear in the key of G, and I also played in Sunday school, in church
on occasion for many, many years. Reading music -- I did not become a good
reader of music, but I had a very good memory and -- of the classical numbers.
Later on I picked it up in college after I dropped it. See, I dropped -- after
I went up to aunt
Jane's in my seventh grade, then in the eighth grade I was busy with other
things and I didn't continue. And then in college I didn't -- in high school
years, I didn't take any music. I played in the orchestra a violin, a second
violin, not very well. But then in college a remarkable woman, Margaret
Loman, a concert pianist, heard me play something from memory that I played
at some sort of a college function and she called me Richard like my mother
did, rather than Dick, which all the other kids -- says, "Richard, you have
a talent here. I want you to take some lessons". She said, "You've got to
get acquainted with Brahms
and Bach",
and so I took lessons, and I don't know how I did it in that junior year,
because in that year I went out for football. I had the lead in the junior
play. I was on the debating team. I did reasonably -- quite well in my studies
in that year. I worked at home in the grocery store, went to market every
morning, and so forth and so on, and yet took lessons. Well, it doesn't show
I'm so great, but it does show she was pretty inspirational, because I appreciated
Brahms and Bach. In fact, my favorite number, and I have been trying to get Van
Cliburn to put it on a record for me, was Brahms' "Rhapsody in G" which
I can still play little bits of.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:49:36
[Frank Gannon]
We have a film of your
mother talking about your early musical prowess. I don't know whether you've
seen this before.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:49:45
[Richard Nixon]
No, I haven't. No, I didn't
know that.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:50:14
[Richard Nixon]
I've never seen that before.
It shows my mother
must have had a good feeling about politics that she would allow them to film
her talking on the phone.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:50:24
[Frank Gannon]
Did you ever consider
becoming a serious musician?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:50:27
[Richard Nixon]
Yes. Oh, yes. Not -- not
in the college years. But I think the time I considered it is after I finished
at Lindsay, when I was twelve years old and I came back. And then I went to
Fullerton High School, and then it really came down to a choice where I did
play the -- at Fullerton, I did play the violin in the orchestra. It came
down to a choice -- would I concentrate on music or should I move to debating
and other areas. And I finally moved in the other direction and didn't pick
it up again till I got to college. Sometimes I rather regret it -- you regret
many things. When I was a kid, I didn't want to be a musician, and I didn't
want to be a service station operator or a racecar driver or anything else.
I wanted to be an engineer, a railroad engineer, and I remember Everett
Barnum used to come on the train from Needles, California. He had the
run from Needles to Los Angeles, and the train would go by, and you could
hear the whistle at night, and, boy, I thought, wouldn't it be great to be
a railroad engineer. Not only to run the engines, not so much that, but to
see different places and all that sort of thing. But in terms of the music
thing, I have always had a feeling that I'd like to be able to express myself
in music, to be able to compose it. I've always felt -- I like organ music,
particularly in the great cathedrals of Europe and in this country as well.
And I've always felt what -- how great it would be to be able to play a great
organ and to improvise and compose. And I've also had a sort of a secret yearning
to really direct a great symphony orchestra. But all of that's by the boards
now. I mean, it never came to pass. Incidentally, I should -- the -- well,
that's enough.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:52:17
[Frank Gannon]
I would bet you that when
these programs are aired, you will get offers from half a dozen cathedrals
to give you the key and let you go in and improvise at the keyboards.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:52:27
[Richard Nixon]
No, I'm past that point
now. I don't have the flexibility in my fingers that I used to have.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:52:33
[Frank Gannon]
You - in the '46 and '50
campaigns -
Day 1, Tape 1
00:52:36
[Richard Nixon]
Incidentally, I should
say -- incidentally, that as I understand playing an organ is much more difficult
that the piano. It's like the difference between flying an airplane and a
helicopter. When you fly an airplane, of course, you use your hand. You fly
a helicopter, you've got to use your feet and your hands, and the same is
true with an organ. So, I have a hard enough time doing the piano. I don't
think I could do the organ.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:52:57
[Frank Gannon]
If you could - if Zubin
