Read Online The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers - Free Book Online

Nixon to come up with dates for social events. A female cousin who was fond of him reported glumly on his reaction,or lack of it, when she got him to take her for a drive. He was “the slowest driver in the world,” and he talked on and on—about politics.
    In their last year of high school the daughter of the Whittier police chief, Ola Florence Welch, wrote in her diary, “Oh, how I hate Richard Nixon!” After playing the queen of Carthage to Nixon’s Trojan Prince Aeneas in the 1929 Latin class play, however, she changed her mind. His onstage “tender embrace” had drawn hoots of derision from the audience. Yet that night, before Ola had her makeup off, Nixon delivered the opening lines of their real-life romance. “He insisted,” she remembered, “that I must come and meet his folks immediately.”
    Nixon was Ola’s first real date, and she his. They were sixteen and beginning a stormy relationship that was to last more than six years. “I’ve tried to figure out why I’m so cracked about you,” he wrote in the first of a stream of letters. “These are the reasons. You are not a boy chaser. You use your brains to good purposes. You never show your anger to anyone . . . and most of all, ‘You are just you.’ . . . Love from Dick Nixon.”
    â€œWould you think,” Nixon had asked his cousin Merle earlier, “it would be wiser to marry a pretty girl or a smart girl?” In Ola he found a girl who was both intelligent, an A student, almost as active as he in student affairs, and attractive too. Ola, for her part, thought him “the smartest man that ever was . . . tremendously interesting and engrossing”—and “quite handsome” too.
    Soon there were trips together to the movies and the beach, walks in the hills, and expeditions in the Ford Nixon shared with Merle. His mother professed to know what went on, or rather did not go on. “He talked not of romance,” she claimed years later, “but about such things as what might have happened if Persia had conquered the Greeks or what might have happened if Plato never lived. At least, this is what I have been told by boys who double-dated with Richard.”
    About that time Nixon ventured with Merle into a Los Angeles burlesque joint to watch the bump and grind of “a stripteaser who didn’t strip too far.” His cousin thought him “very normal” so far as girls were concerned, as did Ola, while insisting fifty years later that there had been “no hanky-panky.” She added, though, that he was “never comfortable with women.”
    As the pair moved on from school to college, they were increasingly seen as a couple, to the point that friends assumed they would get married. Yet all was not well. It was not just that Ola’s parents disliked Nixon or that her sister thought him “a real pill.” Nor was it only that they argued constantly about politics; she liked Franklin Roosevelt, of whom he disapproved. Ola discovered that the boy she had admired as “so strong, so articulate” had a weaker side. “Deep down,” she reflected recently, “he had this insecure side to him.”
    Four years into the relationship, as the couple turned twenty, it began to fall apart. When Nixon was running for president of the student body and became afraid he was going to lose, he became depressed. Then he turned to Olafor support. Once he had won the presidency, though, he treated her shabbily. “He started dating other girls,” she remembered, “and I was left thinking, ‘Maybe now he’s president he’s changed.’ I began to feel that I wasn’t good enough for him.”
    â€œHe was so disloyal . . .” said Ola’s sister. “He two-timed her. . . . He would take her to a party and then go home with someone else, so that my mother