Beans, Brains, Brawn, and Bowels

Thanks for tuning in to Hello Down There! It’s Your Friend, History! A title I would love to explain to you but cannot, because today we’re diving right into a series of episodes on Richard Nixon.
When Hannah Milhous married Frank Nixon after a four-month courtship, her mother sent her off with a couple lines of poetry: You’ll get your reward for such service given/If not here on earth, you’ll get it in heaven. Hannah’s younger sister made her displeasure known in an equally ominous way, climbing a tree to carve, “Hannah is a bad girl,” into the bark. Their disapproval was due to their perception that Hanna was marrying down. The Milhouses were an upper-class, severely Quaker family, while Frank was a non-Quaker farmhand whom one neighbor accurately described as a “horny bastard,” considering that he had to stop dancing in public because he got hard when he held a woman.

Richard Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California in 1913. He grew up poor — for much of his childhood, his father struggled to eke out a living on a failing lemon farm. Frank was physically abusive, while Hannah was emotionally so. She would discipline the children by giving them the silent treatment for days on end. Nixon once noted approvingly, “In her whole life, I never heard her say to me, or to anyone else, ‘I love you.’” He also said, “My mother was very controlled and I became that way. I’m a disciplined person… I cry inside…”

Now I don’t know why he said that because it was not even a little bit true. His life was defined by his uncontrolled emotions. Even as a child, he flew into violent rages. He once ended an argument over tadpoles by hitting another kid with the blunt end of a hatchet. As an adult, he alienated aides with his aggressive outbursts, once knowingly jabbing a man in the spot where he’d just had a rib removed for open-heart surgery.

His life was also defined by his bizarre and uncomfortable relationship with women. A high school classmate remembered that, “He made quite an issue of girls — that he was a woman-hater…he was going to be a bachelor all his life.” Another said, “As a debater his main theme in grammar school and the first years of high school was why he hated girls.” The dislike was mutual, with one female classmate accurately noting, “He wasn’t sexy.”

Despite his general awkwardness and specific misogyny, he fell for Ola Florence Welch, who starred opposite him in a Latin Club play. She, bizarrely, fell for him too, and they began a relationship that would last through his college years. He wrote in her yearbook that he had enjoyed being in a play with her, quote “even though I have always detested making love in public — or anywhere else for that matter.”

In college, he helped start a club called the Orthogonians to rival the elitist club on campus. Its motto was “Beans, Brains, Brawn and Bowels.” He helped to write the constitution, the club song, and the initiation rituals, which included being paddled nude and digging up and eating a dead animal.

He and Ola stayed together when he left California for Duke law school, where he lived off-campus in a cabin in the woods with no electricity or running water. As he studied, he wrote to her, “Let me tell you about the nuttiest of the nutty Nixons. He remains a stolid bachelor and I think his hair is beginning to thin out. He doesn’t smoke, he drinks very little, he swears less and he is as crazy as ever. He still thinks an awful lot of his mother.” Shortly after, perhaps because of the severe lack of game demonstrated by this letter, he returned home to find that she was dating someone else. It took him weeks to accept that their relationship was over, but he came to terms with it shortly before her wedding. Not having learned his lesson about leaving his mother out of letters to women, he wrote, “I regret having embarrassed you. In the year and a half I’ve been at Duke, I’ve realized more than ever the perfection, the splendor, the grandeur of my mother’s character. Incapable of selfishness, she is to me a supreme ideal. And you have taken your place with her in my heart — as an example for which all men should strive.”

He met his future wife, Pat, at auditions for a community theater production in 1938, though he later claimed they met at a football game. She wasn’t interested in him, but he pursued her anyway, demonstrating both his creepiness and, again, the severe lack of game that has afflicted most of this nation’s presidents. He introduced her to his parents days after they met and would show up at her apartment uninvited to ask her to take walks with him. If she shut the door in his face, he would write notes and slip them underneath it. He even drove her to LA for dates with other men. Eventually, this poor woman agreed to go on a date with him, and they married in 1940. Upon signing the marriage certificate, he learned that her real name was Thelma.

