U.S. President Richard Nixon has inspired a slew of biographies, numerous satirical television skits, and, yes, a caricature shower head. Journalists, historians, and political scientists have depicted Nixon as brilliant but flawed, as a victim of unreasoning news media and academic hostility, and as a threat to democracy. Surprisingly, as historian H. Larry Ingle observed, in all the vicious and, occasionally, sympathetic treatments of Nixon's political career, few authors have made the effort to examine his religious values. At best, journalists and academics may have mentioned Nixon's Quaker faith in passing, but then shrugged it off, unable to reconcile how an heir to pacifist William Penn could have dispatched so many Indochinese insurgents to the Promised Land.
In truth, Ingle contends, there really was little to reconcile when it came to the interactions between Nixon's religious values and political deeds. West Coast, particularly southern California, Quakers barely resembled their Pennsylvania forebears. Nixon's Quaker community was evangelical, expressive, and fully engaged with secular politics. Indeed, Los Angeles Quakers would have blended in well in a Billy Graham revival, or a Norman Vincent Peale “seminar” on the qualities that constituted good living. When queried on his religious grounding, however, Nixon inclined toward painting himself as more Penn than Graham. Ingle brands this tendency as, “Nixon's first cover up.” That may be a little harsh given that few members of religious minority sects have climbed the “greasy pole” of American politics to the White House. Discretion and misdirection are understandable tactics.
After the United States entered World War II in late 1941, Nixon was among the 60 percent of Quakers nationally who enlisted in the armed forces. Ingle noted that just 26 percent of all Quakers cited their pacifist religious beliefs in pursuit of a military service exemption. The future president was well within the mainstream of American Quakerism. There is, however, one distinction which became increasingly salient after World War II: West Coast Quakers were far more militantly anti-communist than their eastern contemporaries. Nixon never trusted the leaders of the American Friends Service Committee, convinced that the East Coast Quakers were far more accommodating of Russian and Chinese communism than they had been of German and Japanese fascism. Whether accurate or not, and it would require a Talmudic discourse to arrive at a solution that would satisfy no one, Nixon believed this was so and acted accordingly.
Perhaps the most compelling section of Ingle's book is his treatment of the interaction between Soviet-agent-turned-Quaker anti-communist Whittaker Chambers's and congressman Nixon in 1948. Given Chambers’ ideological odyssey, it was understandable that his religious convictions gave him a deeply felt mission to bear witness against communism.
Nixon felt a compulsion to be anti-communist, but religious fire did not light his way. Instead, when faced with Alger Hiss, a well-educated, well-connected New Deal bureaucrat whom Chambers exposed as a Soviet agent, Nixon's class resentments burned. As even sympathetic biographers have written, economic circumstances had required Nixon to work all the harder to get to Congress and a seat on the less-than-plum House Committee on Un-American Activities. Gazing upon Hiss, and behind him the host of influential Democrats who advanced him—Felix Frankfurter, Henry Wallace, Dean Acheson, and Eleanor Roosevelt—Nixon was more Lenin than Penn.
Ingle's discussion of the 1960 presidential election offers a very good analysis of the religious political dynamic. As in 1928, the Democrats nominated a Catholic and the Republicans a Quaker. Democrats feared that John F. Kennedy, like Al Smith a generation earlier, would drive away Southern Protestants and lose the election. Luckily for Kennedy, his Catholicism, which was more cultural than practiced, worked to his advantage. Protestant evangelicals, who were inclined to support Nixon, often went over the top in their anti-Vatican rhetoric, discrediting themselves and embarrassing Nixon, who realized that a public discussion of religion was a losing game.
As a World War II veteran, and here Ingle could have driven this home more forcefully, Nixon knew Catholics had proven their loyalty to America. Moreover, it was not just Kennedy, whose exploits in the Solomon Islands had elements of a Passion Play, but well-known Medal of Honor recipients such as John Basilone and Audie Murphy, who settled the issue of Catholic patriotism. The damage Nixon's evangelical supporters inflicted upon him, most especially by arousing Catholics and fair-minded Protestants, helped assure Kennedy's narrow victory.
Nixon's presidency would have merited an entire book by itself. Inheriting a nation polarized over the Vietnam War, violent campus protests, burning inner cities, and a countercultural revolution, Nixon played a bad hand well. Majority congressional Democrats, disinclined to support a Republican President, particularly one who had publicly embarrassed them during the Chambers-Hiss affair, attempted to thwart him with every tool at their disposal. For the most part, Nixon outmaneuvered them repeatedly, but in the process sowed the seeds of his near-impeachment and resignation in 1974. Ingle's discussion of Nixon's agonies and religious convolutions is nicely done.
One could wish for a longer book, fleshing out a few incidents in Nixon's life. For example, in discussing Nixon's post-presidential years, Ingle relates a 1987 trip he made to a hospital to visit a former staffer, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, who had attempted suicide. The import of that visit would have been amplified to readers if more context had been provided. McFarlane was a decorated Vietnam War veteran whose memories haunted him nightly. He became President Ronald Reagan's National Security Adviser and was one of the key players in the “Iran-Contra Scandal.” Nixon, without cameras, went to buck up a wounded soul and relate how he came to deal with his own inner struggles. This was a Nixon of grace—a person of deep feeling and character. Ironically, Nixon's first true “cover up” was never revealing such qualities to the public.
