THE NIXON YEARS: DOWN FROM THE HIGHEST MOUNTAINTOP

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friends were taciturn, self-made men who shunned the spotlight. These were principally those two rich entrepreneurs, Bebe Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp. "I'm an introvert in an extravert profession," Nixon said—a formula that itself may have been a stratagem of concealment. When confronted with a crisis, he became more secretive than ever, withdrawing into seclusion and arriving at a decision with relatively little outside advice. Sternly self-controlled ("I have a fetish about disciplining myself"), he was stiff in public and rarely relaxed in private. As Author Garry Wills maintained in Nixon Agonistes, Nixon erected this "wall of decorum in dress and manner" so that he could "fend off the world, avoid participation in it."

Perhaps Nixon did so because he saw the world as a fundamentally hostile place and life as an almost uninterrupted series of crises. In the words of James David Barber, chairman of Duke University's political science department and author of The Presidential Character: "Nixon lives in a fighting world; his writing and speaking are full of the imagery of combat. He sees himself as forever engaged in battles, hit by 'terrible attacks,' in virtual hand-to-hand combat."

By seeing himself under permanent siege, he conjured up even more enemies than he actually had. In the face of criticism, he was inclined to retaliate savagely, living under constant temptation to show up his enemies, to "get them" before they got him. After his 1972 triumph, when New York Times Columnist James Reston asked whether Nixon's smashing re-election would lead to reconciliation with his enemies, a White House aide replied: "The President does not want to make peace with his critics. He wants them to admit publicly that they were wrong."

In Barber's view, Nixon's greatest fear was "public exposure of personal inadequacy." While he often proclaimed his relish for combat, he seemed to dread it at the same time; it was as if defeat would mean, as it did for the King of the Wood in Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, a sentence of death. It was his efforts to prevent the exposure of his Administration's failings that ultimately undid him.

In one of the press conferences in his last year, Nixon said: "I have a quality which I guess I must have inherited from my Midwestern mother and father, which is that the tougher it gets, the cooler I get." Many who knew him well doubted that claim. They saw, or thought they saw, rage and consuming bitterness beneath the façade. But he did display amazing endurance and (with a few lapses) a remarkable public calm during more than a year of savage at tacks and adversity.

He often invoked his Midwestern heritage. His mother, Hannah Milhous, was an Indiana Quaker whose family, celebrated in Jessamyn West's novel The Friendly Persuasion, moved to Whittier, Calif., at the turn of the century. His father, Francis Anthony Nixon, was an Ohio Methodist with only six years of formal education who left his job as a trolley-car operator in Columbus and drifted to Southern California in search of warmer weather. After Frank married Hannah in 1908, he was barely able to scrape by as a citrus-fruit farmer, grocer and gas-station owner. A neighbor described Frank Nixon as "brusque, loud, dogmatic,