Whittier College, Home of Dirty Tricks, and Richard M. Nixon Reconsidered

When it came to making a decision about where to go to college, Dick Nixon, an innocent Whittier Quaker boy, had to settle for local Whittier College - because he couldn’t afford to accept a Harvard scholarship that didn’t include travel and living expenses. The sense of disappointment the young Nixon carried with him onto the Whittier College campus was just the beginning…

At Whittier College, the young Quaker naturally sought acceptance in the Societies, which dominated social life on campus. When an upper class Society rejected Nixon, he channeled his deepening disappointment into the founding of a new Society, the Orthogonians. As the City of Whittier has become a Hispanic-majority city and Whittier College has transformed itself into a Hispanic-Serving Institution, the Orthogonian Society founded by a poor underdog among upper class youth has become a diversity student-dominated one.

Nixon’s insecurities and disappointments drove him to solutions that exhaled resentment even as they embraced known wrongs. When voters rejected Nixon’s 1962 California gubernatorial bid, after he had lost to JFK in the 1960 presidential contest, the loser’s “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” reaction brought to mind nothing so much as caricatures of the beatings Nixon took on the Whittier College football field to prove himself to those who would never accept him. And, of course, America certainly would have Nixon to kick around, again.

Nixon returned to Whittier after graduating 3rd in his class at Duke and still not finding an opening in New York to practice law. During this period Nixon became deeply involved in Whittier College operations and perfected his modus operandi, Dirty Tricks, as he won election as a U. S. representative and then senator by unfairly smearing his opponents. “Of course I knew Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist,” Nixon admitted. “But…I had to win… The important thing is to win.” This self-destructive drive to throw away one’s chance for glory by cheating seems to have seeped into as it now oozes out of Whittier’s pores.

Nixon's disgraceful campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas for the U. S. Senate, a woman Whittier College should today hold up as a role model for young women, again centered on completely dishonestly casting his opponent as a Communist. In reality, the House voting records of Nixon and Douglas were more similar than different. Nevertheless, Nixon called Douglas the Pink Lady, and tastelessly said she was "pink right down to her underwear". It was Helen Gahagan Douglas who tagged Nixon with Tricky Dick, which he deservedly carried to his grave.

Nixon would go on to embarrass IKE (Nixon evaded personal consequences for illegal campaign contributions with the now infamous 'Checkers Speech' and blaming who else but Communists, when in fact a California Republican had gone to the press) and lose to Kennedy and then Pat Brown, only to scramble over the bodies to the very top, winning the presidency, a second time with a plan so secret even Nixon didn’t know it, and then all those Dirty Tricks caught up with the prototypical post-Quaker-affiliation Whittier College graduate. Nixon’s fear of the wages of sin was the consequence of his many sins. For Nixon, to win was to be accepted, to be right, and he never learned better.

Whittier College, a macrocosm of Nixon’s flaws, has never known quite what to do with its most infamous graduate, one year refusing to house Nixon archives, another wildly imagining that Henry Kissinger might provide some legitimacy to the unshakable Nixon albatross of a legacy. Evidently, Whittier College diversity doesn’t extend to Chile, but any Chilean student’s open letter to the campus paper would doubtlessly mysteriously be lost on the way to publication even if such a letter was sent.

Whittier College shaped and was shaped by Richard Milhous Nixon, who came to campus an innocent Quaker boy and left as the ultimately Not So Slick Dick. Whittier College’s chance for glory is to reconsider Whittier College, home of Dirty Tricks, and Richard M. Nixon, to by inspirational self-analysis and self-improvement help a nation recover from the shame its Dirty Tricks brought to us all, and instead of taking that high road, Whittier College has, so much like Nixon himself, instead lunged self-destructively onward by Dirty Tricks as usual.

Nixon talked about his formative experiences. “What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid.” Continuing, “ If you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.”

Of course, Nixon never changed that upper class view of him. It’s unfortunate that he would do anything to try to do so, and that Whittier College still can’t face itself. Until Whittier College does take an honest look at, change and heal itself, it will continue to be at bottom more an inglorious institution of lower learning than the fine liberal arts college it wishes us to believe it is despite history.

NIXON QUIZ

1) Did Richard Nixon fail to include being caught breaking & entering a Duke Law School professor's office, and an arrest while an undergraduate at Whittier College, in a FBI employment application?

2) If you answered Yes to Question 1): Why was Nixon arrested while a Whittier College student?

