The poor boy from California got into politics almost by accident, and the suave aristocrat from Boston absorbed his political heritage with mother's milk. Yet, despite their differences, the two 1960 Republican nominees have an uncommon lot in common, and on the G.O.P.'s presidential medallion their two profiles fit the times and the issues with minted precision.
Richard Milhous Nixon, 47, the presidential choice, is the second of five sons* of Francis Nixon, an unsuccessful Southern California citrus farmer, and his wife Hannah, a pious Quaker. When Frank Nixon's lemon grove failed, he moved his family to Quaker-led Whittier, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and opened a small grocery. Dick spent his after school hours and his summers helping out in the store and with the chores in his meager home. "Richard always pulled the shades down when he washed the dishes," his mother recalls, "so that people wouldn't see him with his hands in the dishpan." Up from the dishpans, Dick worked doggedly through Whittier College and then went on to Duke University Law School on a scholarship (he eked out his scholarship by rooming in a ramshackle farmhouse). Back in Whittier, he met and married Pat Ryan, a pretty red-headed schoolteacher who, if anything, had come along an even more hardscrabble road (TIME cover, Feb. 29). After naval service in the Pacific during World War II, Lieut. Commander Nixon found himself in Baltimore, wondering, like many another young veteran, what to do with himself. He caught wind of a Whittier newspaper ad, paid for by a group of 100 leading Republicans:
WANTED: Congressman candidate with no previous political experience to defeat a man who has represented the district House for ten years. Any young man, resident of district, preferably a veteran, fair education, no political strings or obligations, and possessed of a few ideas for betterment of country at large, may apply.
Dick Nixon applied for the job, got the nod from the committee of 100, and plunged into the campaign with pile-driving energy, $5,000 in savings—and an all-out assist from Pat. He won in a breeze over the New Dealing Democratic incumbent. Congressman Jerry Voorhis. Nixon's headline-making investigations of the Communist conspiracy in Government and his unmasking of Alger Hiss catapulted him to national fame and a Senate seat in 1950. Two years later, as one of the earliest and most enthusiastic ad mirers of Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon became Ike's running mate. In six crammed years, Dick Nixon rose from complete obscurity to become, at 40, the youngest Vice President since John Breckinridge (of the Buchanan Administration) and Ike's able right-hand man.
Henry Cabot Lodge, 58, the vice-presidential nominee, was born a princeling of one of Boston's great Brahmin families. His poet father died when young Henry was seven, and his grandfather, the ferocious, archisolationist old Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., took over his education and training. Part of his boyhood was spent in France, and Lodge became completely bilingual. At Harvard he graduated with honors in three years, and his classmates found him a rather stuffy, condescending young man with the good looks of an Apollo† and an undoubted charm—when he chose to turn it on.