Richard Nixons Rocky Road to Presidency essays

Richard Nixon's Rocky Road to Presidency essays Richard Milhous Nixon, America's thirty-seventh president, was the second of five sons of Frances Anthony and Hannah Milhous Nixon. He was born in 1913 in Yorba Linda, California ("Richard Milhous Nixon"). The name, Nixon, means "he wins" or "he faileth not" (Ambrose 12). Hannah was a member of the Society of Friends, better known as Quakers. Nixon's father was a Methodist but converted to Quakerism and became deeply committed when he was married (Ambrose 18). Frank taught Sunday school and at the age of five Nixon attended regularly, at the age of six or seven he participated in discussions and expressed his opinions (Hoyt 28). He was not a boy who enjoyed pranks but was very mature even when he was five or six years old and interested in things way beyond the usual grasp of a boy his age (Mazo 19). Nixon was hard-working and labeled a "helper" at home, but because he particularly hated washing dishes, he would pull down the window shade in the kitchen in case some outsider saw h im doing "women's work" (Mazo and Hess 37). Nixon would love to sit and read to his mother and just be around her. His father frightened him, but he never doubted his love and protection (Hoyt 30). Religion, family, and school were the center of Nixon's life. He attended a church where he learned tolerance, and not to show emotions or express his feelings physically (Mazo 18). Throughout his adult life, he would bottle up his emotions and sometimes even appear cold to his wife Patricia Ryan whom he married in 1940 ("Richard Milhous Nixon"). Some would say Nixon's "public indifference toward Pat bordered on cruelty [and he] almost brutally ignored her as she trotted along behind him" (Ambrose 585). The inability to trust anyone became one of Nixon's principal personality traits and later on he would comment on it in his speeches: "in my job [he was then Vice President] you can't enjoy the luxury of intimate personal relationships. You can't confide absolute...