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At Whittier College, young Dick Nixon showed two qualities that are still conspicuous in his makeup: hard work, and a passion for simplified expression. One evening the political history students had a party. For a time the ice cream was missing, and so was one of the invited students. Presently, in rushed the missing boy—Richard Nixon. He dumped the ice cream on the table, said that he could not stay because he had to make more deliveries for his father's grocery, and left. Whittier's President Paul Smith remembers that Nixon used to write very brief answers on exams. "At first you thought that he couldn't answer the question in that short a space. But, by golly, he had gone to the heart of the problem and put it down simply." Nixon got an A.B. degree from Whittier (second in his class), won a scholarship to Duke University Law School (in faraway North Carolina), where in 1937 he finished third in his class.
Back home in Whittier, Nixon practiced law and married Thelma Patricia Ryan. When war came, he went to Washington as a lawyer for the OPA. Soon fed up with bureaucracy, he got a Navy Commission and went to war—in Ottumwa, Iowa, in the Solomon Islands, and in Hagerstown, Md., emerging a lieutenant commander.
Mud & Rabbits. He went back to Whittier—and promptly ran for Congress against able, New Dealing Jerry Voorhis. It was a tough, bitter campaign. Southern California politics has not yet discovered Technicolor: white is still white and black is mud. Voorhis' record included some respectable anti-Communist credentials, but he was vulnerable as a friend of the C.I.O. and of its national Political Action Committee. Although the Los Angeles PAC. which was Communist-dominated, did not endorse Voorhis, Nixon pinned the PAC label on his opponent, who had the support of many California PAC leaders.
Another Nixon charge: Voorhis had his name on only one piece of legislation, a bill transferring responsibility for the rabbit population of the U.S. from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture. Before laughing crowds, Candidate Nixon made the most of it. He beat Voorhis (who quit politics and California).
Congressman Nixon, a husky (5 ft. 10 in.. 180 Ibs.), black-browed young man with a fire in his eyes, typified an eager new generation of Republicans. Spared the bitterness of futile opposition during the long, lean years of the New Deal, Nixon went to Washington with a positive approach. He voted with the bulk of his party on 78% of the issues; most of his deviations from the party were on the liberal side. To become an "Eisenhower Republican." Nixon did not have to twist away from his voting record. What Eisenhower stands for today is remarkably like what Nixon was voting for in 1947-52. But Nixon was just another promising young Congressman when the Alger Hiss case broke in the summer of 1948.