NIXON QUIZ Results: Partial Credit

Meghan Lee, a National Archives and Records Administration Archivist at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum, informs us that, "In 1959, Richard Nixon told biographer Bela Kornitzer of the break-in. It had not been reported to that time." If that was indeed the first admission by Nixon of his breaking & entering a Duke Law School office, then he couldn't have included the incident in his FBI employment application. Nixon's FBI application itself would provide the definitive clarification. As it is, we have Richard Nixon's word, but also the low probability that soon to be dubbed 'Tricky Dick' would volunteer the act when it was believed no disciplinary or criminal record of the break-in existed.

Nixon biographer Roger Morris has Dick Nixon and two accomplices breaking and entering a Duke Law School Dean's office to check grades before their public posting. The facts and purpose of the break-in would seem least unreliably arrived at through interviewing the accomplices with Nixon no longer in a position to influence them.

Meghan Lee also reports that, "There is no mention of Richard Nixon being arrested while attending Whittier College in either processed archive collections or in secondary sources such as Stephen Ambrose's Nixon", and suggests searches of local historical society and police archives. More compelling than records, or the lazy ('serial plagiarist') Ambrose, in denial of such an arrest, though, are the observations of Nixon's Whittier contemporary Allie Darling Lowe, whose father helped Nixon establish himself in Whittier, and whose brother Nixon had to apologize for being intimidated during Nixon's dirty tricks campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas for the U. S. Senate.

According to the 92 year old Whittier native Darling Lowe, in a 2007 Ken Braiterman interview, Dick Nixon dated the Whittier P. D. Chief's daughter from high school on through Nixon's Whittier undergraduate years (she reportedly broke up with Nixon, when he was going off to Duke Law School and suggested his steady girlfriend for years buy herself an engagement ring). An arrest or surviving record of an arrest of Dick Nixon while he was an undergrad at Whittier College, therefore, is extremely unlikely, nor apparently would Nixon's relationship with the Chief's daughter have been likely to survive an arrest record.

NARA's Archivist Lee also relates that, "According to Ambrose, Jonathon Aitken, and Nixon's own memoirs, J. Edgar Hoover later disclosed to Vice-President Nixon that the appropriation had been cut off for the position he had applied for." Hoover's statement will remain the official explanation, unless it's shown that the FBI troubled to learn about the Duke incident, and/or any Nixon arrest. The problem, of course, is sources.

Academician Stephen Ambrose has been proven a serial plagiarist. Jonathon Aitken was a Tory MP and Minister in the U. K., until he was sentenced to prison for perjury and perversion of justice, and branded a "serial liar". Nixon, not surprisingly, seems to have liked Aitken, granting him rare interviews as well as answering his submitted questions. J. Edgar Hoover was an old queen whose entire life was a lie, who as the Director of the FBI declared there was no organized crime in America, among other howlers. And Tricky Dick isn't the kind of nickname one picks up for being honest. Strange bedfellows is one thing, but dishonest bedfellows is just too much.

So far, it's confessed and accepted that Nixon was guilty of breaking & entering at Duke, and circumstantial evidence supports Nixon having omitted any mention of that incident in his FBI application, and it's obvious enough that the FBI didn't want Nixon or didn't want Nixon enough to find him a position or another position in the Bureau. There is also good cause to suggest any local arrest of Nixon while he was an undergraduate at Whittier College is as unlikely as it is likely any such arrest record would have been expunged if it had been made.

Nixon, later conducting City of Whittier Attorney's business, would have ample opportunity to disappear any such arrest record. The infamous erasure of 18 minutes of a subpoenaed White House tape recording shows Richard Nixon was far from above destroying or having evidence destroyed, just as he was far from above fabricating or having documents fabricated.

Jerry Brown, while California Secretary of State in the early 1970s, before Watergate revelations compelled Nixon to become our first President to have to resign, "exposed President Nixon's use of falsely notarized documents to improperly earn a large tax deduction."

What's clear is that the young Dick Nixon was indeed the prototypical post-Quaker Whittier College Dirty Tricks graduate, and matured into a prototypical embarrassment and disgrace, a criminal, an albatross. And what has changed at Whittier College?

Thankfully, things have finally changed at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, now under the direction of NARA's Timothy Naftali and staffed by diligent archivists like Meghan Lee. We look forward to a steady flow of Richard Nixon revelations, some of which will reveal as well still more about rogue private liberal arts Whittier College, which, like its infamous graduate Richard M. Nixon, will, finally, have to face the consequences of its wrongs.

http://www.blogsnh.com/drupal/blog_entry/ken_braiterman/just_when_i_thought_i_knew_richard_nixon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Gahagan

What Happened to History? http://hnn.us/articles/969.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Aitken

Nixon tax fraud exposed: http://ag.ca.gov/ag/brown.php