Nixon’s career in politics began after he returned from serving in WWII. A group of conservative local businessmen enlisted him to challenge a popular democratic congressman in the 1946 election. He used cherrypicked documents and misinformation to accuse his opponent of being a communist. While he was running, he and his wife struggled to find a home in the limited post-war housing market. After months of living with his parents, he found a place to rent. It was only within their budget because the owner kept hundreds of shrieking minks next door in an ultimately doomed attempt to break into the fur industry.

He won the election, gaining 56% of the vote and life-long enemies among liberals who found his campaign strategy distasteful. While in the House, he served on the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, which ruined lives and violated civil liberties while seeking to expose Communists in American society. He found time in his busy Communist-hunting schedule to befriend future president and rival John F. Kennedy, a representative from Massachusetts. Nixon would describe them as “a pair of unmatched bookends.”
Kennedy was rich and glamorous, while Nixon had grown up poor and felt out of place in high society. Despite their differences, Nixon felt that they had similar personalities, describing them both as shy and private. They bonded over baseball and military service — both had served in the Navy and were stationed in the Pacific during WWII. While Nixon prepared for a trip to Europe, Kennedy stopped by his office to offer him the phone numbers of several Parisian women. Nixon was too embarrassed to take them.

Nixon went to visit Kennedy in the hospital after a surgery, discovering only upon his arrival that Kennedy had been given the last rites due to severe complications. Nixon began to cry, fleeing the hospital for the privacy of his car. “That poor young man is going to die,” he sobbed. I’d like to pause here to let you know that Nixon was only four years older than Kennedy. Anyway. “Poor brave Jack is going to die!” he cried. “Oh God, don’t let him die!” Nixon’s loyalty to Kennedy was so strong that he would later refuse to campaign for a former aide running for office in Massachusetts because Kennedy was up for reelection in the same year. Nixon would have been expected to endorse Kennedy’s Republican opponent, and he wasn’t willing to. A historian would later say that Kennedy had over Nixon, “the same charm that a snake charmer exerts over a snake.”

Nixon’s loyalty wasn’t quite reciprocated, but Kennedy did hand-deliver a thousand-dollar check to Nixon’s campaign office when he ran for Senate in 1950, a donation Kennedy would later call “the biggest damnfool mistake” he ever made. To reach the Senate, Nixon relied on the same red-baiting tactics that had gotten him to Congress in the first place. The two campaigns earned Nixon a reputation as a dirty campaigner and the nickname “Tricky Dick.”

On the night of his victory, he and his parents attended a party thrown by a supporter. They asked for milk, but Nixon pulled his host aside and asked to have a bit of bourbon slipped into his glass so his parents wouldn’t know he was drinking. Now I don’t have bourbon, but I do have scotch, which is kind of close, so I went ahead and put a splash of that in some milk, and I’m here to tell you: it is not pleasant. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be, but it is definitely worse than just being sober for the duration of a party or, as a thirty-seven-year-old senator-elect, admitting to your parents that you want a drink. It mostly just tasted like scotch, but with a strong milky aftertaste. It sort of coated my mouth for about a half hour after, and it also made my tongue tingle like I was having an allergic reaction, even though I am allergic to neither milk nor scotch. So. I don’t know, Richard. I don’t know.
Nixon spent less than two years in the Senate before being chosen as Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952. Eisenhower, a celebrated WWII general, was so popular that politicians in both parties had tried to convince him to run for president in ’48. I assume the Democrats who’d been planning an insurrection against an incumbent president were really embarrassed when Eisenhower turned out to be a Republican.

