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The one fact everyone seems to agree upon about Richard Nixon's life is that he was born on January 9, 1913. But from then on, the arguments start. In later years, Nixon himself would romanticise his early years: "I was born in a house my father built" in the farming community of Yorba Linda "surrounded by avocado and citrus groves and barley, alfafla and bean fields." [1] His early years there were "hard but happy." By the time of his death, this self-interpretation of his formative years seemed to have been accepted by many observers. Billy Graham makes the claim in the closing remarks at Nixon's funeral that "No one could ever understand Richard Nixon unless they understood the family from which he came, the Quaker church that he attended, Whittier College where he studied, and the land and the people in this area where you are sitting today. His roots were deep in this part of California." To this bucolic vision, Bob Dole added further imagery taken directly from Nixon's own memoirs: "He was the grocer's son who got ahead by working harder and longer than everyone else. How American."

But there was another side to Richard Nixon's early years that did not sit as neatly with the American success story he later created for himself. As historian Michael Beschloss points out, according to a conversation between the President and Henry Kissinger in 1970, Nixon "seemed to believe that his rise to power was not the result of talent and reslience but that it 'had all been accidental'". 

Certainly in this period Nixon and his family endured many set backs at odds with the pastoral idyll that Nixon describes. As he later admits, his family was wracked by illness. When Nixon was twelve, his youngest brother Arthur died suddenly of tubercular encephalitis. A few years later, Nixon's oldest brother Harold contracted tuberculosis and also died, after a long and painful battle. As Haynes Johnson presents Nixon's early years, the family was "plagued with bad luck and failure". When Nixon's family left Yorba Linda in 1922 for Whittier, where his father became a grocer and gas station operator, "Frank Nixon looked at two pieces of property that were for sale. A year later drillers struck oil on the one he didn't buy."

Despite Bob Dole, Billy Graham, and Bill Clinton's anodyne description of Nixon's "humble roots" and his attachment to the land of California, even Nixon himself admits that he had always dreamed of leaving home to study at college in the East, and by the time he finished high school, "there was also a possibility of a tuition scholarship to Yale". However, in another setback to Nixon's ambitions, "travel and living expenses would amount to even more than tuition, and by 1930 the Depression and the enormous expenses of Harold's illness had stripped our family to the bone. I had no choice but to live at home, and that meant I would have to attend Whittier College. I was disappointed..." [2] When Nixon finished at Whittier, he left for Duke University in North Carolina. After earning his law degree there in 1937, he applied for a job at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It would later emerge that a bureaucratic cut back, not his lack of ability, prevented him from being recruited.

Only after this setback did Nixon return home to Whittier to practice law. This pattern of a return to California only after major defeat would continue throughout Nixon's life, in the 1960s, and after Watergate. In 1938, he met Pat Ryan and they married two years later. In those years, Nixon became a prominent community member and partner in Whittier's oldest law firm. He was also approached to run as a Republican for the state assembly. "I was flattered and interested by this suggestion, but the war intervened." [3]

[1] Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1978, 3
[2] Ibid., 15
[3] Ibid., 23
 

Read Nixon's 1937 application for a position at the FBI

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