Mehta came in and offered you his baton and his orchestra, do you have
a piece you would -- an orchestral piece that you would choose to conduct?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:53:14
[Richard Nixon]
Well, it would be symphonic,
without question, not modern music, not Rhapsody in Blue or any of the --
although I like that. None of the musical comedies and so forth. Of course,
Mehta probably wouldn't ask for those. I would think, and this is sort of
in-between, that I would like to conduct, for example, a number that always
seemed to give me a lift, and that was "Victory at Sea", the score from "Victory
at Sea", which is a great score. And another one is Liszt's
"Préludes" . I have an interesting, which -- it's interesting, but
also a little, I think, rather exasperating anecdote about that. I recall,
in my second inauguration, they asked me what I wanted them to play, and so
I mentioned Liszt's "Préludes" . The orchestra leader refused. And
I said, "Why do you refuse to play it?" They said because it was one of Hitler's
favorites. And I thought, "My God". Of course, I knew Wagner
was supposed to be too close to Hitler and so forth. I don't much care for
Wagnerian music anyway, because I'm not that much of an opera buff, but Beethoven
-- Hitler liked Beethoven, he liked Wagner, and so forth -- does that mean
-- and he liked Liszt. Does that mean that a great orchestra playing for the
inauguration of a president of the United States didn't want to play it? I
thought it was a little bit much.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:54:45
[Frank Gannon]
In the ' 46 and ' 50 campaigns,
you played the piano. You played fairly often, I think, as a -- sort of as
a technique of campaigning. In those days people were used to gathering around
the piano and singing. Did you -- did you want your daughters to learn?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:55:03
[Richard Nixon]
Oh, yes.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:55:04
[Frank Gannon]
Did they take lessons?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:55:05
[Richard Nixon]
Well, we -- oh, yes. We
went through that. The musical heritage, though, didn't go beyond me. Both
Julie and Tricia like music. Pat naturally wanted to give them an opportunity
to learn. We bought an accordion for one and gave piano lessons to the other,
to Tricia particularly. I remember -- remember an incident on that. This is
about, I would say, 1956, and at that time she would have been ten years old,
and she was taking piano lessons for the first time, and I was trying to help
her one night. And I was telling her, "You know, honey, the most important
thing in learning to play the piano is to practice". I said, "It's tiring
and boring, but if you practice, you can be as good as you want to be". She
thought a moment and she looked at me and said, "You know, Daddy, you should
have practiced more when you were a little boy. If you had, you might have
become famous and have gone to Hollywood, and they would have buried you in
a special place".
Day 1, Tape 1
00:56:19
[Frank Gannon]
Do you -- the -- the Nixon
market was a successful operation added to the service station. One of the
things that it specialized in were your mother's pies and cakes. Did you participate
in the --
Day 1, Tape 1
00:56:39
[Richard Nixon]
Oh, yes.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:56:40
[Frank Gannon]
-- work in the market?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:56:41
[Richard Nixon]
Well, let me say that
not only my mother's pies and cakes, but to show you how -- what competence
the old
man had. When my mother had to go to Arizona with Harold,
who had tuberculosis and spent three years -- two -- over two years there
with him, my dad made the pies and cakes himself, in addition to everything
else he was doing. They weren't as -- quite as good as my mother's, but they
were good. The only problem that both of them had is that, when Christmas
came around, they made some excellent mincemeat, but they wouldn't put any
brandy in it. One time Don
and I -- Don was working in the store at that time - we sneaked in a bottle
and put some in, and they thought it was the best mincemeat they'd ever made,
but they didn't know why. But, be that as it may, I remember my mother made
those marvelous lemon pies and apple pies, not the kind where you use the
apples that are already cooked, but the ones where you slice them in raw and
then it bulges up the crust, and so forth. Her crusts were fantastic, and
great mince pie, and the prices were wonderful, too.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:57:45
[Frank Gannon]
What did they cost?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:57:46
[Richard Nixon]
Lemon - lemon, twenty-five
cents. Apple, thirty cents. Cherry, thirty cents. Mince, thirty-five cents.
And, anyway, the -- she also -- she also was very good at cakes and her specialty,
rather than devil's food, was angel's food, which I guess is also something,
too. And I remember so well that she had sort of a fetish about it, however.
