If
what it means to be an American of the old-fashioned sort (hard-working,
proudly self-reliant, contemptuous of the ungratefully privileged) can be distilled into
a plain nine-word apothegm, Richard Nixon does so in the farewell speech to his
staff on Aug. 9, 1974, the day he became the first American president to resign
from office. In RN: The Memoirs of
Richard Nixon (1978), Nixon remembers an English professor at Whittier
College, Albert Upston (“he stimulated us by his outspoken unorthodoxy”), urging
him to read Tolstoy:
“At
the end of my junior year he told me that my education would not be complete
until I read Tolstoy and the other great Russian novelists. That summer I read
little else. My favorite was Resurrection,
Tolstoy’s last major novel. I was
even more deeply affected by the philosophical works of his later years. His
program for a peaceful revolution for the downtrodden Russian masses, his passionate
opposition to war, and his emphasis on the spiritual elements in all aspects of
life left a more lasting impression on me than his novels. At that time in my
life I became a Tolstoyan.”
Nixon
was raised a Quaker. Among the earliest and most ardent non-Russian Tolstoyans were
a Quaker husband and wife, Aylmer (1858-1938) and Louise (1855-1939) Maude.
They met the writer in 1888, befriended him and eventually translated most of
his work into English. Louise’s version of Resurrection,
almost certainly the translation read by Nixon, was published in 1900. In
1908-10, Aylmer published his two-volume biography of Tolstoy. In Richard Milhous Nixon: The Invisible Quest
(2007), Conrad Black reports: “Nixon was very knowledgeable about some Russian
authors – in particular, Tolstoy, about whom he held forth to his entourage.”
Earlier, Black tells us Nixon judged Guy de Maupassant “the greatest short
story writer in any language.” At Whittier, Nixon “developed a taste for historical
biography that he never lost, slogging through John Hay and John Nicolay’s
ten-volume life of Abraham Lincoln.”
After
a summit with the Soviet Union, Nixon was moved to buy Winston Churchill's Triumph and Tragedy (1953, the year Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature), the sixth and final volume in The Second World War. He wished to
review Churchill’s recollections of the Yalta Conference. As president he read
Robert Blake’s 1966 life of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, and reportedly
was amused by Disraeli's comparison of the Liberal front bench to “a range of
exhausted volcanoes.” Nixon’s relation to books, at once recreational and
pragmatic, seems to embody a reader’s response to Dr. Johnson’s famous prescription
for writers: “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy
life, or better to endure it.” The same could be said of many public men and women.
Nixon
was born on this date one hundred years ago, on Jan. 9, 1913, in Yorba Linda,
Calif. In 1922 his family moved to Whittier, Calif., named for the Quaker poet
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892). He graduated from Whittier College in
1934. In his farewell speech, Nixon speaks with great feeling of his father:
“I
remember my old man. I think that they would have called him sort of a little
man, common man. He didn’t consider himself that way. You know what he was? He
was a streetcar motorman first, and then he was a farmer, and then he had a
lemon ranch. It was the poorest lemon ranch in California, I can assure you. He
sold it before they found oil on it. And then he was a grocer. But he was a
great man, because he did his job, and every job counts up to the hilt,
regardless of what happens.”
One
of Whittier’s hymns, “It May Not Be Our Lot,” is adapted from his poem
“Seedtime and Harvest” (1843). It
includes these lines:
“It
may not be our lot to wield
The
sickle in the ripened field;
Nor
ours to hear, on summer eves,
The
reaper’s song among the sheaves.
“Yet
where our duty’s task is wrought
In
unison with God’s great thought,
The
near and future blend in one,
And
whatsoe’er is willed, is done.”
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