THE NIXON YEARS: DOWN FROM THE HIGHEST MOUNTAINTOP

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strongwilled, emotional and impatient." Some who were troubled by Richard Nixon's apparent rootlessness, that strange plastic quality of speech, thought and behavior that some how failed to suggest the traces of a home town or a home region, blamed this phenomenon on California, often seen as a state of uprooted migrants and shallow or phony culture. That analysis was unfair to California. Whatever it was that made Nixon seem so oddly awkward and synthetic must be looked for in himself.

Hardscrabble Atmosphere

Richard, one of five sons (two died at early ages), grew up in a hardscrabble, contentious atmosphere. He was a gifted student who finished second in his class at the Quaker Whittier College and a less gifted football player who regularly warmed the bench. In later years, he was to recall his coach's advice: "You must get angry, terribly angry about losing. But the mark of the good loser is that he takes his anger out on himself and not on his victorious opponent or his teammates." Nixon learned only half the lesson, and all his life took his anger out on his opponents as well as himself.

At Duke Law School, where he earned the nickname "Gloomy Gus" for his cautious, pessimistic, Depression-bred outlook, Nixon finished third in his class. Unable to land work with a major New York law firm (he also tried the FBI), he returned to practice in Whittier, where he met Thelma Catherine ("Pat") Ryan, who taught shorthand and typing at the local high school. They were married after a two-year courtship and set up housekeeping in an apartment over a garage.

After Pearl Harbor, Nixon served in Washington with the tire-rationing unit of the Office of Price Administration, a job that gave him a lasting distaste for economic controls. Entering the Navy as a lieutenant (j.g.), he left as a lieutenant commander. He served as a supply officer in the South Pacific, learned poker well enough to win regularly, and developed a colorful vocabulary. He gave up the poker, but his swearing became something of a legend.

Nixon was thrust into politics in 1946 when a group of Southern California Republicans urged him to challenge five-term Democratic Congressman Jerry Voorhis. His prospective sponsors first wanted to know whether Nixon was in fact a Republican. "I guess so," he replied. "I voted for Dewey." Voorhis was an earnest liberal, but Nixon managed to suggest that he was a dangerous left-winger by linking him to the radical California Political Action Committee (PAC).

Voorhis was indeed supported by PAC, but by the more moderate National Citizens PAC and not, as Nixon implied, the California group. Nonetheless, that deliberate confusion plus Nixon's undeniably vigorous campaign gave him a 16,000-vote victory.

He was on his way. Before his first term was out, he had become a national figure for his role in the investigation of the attractive, patrician Alger Hiss as a former Communist courier. The House Un-American Activities Committee was ready to abandon its probe, but Nixon persevered until a plainly damaging case had been made against Hiss, largely on the witness of Whittaker Chambers, a brilliant and enigmatic writer and editor who, before he joined TIME in 1939, had been a Communist for 15 years.

Investigative Doggedness

The affair stunned the