She felt that it was important to get the fresh air into it. And so instead
of beating -- as you know, with angel food cake you take the whites of eggs
and then you beat them like that -- now they do it with a mixer -- these were
the days before mixers, or it was then, at least. And I remember my mother
in Yorba Linda and later on, in Whittier, particularly when she was baking
them for the store, she'd stand out on the porch on those cold California
mornings, because, as you know, it can be very cold in California in the morning.
She's beating those egg whites for angel food cake. And, believe me, I think
they were a little better with that fresh air in them.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:58:56
[Frank Gannon]
Were you a serious child?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:58:59
[Richard Nixon]
Most people think so,
that is, those -- the psychohistorians say so. But as far as my family is
concerned, they say that I -- I studied hard and I worked hard, but that we
also had a lot of fun and we -- like the garlic story and a few others that
you've heard about.
Day 1, Tape 1
00:59:23
[Frank Gannon]
Was your mother a disciplinarian
as well?
Day 1, Tape 1
00:59:26
[Richard Nixon]
In a very quiet way, yes,
but she would do it with a look. If you did something that was wrong, you
knew it, and she'd just look at you or very quietly, very softly, she would
say something. Incidentally, I have something about pies that will interest
you. How -- I mentioned earlier my aunt
Olive, who was so gentle and kind and thoughtful always of other people's
feelings. I remember one family reunion aunt Olive had made an apple pie and
we were eating it, and I said -- I was just maybe eight years old at the time.
I said, "aunt Ollie, this is even better than mom" -- "than mother's" aunt
Olive didn't say anything at the moment. My mother says, "That's right, Olive.
It certainly is". Later on, aunt Olive took me aside, and she says, "Richard,
just remember. Nobody makes better pies than your mother". And it was a lesson
I never forgot. Here we -- I was here, of course, trying to praise her, but
not sensitive to the fact that in praising her it might have been something
my mother wouldn't appre -- although my mother, of course, was so big that
she sort of laughed about it.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:00:44
[Frank Gannon]
Thinking about apple pies,
I remember once how you mentioned how you were -- thinking back to your mother's
apple pies -- how you were impressed with a film -- was it "Waterloo Bridge"
?
Day 1, Tape 1
01:00:53
[Richard Nixon]
Yes. As a matter of fact,
I mentioned that to Jimmy Stewart, Jimmy Stewart in "Waterloo Bridge" . I
mentioned it to him about eight years -- seven years ago, when I was at Chasen's
Restaurant in Los Angeles, and he was there with his wife, Gloria.
And I went over to the table before leaving and paid my respects, and I said,"
You know, you've made so many movies, but I remember Waterloo Bridge . And
I remember it particularly. There was a moment when you were talking to this
girl who was sort of a woman of fortune, and you were trying to tell her what
you thought of her. And what you said was that you compared her and your feeling
toward her with the way you felt about your mother and her apple pies. She
said, "My Mother made great apple pie." And she said, "After she died, I've
never liked apple pie since", because there was nothing to compare with it".
It was something like that, but Jimmy remembered. He appreciated the fact
that it had an impact.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:02:10
[Frank Gannon]
Do -- I read a story about
your mother at the store or at the time of the store, that you had taken some
grapes from a nearby arbor, and she --
Day 1, Tape 1
01:02:22
[Richard Nixon]
As a matter of fact, that
occurred earlier. When we were in Yorba Linda, which was a very small town,
and everybody knew everybody else, of course, and one of our closest neighbor
was -- neighbors was Mrs.
Trueblood, incidentally, a great Quaker name, as you know, and Mrs. Trueblood
was a very kind lady and a very good friend of my mother's. And one day my
brother and I -- I think it was Don
and I -- we were over playing near the Trueblood's, and the concord grapes
were just come in, and they were beautiful, and so we took some. We ate them.