Eisenhower almost immediately had cause to regret choosing Nixon. A group of California businessowners had started a fund for Nixon to use for political expenses ranging from advertising to sending out Christmas cards. At the time, it was worth about $18,000. This apparently wasn’t unheard of — Adlai Stevenson, the democratic presidential candidate, had a fund of his own — but Nixon’s got a lot of negative attention and people began to call for him to be dropped from the ticket. Dumping Nixon would have been politically damaging for Eisenhower, but keeping him was also proving to be troublesome. Eisenhower watched the fallout from his campaign train, the Eisenhower — Look Ahead, Neighbor! — Special, neither defending Nixon nor having the good grace to just put him out of his misery. Even when Nixon called him asking him to make a choice — sagely advising the future president of the United States to “shit or get off the pot” — Eisenhower refused to take responsibility for the difficult decision. This would not be the last time Eisenhower would leave Nixon hanging when his political future was in jeopardy, perhaps because he was, to quote Nixon’s close personal friend John Kennedy, “terribly cold” and “a shit.”

As the drama unfolded, Nixon was campaigning on his own train, the Dick Nixon Special. Incidentally, when Nixon was a child, his mother wrote a note to his teacher insisting that he be called Richard, so I like to imagine that his choice to go by Dick was a little splash of rebellion in the sea of mommy issues he drowned in. At Eisenhower’s suggestion, Nixon made arrangements to go on television and provide a full financial disclosure, a prospect his wife found humiliating. Once the decision was made, he locked himself away, agonizing over his speech. At the very last minute, he received a message from Eisenhower’s advisors saying he should resign at the end of the broadcast, which could not have been better executed to throw him off his game. The predictable emotional turmoil that followed prevented him from fully memorizing the speech.

During the broadcast, he described the fund as well as his family’s finances, laying out their assets and their debts in excruciating detail. He then said he had to disclose a gift he had received from a supporter: a cocker spaniel his six year old daughter had named Checkers. He closed the anecdote, “I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.” This line, which opponents found hopelessly corny, led to the speech being known as the Checkers speech. Instead of resigning as instructed, he asked viewers to contact the RNC and say whether they thought he should step down.

He was heavily dazed at the end of the speech, reaching out toward the imaginary audience and bumping into the camera. He hid his face in the set’s curtains while moaning about how he’d blown it, although he soon discovered that the speech had resonated with the public, striking a chord with working class voters. He and Eisenhower met, and it was confirmed that he would be staying on the ticket. At the event that followed, a fellow senator congratulated Nixon on his speech, and Nixon began to cry on his shoulder. Nixon’s drama teacher later bragged about how he had taught Nixon to fake cry. There’s a link to the photo in the episode description if you’re curious about whether Nixon was an attractive crier. Spoiler: he was not.

Eisenhower and Nixon won in 1952, but their working relationship remained fraught. During a meeting, Eisenhower urged his listeners to tape their conversations, particularly when talking to someone they distrusted. A biographer later asserted that Eisenhower almost always taped his conversations with Nixon. Eisenhower had a property in Gettysburg to which he sometimes retreated. Nixon merited an invite to the property, but apparently couldn’t quite make the jump to being allowed inside, saying a full four years into their administration that Eisenhower had never asked him into the house.

In ’56, Eisenhower again demonstrated his staggering disinterest in Nixon, ruminating for months on whether to drop him from the ticket. Like in the fund crisis, Eisenhower wouldn’t make a firm decision, trying to get Nixon to step down on his own and refusing to confirm to journalists that he wanted Nixon on the ticket. Ultimately Nixon stayed on, but only after spending months in an agonizing state of uncertainty.

During the Republican convention that year, Nixon’s father’s health began to fail. Nixon flew home to be with him as he passed, but journalists suspected that he was faking it for good press, so they sent a reporter to sit and watch him watch his father die. This didn’t cause his long-standing animosity toward the press, but it certainly didn’t help. The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won again in 1956. Nixon was a strong candidate for the presidency in 1960, although as I’ll discuss next time, having to own the weaknesses of Eisenhower’s administration while being unable to count on his full-throated support would be a major challenge.