American Experience

Roger Morris on Nixon's ambition

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I think his ambition is undoubtedly rooted in part in the example of his father who was an enormously hard worker. It's certainly fueled by his mother ambition, which is very substantial. Hannah Nixon is, I think, forever trying to make up for the, not a bad marriage in an emotional sense, but a bad marriage in a social and economic sense. She wants success for all her sons and especially for this middle son who is patently talented and has this drive anyway. In part, it's fed by all of the peer reinforcement and pressure which comes of a small community which begins to celebrate the achievements of this, not quite prodigy, but obviously talented child.

In Yorba Linda he's reciting orations and performing in the second and third grade in ways that bring a lot of gratification and a lot of community adulation. So that his status and in a sense, his power, as an individual, is very early on rooted in that distinction and accomplishment. All of those things are factors. But I think that there is something deep within Richard Nixon as there is deep within all achieving individuals which transcends his family or his culture or his time and place. And that's a kind of restless little engine, a drive which would have been there, I think, had he been born in Iowa or Florida or New York or anywhere else to very different parents under different circumstances.

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