When we got home, why, of course, those -- concord grape was all over our
face, and my mother
said, "Where did you -- you get those? What happened?" We said we got them
at Mrs. Trueblood's. She said, "Now you should not have done that", and she
gave each of us five cents, and she said, "You take that over and give it
to Mrs. Trueblood". Well, I remember we gave the five cents to Mrs. Trueblood,
and Mrs. Trueblood didn't want to take it, and I could see -- I remember even
to this day Mrs. Trueblood seemed to have tears in her eyes, but, of course,
Mrs. Trueblood had to take it. But we never forgot that. We didn't get any
more grapes, and we didn't take any more there or anyplace else.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:03:34
[Frank Gannon]
During the time of the
store, your father, which is surprising in a man who was as -- as tough a
dealer as he, was burned by some tire buyers.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:03:44
[Richard Nixon]
Oh, yes. Once, but never
again. You have to understand that we were operating in the store in the years
just before the Depression and during the Depression,
and it was on a very close margin, and because of the illness in our family,
our budget was pretty tight, and so, therefore, we had to be concerned about
any -- any losses that might occur. But one of the biggest profit items in
the service station was tires. And, incidentally, when I give you these figures,
it'd show you that tires was one of the few items in America that has not
gone up in price, because on this occasion, a fellow came along one day. He
was in a big car. It was a big Buick, as I recall, and he had three children
and his wife with him, and he needed two tires. And so he picked up two of
the best tires that we had. It costs sixty-seven dollars for two tires. And
so the old man changed the tires, put them back on the wheels and so forth,
and the fellow was very impressive - looking and gave him a check for it,
for sixty-seven dollars, and my father
was so appreciative of making this very big sale, where you'd make a profit
of about ten bucks on sixty-seven -- that he gave each of those children,
I remember, a candy bar. And so they drove off. Two days later the check bounced.
And I must say that my mother and father, I heard them talking about it at
the dinner table. They couldn't understand how that could have happened, but
from that on -- then on in my father's place, unless he knew the people, it
was cash and carry.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:05:34
[Frank Gannon]
Were you --
Day 1, Tape 1
01:05:36
[Richard Nixon]
Although we did have credit,
let me say, and a lot of people never paid the bills, and we didn't press
them too hard, either.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:05:43
[Frank Gannon]
This was a time when a lot of important historical things were happening, in the outside world at any rate. Do you have any memory of the First World War or its impact on the town?
Day 1, Tape 1
01:05:59
[Richard
Nixon]
Well, the First World
War, I have a vivid memory of when it ended, of Armistice
Day. Now, you understand that I was only then five years old, but I can
remember to this day. We lived in Yorba Linda then. We went over to Placentia.
hey were going to have a parade. The American Legion had a parade, and I remember
they had an effigy of the Kaiser
hanging on a -- a -- one of the floats, and I thought it was the real Kaiser,
that they had him hanging there.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:06:33
[Frank Gannon]
Do you remember getting
the first radio?
Day 1, Tape 1
01:06:36
[Richard Nixon]
Oh, very well. As a matter
of fact, it was called a GilFilan. I don't know that they even make it any
more. It's a great big thing. It's like -- as a matter of fact, when I went
to Russia and to China, I saw these huge radios, which of course before you
get minituration -- miniaturization is the way it was, and it reminded me
of that old GilFilan radio. And the reason my parents got it, however, was
not for the music, but they got it for the religious programs. They loved
listening to Aimee
McPherson and Bob
Shuler and the great evangelists on the radio. And so they got this. They
made the expenditure for that. But I remember radios even before we got that
fancy one. My brother Harold was very good on mechanical things, too, and
we got a crystal set. And, you know, you take that, you -- you -- and you
did various things. I don't know. He was better at it than I was, and we used
to tune in on things on the crystal set, including a boxing match now and
then. How things have changed. But let me say, not having radio and not having
television was not all that bad, because we made up for that in conversation
and in reading. And so, consequently, I've always said, and fortunately Pat
totally agreed with me, and both Tricia
and Julie did, limit people on TV, because you miss so much if you miss reading
and conversation. People just don't do that any more. They don't know how
to talk.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:08:07
[Frank Gannon]
What did you read as a
child?
