NARRATOR: Richard Nixon was born in the tiny Southern California desert town of Yorba Linda in 1913. He grew up among the people he would one day call "forgotten Americans," and "the silent majority," hard-working, church-going people, farmers, shopkeepers, people with an inbred respect for authority and an unyielding belief in the American Dream.

Pres. NIXON: [August 9, 1974] I remember my old man. I think that they would have called him a sort of a little man, a common man. He didn't consider himself that way. You know what he was? He was a streetcar motorman first and then he was a farmer and then he had a lemon ranch and then he was a grocer. But he was a great man.

NARRATOR: "Richard had his father's fire," his mother, Hannah Milhous Nixon once said, "and my tact." She seemed the opposite of the loud, aggressive husband her Quaker family always believed beneath her: soft-spoken, tightly controlled, never allowing anger to get the better of her. She insisted her second son be called "Richard," not "Dick," taught him to read before he entered school and made sure he said his prayers daily and went four times to Quaker meeting on Sundays.

SECOND-GRADE TEACHER: I taught Richard Nixon in the second grade here in Yorba Linda. He sat in the back seat and always came to school with a white starched shirt with long sleeves. He was always a quiet, dignified little fellow and a very good student.

NARRATOR: He was clumsy, but dogged at games, shy but gifted at reciting poetry and full of his father's enthusiasm for politics.

MERLE WEST, Cousin: Dick was politically inclined as a kid. I remember walking to school and I think it was when Harding was running for president and old Dick was there on a stump, saying why everybody should vote for Harding.

NARRATOR: The Nixons moved to nearby Whittier when Richard was nine. Founded by Quakers in 1887, it was a sober, industrious community, no liquor stores, no bars, no dance halls. Frank Nixon bought a gas station along the highway and soon added a general store where the whole family worked, often 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

Mr. NIXON: One thing my mother and dad always used to say when we were growing up -- I don't mean my mother because she was a little biased -- but my dad used to say when we were growing up, he said, "You know, you boys" -- speaking to me particularly -- "you boys have got to get out and scratch. You're not going to get anywhere on your good looks."

NARRATOR: When Richard was 12, his younger brother Arthur suddenly fell ill and died. And within eight years, Harold, the eldest brother and family favorite, would succumb to tuberculosis. Hannah Nixon recalled, "It was Arthur's passing that first stirred within Richard a determination to help make up for our loss by making us very proud of him. He may have felt a kind of guilt that Harold and Arthur were dead and he was alive," she remembered.

Pres. NIXON: [August 9, 1974] My mother was a saint and I think of her, two boys dying of tuberculosis, nursing four others and seeing each of them die and when they died, it was like one of her own. Yes, she will have no books written about her, but she was a saint.

NARRATOR: "I would like to study law and enter politics for an occupation," Nixon wrote in the eighth grade, "so that I might be of some good to the people." Nixon worked hard for everything he got and his sober, industrious air sometimes put off his contemporaries. When he ran for class president at Whittier High, he lost to a candidate he later dismissed as "an athlete and personality boy." He would not lose another election for 30 years.

Both Harvard and Yale invited Nixon to apply for scholarships, but his dream of a prestigious Eastern university was frustrated. It was 1930, the Great Depression and Harold was in the midst of his long struggle with tuberculosis. "We needed Richard at home," Hannah Nixon remembered. Nixon had to settle for Whittier College just down the road and later said he'd never felt disappointed. He soon became a big man on the small campus.

He was an ambitious student politician, an accomplished actor, a champion debater. The Whittier student body elected Nixon president in 1933. He was both admired and resented for what one student called, "an almost ruthless cocksureness." The exclusive Franklin Club denied Nixon membership. He helped organize a competing club, the Orthogonians or square-shooters, students who took pride in working their way through college. They wore no ties, served spaghetti and beans and attracted the college's best athletes.

Nixon later denied there was any class distinction between his shirt-sleeved Orthogonians and the tuxedo-ed Franklins, but throughout his life, he would emphasize the differences between his own modest beginnings and the wealthy, privileged backgrounds of his political opponents.