Day 1, Tape 1
01:08:10
[Richard Nixon]
Well, we had access to
a Wonderworld set. It was a set of, I suppose, a children's ency -- encyclopedia,
and I remember particularly that I was interested in the history. I was --
in the Greek mythology and that sort of thing. We also had a book -- I remember
a book that we had, which I think my father gave to me, of the great heroes
of early America. And I remember Mad
Anthony Wayne and Nathanael
Greene, who was the Quaker who fought in the Revolutionary War. Those
stick in my -- but I read those stories over and over again. And then there
were magazines, The "Ladies' Home Journal", which my mother took, "The Saturday
Evening Post" and "The National Geographic", which we didn't take, but which
my -- the Marshburns, my aunt -- uncle
Oscar and aunt
Olive took, and I used to go up there and borrow it. I've learned since,
of course, never loan it because they seldom come back, but I loved to turn
that -- through the pages of that magazine and think of the far-off places
I wanted to go. Well, the other thing we read was the ""Bible"", and I don't
say this simply because it's expected to be said, but the ""Bible"" is not
just a great book. It's -- it's a great collection of books. I remember one
who was not particularly religious of my college professors, Albert
Upton. As a matter of fact, I think he was an agnostic, but he once said
to me the greatest book ever written was "Ecclesiastes". And it is a great
book, and you can read it today, and -- the profundity of it. And I don't
think that we missed a thing by not having quite as much to read, but having
higher quality. So, we -- I read the "Old Testament" and the "New Testament"
, and then, of course, anything else that happened to come out. It wasn't
too much, but what we had was pretty good.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:10:06
[Frank Gannon]
Counting as one of the
major historical events of the time, from your point of view, must have been
your first baseball game.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:10:13
[Richard Nixon]
Oh, I remember that very
well. Shorty
Hedges, a neighbor, and I and a classmate, when I was about twelve years
old, we took the streetcar, the big red car, they called it -- Pacific Electric
-- over to L.A., Los Angeles, to see a baseball game at Wrigley Field. That
was when the Los Angeles Angels was a maynor -- minor league, a double-A but
minor league. And they were playing the San Francisco Seals in a double header.
I don't remember much about it, except that I remember that the Angels' catcher
was named "Truck"
Hannah. He was a great catcher, and he could hit, but he couldn't run.
And so he never made the major leagues. And the pitcher that day, and this
I remember very well because he won the game, was Charlie
Root, who pitched for the Angels and later went up to the -- the Cubs.
And he was the one that threw the [gopher ball] to Babe
Ruth, and Babe Ruth pointed and then hit it over the fence. Charlie Root
was the pitcher, and I followed that. I followed, incidentally, sports. We
spoke of what I read. Well, I read the newspapers. I read newspapers from
a very, very early age. We took the "Los Angeles Times" , and it was delivered
in Yorba Linda and later in Whittier. And I used to read it from cover to
cover, and I used to really read the sports pages, and I could tell you about
virtually everything in sports from Big
Bill Tilden in tennis to the Olympic stars to the basketball, et cetera,
et cetera. But, getting on to this baseball game, while I remember the games,
and I remember that the Angels, I think, split the two games, what I particularly
remember is the hot dogs. And Shorty and I bought hot dogs and each of us
-- you'd get them for ten cents each, and we each had a dollar to spend. We
each had six, and the guy came around at the last, the place wasn't sold out,
and he had two left. And he said, "Look, I'll give you these for a nickel
apiece." Shorty said, "No way. I don't have room". And so though it was a
bargain, that was one time we didn't take it.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:12:18
[Frank Gannon]
This -- this was the time,
and you've subsequently written about the sadness of it, that your brother Arthur
died. You had just come back from being with aunt
Jane in Lindsay, I believe, and he developed a headache that --
Day 1, Tape 1
01:12:41
[Richard Nixon]
Well, from this picture,
you can see he was a very, very handsome fellow, young fellow. He was five
years younger than I, and he was, of course, the favorite of the family. We
had a very close tie. As a matter of fact, I remember when he -- he came up
with my mother and father and Don to pick me up at Lindsay. They drove up
there, and when he got out of the car and saw me, he ran to me and he kissed
me very -- rather quietly and not too much notice -- on the cheek. Later,
my mother said that on the way up he had asked her, "Would it be all right
if I kiss Richard on the cheek?" And she said, "Okay", which of course, is
another indication of the way that we -- we are quite private. As a matter
of fact, I've taken a lot of heat from many of the people, many of my female
supporters and non-supporters and critics because I just don't believe in
the public kissing. It's very difficult. I don't mind bussing somebody on
the forehead or the cheek and so forth, but we just don't do it. I don't mind
if others do it. It doesn't bother me a bit, but with Pat,
as you know, and so forth, it's just a sense of privacy. It's something we
didn't do -- we -- anyway, we came on down -- after we back -- we came on
down from Lindsay, and after we got back, Arthur complained of a headache.
Incidentally, in retrospect, we might have guessed that it might have been
because of cigarettes, because he -- he had a mind of his own, and I remember
about two years before that, when he was five years old, he got a package
of cigarettes out of the store, and he took it out in back of the store, and
he proceeded to smoke one of them. And a nosy neighbor reported to my mother,
and I must say I didn't much care about that or her since. But, anyway, it
wasn't cigarettes this time. It tur -- turned out to be tubercular meningitis.
Nothing could be done about it, absolutely nothing. And so I recall so well,
oh, the days before he died. And I recall particularly -- you hear of my father,
this tough, rough, diamond in the rough. I'll never forget it. After the doctor, Doctor
Wilson, from Whittier, had gone up and diagnosed the case, after they'd
make a spinal tap and found that it was tubercular meningitis and said that
there was no hope, he came down the stairs and my father said, "They say"
-- he was crying uncontrollably. He says, "They say the little darling's going
to die". Well, anyway, we -- then two days after that, a couple of days after
the doctor did it -- gave that prognosis, we went up to see him and he was
awake. He'd come out of a coma, and he asked his mother if he couldn't have
some tomato gravy. He liked tomato gravy on toast. And so they hadn't let
him eat much, and so I remember she brought it up to him, and he had that.
And then shortly thereafter he just went to sleep, and so that was the end.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:16:16
[Frank Gannon]
Some years later, when
you were in college, you wrote a -- an essay about your brother, about Arthur,
that your mother
kept, and it opened -- the essay opened with a reference to the picture and
-- that was always kept in the -- in the sitting room. And I wonder if you
could read some of it -- from some of it.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:16:41
[Richard Nixon]
All right. Let's see.
I'll have to put my glasses on for that.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:16:47
[Frank Gannon]
This was written in --
about 1930 as a - -or just before, as a high school composition exercise?
Day 1, Tape 1
01:16:55
[Richard Nixon]
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No. This was written in
1930 when I was a freshman in college, a freshman in college, written for
Freshman English, I remember. Well, it isn't great literature, but perhaps
it indicates how the -- that particular event affected all of us. I was describing
him. "I remember how his eyes changed from their original baby blue to an
almost black shade, and how his hair, blonde at first, became dark brown,
and how his mouth, toothless for five months, was filled with tiny white teeth,
which, by the way, were exceedingly sharp when applied on soft fingers or
toes which happened to get within their reach, and how those little coherent
-- incoherent sounds of his finally developed into words and then into sentences,
how he learned to roll over and then to crawl and finally to walk. Although
I do not remember many incidents connected with my brother's early childhood,
there were some which made a clear imprint on my mind. There was one time
when he was asked to be a ringbearer at a wedding. I remember how my mother
had to work with him for hours to get him to do it, because he disliked walking
with the little flower girl. Another time, when he was about five years old,
he showed the world that he was a man by getting some cigarettes out of our
store and secretly smoking them in back of the house. Unfortunately for him,
one of our gossipy neighbors happened to see him, and she promptly informed
my mother. I have disliked that neighbor from that time. And, again, I shall
never forget how he disliked wearing sticky, woolly suits. As soon as he was
able to read, he used to search the mail order catalogues for suits which
weren't sticky. There's a grave now, out in the hills, but, like the picture,
it contains only the bodily image of my brother. And so when I'm tired and
worried and I'm almost ready to quit trying to live as I should, I look up,
I see the picture of a little boy with sparkling eyes and curly hair. I remember
the childlike prayer. I pray that it may prove true for me as it did for my
brother Arthur". The prayer I was referring to was just before he died, or
the day before he died, when the final coma, he had his -- my mother come
to the bed, and he said, "I want to say the -- my prayers". And the prayer,
of course, is the very well-known one which I'm sure everybody's familiar
with. "Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should
die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." And then that was the
last words he ever spoke.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:19:59
[Frank Gannon]
You started school, or
started high school, in 1926.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:20:10
[Richard Nixon]
Right.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:20:11
[Frank Gannon]
What kind of a -- what
kind of a student were you?
Day 1, Tape 1
01:20:16
[Richard Nixon]
I was a pretty good student,
not because I was so -- with any inherited genius. But I worked hard, and
I was -- I was very good in Latin. I had four years of straight A's, perhaps
a lot of help from my mother in that. I was very good in English, very good
in history. They were easy for me. And I had, however, great difficulty with
math and science, but I managed to do them well, because it's always been
my theory in life that the real test of a person is not how you do the things
you like well, but how you do the things you don't like well. Not how well
you do the easy things, but how well you do the tough things. And so, whenever
I had something in math or science that was real tough, to me it was a challenge,
and I'd work harder on that than I would on -- like my English composition,
which was like falling off a log for me.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:20:49
[Frank Gannon]
You once told a story
about a -- a geometry problem that -- that if you got -- if you got the answer
to the problem, you didn't -- it gave you an A for the course.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:21:01
[Richard Nixon]
Yes. The teacher was [unclear:
Miss Urnsberger]. She was, as I recall -- and she was -- she was
very good, German background, and -- and she gave us the challenge. This was
a very difficult geometric problem, and she said if -- anyone that got the
answer to that problem would get an A for the course. Why, I took it home
and I worked all night. I remember it was a very, very cold night because
I came downstairs from the upstairs bedroom where we were sleeping and came
down to the kitchen and sat at the kitchen table. I lit the fire in the stove,
which was a gas stove, opened it up, the oven, so as to heat the room. And
just as the dawn came up I got the answer. And I got the A. I haven't the
slightest idea, as I recall, what it was about, but I got an A for the course,
but it was because of an all-night vigil.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:22:24
[Frank Gannon]
You were -- you were active
in debate and dramatics in school, and I know in sports. In dramatics I think
you made a very impressive dramatic debut.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:22:34
[Richard Nixon]
Well, it was -- it's --
in retrospect, my first dramatic appearance was -- should really have been
my last, because it was an almost unbelievably horrendous experience. I mentioned
the fact that I was fairly proficient in Latin, and at Whittier High School
we alwa -- which had a very strong Latin department -- in fact, it was a requirement
at Whittier -- no longer, but was then -- for graduation for those that wanted
to go to college. But, in any event, in this particular year -- it was my
senior year -- the Latin play -- not in Latin, but in English -- was the "Aeneid",
Virgil's Aeneid , which of course we had studied. It's the fourth year Latin
course in most high schools, was then at least. And I played the part of Aeneas
and my girlfriend, Ola
Florence Welch, played the part of Dido. Well, it was quite an experience
in two different ways. First, at one point, a very dramatic moment, the script
calls for Aeneas and Dido to embrace. In fact, it calls for Aeneas to kiss
Dido. I wouldn't do that, but at least we agreed that we would embrace. And
I'll never forget when I threw my arms around Dido, i.e. Ola Florence, the
hoots and the catcalls and the whistles from all the kids out there. We both
turned red and got through the play. But what was really -- made it worse
was that I was in excruciating pain. I had a -- they rented costumes, and
I had to have silver boots, and they came in from the costume people. I was
only about five-nine at that time. I didn't get up to my five-eleven until
I got to college, but, in any event, they must have thought -- they figured
-- tried to guess what my shoe size was. They didn't realize my feet were
already eleven-D, which they are today, which is pretty big even for one who's
five-eleven. So they had a five-nine boot. Well, it took two Latin teachers
and the school janitor to get them on me, and I walked around that stage,
and every, every step was the most excruciating experience. And, let me say
this, I've never worn boots since. I was just thinking I have per -- at least
ten pairs of boots that have been given to me in my campaigns, campaigns in
Texas in six -- '52, '56, 1960, again in 1968 and 1972, and I've given them
all away. I can't stand boots because I remember the horror of having to wear
boots in that play.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:25:34
[Frank Gannon]
You -- you were also very
active and very successful in debate atthis time, and I think you've -- or
I've heard you say that the teacher who taught you a natural sense of speaking,
or natural style of speaking as opposed to the rather florid type that was
popular at the time, accounted for a lot of your subsequent success in debate
--
Day 1, Tape 1
01:25:58
[Richard Nixon]
Yes.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:25:59
[Frank Gannon]
-- and in politics.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:25:59
[Richard Nixon]
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| Video Clip 3,936k |
I remember his name very
well. H.
Lynn Sheller, he was called. Many didn't like him because he was a very
tough grader, but I have found, incidentally, that my best teachers, in retrospect,
were those who were toughest on me. I remember, for example, that my -- my
teacher of history, Jenny
Levin, was -- was awfully tough grader in U.S. history, so tough, as a
matter of fact, the parents complained so much that they made her teach study
hall, and -- which was a great loss. But, in any event, I can -- I can remember
that H. Lynn Sheller used to -- was -- would have been great in today's television
age, I think, because he would have told people what they need to hear, and
that is, be yourself, be natural. Those were the days when there were oratorical
contests, and I won quite a few of them, when you had automatic gestures,
you know, and great flights of oratory, and so forth. But Sheller used to
say over and over again, "Remember, speeches--speaking is conversation. If
you have an audience, you may raise the level of your voice, but don't shout
at people. Talk to them. Converse with them". And so I have used to the greatest
extent possible the conversational tone ever since. And I think it's particularly
suited for television.
Day 1, Tape 1
01:27:36
[Frank Gannon]
I think this is our --
[Action note: Picture fades to black.]
[Action note: Picture returns without sound.]
[Action note: Picture fades to black.]
Feb. 9, 1983
Day 1, Tape 2
00:00:58
[Action
note: Picture appears without sound.]
Day 1, Tape 2
00:01:08
[Richard Nixon]
-- and he, telling of
his cam -- of his election to the Senate, and it was very, very close. And
I remember calling him that night. And he says, "Well, I'm gone". That's the
way --" I'm gone" -- and then he finally won. And later he told a group of
us at [unclear: Charter Marching] about the incident. He said
that he -- that his manager told him, his manager in Louisville got a call
from this guy out in the mountain country, and he said, " "Tell" -- he said,
"How's it going down there?" And he says, "Well, it's mighty close". And this
guy in the mountain country out in his district said, "Well, you tell the
senator we're praying for him". And he -- he -- "You son-of-a-bitch, you get
back to stealing and stop praying!"
Day 1, Tape 2
00:01:57
[Frank Gannon]
[Laughs] That's very good.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:01:59
[Richard Nixon]
That's a great story.
I can tell that.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:00
[Frank Gannon]
Absolutely.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:01
[Richard Nixon]
Oh, I'm going to tell
it. And I'll say, "You S" -- I'll say, "S.O.B". I think son-of-a-bitch can
be said on this program, can't it?
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:07
[Frank Gannon]
Yes.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:07
[Richard Nixon]
Is that done on television?
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:08
[Frank Gannon]
No --
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:10
[Richard Nixon]
Well, S.O.B.
[Frank Gannon]
-- but we can --
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:11
[Richard Nixon]
"S.O.B".
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:11
[Frank Gannon]
We'll make -- we'll place
television history.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:13
[Offscreen voice]
You can do anything you
want.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:14
[Richard Nixon]
What's the matter with
that?
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:15
[Offscreen voice]
You can say son-of-a-bitch.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:16
[Frank Gannon]
Yeah.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:17
[Richard Nixon]
I think -- no.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:18
[Offscreen voice]
[inaudible]
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:19
[Richard Nixon]
I think that is done,
and I think hell can be said also, like, Give 'em hell, and that sort of thing.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:23
[Offscreen voice]
[inaudible]
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:27
[Richard Nixon]
But that's a great story.
The way I had it originally, he said, "You son-of-a-bitch, stop praying and
get back to stealing".
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:38
[Offscreen voice]
[inaudible]
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:41
[Richard Nixon]
Isn't that a great story,
though?
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:43
[Frank Gannon]
Yeah. I had not heard
that before.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:45
[Richard Nixon]
That's one of the great
stories.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:48
[Frank Gannon]
All the more reason to
get these things down.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:50
[Richard Nixon]
Oh, yeah, I've got a lot
of those if I can remember if I just.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:02:59
[Offscreen voice]
[inaudible]
Day 1, Tape 2
00:03:06
[Frank Gannon]
I'm going to talk a little
more about sports in high school and then about Harold's
illnesses in Prescott, but not his death.
Day 1, Tape 2
00:03:13
[Richard
Nixon]
You're not going to get
to his death yet?
Day 1, Tape 2
00:03:14